As more Americans seek restaurant-quality fare on frozen-pizza shelves, major retailers and grocery chains are eyeing independent pizzerias to meet the demand. Case in point: PMQ Pizza featured Katie Lee, owner of the three-store Katie’s in St. Louis and a fast-growing force in retail pizza, in the May 2025 issue. But Lee has some tough competition, including Seattle’s Tutta Bella, with seven locations (five brick-and-mortar stores and two food trucks) in Washington State.
Washington media outlets are reporting that Tutta Bella is ramping up production at its food manufacturing facility in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood, thanks to a new deal with Kroger for its frozen pies. According to Seattle Business Magazine (SBM), Tutta Bella’s wood-fired Neapolitan pizzas will be offered in 1,200 Kroger stores in 40 states.
Kroger already offers Tutta Bella’s pies at 200 stores, SBM notes, but that number will climb dramatically with the new agreement. Kroger reportedly placed an order for 85,000 pizzas to the tune of more than $1 million in sales for Tutta Bella.
Related: Winning the Cold War: How Anthony Mangieri Conquered the Frozen Pizza Segment
“We didn’t set out to become a national food manufacturer—it happened organically, one pizza at a time,” Tutta Bella founder and CEO Joe Fugere told SBM.
Now it’s more like thousands of pies at a time. In fact, Fugere brought in Alex Camara as Tutta Bella’s president and COO in February 2024 to help the company grow its retail/consumer packaged goods line both regionally and beyond the Pacific Northwest. Camara’s previous experience was in food retail and global manufacturing.
“With significant growth ahead for Tutta Bella, it was clear that we needed to add an executive resource, a growth-minded leader with the expertise and vision to guide us through this next phase of our journey,” Fugere said last year. “Alex checks every box, and he’s the perfect fit for us.”
The Kroger deal is the biggest move yet in Tutta Bella’s long-term strategy to grab more market share in the lucrative retail pizza space. The company opened its massive Culinary Innovation Hub in August 2023, with a ceremony that included a “blessing of the ovens” by a priest. The 15,000-square-foot facility boasts a state-of-the-art prep kitchen, production facility and office space and also serves as the brand’s headquarters.
Tutta Bella already supplies pizzas to 63 Costco locations in the Northwest and to an unspecified number of Fred Meyer and QFC stores. The brand’s sales are currently split about 50/50 between its restaurants and its food manufacturing arm, but that number will likely skew to 80% food manufacturing in the next couple of years.
“When an initial order comes in, you have to fill, and then you refill,” Fugere told The Puget Sound Business Journal. “We worked around the clock for 14 days to fulfill the initial order. We fulfilled it on time, but it killed us—like, everyone was exhausted.”
