Story By: Rick Hynum | Photos By: Gregg Goldman + Tré Parmalee
For St. Louis pizzaiola Katie Lee, winning Walmart’s Golden Ticket last September was a remarkable milestone in a career of high-flying ups and rock-bottom downs. And talk about an “up.”
An achievement like that—the opportunity to get her line of frozen pizzas, pasta bakes and other consumer packaged goods (CPGs) on the world’s largest retailer’s shelves—would be enough to make many entrepreneurs forget all of the setbacks. But not Lee. The downs helped make her who she is today, and she knows it.
And who is she? Arguably St. Louis’ most acclaimed restaurateur, the media-savvy founder of Katie’s (formerly Katie’s Pizza & Pasta Osteria), and a consummate businesswoman who has built a fast-growing nationwide CPG brand entirely, thus far, on her own dime. She’s also a recovering alcoholic and high-school dropout. And talk about “downs.” When she was dropped off at a rehab center in 2011, she couldn’t even remember who brought her there—and anxiously pondered making a getaway as soon as she walked through the door.
“Washed up on shore. That’s the thing. I never know where I’ll wash up and if I’ll be dead or swimming. There are no rescue missions. No shuttle every 15 minutes. I have to float and hope.”
That’s from Lee’s autobiography, The Katie Lee Story, released this month. (Learn more in the sidebar at the bottom of the page). But lest you think it sounds like a depressing read, think again: Lee is swimming now and swimming fast, setting the pace and winning the race while learning from every loss she ever suffered. And she’s about to become one of the pizza community’s most recognizable figures.
“It’s like when someone strikes oil or gold. I thought, holy cow, we sold 50,000 pizzas in the first six weeks! This is an incredible product.” —Katie Lee
“Our team is phenomenal,” Lee says. “They stood by me during COVID while we developed the frozen pizza, and we stayed in business. That really showed me how important our people are.”
“A Survival Mechanism”
PMQ Pizzafirst profiled Lee in the May 2017 issue, in which we dubbed her “the queen of all St. Louis media” and “an unstoppable force, a driven, laser-focused entrepreneur who does pretty much everything right.” That hasn’t changed, although she now oversees three locations (with a fourth coming soon) and in 2024 rebranded her business to simply Katie’s. She still prizes clean ingredients, as local and seasonal as possible. And “artisan” seems a feeble descriptor for pizzas like the Bomba Prawn and the Tuscan Anchovy or pastas like squid-ink spaghetti and Potato Agnolotti with sturgeon caviar.
“We call it affordable luxury,” Lee says. “Real food. All of our food is made with extra-virgin olive oil, no seed oils, no additives, no chemicals, no sugar….All of our flours are organic and ancient-grain. We use real tomatoes, fresh garlic, fresh basil. So it’s an unusually healthy product for pizza. I call it clean comfort food.”
It’s also exactly what many consumers are looking for today. And Lee, who has been a clean-food evangelist for years, knows it. But even she was taken aback when she introduced St. Louis to frozen versions of her pizzas in 2020, at the start of the pandemic.
With a shutdown order in place, Lee’s high-end culinary style didn’t exactly lend itself to traditional delivery. “So we prototyped a frozen pizza and pivoted to that in about 72 hours,” she recalls. “We launched a simple e-commerce site on Shopify and sold 50,000 pizzas in the first six weeks, just in the metropolitan St. Louis area. We turned the dining rooms into assembly lines, and our cooks were making all of the pizzas there. We turned all of our servers and bartenders into delivery drivers, and they were delivering boxes of frozen pizzas across the metro area….We kept everybody working that wanted to work, and we were still hiring the whole time. So it was a beautiful experience.”
