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.

Katie Horgan spent six years as a Marine Corps logistics officer, running truck convoys in Iraq and coordinating operations for a ship-based crisis response force in the Pacific. After earning her MBA at Columbia, she dove into the NYC startup world, holding operations roles at Plated during its explosive meal kit growth phase, then at Crave Crush and SelfMade. When that last role ended abruptly, she made the leap to working for herself, cold emailing brands from her personal Gmail and slowly building what would become Bravo CPG, a fractional operations firm that has now worked with more than 225 growth-stage CPG brands and grown to a team of 32.

In this conversation, Katie and George dig into the real mechanics of going from fired to founder, including the year it took her to figure out how to describe what she was even selling, the Gary Vee-inspired cold outreach strategy that landed her first clients, and the uncomfortable inflection points where she had to choose between a comfortable lifestyle business and pushing for something bigger. Katie shares what she's seen go wrong across hundreds of brands, from hiring senior leaders who end up as shipping clerks to the chronic disconnect between sales, ops and finance that quietly bleeds margin. She also introduces a framework borrowed from her military days: the distinction between "current ops" and "future ops," and why almost no startup has anyone dedicated to thinking 12 months ahead.

The episode wraps with Katie's van life adventures in her Sprinter van Bessie, a dubious ChatGPT tax strategy, and the question every van lifer dreads. You can find Katie on LinkedIn or at bravocpg.com, or email her directly at [email protected].

Nick Wiseman started cooking in D.C. kitchens at 15, trained under Fabio Trabocchi in New York, then came home and opened a Jewish deli named after his grandfather's grocery stores. Little Sesame was born in the 500-square-foot basement of that deli in 2016, inspired by the hummus his co-founder Ronen Tenne used to make for family meals on the line. When COVID hit, Nick turned the restaurant into a community kitchen that served 100,000 free meals — while simultaneously building a CPG lab in the back room. That packaged hummus launched at 14 Whole Foods in 2021. Today Little Sesame is the 5th largest and fastest-growing national hummus brand in the country, available in 4,000 stores.

In this episode, George and Nick talk about culinary-first manufacturing and why Little Sesame has always self-manufactured rather than co-packing — including a framework Nick borrowed from Patagonia: automate where human craft doesn't make the product better, and never touch the steps where it does. They dig into Nick's decade-long direct relationship with Casey Bailey, a regenerative farmer in Montana, how a $2.2M USDA grant helped scale that supply chain, and why Nick believes regen ag is "the purple bridge" between left and right. The conversation also covers the tension between mission and venture-backed growth, why the risk-reward profile for food founders is getting less compelling, and how Little Sesame is thinking about storytelling as it moves from natural channel into mass retail with a new snacking lineup at Target.

Find Little Sesame at eatlittlesesame.com and on Instagram at @eatlittlesesame. Connect with Nick on LinkedIn. Little Sesame is available at Whole Foods, Sprouts, Target, Wegmans, and independent retailers nationwide.

Gardar Stefansson is an Icelandic food entrepreneur who has spent his career turning unlikely starting points into real businesses. His first company used geothermal hot springs in Iceland's Westfjords to make sea salt — an idea born from his master's thesis at Aarhus University in Denmark. After exiting the salt business, he and two co-founders launched what became Good Good, now the fastest-growing jam brand in America. The company started as a stevia sweetener brand that wasn't selling, pivoted into no-added-sugar jams after cooking batches in Gardar's kitchen with his aunt (who has Type 2 diabetes), and grew into a brand carried in over 15,000 US retail locations across Walmart, Costco, Whole Foods, HEB, Kroger, and more — all with a team of about 15 people.

In this conversation, George and Gardar talk about what it means to build a global CPG brand from an island of 380,000 people, why Good Good entered the US market "backwards" through conventional retail before natural, the real social cost of being a founder who is also the face of the brand, and how a bet with his marketing team led to Gardar running the full Austin Marathon dressed as a jar of strawberry jam. They also get into company culture across time zones, the role of AI in small CPG operations, and why karaoke might be the most underrated team-building tool in business.

