TruFood Manufacturing employees are surrounded by chocolate, granola and nutrition bars each day in their three facilities throughout Pittsburgh, Pa., and one in Commack, N.Y. As dreamy and carefree as that sounds, security is an important component for any food manufacturing facility. Over the years, TruFood implemented two separate security systems — one for biometric authentication and a separate one for access control — making ongoing monitoring and management increasingly time intensive and inefficient. The original system included first generation biometrics, which was groundbreaking at the time but didn’t allow for any changes in fingerprints over years, e.g., damaged prints, weight fluctuations, etc. There was no machine learning in the original systems deployed, which led to inaccuracies and delays. Add to that, the system was aging out after 10 years of use and vendors were no longer supporting the systems, plus hardware issues were popping up again and again with no easy fix. The nature of the existing disparate systems at different sites prevented TruFood from implementing the same system company-wide. It was clear an upgrade was needed to ensure the company’s commitment to secure manufacturing.

The managers at TruFood began their due diligence researching the various access control options in June 2022, which continued for about six months. After several demos and onsite visits with Pittsburgh-area integrator Fedora Intertech, the team decided on Suprema’s BioStar 2 solution and completed installation for the Pittsburgh facilities in April 2023.