After years of financial woes, Southern Season store in Chapel Hill to close next year
The Chapel Hill foodie superstore Southern Season will close early next year, more than three years after declaring bankruptcy.
Southern Season’s parent company, Calvert Retail, announced the closing Monday morning in a news release. Calvert owner Eric Brinsfield said the 44-year-old store would shut down in early 2020, allowing for one last push through the holidays.
The store’s restaurant, Weathervane, has already closed.
“Southern Season is an incredible business, and I firmly believe that the concept is part of the future of retail,” Brinsfield said in the release. “However, it requires a more robust organization and more capital than I can provide as a small business owner. I have made the difficult decision to close the Chapel Hill retail store and focus on our online business from our facility in Graham.”
The Delaware-based Calvert Retail purchased the company for $3.5 million in 2016, while Southern Season was the midst of its $18 million bankruptcy restructuring. Southern Season had previously been purchased in 2011 by TC Capital Fund. At one time, the popular cookware and specialty foods brand had grown to include stores in Richmond and Charleston, each notable Southern dining cities. But those locations were shuttered in 2016 after a couple years in business.
Calvert continues to operate other retail stores, including the Kitchen & Company locations in Asheville and Mount Pleasant, SC.
Southern Season’s bankruptcy put a strain on the local food economy at the time. Numerous specialty food companies were left unpaid as the company sought bankruptcy protection. In 2016 Southern Season’s debts were $18.3 million and assets $9.8 million.
According to the release, Southern Season will continue to exist as a brand, selling gift baskets and prepared food items online and shipping through the company’s distribution center in Graham. Closing the store in Chapel Hill’s University Place mall will leave the town without Southern Season for the first time since 1975.
Southern Season began as an 800-square-foot coffee and food counter owned by Michael Barefoot and grew into a $30 million business, including the 60,000-square-food flagship store in Chapel Hill. That expansive store was filled with designer cookware, shelves of Southern specialty foods, from grits to jams and well beyond and also kept a large wine and beer selection. There was also a cooking school, where chefs and cookbook authors regularly led classes.
On Monday, as the store announced its eventual closing, fans and customers lamented on social media the future absence of a foodie favorite. Southern Season’s role as a cooking school will be sharply missed, said Sandra Gutierrez, a celebrated cookbook author and instructor.
“Southern Season was at the heart of the food scene in the Triangle for the last 40 years,” Gutierrez said in a phone interview. “So many places, Whole Foods, Wegmans, began to cut into the niche that belonged to Southern Season. The role as an education center, that’s going to be sorely missed....People would come from very far away to teach at the Southern Season. Its reputation as a store and cooking school was very solid nationally.”
Speculation of Southern Season’s eventual closing has been swirling for years. In the summer, amid reports of bare shelves in the store, Brinsfield said in an email that summer is Southern Season’s slowest time of the year and that the empty spaces were part of inventory changes and additions. Three months later he announced the closing.
“For 44 years, the business has played an outsized role in the Triangle’s food community,” Brinsfield said in a release. “This is no doubt because of the incredible people of Southern Season who continue to amaze me every day. We really want to thank the people of Orange, Chatham, Durham and beyond for all of the great years that we had in Chapel Hill.”
In the final months of Southern Season’s retail store, Brinsfield said there will be some “incredible values” to be found within the remaining inventory.
This story was originally published November 11, 2019 at 10:11 AM with the headline "After years of financial woes, Southern Season store in Chapel Hill to close next year."
