Katie Lee, the St. Louis restaurateur behind KATIE'S Pizza & Pasta, will release her debut memoir UNEMPLOYABLE: The Katie Lee Story exclusively at Target stores nationwide on Sept. 27, priced at $24.99. The book will share end-aisle displays with her growing line of Italian retail products — a deliberate merchandising move that doubles as a brand-awareness play at mass scale.
The Retail Opportunity
The Target placement arrives at a moment of significant momentum for Katie's consumer packaged goods operation. Just one year ago, four SKUs of KATIE'S frozen pizzas were available in roughly 400 specialty grocery stores. Today, the brand carries 18 SKUs — including frozen pasta bakes, dried pastas, sauces, and olive oil — across more than 6,000 retail outlets. The Target end-aisle program, running through Oct. 31, will feature the full SKU lineup alongside the book and a companion vinyl album titled One Night at Katie's, a 14-track original soundtrack designed to evoke the sensory atmosphere of her restaurants.
For operators and food entrepreneurs watching restaurant-to-retail expansion strategies, the Katie's trajectory offers a case study in vertical integration: four brick-and-mortar restaurant locations, a frozen pizza manufacturing plant, an e-commerce channel, and a 300-acre farm-to-table property all operating under one 100% women-owned entity. Lee has maintained full ownership throughout the company's growth.
The Story Behind the Brand
The memoir itself is the kind of founder narrative that rarely makes it to print unfiltered. Lee traces her path from a chaotic St. Louis childhood — caring for her father, Tom Lee, a self-employed epileptic with brain damage who told her repeatedly she was "unemployable" — through dropping out of high school at 15, addiction, single motherhood, and eventually being dropped off at a halfway house on South Broadway with a plastic grocery bag of belongings. That scene opens the book.
What follows, Lee writes without polish: waitressing, a first business built on borrowed money and fabricated confidence, a Kickstarter campaign, the loss of her best friend Rolando Colon just before COVID-19 shuttered her restaurants. The book closes with an epilogue set in Italy, centering on Lee and her daughter, Nadia. "Unemployable is a roadmap for everyone who was told they didn't have a chance," Lee said.
The memoir's production team includes creative director Tony Gaddis, cover design by Gaddis and Todd Hippensteel, cover photography by Björn Wallander, and book design by Headcase Design. It is published by Swan Bluff Press (ISBN 979-8-9964877-0-7).
What It Means for the Industry
The simultaneous book-and-product retail activation is a sophisticated brand moment, one that food and beverage industry observers will recognize as an increasingly common strategy for chef-founder brands seeking to build consumer loyalty beyond the dining room. For Katie's, the Target partnership provides national shelf presence at a scale the brand had not previously reached, while the memoir gives the product line a human story that differentiates it in a crowded Italian foods category.
Beginning Nov. 1, both the book and the vinyl album will move to broader retail distribution beyond Target. The brand's production methods — bronze-extruded pasta with egg and semolina, hand-stretched wood-fired pizza dough with a 48-hour ferment — remain consistent between the restaurant and retail lines, a quality-continuity argument Lee has made central to the brand's positioning. KATIE'S holds WBENC certification as a women-owned business and is believed to be the only women-owned certified pizza company operating at this manufacturing scale.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
