In a historic bank building in downtown Mount Hope, the smell of homemade dough fills a colorful pizza processing plant. Inside, old signs, trinkets and paintings line the walls.
LMNO Pizza in downtown Mount Hope opened its doors ten years ago. Vance Summers, the owner, achieved his goal of running a wholesale pizza business, which he says had been his childhood dream.
“I remember when I was eight years old, and our family was asking us what we wanted to be when we grew up, and I said I wanted to have my own pizza place,” Summers said.
Summers said he had no particular reason for his dream other than he likes to eat pizza and likes to make it.
Summers grew up in the west side of Wichita and worked at more than 15 other pizza places, but felt limited by previous workplaces. At the end of the 2000s, he started working for his own pizzeria.
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LMNO began building its wholesale business in Mount Hope in 2011. Summers wanted to expand LMNO Pizza after starting the business out of the back of Barleycorn’s in Wichita.
Create pizza
Summers, his wife Juliet Summers and his four employees create and sell about 4,000 pizzas each month to more than 20 retailers across Kansas.
Some of the more exotic flavors sold by the artisan pizzeria include pork jawbone, cheeseburger, chicken pesto, marmalade, and winemaker.
Retailers can choose from 11 pizzas, but customers can order a hot take-out custom pizza on Friday nights or call ahead for a small order of frozen custom pizzas.
The pizzas are made from scratch – Summers creates pizza dough in large batches, weighs small balls of dough for nine-inch pans, cooks the tomato sauce and measures each topping by hand.
He adds “fairy dust,” or a custom blend of cheeses and spices, to the top of each pizza to prepare it for freezing or baking.
Summers began selling large orders of frozen pizzas to local liquor stores and grocery stores, but soon expanded to most of south-central Kansas. Summers said the expansion on the wholesale side was partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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“We were still doing wholesale even when I was open like a restaurant every day,” Summers said. “Our wholesale business exploded because the places that sold the pizzas needed food to stay open.”
Invest in the community
During the decade, Summers continued to run LMNO from the corner of Ohio Street and Main Street in Mount Hope, purchasing another building across the street for use as additional storage.
Although Summers has expanded his wholesale business to where the production portion of his store takes up almost the entire first floor of the building, he still enjoys opening his doors weekly to customers.
After developing his wholesale business, opening the restaurant became about involvement with Mount Hope residents rather than revenue.
“We’re open Friday nights more for the community part than the money,” Summers said.
LMNO opens Friday nights and sells hot and frozen pizzas to local and out-of-town customers.
The future of LMNO Pizza
When retailers contact Summers for frozen pizza, they often do so weeks in advance, especially for large orders.
Most of Summers’ commissions are for local Kansas businesses, but he said he dreams of having a bigger corporation or company buy his business to expand further.
Even if a company were to buy LMNO’s recipes, he plans to continue creating and baking pizzas in Mount Hope; “until I finish work one day,” Summers said.
“I’m so glad our processing plant is an old bank building and we have overflow storage across the street. I’m glad we invested so much time in this town,” said Summers. “I feel like there are endless opportunities, and being able to control my destiny is what’s important to me.”
