For 60 years, Imo’s Pizza has had one rule when it comes to its pizza toppings: Place them from edge to edge, and always put the cheese on top. Now, thanks to a new partnership with Mike’s Hot Honey, Imo’s is breaking that rule—at least in part—with delicious results.
The iconic St. Louis brand announced today that it is launching the Honey Trap Pizza, a limited-time collaboration featuring curling pepperoni cups, placed on top of the cheese and finished with a drizzle of the Extra Hot version of Mike’s Hot Honey. The special pizza is currently available at all 98 Imo’s Pizza locations.
According to Imo’s president and CEO Dutch Guidici, the Honey Trap Pizza is meant to lean into the two white-hot food trends that do especially well with Gen Z consumers who have demonstrated an inclination toward bold, heat-balanced flavors. It also represents its first collaboration with a national partner, a major milestone for the brand.
“The regional collaboration—using Red Hot Riplets—went well,” Guidici says. “But we’re looking bigger. We’re confident this collaboration will also resonate since it hits two growing segments across the country: cupping pepperoni and Mike’s Hot Honey.”
As Guidici explains, what makes the pepperoni different from the traditional pepperoni currently used on Imo’s pizzas is the casing. Typically, the brand uses an uncased style, so the pepperoni lays flat against the pizza; for the Honey Trap Pizza, the pizza chain is using a cased version that shrinks up when it cooks, causing the slices to form small cups and crisp around the edges, which become meaty receptacles for the pepperoni’s rendered fat and, as well as the sweet and spicy honey.
The new collaboration is not all that’s currently brewing at Imo’s. In regional news, the company is starting to franchise again, opening another store in Kansas City next week (its third). Guidici hopes to build on the success of the current stores and open 10–20 more in the Kansas City metro area. Guidici says he is also looking at expanding the brand to Nashville and other metros within the region.
“Our focus is in cities within 250 miles of St. Louis,” Guidici says. “We’re poised to grow. The warehouse is finished and there’s plenty of capacity. We’re ready to start exploding.”
Arguably, they already have. “We’re doing well in Walmart, we’re in Dillons, a division of Kroger, and have asked to expand further,” he says. “We also participated in Aldi Finds, a limited-run promotion where we shipped several cases of pizza to every Aldi store in the U.S. Once they sold out, they were gone, but the exposure was incredible.”
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