LMNO Pizza in downtown Mount Hope sells homemade pizzas to retailers across Kansas

In a historic bank building in downtown Mount Hope, the smell of homemade dough fills a colorful pizza processing plant. Inside, antique signs, trinkets and paintings line the walls.

LMNO Pizza in downtown Mount Hope opened a decade ago. Vance Summers, the owner, achieved his goal of operating a wholesale pizza business, which he said was his dream since childhood.

"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 didn't have a specific reason for his dream other than he loves eating pizza and enjoys making it. 

Summers grew up on the west side of Wichita and worked at more than 15 other pizza restaurants but felt constrained by previous workplaces. In the late 2000s, he began working toward his own pizza restaurant.

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LMNO began expanding its wholesale business in Mount Hope in 2011. Summers wanted to expand LMNO Pizza after building up the company in the back of Barleycorn's in Wichita. 

Creating pizza

Summers, his wife Juliet Summers, and his four employees create and sell about 4,000 pizzas every month to more than 20 retailers across Kansas.

Some of the more exotic flavors the handmade pizza shop sells include the hog jaw, cheeseburger, chicken pesto, marmalade and winemaker.

Retailers can choose from 11 pizzas, but customers can order a custom pizza to take home hot on Friday evenings or call in advance for a small order of frozen custom pizzas.

The pizzas are made from scratch — Summers creates pizza dough in large batches, weighs out 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 for freezing or cooking.

Summers began selling large orders of frozen pizzas to local liquor and grocery stores but quickly expanded to most of south-central Kansas. Summers said expanding the wholesale side was partially due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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"We were always 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 to have food to stay open."

Investing in the community

Over 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 to use as extra storage.

Although Summers expanded his wholesale business to where the production part of his store takes up almost the entire first floor of the building, he still enjoys opening his doors each week to customers.

After expanding his wholesale business, opening the restaurant became more about involvement with Mount Hope residents rather than revenue.

"We're open on Friday night more for the community part of it rather than the money," Summers said.

LMNO opens on Friday evenings selling hot and frozen pizzas to local and out-of-town customers.

The future of LMNO Pizza

When retailers contact Summers for frozen pizza, oftentimes, they do it weeks in advance, especially for large orders.

Most of Summers' orders are to locally-owned businesses in Kansas, but he said he dreams of a larger corporation or company purchasing his business to expand further.

Even if a company was to purchase LMNO's recipes, he plans to continue creating and cooking pizzas in Mount Hope; "until I'm done working one day," Summers said.

"I'm so happy that our processing plant is an old bank building, and we have overflow storage across the street. I'm glad we've invested so much time into this town," Summers said. "I feel like there's endless opportunity, and being able to control my destiny is what's important to me."