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Key Takeaways
- When dining rooms shut down, Katie Lee focused on survival, not reinvention.
- By turning a restaurant pizza into a frozen product in 24 hours and launching direct-to-consumer with her existing team, she proved that speed and simplicity can unlock entirely new businesses.
When dining rooms shut down during Covid, Katie Lee was not trying to build a new business. “We just wanted to survive,” Lee says.
With restaurants suddenly unable to serve guests, she and her team looked at what they already had and moved fast. At the time, Lee was operating Katie’s Pizza & Pasta in St. Louis, where wood-fired pizza anchored the menu.
“I prototyped the frozen pizza in 24 hours,” Lee explains. They cooked a restaurant pizza, sealed it, froze it and baked it again the next day. “It was awesome.”
Instead of redesigning the product for retail, Lee kept it close to what came out of her kitchens. Then, she flipped her operation almost immediately. Her restaurant’s dining room became a place for a pizza assembly line. “We moved all of the servers and bartenders into delivery drivers,” Lee explains. “They made $10 a box and had a 50-mile radius.”
She launched direct-to-consumer with a basic setup. The response was immediate. “We sold 50,000 pizzas in six weeks,” she says.
Growth brought complications. After placing pizzas in grocery stores, Lee received a call from a federal agent. “We’re pulling all your pizzas off the shelves,” he told her. Selling pizza with pepperoni meant USDA oversight. “I remember saying, ‘Is this a big deal?’” Lee recalls. “And he said, ‘It’s a really big deal.’”
The business paused, entered inspection and continued under federal regulation. Momentum built from there. Lee applied for Walmart’s Open Call and earned a Golden Ticket, a fast-track entry into national distribution. “If you get a Golden Ticket, you’re automatically accepted into 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 is putting Lee’s handmade frozen pizzas in every Target store nationwide.
“When I found out what the purchase order was — 400,000 pizzas — we about lost our minds,” she says.
The team scaled production quickly, expanding its facility, hiring dozens of new employees and producing nearly half a million pizzas in just over three months to meet the first order.
Lee chose not to wait until the outcome was clear to tell the story. “You always hear the success stories afterwards. It’s very rare you get to be involved from the call and from there,” she says. A documentary crew filmed the process as it unfolded, while Lee began writing a memoir in chapters, documenting the work in real time.
Related: He Started Making His Favorite Game Day Snack at Home. Now, His Brand Is Growing Fast.
Learning through life
Before the frozen pizzas or national retail deals, Lee’s story was already defined by contrast. She did not come up through culinary school or formal training. Her experience was built in restaurant kitchens, shaped by repetition and tested long before the business scaled.
That background is how she explains the team behind the brand: “We are a team of misfits,” she says. “A single mom, chefs, creatives, former addicts, dreamers. And now we are on the shelves next to billion-dollar brands. We weren’t supposed 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 will take you no matter what.” Kitchens became her education, and repetition became her training.
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Time spent in Italy sharpened that foundation. Lee lived in Florence while her mother taught fine art, and the experience reshaped how she thought about cooking. “I fell in love with Italian cooking,” she says, pointing to regional recipes and the way food is woven into daily life.
It was not about trends or presentation. It was about restraint and consistency. Those ideas stayed with her when she returned to the United States and opened her first restaurant.
That first restaurant brought attention quickly, and just as quickly, things unraveled. Lee battled addiction while trying to keep the business running. She describes being removed from her own restaurant and eventually losing it.
Sobriety followed, not as a dramatic turning point, but as a practical reset. “Sobriety gives you so many gifts,” she says. “The most basic one is that we just have more time. We’re clear every day.” It changed how she showed up and how she took responsibility.
Family later reshaped her perspective. Motherhood forced distance from daily operations and required trust in others. “You’re pulled away for a while, and you’re forced to rely on other people,” she says. Watching others run the business without her constant presence was uncomfortable, but necessary.
Related: This Michelin-Trained Chef Now Cooks for One of California’s Fastest-Growing Brands
Over time, that trust helped turn Katie’s Pizza & Pasta from a single neighborhood pizzeria into a growing restaurant group, now operating three locations in St. Louis, with two more set to open in 2025.
Those lessons carried forward during Covid, when reliance on her team became essential.
When Lee talks about success, she rarely frames 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 entry point. Sobriety, family and trust are what make the speed sustainable.
Related: This Exec Builds Massive Industry Events Like the National Restaurant Show. Here’s His Strategy.
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Key Takeaways
- When dining rooms shut down, Katie Lee focused on survival, not reinvention.
- By turning a restaurant pizza into a frozen product in 24 hours and launching direct-to-consumer with her existing team, she proved that speed and simplicity can unlock entirely new businesses.
When dining rooms shut down during Covid, Katie Lee was not trying to build a new business. “We just wanted to survive,” Lee says.
With restaurants suddenly unable to serve guests, she and her team looked at what they already had and moved fast. At the time, Lee was operating Katie’s Pizza & Pasta in St. Louis, where wood-fired pizza anchored the menu.
