deals

Deals (w/e 01/30/26)

Lee McCabe

03 Feb 2026 — 1 min read

Highlander Partners Acquires Tapatio Hot Sauce

Highlander Partners acquired the Tapatio hot sauce brand from the founding family in a deal announced this past week. Price wasn’t disclosed, but the logic is pure consumer PE: a cult brand with absurd household penetration, decades of unspent brand equity, and zero need for reinvention. Highlander isn’t buying innovation here, they’re buying distribution leverage, pricing power, and the right to not screw it up. Expect line extensions, channel expansion, and a lot of discipline around not turning a heritage brand into a PowerPoint experiment. Link

Kinderhook Merges Live Oak Environmental and CARDS Recycling Into Ecowaste

Kinderhook announced this week that it is combining portfolio companies Live Oak Environmental and CARDS Recycling under a new platform called Ecowaste. This isn’t a fresh buyout, but it is real PE activity: balance sheets consolidated, management teams reshuffled, and a regional waste-services player scaled overnight. This is private equity doing platform math. Fewer logos, more leverage, cleaner story for lenders and future buyers. Not flashy, but exactly how value actually gets built in services. 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.