deals

Deals (w/e 01/23/26

Lee McCabe

30 Jan 2026 — 1 min read

Dallas-based private equity firm Highlander Partners acquired the Tapatio hot sauce brand

a top-5 U.S. condiment with a cult following, from its founding family. The purchase price wasn’t publicly disclosed, but the strategic logic is clear: consumer food brands with deep loyalty and retail shelf presence can be significantly underestimated by corporate acquirers. Highlander is known for buying heritage consumer assets and reinvesting in distribution and product line extensions. This isn’t a tech buyout, it’s a roll-up of brand equity and physical retail economics where customer loyalty matters more than buzzwords. Link

Kinderhook Forms Ecowaste Through Merger of Live Oak and CARDS Recycling

Kinderhook Industries completed a noteworthy industrial deal this week by merging its existing platform investments Live Oak Environmental and CARDS Recycling under a new banner, Ecowaste. The move consolidates waste services in the Mid-South and creates a much larger regional services business with >$400 million in backing for organic growth and future add-ons. Link

Lifestyle (w/e 2/19/26)

Vox on the rise of “admin nights” — friends hanging out while doing life chores (budgeting, emails, meal prep), i.e., the new nightlife for people with calendars and back-to-back calls. link Reuters on “sober raves” taking off with Gen Z — earlier nights, no hangovers, still a proper dance floor. link

News (2/19/26)

McKinsey Declares “The Fog Has Lifted” on Private Equity McKinsey’s 2026 Global Private Markets Report says the fog has finally lifted, with buyouts up, exits rebounding, and IPOs creeping back after three flat years. That may be true, but the backlog of PE-owned companies is at record highs and

Deals (w/e 2/19/26)

Ariel Alternatives Acquires Front Line Power Construction Ariel Alternatives has acquired Front Line Power Construction, with Cherokee Nation Businesses joining as a minority co-investor. Power grid infrastructure is no longer theoretical. It’s cables, substations, and hard backlog tied to AI data centers and electrification mandates. This isn’t energy-transition

Capital doesn’t scale businesses. It scales whatever dysfunction is already there.

You see this constantly in home services and other PE-backed, multi-location businesses. New locations are added faster than systems mature. Marketing budgets increase, but lead quality becomes harder to explain. Revenue targets go up, while visibility into what’s actually driving demand goes down. On paper, the business is scaling.