Find Gardar and Good Good, on Amazon, Thrive Market, and in stores nationwide. Follow Gardar on LinkedIn  and Good Good on Instagram at @goodgoodbrand. And stay tuned for the Yellowbird x Good Good "Wing Jam" collab — details coming soon.

Robby Sansom is the co-founder and CEO of Force of Nature, a regenerative meat company based here in Austin that's now in Whole Foods nationally and 1,475 Publix stores. Before that, he was one of the first hires at EPIC Provisions, where he helped build the company from a scrappy Austin startup into a category-defining brand that General Mills acquired in 2016. Robby and I were on a panel together recently and I immediately knew I needed him on the podcast because the format was too constrained for the depth of what he has to say about our food system. We get into the real math behind regenerative agriculture — like the fact that it takes 500 years to create an inch of topsoil and the U.S. loses 2 billion tons of it every year — why most certification labels are misleading consumers, and why Force of Nature's beef at 75 cents an ounce is actually cheaper than a bag of Ruffles. The moment that stuck with me most: when I asked Robby whether regenerative agriculture can scale, he said he rejects the premise of the question entirely. The current system isn't the baseline. It's the one that's failing.

Follow Robby on LinkedIn and Force Of Nature on Instagram at @forceofnaturemeats. Check out Force of Nature at forceofnature.com and sign up for their newsletter — even if you never buy anything, the education alone is worth it. And if you're digging Gross to Net, subscribe, leave a review, and tell someone who needs to hear conversations like this one.

This week I was joined by the hilarious, energetic, extremely talented Ryan W Garcia. Ryan is an actor, a coach, a podcaster, and kind of a big deal as an influencer and official Try Guy.

Ryan's exuberance is infectious and he is constantly knocking on a lot of doors. We talked about the business of show business, his mindset and staying power, and his neverending quest for energy and connection.

I hope this episode is as joyful for you as it was for me! 

Follow all of Ryan's exploits on Instagram @muchosgarcias and go check out his amazingly entertaining podcast Big Theatre Kid Energy RIGHT NOW!

Today I talked with Claire Bays whose positivity and motivation rubbed off on me and it will rub off on you too.

Claire is a fitness coach, influencer, podcast host, and MC, just to name a few of the things on her plate. But it wasn't always this way. Claire spent the last decade overcoming challenge after challenge, including celebrating close to 5 years sober.

Claire tries to keep things simple for herself and her coaching practice is all about showing others how possible it is to live a full, vibrant life—simply.

You can follow her journey and her coaching (and her WWE pro wrestler fiance!!) on Instagram @clairebays.

I talk with Chris about pivoting from a culinary career into making hummus for farmer's markets, to borrowing money from his dad to build a hummus factory, to shutting down his hummus factory to move in with his copacker.

Ithaca Hummus has lit the world of hummus on fire and Chris hasn't taken any VC money to do it. I love talking to interesting people who have unique stories and world views and Chris Kirby absolutely does not disappoint.

BY THE WAY, Chris just launched Guillermo's Salsa as Founder and CEO alongside Guillermo from Jimmy Kimmel Live! Me and Guillermo share a birthday AND a love of spicy food and the salsa is quite nice.

Tune in, like, subscribe, all that fun stuff. And make sure you follow Chris Kirby on LinkedIn as well to see what else he gets up to.

Greg Esslinger used to be a Supplier Manager at UNFI. In fact, he was MY Supplier Manager at UNFI when Yellowbird was a fledgling brand. We were both learning the industry at the same time from completely different angles. 

Greg opted out of big distribution years ago to prioritize time with his family and meaningful work over climbing a corporate ladder that ultimately wasn't filling his cup more than draining it.

Tune in for a candid talk about what your distributor partners are optimizing for and some of the things you should look out for.

Follow Greg on LinkedIn for regular deduction tips.

David is the founder of Seed Ranch Flavor Co. and Grown As* Foods. Previously in the renewable energy sector, he never seems to stop moving. 

That penchant for moving takes him all over the world. And he's using his business spend to travel there, in style, for almost free.

Check out David's story here and then head over to the Gross To Net Substack to see the points travel plan that David built JUST FOR ME. If you're a business owner looking to make the most of your travel rewards, hit him up at [email protected].