One morning a month, Marisel Robles arrives at 6 a.m. to set up the Súper Solidario market in Caguas, Puerto Rico. The once-a-month local food market offers products from over 15 small-scale local farms at fair prices, as well as a “solidarity shelf” where any visitor can select items at no cost. And every time she arrives, two hours before opening, there’s a line at the door.
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Once inside, customers shop for fruits like guanabana, mango, pineapple, and papaya; vegetables, leafy greens, and herbs; and an array of Caribbean tubers like yautía, batata, and ñame. Coffee, honey, and locally made baked, canned, and dried goods are also up for grabs. One customer buys 19 avocados every month.
“The idea is for it to be a supermarket where anyone can access good quality food at a reasonable price,” explains Robles, who has been a member of the Súper Solidario team since its inception.
“For us, the most important solution to hunger is to have a direct network between producers and consumers.”
Launched in late 2020, the Súper Solidario is part of a growing constellation of producers and consumers working across Puerto Rico to make fresh, local food more accessible and affordable to their communities through models that reach consumers directly.
The small, relationship-driven distribution networks, which source from the farms around them, offer an alternative on an island where more than 80 percent of food is imported, climate disasters and global shocks hit supply chains hard, and climbing prices at traditional supermarkets exacerbate food insecurity.
Súper Solidario’s 41 members run the operation like a food co-op, exchanging their labor for access to goods at cost. After market day, a “processing brigade” takes care of any leftover produce, whipping it into favorites like sofrito or freezing it to prepare fresh juices the following month.
Last year, more than 2,000 people visited the Súper. Nearly a quarter of those were first-time customers, and more than two-thirds accessed goods from the solidarity shelf. Additionally, the market bought 40 different crops outright from 22 different farmers, who were then able to reach consumers without having to take time away from the land or shoulder the losses of unsold goods.
“We want to promote local production,” says Robles. “For us, the most important solution to hunger is to have a direct network between producers and consumers.”
People sit on both sides of a destroyed bridge that crossed over the San Lorenzo River in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Morovis, Puerto Rico, 2017. (Photo credit: Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via Getty Images)
A Colonized Food System
The first large-scale supermarkets arrived in Puerto Rico in the 1950s. In the late 1940s, Puerto Rico, in conjunction with the U.S. government, had launched Operation Bootstrap to transform the economy from agricultural to industrial through corporate tax breaks and other market-oriented reforms. With rural jobs in decline, many people left the countryside for Puerto Rican or U.S. cities. The amount of land dedicated to farming trended steadily downward.
In the 1970s, food consumption patterns shifted again with the introduction in Puerto Rico of the Food Stamp Program, later replaced by the Nutrition Assistance Program (known as PAN, for its Spanish acronym). With food stamps, as one researcher explains, “local food consumption became increasingly disengaged from local agricultural production, as imports and processed foods took over the increased food demand.”
During these decades, the U.S. heavily promoted imported foods. Katia Avilés-Vázquez, director of the Institute for Agroecology Research and Action in Puerto Rico (IALA), says the goal was to make the Caribbean as a “consumption appendage” of the U.S. mainland.
“There’s a huge process of unlearning that type of education we were force fed. Our tastes buds, our palettes, were assimilated.”
“For example, you had a lot of nutritionists and agronomists going to farms and literally telling moms that if you gave your children breadfruit, which was one of the staple foods here, you would give them parasites. You had to give them potatoes,” Avilés-Vázquez says. She recalls school lunch programs feeding kids apples—a crop that doesn’t grow in Puerto Rico.
“There’s a huge process of unlearning that type of education we were force fed, literally and figuratively,” she says. “Our tastes buds, our palettes, were assimilated.”
Today, more than 40 percent of Puerto Ricans live below the poverty line, and about the same percentage receive PAN benefits. Over the years, the historically central place in Puerto Rican life of market squares, known as plazas de mercado, has declined as many consumers opt for the convenience and savings of big retailers.
Natalí Gaskins, a volunteer at a local food project at the Camposofía alternative school in Utuado, says rural poverty and reliance on PAN play a big role in people’s food choices. “The amount of money you get monthly is only good for eating garbage,” she says of the benefits. “A lot of fresh food culture has been lost because it’s cheaper to buy canned tomatoes than to eat [fresh] tomatoes.” Many rural residents make long trips to Walmart, she says, for more affordable prices.
A 2025 survey of patrons of community meal programs in three municipalities, conducted by the feminist nonprofit Taller Salud, found significant economic and geographic barriers to accessing healthy food. Only 20 percent of participants reported purchasing food at fruit and vegetables stands compared to 93 percent in supermarkets and 27 percent in pharmacies.
Robles, of Súper Solidario, believes however that there’s growing interest in buying local, especially as the cost of living soars. While shoppers are tightening their belts, making fewer grocery trips per month and lowering their budgets, a 2026 consumer insights study found that the quality of fresh fruits and vegetables plays an increasing role in Puerto Ricans’ choice of where to buy groceries.
Today, though, to the east and west of Puerto Rico’s central mountain region, various efforts are building connections between producers and consumers to respond to needs in their communities.
These include the producer-run alternative market Tiendita Soberana; the community-driven honor-system market Nodo Alimentario; and the Finca Güakia farm box program.
The Tiendita Soberana, launched in January, seeks to support local producers and promote education in the community. (Photo courtesy of Tiendita Soberana)
The Tiendita Soberana Alternative Market
In 2017, Hurricane María exposed the vulnerabilities of an island reliant on imports. The storm wiped out 80 percent of Puerto Rico’s crop value, and many local grocery stores closed or had limited food on the shelves in the aftermath.
Infrastructure damage nearly paralyzed shipping, and long-running electricity outages spoiled food both at home and in stores. The Jones Act, an archaic maritime shipping law only briefly waived after María, made disaster response slow and expensive. In the years since, pressures on farmland have increased as speculators and outside investors buy up property.
When the hurricane hit Yabucoa, the fertile southeastern valley where María made landfall, Omar García had seedlings and plants sheltered inside. His grandparents and great-grandparents had worked the land, and he too was interested in growing food. When the storm cleared, he started planting crops, and within weeks he was providing fresh food to the community. Like elsewhere across Puerto Rico, residents came together in mutual aid efforts to support one another and rebuild.
“We organized as a community,” García says. “We fed ourselves within our communities as a method of survival.”
Then in 2021, after years of operating at a smaller scale, García launched a farm called Finca Aurora, producing fruits and vegetables and saving seeds. But he didn’t have a reliable, set location to market what he grew. In 2022, he and a small group of producers started to develop a collective space where they could sell their products and support other farmers.
“We organized as a community. We fed ourselves within our communities as a method of survival.”
Their alternative market, Tiendita Soberana, located in a small storefront across from a shopping center in San Lorenzo, officially launched in January. The collective’s eight founding members work with a wider network of suppliers, providing a fixed location for them to sell goods each week without intermediaries and without having to take time away from the farm.
Since opening, the Tiendita has sourced products from 16 farms or farmers and 17 local makers of various foods, like artisanal bread. Many of the Tiendita’s clients are older adults, García says, though the space also attracts a young generation connected to or influenced by the agroecology movement.
One challenge García has faced is making the Tiendita’s food accessible to everyone.
“In Puerto Rico, it’s very difficult to commercialize local products,” García says. “It’s very difficult to compete with market prices.” Batata, tropical sweet potato, might cost 65 cents a pound in a supermarket, he explains, but local producers have to charge higher prices to cover their costs. His batata costs $2.
