July 29, 2025

Great Ingredients Meet Smart Tech: Craft Cannery’s Recipe for Growth

From Reactive to Proactive: How This Small New York State Food Manufacturers Is Capitalizing on Advanced Sensor Monitoring

What you need to know:

Monitoring systems allow companies across all industries to advance their production and overall business workflows.
The implementation of smart and digital technologies reduces the possibility of human/ man-made error, allowing precise and deep scans of hardware to collect machine and software data.
Early detection of machine or process failures can potentially prevent product loss, reduce downtime, and save money on repairs and replacements.
Analyzing daily production processes and workflows helps minimize the risk of quality decline and productivity loss.

Craft Cannery, a fast-growing food manufacturing and packaging company based in Bergen, NY, is proving that the right blend of ingredients, innovation, and data can lead to remarkable success. Since launching in 2020, the company has:

Won the $500,000 Grow-NY Prize in 2022
Expanded its factory in 2024
Partnered with RIT’s Center of Excellence in Advanced & Sustainable Manufacturing (COE-ASM) to digitize its operations

But what’s the real secret ingredient behind their growth? Smart sensor monitoring and digital manufacturing.

Situation

Temperature control is a big deal in food manufacturing—it’s all about nailing that perfect taste and quality while keeping things safe and healthy.

Just like all food manufacturers, Craft Cannery has regular inspections from federal and state agencies to ensure they’re meeting or exceeding consumer-health regulations.

“We partnered with RIT to really look into our critical processes and map out some approaches to add the right type of temperature-monitoring system for us. They helped define a realistic budget we could live with, understand how a temperature monitoring system could work on the shop floor, and select hardware and software that was a good fit.”

-Paul Guglielmo, Owner and CEO, Craft Cannery

Problem

Finding the right digital-sensing solution.

In 2023, Craft Cannery decided it was time to up their game and wondered if there was a better way to keep tabs on temperatures within their processes. They started by inquiring about adding a more automated temperature-monitoring system to their operations.

"Our technical lead, Chris Piggott, was able to do is tailor a set of commercially available solutions, some of which are free, into a comprehensive system that can talk to the temperature sensors on the floor, store those readings in the cloud, and alert Pauly and his team when temperatures are trending away from where they need them to be.”

-Gerry Hurley, COE-ASM Technical Program Manager

The RIT team teamed up with Pauly to pinpoint where temperature-monitoring systems were needed in the operation process. They closely evaluated the temperature-controlled assets in the existing factory, including three cook kettles, a refrigerator, a freezer, and an automatic filler and capper. They also considered two additional cook kettles planned for expansion.

From Manual to Digital

Sure, top-notch ingredients are key to great food products but leveraging digital technologies to ensure everything stays fresh and functional is just as crucial. Imagine a fridge or freezer going on the fritz, or a kettle not heating properly—that could spell disaster for the product.

With so many kettles, refrigerators, and freezers, Craft Cannery staff had their hands full with daily routines of manually checking and monitoring temperatures, levels, and production efficiency. This manual process left room for human error.

Even with Craft Cannery’s strict temperature-checking protocols, recording measurements on paper logs and then typing them into a record-keeping system was a real hassle. Plus, any temperature deviations during processing could ruin a batch if not corrected quickly. And let’s not forget, improper operation of storage systems, especially during power outages, could lead to spoilage of raw ingredients.

“Anomaly detection and the ability to quickly alert key staff were crucial for CC’s unique monitoring system. With specific refrigerators and kettles needing to meet levels and temperature requirements for the overall best tasting product, every amount of data needs to be precise and accurately recorded. Through their assessment, the RIT engineers systematically defined these requirements and created a solid design concept.”

-Chris Piggott, RIT Engineer

Setting Up the Data Flow

Our expert engineers recommended wireless temperature sensors and probes with extensive battery life, all connected via a Wi-Fi gateway. They also set up a shop-floor device linked to the network to receive data from these sensors using NodeRED, an open-source software platform. This data is then sent to Amazon Timestream, a cloud-based time-series database.

Grafana, an open-source software that allows users to visualize, query, set alerts, and explore metrics, logs, and traces, and send out alarm notifications. The system was configured to provide notices if a refrigerator or freezer strays from its normal range or stops reporting, even during power or communication failures. The Grafana “On-Call” notification system is a game-changer, with alarm de-duplication and automatic escalation. If the primary receiver doesn’t respond within a set time, the system will notify someone else, ensuring no issue goes unnoticed.

About the Tools

Craft Cannery’s new sensors will allow them to measure and track their product data accurately, ensuring they optimize operations and stay on track with their long-term expansion goals. With this tech, Craft Cannery is set to keep delivering quality products without a hitch.

Learn more about our project with Craft and how our engineers assisted.

About the authors

Center of Excellence in Advanced & Sustainable Manufacturing

The Center of Excellence in Advanced & Sustainable Manufacturing (COE-ASM) is a partnership between New York state and RIT dedicated to helping state manufacturers develop and apply new technologies that create competitive business advantages. Funding is provided by the New York State Department of Economic Development (DED). Any opinions, findings conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the DED.