Morgan Zanotti co-founded Primal Kitchen, bootstrapped it to $50M in revenue, and sold it to Kraft Heinz for $200M when she was 35. Then she did the thing almost nobody does — she stayed for five years, quadrupled the business from the inside, and kept her entire founding team in place the whole time. She eventually ran M&A strategy for Kraft's health and wellness portfolio, where she flagged the GLP-1 wave as a freight train before anyone at the company was paying attention. They told her it was a rich-person thing. They were wrong, and she knew it.

Now she's back at zero. Her new company, Waay, is a sparkling protein water — 10g protein, zero sugar, 45 calories — that launched nationwide at Whole Foods in October 2025 and has since picked up Sprouts and Target. We talked about what it's like to start over after a massive exit, why she tried to talk herself out of this for 18 months, how she ended up telling her therapist she should have just bought a car wash, and why she thinks CPG has become almost a billionaire's game. We also got into the stuff that makes the industry simultaneously maddening and worth fighting for — the antiquated systems, the mafia-like distribution networks, and the fact that at the end of the day, everybody still has to eat.

You can find Morgan on LinkedIn, on TikTok and Instagram @morganzanotti and @drinkwaay, and you can try Waay at drinkwaay.com or pick it up at Whole Foods, Sprouts, or Target.