MOD Pizza confirms 1st Dayton-area restaurant will open in Englewood

MOD Pizza will open its first Dayton-area location in Englewood, not Centerville as first thought.

The first local MOD Pizza will be located in the 9100 block of North Main Street (Ohio 48) adjacent to a new Panera Cafe in an outlot in front of the Meijer store on Ohio 48 just south of I-70. It will share a 4,510-square-foot building with a Starbucks coffee shop.

The building is under construction, and the restaurant is projected to open in late December, a spokeswoman for the pizza chain said Friday, Aug. 19.

A MOD Pizza restaurant that was previously announced in the Cornerstone of Centerville development is projected to open three in early 2017, the spokeswoman said. Another MOD Pizza is coming to West Chester, across from the Liberty Center retail development in Butler County.

Each new pizza restaurant will seat 75 inside and another 15 to 20 on a patio, and will employ 30 to 35, according to Craig Hanson, a spokesman for the franchise group opening MOD Pizza locations in the Dayton and Cincinnati areas.

“We are working on several more locations throughout Southern Ohio,” Hanson told us via email. “We expect to have 15 locations within the next few years in Ohio alone.”

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MOD Pizza is a Seattle-based pizza chain with a fast-serve, build-your-own personal-pizza concept similar to the Kettering-based Rapid Fired Pizza, which operates five Dayton-area locations and has signed leases to open several more in the coming months across the region — including one in Englewood just north of the MOD Pizza location. Another entrant into the market with a similar concept is Cleveland-based pizza chain PizzaFire, which is scheduled to open its first Dayton-area location on Monday (Aug. 22) on Far Hills Avenue in Kettering.

>> RELATED: Pizza wars poised to re-ignite

William Singer, development director for the city of Englewood, said the area surrounding the I-70/Ohio 48 interchange is taking off with new development that should only accelerate now that a two-year interchange improvement project is now complete, and traffic patterns have been restored. And Englewood residents are enjoying the increasing variety of dining options, Singer said.

>> RELATED: Rapid Fired Pizza to open restaurant in Englewood

MOD Pizza’s CEO Scott Svenson said in a phone interview with this news outlet last October that his company is pushing to expand throughout the Midwest. It opened its first Michigan location in suburban Detroit last summer. After having only one restaurant as recently as 2009, it is projected to have as many as 200 open nationwide by the end of this year.

>> RELATED: MOD Pizza to open on Liberty Way in West Chester

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