10/16/2026
At this year’s Ignition Community Conference, we’re honored to be recognized by Inductive Automation for our work on an RFID Trace project that brought enterprise-grade traceability to a 100-year-old family bakery. 🥖
We partnered with the Digital Foundry at New Kensington to help Mancini's Bakery, a Pittsburgh institution founded in 1926, to help them pursue BRCGS food safety certification using RFID technology and Kanoa 's MES Trace Module. Certification requires auditable, forward and backward lot traceability, and it opens the door to the major retail and food service contracts that Mancini’s couldn’t compete for before.
Mancini’s bakes over 10,000 loaves a day in the “Old World Style.” This style of baking is a labor intense, handmade process. Skilled bakers measure everything by hand. Every loaf of bread is formed, baked and moved around the facility with no conveyors or automated material handling equipment.
Our solution used Ignition’s new Event Streams Module as the backbone:
🔹 RFID readers at key control points, from receiving to packaging, tracking dough and product as it moves through the facility
🔹 Event Streams turning raw reads into clean, contextualized production events in real time
🔹 New RFID devices automatically created as UDT instances and Kanoa assets, with no operator input required
🔹 Kanoa MES Trace building complete genealogy graphs from those events
🔹 Simple Perspective dashboards designed for bakers, not engineers
The result is a clear path to BRCGS certification and a level of visibility Mancini’s never had before. Management can now see how materials move through the facility in real time. There have been early wins on the floor too, like a dashboard that lets bakers see hopper levels instead of waiting on an alarm.
To give a sense of scale, the system is tracking more than 15,600 tags and 15 RFID readers, and it handles over 10 million RFID events every month, all running on a single Ignition gateway.
Want to see it in action? Check out the video case study here 👇
https://icc.inductiveautomation.com/discover-gallery-detail/2026/mdi
Mancini’s Bakery — a beloved, multi-generational Pittsburgh institution that has been making “Old World” bread for 100 years — worked with MDI to transform a hand-crafted, paper-based bakery into a digitally certified food manufacturer ready to compete at the next level.
