I used to trade the wheat before it was harvested. Two private-equity firms just sold each other the Italian company that supplies the pastry case at your local bakery, and the people who actually bake were not in the room. They never are.
CVC Capital Partners has agreed to buy Irca — the maker of pastry, bakery, chocolate, and ice cream ingredients sold in more than a hundred countries — from another private-equity shop called Advent, according to the Wall Street Journal (Adam Whittaker, June 29, 2026). Under Advent’s ownership, Irca’s revenue grew from 370 million euros in 2021 to 1.5 billion euros. CVC says it will “support the next phase of growth.” The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter.
There is an honest case to be granted here, because the logic of the market is not always a lie — and I want to name it before I take a single thing back. Private equity, done well, takes a fragmented industry, professionalizes it, invests in capacity, opens export markets, and creates scale that the public markets alone would not have built. Advent took a regional Italian ingredients house and built a 7,000-product platform that reaches bakers and gelato makers on five continents. That is real work, done by real people inside the firm. The corner bakery in Sheboygan and the chocolate shop in Stevens Point both depend on companies like Irca for the compounds that keep their cases stocked. Somebody had to build that scale, and the public exchanges had not done it. Some of that consolidation does genuine engineering work — combining overlapping emulsifier portfolios, sharing cold-chain logistics, building the R&D bench a single supplier could not have afforded alone — and I will not deny it.
But read the announcement the way I used to read a futures tape, and you will see what is actually being transacted. CVC and Advent did not move Irca to a strategic operator with engineering depth, a long-horizon family owner, or a cooperative of the firm’s own workers. They moved it from one pool of limited-partner capital to another. Last month CVC separately agreed to buy International Flavors & Fragrances’ food-ingredients business for $4.3 billion including debt. Three weeks before that, Ingredion moved to acquire Tate & Lyle in a $3.6 billion deal that put nearly five hundred jobs at risk. The same thing, in three flavors, inside five weeks.
Here is the question the men writing these press releases never have to answer. When Advent bought Irca back in 2021, where did the purchase money come from? It came from debt loaded onto Irca’s own balance sheet, plus a slug of LP capital that expected — and will receive — a multiple of its money back when CVC exits. The 1.5 billion in revenue Irca now carries was not grown by being a better pastry supplier. It was grown the way every revenue line at every PE-owned industrial gets grown: by acquiring competitors, raising prices to the captive bakery buyers downstream, cutting overlapping headcount, levering the platform for the next sale. Some of that is operational discipline. Most of it is what we used to call, in the trade, multiple expansion — paying yourself for buying something by claiming it is now worth more.
I used to trade the corn before it was planted. I know how little the men in that building think about the men in the field, and the field here is a bakery in Sheboygan or a gelato shop two counties over. The buyer of those ingredients — the working bakery, the small chocolate maker, the regional ice cream producer — has no counterparty. They cannot shop around to a non-extractive alternative at scale, because the industry has been consolidated into a handful of platforms by men whose balance sheets run in the billions of euros and whose workers’ names they will never learn. That is not a market. That is what Chesterton called the curse of bigness in a pastry case.
And what is actually being traded here? Not a new idea, not a new tool, not a new risk taken. The physical substance of human nourishment — the flour, the chocolate, the ice cream bases that a real town uses to feed itself — stacked and bundled and sold between two private-equity funds. They are taking the very ingredients of daily life and severing them from their place, turning them into a line item owned by men who will never set foot in the county where the bread is actually broken.
Here is the deeper unfaith. The whole point of an enterprise — the conservative point, the Burkean point — is that it is an intergenerational trust held in a place. A bakery that has served a town for eighty years is part of the town’s soul. An industrial supplier that serves a thousand such bakeries across a hundred countries is, in its own way, also part of a place: the place being Italy, and the workers being the ones who actually make the compounds. Private equity, by structure, has no loyalty to place. Its only loyalty is to the harvest date on the fund. When Advent exits to CVC, the workers at the Irca plant are not consulted, the bakery customers downstream are not consulted, the towns are not consulted. Two limited partnerships met in a boardroom in Amsterdam and decided whose hands will hold the next coupon.
This is what your movement now means by capitalism. Not the capitalism of the corner grocer who knows your name, who extends you credit in a hard week, who can be sued at the local courthouse if his flour is bad. That capitalism was always partly sentimental, and the corner grocer is mostly gone anyway. The capitalism of the twenty-first century is the capitalism of the buyout shop: no inventory risk, no community obligation, no brand loyalty past the next flip. It is the capitalism of Belloc’s Servile State — the productive worker increasingly a wage-taker on a platform owned by people who have never set foot in his plant. And the conservative commentariat, which a generation ago would have named this for what it was, has instead supplied the theology for it. The fund is “supporting growth.” The acquisition is “building scale.” The flip is “unlocking value.” But a liberty that allows the substance of a town’s life to be treated as a disposable abstraction in a spreadsheet is not liberty. It is just the same old master, dressed in a bespoke suit. They price what should not be priced, and they call it freedom.
There is an answer that does not pass through either Amsterdam or Brussels. It does not require the consolidated state — because concentrated state power is the same disease in a different coat. It does not require a regulator to break Irca up with a Brandeisian gavel, though the antitrust case could certainly be made. The cure is the distributed answer. It is the cooperative, and it already exists in the dairy case next door to this one. Organic Valley — the farmer-owned cooperative headquartered up the road in La Farge, Wisconsin — unites some 1,600 family farms and captures roughly thirty percent of the American organic milk market for its members. Mondragon, in the Basque country, runs seventy thousand workers across a federation of worker-owned cooperatives with internal pay ratios around five-to-one. Land O’Lakes is a century-old farmer co-op that posted roughly $16 billion in sales last year. REI, owned by its members, returned $3.53 billion in sales — and posted a $156 million loss in 2024, which is also part of the honest answer. Cooperatives fail. Cooperatives drift toward managerial oligarchy. The degeneration thesis is real, and it has been since Beatrice Potter sketched it in 1891. But the model survives because it answers the question the buyout shop cannot: who owns the firm, and on whose behalf does it exist?
The buyout shop answers: the limited partners, and on behalf of the next flip. The cooperative answers: the members, and on behalf of the next generation. That second answer is older than the joint-stock company. It is older than the holding company. It is the form the human beings who actually make the pastry have always reached for when nobody else will treat them as principals in their own enterprise.
The men who sold your pastry supplier to each other this week did not break the law. They did not even do anything unusual. They did what the modern capital structure rewards them for doing. The point is not that they are villains. The point is that the structure makes them so, and that we have stopped asking whether the structure itself can be changed — not by some distant bureau, but by the workers in the plant, the farmers in the field, and the bakers downstream deciding, in their own time and in their own places, to build the alternative one member-ownership at a time. The earth was given for all. It is past time we started running the bakery that way.