Katie’s Frozen Pizzas Land At Target With $20 Million Retail Deal

Katie Lee’s rise from addiction and homelessness to becoming the founder of a booming handmade frozen pizza company is the quintessential American comeback story. Once a homeless high school dropout, Lee turned her dream of owning a neighborhood pizzeria in her hometown of St. Louis into reality in 2008 – a dream she’d had for years but had been unable to achieve due to her alcohol and drug dependency.

Today, her beautiful, modern Italian namesake restaurant boasts three beloved locations across the city, and in an incredible milestone, her line of artisanal frozen pizzas will be available in every Target store nationwide as of September 17. Most notably, Lee and her team of award-winning chefs did it all by embracing the impossible – using many local and organic ingredients, every Katie’s pizza is handmade.

This culinary feat is a personal triumph for Lee and her team, whose number one goal is to respect the traditional process of crafting hand-stretched, wood-fired, premium pizzas. No automation allowed here – these are real pizzas, made by hardworking people. And the difference is crystal clear once you take them home, bake them, and taste them. You get restaurant-quality, Neapolitan-style crispy crust pizza loaded with flavor.

“As a busy working mom, it’s hard to find convenient, real food, so we made it ourselves,” says Lee. “This is real food for the soul, handcrafted with the best ingredients. There’s nothing else like it and we’re proud to stand behind that.”

How Katie’s is disrupting the frozen pizza industry

“We didn’t just get into Target — we got there while making every pizza by hand, in a facility we built ourselves, with chefs, not machines,” says Lee. “There’s no big consulting firm, no focus group, no ghostwriter. It is real food, made by real people. We did it our way.”

The $20 million retail deal is putting Katie’s handmade frozen pizzas in every Target store nationwide, premiering with coveted endcaps in the frozen aisle. This is a huge milestone for an independent, female-founded, chef-led frozen food brand that’s competing in a space dominated by mass-scale, heavily automated competitors.

“Everyone else is automating. We’re hand-making every pizza. Everyone’s outsourcing. We’re doing everything in-house. Everyone’s crafting imaginary brands. We’re just telling our real story. That’s what makes people feel it,” says Lee, whose business team also includes her brother Johnny as COO and her mother, Brenda, as the art director – a true family affair.

Every Katie’s frozen pizza starts with 48-hour naturally leavened dough, which is then hand stretched into a crust and wood fired at 800° F. The crusts are topped with fresh house-made sauces and premium ingredients, carefully and responsibly sourced locally as well as imported from Italy. The four varieties featured at Target are Burrata Margherita, Pepperoni Stracciatella, Meatball and Black Garlic Burrata. These are a far cry from your average run of the mill frozen pizzas.

Perfect handcrafted pizza from a team of misfits

Katie’s frozen pizzas were born during the pandemic, when the team scrambled to pivot from serving at the restaurants to catering to folks at home. Determined to keep every member of her staff employed, Lee transformed the restaurants into pizza production lines, turning waiters into delivery drivers and prep cooks. Not a single employee was laid off.

In just five years, Lee and her team thoughtfully and meticulously scaled production while staying true to their commitment to tradition, freshness and quality, and customers have clearly taken notice. The business quickly grew locally and eventually to regional distribution, followed by permanent shelf space in select local and regional grocery chains. Thanks to the Target deal, Katie’s frozen pizzas will now be available nationwide.

“We’re a team of misfits,” says Lee. “A single mom, chefs, creatives, former addicts, dreamers. And now we’re on the shelves next to billion-dollar brands. We weren’t supposed to be here. And that’s exactly why we are.”

Katie’s handmade frozen pizzas have outperformed the strong frozen pizza category, with more than 100% year over year growth since 2021. Lee herself has been honored as St. Louis Chef of the Year for six years running, a testament to her leadership, culinary vision and relentless devotion to quality, creativity and soul.

“Breaking into frozen pizza without major investors, without agencies, without shortcuts — it’s statistically impossible. But we did it. Not because we gamed the system, but because we refused to play by its rules.”