Look Inside: Farmer Joen Farmers Market - Sussex, NJ

Farmer Joen Farmers Market
Owner: Ju Gil Joen

Opened: ca. 2014
Cooperative: none
Location: 205 NJ-23 N, Sussex, NJ

Photographed: July 2020

We arrive in Wantage for a look inside the Farmer Joen Farmers Market (formerly the Route 23 Farmers Market) in the Wantage Plaza, just next door to Sussex Meat Packing. This strip mall was also previously home to a Jamesway, later Ames, department store as well as a Foodtown but I'm unclear exactly where each of those was. This roughly 20,000 square foot store is in what I suspect is half of the Foodtown space, but I don't know that for certain.

Unlike some of the other similar stores we've seen recently, this is a rather large space displaying almost exclusively produce. I wonder how successful this store is, since we can see it was deserted when I visited. The Sussex County area is a highly rural area, so there's also lots of local produce available around this area.

A look at refrigrated produce on the back wall.

Looking up towards the front of the store, we can see a little bit of grocery here. The large front windows and corner location make this look an awful lot like half of a Foodtown -- not something we haven't seen before.

Nice displays with the baskets to the right! That's about all for Farmer Joen, and tomorrow, we move just to the north along route 23 for our next store just over a mile away (which, I assume is what may have put this Foodtown out of business when it was expanded in the early 00s) tomorrow on The Market Report!