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 katie@bravocpg.com.

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.