In 2006, Justin Dye helped buy the stores that came with a rather discouraging description: “non-core.” They were part of Albertsons, and the Cerberus-led acquisition gave him a new job as chief strategy officer. In the language of transactions, a store can become peripheral with remarkable ease. Its employees still have to open the doors the next morning.
That gap between the deal and the next morning is a useful place to begin with Dye. His career has crossed consulting, industrial business, grocery retail, private equity and cannabis. The recurring subject is what happens once somebody owns the business. An acquisition announcement takes an afternoon. Making the acquired company work can occupy the next decade.
At Albertsons, the decade brought acquisitions of Safeway, New Albertsons stores from Supervalu, United Supermarkets and Haggen Food & Pharmacy assets. Dye held strategy, operations and administrative leadership roles. By the end of his tenure, the company had more than 2,300 stores and 285,000 employees. Those numbers describe a collective enterprise, with Dye among the executives responsible for its expansion.
The sales comparison is striking enough without embellishment: approximately $10 billion became more than $60 billion during his eleven years there. Grocery supplied an education in scale that a transaction model alone could hardly provide. Thousands of stores mean thousands of daily opportunities for a plan to encounter a delivery truck, a price label or a dissatisfied customer.
A political science degree meets the loading dock
Dye grew up in Winslow, Indiana, a small community shaped by farming and coal mining. He has described himself as a competitive sports fan. At DePauw University, he studied political science, minored in religion and graduated in 1994. It is a pleasingly indirect academic route into the business of coordinating supermarkets.
Years later, discussing DePauw’s School of Business and Leadership, he returned to the demands of the classroom: “You had to show up and participate.” He talked about writing, speaking, defending a position and solving problems. The connection to his working life is easy to see. A strategy becomes rather more useful when someone can explain it to the people expected to carry it out.
His early employers included Arthur Andersen, General Electric and Cerberus Capital Management. Together, those stops put consulting, corporate development and private equity on the same résumé. Albertsons then placed him inside the business being changed. By 2017, when he left as chief administrative officer, the person who helped arrange the purchase had spent years dealing with its consequences.
That October he joined Peter J. Solomon Company as a senior adviser, working with Scott Moses on food retail, distribution and related consumer businesses. The appointment returned him to advisory work with an unusually practical credential: he had been responsible for integrating businesses, including the Albertsons-Safeway combination. The client’s question about what happens after closing was one he had already lived.
“You had to show up and participate.”
Justin Dye, on his DePauw education
Buying a business, then taking a job in it
Dye founded Dye Capital & Company after leaving Albertsons. Securities filings date the firm’s founding to 2018. Today its leadership page identifies him as founder and CEO. Its investment interests range across technology, consumer businesses, food and supply chains, industrial technology, real estate and financial services.
The team helps explain that breadth. Ken Diehl, the firm’s partner and president, has worked across Kroger, Albertsons, Jewel-Osco and other retailers. Dye Capital’s proposition is to put operating experience alongside money. Its emphasis on systems, technology and developing managers suggests a firm interested in the recurring work of ownership, including the parts that rarely justify a press release.
The investment in Medicine Man Technologies made the arrangement unusually literal. Dye became chairman in June 2019 and chief executive that December. Here was an investor who also acquired a calendar full of operating responsibilities. Medicine Man had begun as a consultancy; the next phase would involve owning businesses that cultivated, manufactured and sold cannabis.
Colorado was the initial setting. In April 2020, the company completed its Mesa Organics and Purplebee’s acquisition. The business was also adopting the name Schwazze, borrowed from a pruning technique. Corporate names are often obliged to do considerable explanatory work. This one carried a horticultural argument about creating room for growth.
The grocery people arrive
The transfer from food retail to cannabis was partly a transfer of people. Todd Williams brought Albertsons acquisition experience. Shane Sampson, another former Albertsons colleague, worked with Dye at Schwazze in marketing and merchandising. Nirup Krishnamurthy brought a background spanning technology, airlines and grocery restructuring. These were connections built around operating businesses, rather than simply financing them.
