Ep. 20 - Message In A Jar with Matt Dunaj | Gross To Net

Ep. 20 - Message In A Jar with Matt Dunaj | Gross To Net

Most people meet a finance chief only after the interesting decisions are already made — he's the one who tells you whether you can afford them. Matt Dunaj has spent his career sitting exactly where those trades get made: as CFO at Follow Your Heart through its sale to Danone, as CFO/COO at Fly By Jing during its hypergrowth chili crisp era, and now as CFO at SWG Brands, the vertically integrated sexual-wellness group behind Hello Cake, Wet Lubricants, and Trigg Laboratories. Three categories that have almost nothing in common on paper, and one person who's been at the financial controls of all of them. We get into how he actually reads a company on day one (the answer starts with the balance sheet, not the P&L), what nearly a decade inside a fifty-year-old plant-based pioneer teaches you that job-hopping can't, why the most successful month at a growing CPG brand can be the most painful one for cash, what changes when "filling a jar of vegan mayonnaise" turns into "filling a bottle of personal lubricant," and how to actually make demand-planning decisions before a Walmart pipefill when no math makes you certain. Along the way: a hobby that started as cactus collecting and ended in marriage, a meadow scythed by hand, a broken-TV recording that ended up sounding like music, and the fruit bowl analogy still running culture at companies Matt hasn't worked at in years. Matt also calls himself The CFO Guy, which most people in his seat would never do — and the reason why is the most honest thing said in the episode. Find Matt on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-dunaj/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-dunaj/]. Gross to Net is hosted by George Milton — find him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-milton-a8348956/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-milton-a8348956/]. If this one resonated, the easiest thing you can do is share it with one operator who needs to hear it.

Ep. 19 - Be More You with Morgan Zanotti | Gross To Net

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 [https://drinkwaay.com], 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 [https://www.linkedin.com/in/morgan-buehler-zanotti-31989620/], on TikTok and Instagram @morganzanotti [https://www.tiktok.com/@morganzanotti] and @drinkwaay [https://www.instagram.com/drinkwaay/], and you can try Waay at drinkwaay.com [https://drinkwaay.com] or pick it up at Whole Foods, Sprouts, or Target.

Ep. 18 - Create Your Own Adventure with Katie Horgan | Gross To Net

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 [https://www.linkedin.com/in/horgankatie/] or at bravocpg.com [httpd://www.bravocpg.com], or email her directly at katie@bravocpg.com [katie@bravocpg.com].

Ep. 17 - Free The Hummus with Nick Wiseman

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 [https://www.eatlittlesesame.com] and on Instagram at @eatlittlesesame [https://www.instagram.com/eatlittlesesame]. Connect with Nick on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-wiseman-7338262b/]. Little Sesame is available at Whole Foods, Sprouts, Target, Wegmans, and independent retailers nationwide.

Ep. 16 - Your Favorite Jam Brand Is From Iceland with Gardar Stefansson | Gross To Net

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 [httpd://www.goodgoodbrands.com], on Amazon, Thrive Market, and in stores nationwide. Follow Gardar on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/gardar-stefansson]  and Good Good on Instagram at @goodgoodbrand [https://instagram.com/goodgoodbrand]. And stay tuned for the Yellowbird x Good Good "Wing Jam" collab — details coming soon.