Other large pizza brands were shipping frozen pies in 2020, but Lee’s brand was hardly large—or even particularly well-known outside of St. Louis. And she certainly didn’t envision launching a CPG line that would eventually get Walmart’s attention. “It was really a survival mechanism,” she says. A few years earlier, she had started a meal kit brand called Vero Pasta, but it never took off. “After that failed, I was very worried that this might not work. But it was an instant success. My restaurants have always been a success, and I’m lucky like that. But this was the first time where I felt like, oh, my goodness! It’s like when someone strikes oil or gold. I thought, holy cow, we sold 50,000 pizzas in the first six weeks! And I realized that this wasn’t just the community supporting restaurants. This is an incredible product.”
Suddenly, that facility where Lee had made her meal kits—a space she still owned—was paying off in an unexpected way. She installed wood-fired pizza ovens and walk-in freezers, transforming it into a manufacturing plant that’s still growing today as she has added more products.
So, aside from building out the facility, what did Lee have to do differently to create her now-burgeoning line of frozen pizzas and other products? “Nothing,” she says. “Here’s the innovative part about our company. People want to cut costs and think they need to use different cheeses and different processes to make food. So what you find in the grocery store is overly processed food with a lot of science and junk behind it. Because we had to pivot so quickly, we made the exact same pizza, sealed it and froze it. And then we realized that’s the best way to do it….And it’s what everyone is afraid to do. So there is no leap. There is no difference. It’s literally the exact same chefs, the same dough, the same flour, the same everything. We hand-stretch it. We fire it in the same ovens with the same Missouri white oak. The only difference is that we seal it and freeze it [at the plant].”
Lee’s all-star Chef Collective—Cary McDowell, Derek Woodley and Jake Sanderson—amassed decades of experience at some of the country’s most renowned restaurants.
“A Chicken-and-Egg Situation”
It should be noted that Lee did all of that without outside funding. “The restaurants are very successful, so they funded the frozen business in its startup phase,” she notes. “We already had the plant. We just put in the ovens and the walk-ins. It’s much less expensive than building a restaurant.”
Lee knew she was onto something huge. If she could sell 50,000 pizzas in six weeks via a Shopify site, what if she got her frozen line into grocery stores? In St. Louis, regional chains like Diersbergs Markets and Straubs signed on first, followed by Balducci’s, Fresh Market and Fresh Thyme. Then a deal with Unified Natural Foods, a nationwide distribution center (DC) for specialty foods, expanded her company’s reach significantly.
But none of it came easily. “It’s very hard to make it into a distribution center, because you need the buyers,” Lee explains. “But the buyers don’t want you until you have a distribution center. So it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Certain DCs believe in the product so much that they bring you on, but it’s very unusual for them to take that risk. And sometimes we have to get those accounts with the grocers first and get enough grocers in, say, Oregon that the DC in the Northwest will take us on. It’s a very, very hard thing to do. The DCs need to know they’re going to sell your product and need to see deals [with retailers]. But the retailers also need to see you in a DC so they can pick up the product.”
“It’s very hard to make it into a distribution center, because you need the buyers. But the buyers don’t want you until you have a distribution center.” —Katie Lee
Which leads us back to Walmart. Lee had already gotten Katie’s products into 800 stores prior to securing the Golden Ticket—“without a broker, without a marketing spend, without anything,” she notes. Then, in September 2024, Lee and her culinary director, Jake Sanderson, attended Walmart’s Open Call pitch day in Bentonville, Arkansas. On offer was the full line of Katie’s frozen pizzas and pasta bakes, plus her sauces (arrabbiata, marinara and lemon cream); barrel-aged balsamic and EVOO; and slow-dried pastas like bucatini and fiori.
A Golden Ticket is the grand prize, signifying that Walmart intends to move forward with the product for placement in stores, on Walmart.com or both. Selected applicants pitch their products in 30-minute meetings. Lee’s team had been pursuing Walmart for nearly five years, sending samples and showing products off to the retailer’s reps at expos. But her expectations were not high. “We had no idea it was possible to get a deal like that,” Lee says. “We thought it would be like all the other trade shows or tabletop shows, where you meet the buyers, build a relationship and plant seeds, hoping it develops over time, which is how we’ve done everything else. And then over the next year or two, hopefully, we could get into a couple of stores or something like that.”
