Leadership Awards
Recognizing trailblazing specialty food business leaders who are pushing our industry forward 
2019 Leadership award winner for Vision

Patrick Mateer

Seal the Seasons
2019
Vision

What if local blackberries and blueberries were available year-round at your neighborhood grocer? Frozen, of course, but harvested at peak ripeness by a farmer down the road, not in Ecuador or Chile. The price wouldn’t be out of reach either.

That was the vision of Patrick Mateer, 25, the CEO of Seal the Seasons. He founded the company in 2014 while still in college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While working at a fresh food distributor and a farmer’s market, he noted a disconnect.

“I saw how the local produce went over so well, the benefits for consumers – higher quality, taste, nutrition – but it was seasonal, hard to do year-round, often expensive, and inconvenient,” he says. “I wanted to eliminate the barriers, reduce food waste, and maximize crop yields by partnering with family farms and larger, mid-size farms to make it really easy for grocery stores to buy local.”

Today, more than 3,000 outlets in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Pacific Northwest, Great Lakes, and Southwest carry the Seal the Seasons brand in their freezer sections.

Seal the Seasons has provided local growers with a 52-week market for perishable berries as well as peaches, apples, and cherries. In each region, a partner-farmer’s image appears on the packaging. For more specific traceability, the company’s website allows consumers to type in a lot code to see exactly where it came from.

Affordability is a primary focus, not organic certification or cosmetic beauty. Fruit can be marred by hail, excessive rain, or sun. “When it’s frozen and you blend it up in a smoothie, you care less if it’s blemished,” Mateer says.

Seal the Seasons generated more than $1 million last year, says Mateer, who has 9 employees. Teams travel around the country to inspect participating farms, looking at groundwater reports and making sure food safety and fair labor practices are met.

Farm-to-freezer is just the start. “Our 10-year vision,” Mateer says, “is to make local food available in every aisle in the grocery store.”

Highlights

  • 2014: Patrick Mateer co-founds Seal the Seasons while participating in the University of North Carolina’s social entrepreneurship program.
  • 2015: Seal the Seasons wins $50,000 SECU (State Employees Credit Union) Emerging Issue Prize for Innovation; Mateer graduates from college.
  • 2016: First major grocer, Harris Teeter, starts stocking Seal the Seasons’ flash-frozen local produce, followed by Whole Foods in Virginia and the Carolinas.
  • 2018: Expands footprint to the Northeast, Great Lakes, Pacific Northwest, and Southwest; Mateer named one of Forbes’ top 30 social entrepreneurs under 30 years old; raised $1.8 million in private equity offering.