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Key Takeaways
- When the dining rooms closed, Katie Lee focused on surviving, not reinventing.
- By turning a restaurant pizza into a frozen product within 24 hours and launching direct-to-consumer with her existing team, she proved that speed and simplicity can open up entirely new businesses.
If the dining rooms are closed during Covid, Katie Lee wasn’t trying to build a new business. “We just wanted to survive,” says Lee.
With restaurants suddenly unable to serve guests, she and her team looked at what they already had and quickly took action. At the time, Lee was active Katie’s pizza and pasta in St. Louis, where wood-fired pizza anchored the menu.
“I made a prototype of the frozen pizza within 24 hours,” Lee explains. They cooked a restaurant pizza, sealed it, froze it and baked it again the next day. “It was great.”
Instead of redesigning the product for retail, Lee kept it close to what came out of her kitchens. She then reversed her surgery almost immediately. Her restaurant’s dining room became a place for a pizza assembly line. “We converted all the servers and bartenders into delivery people,” Lee explains. “They made $10 a box and had a 50-mile radius.”
She launched direct-to-consumer with a basic configuration. The response was immediate. “We sold 50,000 pizzas in six weeks,” she says.
The growth brought complications. After placing pizzas in grocery stores, Lee received a call from a federal agent. “We’re taking all your pizzas off the shelves,” he told her. Selling pepperoni pizza meant scrutiny from the USDA. “I remember saying, ‘Is this a big deal?’” Lee recalls. “And he said, ‘It’s a really big deal.'”
The company shut down, entered an inspection and continued under federal regulations. Momentum built from there. Lee signed up for Walmart’s Open Call and earned a Golden Ticket, fast-track access to national distribution. “If you get a Golden Ticket, you are automatically admitted to Walmart,” she says.
Not long after, Target reached out. Lee flew to Minneapolis expecting a limited regional rollout. Instead, the meeting ended with a full national launch. The $20 million retail deal will see Lee’s handmade frozen pizzas included in every store Target store nationally.
“When I found out what the order was – 400,000 pizzas – we almost lost our minds,” she says.
The team quickly scaled up production, expanded the factory, hired dozens of new employees and produced nearly half a million pizzas in just over three months to meet the initial order.
Lee chose not to wait until the outcome was clear to tell the story. “You always hear the success stories afterwards. It’s rare that you get involved right from the phone call,” she says. A documentary crew filmed the process as it unfolded, as Lee began writing his memoir in chapters, documenting the work in real time.
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Learning through life
Before frozen pizzas or national retail deals, Lee’s story was defined by contrast. She has not attended culinary school or any formal training. Her experience was built in restaurant kitchens, shaped through repetition and tested long before the company scaled.
That background is how she explains the team behind the brand: “We are a team of misfits,” she says. “A single mother, chefs, creatives, ex-addicts, dreamers. And now we’re on the shelves next to billion-dollar brands. We weren’t meant to be here, and that’s exactly why we are.”
Lee learned the industry by working in restaurants, not classrooms. “I’m a high school dropout,” she says. “Restaurants take you with them no matter what.” Kitchens became her training, and repetition became her training.
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Time spent in Italy honed that foundation. Lee lived in Florence while her mother taught fine arts, and the experience changed the way she thought about cooking. “I fell in love with Italian cuisine,” she says, pointing to regional recipes and the way food is woven into everyday life.
It wasn’t about trends or presentation. It was about restraint and consistency. Those ideas stuck with her when she returned to the United States and opened her first restaurant.
That first restaurant quickly attracted attention, and just as quickly, things unraveled. Lee battled addiction while trying to keep the business afloat. She describes being kicked out of her own restaurant and ultimately losing.
Sobriety followed, not as a dramatic turning point, but as a practical reset. “Sobriety gives you so many gifts,” she says. “The most fundamental one is that we just have more time. We are free every day.” It changed the way she showed up and how she took responsibility.
Family later reshaped her perspective. Motherhood forced distancing from daily work and required trust in others. “You are pulled away for a while and you are dependent on other people,” she says. It was uncomfortable, but necessary, to see others running the business without her constant presence.
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Over time, that trust has grown Katie’s Pizza & Pasta from a single neighborhood pizzeria to a growing restaurant group, now operating three locations in St. Louis, with two more set to open in 2025.
These lessons continued during Covid, when reliance on her team became essential.
When Lee talks about success, she rarely views it as personal achievement. “Being able to share this success and dream big with a group of people who may not have had this opportunity [is] the most exciting part,” she says.
For Lee, food was the starting point. Sobriety, family and trust make the speed sustainable.
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