Instead, Lee got her Golden Ticket in less than an hour. And that deal quickly led to more opportunities. “Since we got it,” she says, “it’s been a great experience watching the company get a lot of attention from all of these other retailers that maybe weren’t taking notice yet.”
Lee considers the late Rolando Colon a co-founder of Katie’s. Her longtime dear friend, he cooked every day in the restaurant—not for customers but for Lee’s employees. “He’d dance and sing and kiss and hug,” she says.
Decisions to Make
But Lee is, in a sense, her own “golden ticket.” Her company has now cut deals with Whole Foods, the Big Y supermarket chain in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and the Sprouts Farmers Market chain in Arizona. “We’re working on Winn-Dixie—we’re very close with that—and Target,” she says. “We’ve had a lot of meetings with Kroger. So we’ve made a lot of headway, with hopefully another 1,500 doors from the Natural Products Expo West that we’re working on. We’re very close with about 20 retailers right now and have another 50 just waiting for reviews.”
Meanwhile, the Katie’s CPG line has seen about 50% growth month over month—and that’s without any Walmart stores yet. Winning the Golden Ticket validated Lee’s brand, but how it plays out is currently up in the air, she says. Right now, she’s looking at a launch in Q3 or Q4 of this year. Still, there’s a lot to figure out.
“We have to make a decision about what’s best for Walmart and for us,” Lee says. “If we proceed with it, are we ready to give them our all and give them the price they want? There’s an option to choose how many locations we go into. We have a lot to determine, and we want to make the best decision not just for us, but for the retailer. One thing we’ve learned this year is the importance of building real partnerships with the retailers. We didn’t really understand that in the beginning, and we’re learning that it’s a partnership—making sure we can support them as much as they can support us. So I really can’t answer that yet, except to say that we’re just trying to figure it out.”
It’s a good problem to have, and Lee is confident she’ll crack it. Her autobiography—a unique, magazine-style work of art with striking illustrations and her own tight, crisp yet tender prose—will help raise her profile, and she’s brought in Magrino Public Relations (Martha Stewart’s publicist) to build more buzz. “They will help get that book out and get me on podcasts, sharing the story, with the ultimate goal to drive sales to retailers and get Americans connected with my family and with what we’ve built.”
In other words, wherever that Golden Ticket might take her, Lee’s still the captain of the ship, setting her own course. Not too shabby for a dropout who once had to “hope and float.”
“I’m not in a position where everything is riding on Walmart,” she says. “It’s amazing, it’s absolutely gonna take us to the next level. But we’re grateful for what we have already….I always believed we will be in Walmart. I know we’re going to be in Target and Costco. I know we’ll be in every retailer across the country. It’s just a matter of how long—and how much hard work—it will take to get there. [The Golden Ticket] just made it easier.”
Rick Hynum is PMQ’s editor in chief.
Coming Clean: The Katie Lee Story
Clean ingredients are important to Katie Lee, owner of Katie’s in St. Louis. So is staying clean and sober. She became addicted to alcohol in her early teens and tried for years—and kept failing—to get sober. While she dropped in and out of rehab, the restaurant business remained her first love. As she recently told Forbes, “It’s probably the only industry that welcomes 15-year-old dropout addicts.” Sober for about 15 years now, Lee’s victory over addiction is a tale in itself, described in both painful and funny detail in The Katie Lee Story, her illustrated, magazine-format autobiography released this month. “It’s a very vulnerable story,” she says. “I share a lot of things that maybe people wouldn’t necessarily want to share, but I’m an open book and really want to connect with people. We all go through painful events and struggles, but never in the book do you get the sense that I…feel like a victim. I’m grateful for all that I have and all I’ve been through. And hopefully that can inspire others who are going through a tough time.”
The Katie Lee Story can be purchased in hard copy at any Katie’s restaurant or in digital and audiobook format at Katies.com and KatieLeeStory.com.