For Dye, the attraction was a fragmented industry with many independent retailers and producers. His proposed answer included familiar retail tools: better product selection, coordinated operations, customer data and loyalty programs. The product required different expertise and rules. The task of getting a team, a supply chain and a shop to work together remained recognisable.
His acquisition process was concrete. Put stores on a map. Compare their volumes. Look for locations that add useful density. Then ask whether the organisation has people available to run them. That final question puts a sensible limit on the excitement of buying. A promising address does not arrive with a spare management team attached.
He also described checking whether a deal could be completed promptly and whether its operations would fit the existing business. Read together, those questions suggest an investor assessing the distance between a purchase and a functioning operation. The map matters because nearby businesses can share attention and resources. The staffing question matters because attention is finite.
- 01Map the storesLocation & market density
- 02Compare the businessVolume & operating fit
- 03Check the benchPeople available to run it
The handover, and the harder chapter
By October 2022, Schwazze described a business that had grown from fewer than twenty employees in 2019 to more than 725 across two states. Krishnamurthy was promoted from chief operating officer to president, taking responsibility for strategic planning, growth initiatives and execution. Dye remained chief executive and chairman while the operating responsibilities shifted.
In May 2023, Krishnamurthy succeeded him as CEO. Dye became non-executive chairman. The transition had been prepared over months after Dye told the board he wanted to move into a chairman’s role. The change offered another view of his work: hiring a successor, then making room for that person to run the business.
The next chapter complicates any tidy success story. In October 2025, Schwazze entered a restructuring agreement involving Vireo. Vireo had acquired a majority of the principal outstanding on Schwazze’s senior secured notes. A public auction of collateral followed in November, with the noteholders’ credit bid winning. The businesses Dye had helped assemble were moving through a creditor-led restructuring.
On March 23, 2026, Vireo closed its acquisition of certain Schwazze assets: twenty-four dispensaries in Colorado, twenty-one in New Mexico and one manufacturing facility in each state. Dye was named chairman of Vireo’s Colorado and New Mexico business, with Forrest Hoffmaster as CEO. Ownership had changed; much of the operating work, and the need for experienced people to do it, continued.
That distinction matters when considering Dye’s record. The earlier expansion and the later restructuring belong in the same account. Building a retail organisation does not settle the question of its financing. A larger footprint brings operating possibilities, but its capital structure still has to survive the market around it. The 2026 transaction is a consequential part of his story, rather than a footnote to its growth figures.
A microphone beside the investment desk
Dye’s more recent work extends beyond buying and running companies. He has announced a managing director role at Sharpe Credit Partners, an asset-based lending platform focused on overlooked niches. The move keeps him close to a familiar problem: understanding a business well enough to decide how capital should enter it, and on what terms.
There is also a microphone. With John Ehrhard, he co-hosts Legends of the Arena, a podcast whose introductory episode appeared in September 2025. Its premise draws on Theodore Roosevelt’s speech about entering the arena. Guests have included golf coach Sean Foley, sports entrepreneur Brandon Steiner and wine entrepreneur Jen Pelka. The conversations give Dye a different seat: the person asking how somebody else built something.
His public discussion of the Steiner episode focused on selling, preparation and earning long-term partnerships. Those interests fit the working concerns visible throughout his career. A relationship can open a conversation, but the work that follows determines whether it lasts. Hearing him ask about other people’s decisions adds texture to a résumé otherwise crowded with corporate titles.
The less formal details are modest and rather endearing. He enjoys live music and reading. Asked about cooking, he assigned himself the clean-up role and called himself a “decent dishwasher.” An executive can delegate a great deal; the dinner plates apparently remain within his remit.
There is a line back to DePauw in all this. He has served on its board of trustees and spoken about the value of learning outside one’s original field. His own route supplies the example: political science, industrial companies, supermarkets, investing, a regulated retail industry and now interviews with other builders. The subject changes. His interest in how people organise themselves to get work done appears to travel with him.
The career is still in progress, with operating achievements, a restructuring and new responsibilities sharing the page. What gives it continuity is the willingness to take responsibility after the transaction. Somewhere beyond the signatures, a business still needs people, decisions and somebody prepared to show up the next morning.