Before Seal the Seasons was a company, it was a Saturday alarm. Patrick Mateer would get on his bike and ride to the Carrboro Farmers Market at 6:30 in the morning. A student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he ran the donation station, collecting produce that had not sold and taking it to a nearby community center. The job helped pay tuition. It also gave him a close view of a market whose charm disguised an unforgiving clock.
Customers returned to the same stalls, asked after crops and children, and paid fairly for food whose origin they knew. Yet a berry does not consult the market schedule before ripening. A storm can thin the Saturday crowd. Labor can disappear at harvest. Fruit ready on Monday may have very few places to go.
Mateer once described seeing a strawberry farmer dig a hole larger than a swimming pool, fill it with excess fruit, and plow it under. The image has the bluntness of a parable, but the business problem was precise. Demand for local food existed. Farmers could supply it. What failed was the brief interval in which the two were allowed to meet.
The calendar was the competitor
Mateer grew up in Chapel Hill in a household where community was a verb. He remembers his parents making casseroles for sick friends, kenneling a neighbor's dog, and turning up for local gatherings. At the market he recognized the same pattern, now expressed through food. People did not merely buy a carton of berries. They bought participation in the place that produced them.
He was also the child who kept asking why. He rebuilt Lego structures, made elaborate forts in the woods, joined Odyssey of the Mind, and tried improv. The adult version of that curiosity arrived at a useful question: if the fresh aisle cannot accommodate a local harvest for long, why must “local” disappear with it?
His answer was freezing, close to the farm. Seal the Seasons would buy produce from family growers, freeze and pack it within the region, and sell it through nearby grocery stores through the year. A North Carolina blueberry could retain both its taste and its address. The company could grow nationally without turning its supply into one anonymous pool.
Mateer studied political science and economics, not business. Seal the Seasons began while he was at UNC, developed with co-founder Alex Piasecki and other early collaborators. He stepped away for a semester to enter competitions and brought home roughly $80,000 in prize money. One 2015 win contributed $50,000. It was enough to begin turning an observation into machinery.
The earliest version was wonderfully literal. The team installed an individual quick freezing line in a shared-use kitchen in Hillsborough. Produce was cleaned, cut, frozen, packed, and driven to stores. Seven local co-ops agreed to stock it in 2015. Larger North Carolina grocers followed.
The freezer is only one part
Owning production felt like control. It soon looked like a bottleneck. The line could not keep pace, while fixed equipment and seasonal volume made capital work too hard. In 2017, Seal the Seasons moved toward co-packers and regional farm partners. A published industry case study reported that the change nearly doubled gross-margin contribution and allowed more money to pass to growers.
The pivot clarified what the company actually was. Its special equipment was not the freezing machine. It was coordination: forecasts, purchase commitments, growers, processors, cold storage, distributors, grocery buyers, packaging, and the label that tells a shopper where the fruit grew.
That coordination is fussy because farming does not offer software's favorite luxury: another release next week. “We only have one chance to source produce each year,” Mateer has said. Root rot, drought, and pests can erase a plan. Meanwhile, some grocery stores reset their assortment only once a year, and shelf fees can punish a young brand before a shopper even sees it. Seal the Seasons needed backup farms, accurate forecasts, and enough cash to buy months of inventory at once.
Its regional architecture also produced a useful paradox. The brand could become more visible while the food remained more local. By 2019, Mateer said the company had moved from seven co-ops to more than 3,200 retailers. By 2022, public accounts placed it in more than 4,000 stores across six regions. Company materials have since described approximately 4,000 retail locations in 30 states; a 2023 funding document reported partnerships with more than 100 farms and 6,000 stores. The counts reflect different moments and definitions, but the trajectory is plain.
Mission requires margins
Social enterprise can sound soft around the edges. Mateer's education was anything but. He sought mentors because, as he has readily admitted, he had never taken a business class. SCORE volunteers helped him work through vendor relationships, management documents, legal language, and performance analysis. Food-industry advisers taught him the dialects of investors, whose definitions of “impact” and acceptable evidence rarely arrive standardized.
He learned to accept help without outsourcing judgment. Advisers sometimes contradicted one another. His conclusion was neither rebellious nor obedient: “Getting advice and asking for help is important. But it's equally important to trust your gut.” A founder must listen to the room and still be responsible for leaving by the right door.
Do not confuse the machinery you bought first with the value only your company can create. Seal the Seasons changed how it froze fruit while keeping its promise to farms and shoppers intact.
Recognition followed the growth. Forbes named Mateer to its 2017 30 Under 30 list for Social Entrepreneurship. He received the Specialty Food Association's Leadership Award for Vision in 2018. Seal the Seasons joined the Chobani Incubator in 2019 and later earned food-industry recognition for social responsibility and as an emerging brand. The honors mattered, but grocery is a weekly referendum. A plaque cannot hold a freezer door open.
The company widened its range beyond bags of single fruit and blends. Smoothie kits added flavors and a new use for regionally sourced ingredients, with Mateer drawing attention to regenerative agriculture at a 2022 industry show. Food-access collaborations continued as well. In one project, Seal the Seasons helped the Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina pack 56,000 pounds of donated frozen sweet potatoes, using the commercial supply chain for an explicitly local purpose.
After the startup romance
Eleven years into the business, the conversation had shifted from invention to durability. In May 2025, Seal the Seasons announced an undisclosed convertible-note investment from Farnell Packaging, a supplier it had worked with for nearly a decade. The partnership focused on packaging sustainability and new commercial opportunities. The same announcement included three internal promotions; Mateer said the promoted employees had each spent more than five years at the company and that average team tenure was seven and a half years.
Those are not dorm-room statistics. They belong to the long middle of company building, when a founder's task becomes less cinematic: inventory cycles, financial planning, packaging questions at product demos, certified-organic smoothie-kit variants, and another thousand grocery doors. Mateer described the business as maturing from a startup dependent on outside funding into an established middle-market brand.
The language of the company has matured too. Early ambition centered on saving farms and extending local food through winter. Later work includes regenerative practices, food-waste reduction, lower-impact packaging, and supply-chain resilience. These are large claims only when detached from operations. Attached to crop commitments, processor contracts, and a bag in a freezer, they become a list of chores.
Mateer still keeps a little beginner's energy. His company biography notes a motorcycle and an effort to learn cooking from scratch. Both hobbies suit someone attracted to systems whose workings are visible, occasionally greasy, and improved by paying attention.
The lasting charm of Seal the Seasons is not that freezing makes time stop. It does something more useful: it negotiates with time. A harvest still has a season. A blueberry still comes from somewhere. The farmer still faces weather, labor, and risk. Mateer's business simply gives that crop a longer appointment with the people who want it.
The Saturday market taught him that community could create demand. Economics taught him that demand was not enough. Between affection and access stood an unglamorous chain of cold rooms, trucks, contracts, and grocery resets. Patrick Mateer built there, in the gap between the berry and the calendar. Summer did not need a better slogan. It needed somewhere to wait.