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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.
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