When it comes to food, it doesn’t get much simpler than bread.
But there’s nothing simple about producing it, marketing it and selling it.
Just ask Mary Mancini Hartner. For much of the past 50 years, she’s been overseeing a family-owned business that’s been crafting and selling some of the region’s most beloved breads, and throughout that time she’s had to weather economic, labor, production and marketing challenges as well as changes in customer tastes.
And she’s had to do it at the same century-old bakery that her grandfather Frank Mancini built in the Stowe Township enclave of West Park to house her Uncle Jim’s fledgling enterprise.
She’s done it about as well as it could be done, and for her efforts, Hartner was recently named the Western Pennsylvania District Small Businessperson of the Year for National Small Business Week 2026 by the U.S. Small Business Administration Western PA District office.
“The honor celebrates not just business success,” the Duquesne University Small Business Development Center wrote in a press release, “but a lifetime commitment to craftsmanship, family and community.”
Hartner said she was a bit surprised when she learned she’d be receiving that recognition. And the fact that the bakery is celebrating its 100th birthday this year makes the award even sweeter.
“We’re kind of an institution here,” she said. “A big, small bakery.
“It’s a privilege and an honor and it says we must be doing something right.”
And to think that her dad, Ernie – who joined his brother Jim at the bakery after World War II – declined Mary’s offer to come and work at the family business after she obtained her Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Pittsburgh in the mid-1970s.
“I saw it as a good way to have a part-time job when I was raising my kids,” said Hartner, who figured she could help with accounting, given her MBA. “He said, ‘Nope.’”
Things changed for Hartner when her brother Frankie, who had studied business at the University of Miami and gone to a baking school in Minneapolis before entering the family bakery business, died in a motorcycle accident in 1977 at the age of 28. After that, Hartner began helping at the bakery part time, and after her children were older and established in school, she felt she needed to help her dad a little more.
So she had a talk with her children. “I said, ‘What would you rather me do – continue to work a little and be here with you, or work a regular job?’ They said, ‘Work a regular job.’
“I interpreted it as, if I had a bigger paycheck, they could buy more things. Or they wanted me out of their hair.”
So Hartner began working full time, and she’s been at it ever since – even at an age when most of her contemporaries have been long retired.
Her work ethic and dedication to the business have made a major impression on Denis Olson, a senior business consultant with the Duquesne SBDC.
“It’s amazing,” he said. “She’s very protective of the brand, which is well-known in the Pittsburgh region. She’s very caring for her employees. She leads by example and she’s still learning as she goes, to get better with planning, to help grow and become more profitable.”
Olson said he considers Hartner to be “pretty high energy considering how many years she’s worked. Others might take the easy way out and retire, but Mary stays with the business and wants to make sure it’s successful.”
Olson said Hartner serves as a great example to her son, Nick Mancini Hartner, who is also an owner of the business. “He can see her work ethic, and he brings the youth and the education he’s gotten over the years,” Olson said. “Hopefully we’ll have Mancini’s for a long time.”
One of the reasons the bakery has enjoyed the success it has is because it’s always looking for ways to improve. As an example, Olson said the owners came to the Duquesne SBDC a couple of years ago looking for help in developing a business strategy – “a plan of growth to improve their profitability that would ultimately lead to expansion and more jobs for the community.”
Olson said the SBDC guided the business through a strategic plan process that focused on continuous improvement in every facet of the bakery’s business – quality control, production, distribution, marketing, sales and customer satisfaction. He said the SBDC’s relationship with Mancini’s will be a long-term one.
Olson said that most small businesses “don’t do good strategic planning. But (Mancini’s) wanted help with that.”
Essentially, Olson said, the bakery wanted to increase efficiency and it’s done that in part by automating portions of the breadmaking process. The bakery purchased custom-made equipment from Europe to help in that area and it’s also made a lot of operational improvements as part of its strategic plan, Olson said.
“Now they’re embarking on a growth initiative: how do we grow (the business), should there be more products offered, maybe acquisition or licensing,” Olson said. “They’re looking at ways to grow the top line while they continue to be operationally efficient. That’s a long-term project with them and hopefully it will keep them going forward and continue being a staple of the market.”
The idea of improving and upgrading the business makes perfect sense, but it’s not all that easy when you’re dealing with an institution like Mancini’s. The bakery already has seen its share of growth, expanding from five delivery routes when Hartner was growing up in the Windgap area and hanging around the place – but not yet working – to 15 routes today. Back in Hartner’s early days, sales were tracked on small pads similar to ones that waitresses would use to take orders in a restaurant, complete with carbon paper to make a copies. “It was all done by hand,” Hartner recalled.
Eventually, she brought in a computer and a friend taught her how to use a program to track sales in the late 1980s.
“There’s been a lot of (changes),” Harner said. “We put in procedures to make more bread. When I first started here, the business was always based on the amount of bread one man could bake in an hour because it was so labor-intensive. You could only make so much and the only way to make more was to have more people.”
Hartner admits that it hasn’t been easy to incorporate new ways of doing business in a century-old enterprise.
“It’s always been a struggle to try to keep the artisan ways, the artisan traditions, the heritage of the bread, and take on the new technology while trying not to change the product,” she said. “That’s the struggle we live with.”
Hartner said it’s also a bit of a struggle to find employees these days. The bakery currently employs 54 people compared with the 35 who were there when Hartner began working there.
“It’s very difficult to hire people who will stay with you,” she said. “I’ve been here a long time and I’ve heard people complain about the ‘new generation,’ but this has been the hardest time. I think there just aren’t enough people. The population is really going down. There’s just not as many kids as there used to be.”
In terms of its products, the bakery has tried to keep up with the times and people’s changing tastes. Currently, according to Mancini’s website, the bakery produces 10 different types of bread, six varieties of dinner rolls, five types of sandwich and hoagie rolls and various specialty items. But that lineup has seen some changes. For example, when low-carb diets were in vogue and people cut back on their bread consumption, the bakery even produced a low-carb variety. But that didn’t work out.
“People were saying they didn’t want to eat carbs,” Hartner said. “That was difficult. There have been so many changes. And changes are hard to do when you have people who don’t want to change.”
Changes also are evident in Mancini’s customer base. Smaller grocery stores are closing and even larger grocery stores are losing market share to places like Costco, Sam’s Club, ALDI and Whole Foods.
“They’re all national branding units,” Hartner said. “It’s hard for us, a regional place, to find a home in these big operations.”
Hartner said the larger corporate stores have standards that require bakeries to be certified to place their products. “And to do that, you have to modernize the plant,” Hartner said. “We’re working on that. We’re getting close to being certified, and that will open up those avenues.”
As of now, Mancini’s has more than 300 customers – grocery stores, supermarkets, restaurants, hoagie shops, pizza shops. The original bakery on Woodward Avenue and the Strip District satellite location also see their share of individual customers.
Hartner said at different points along the way, she’s considered moving, but that never happened. Instead, Mancini’s has made seven different additions to the West Park location.
“I guess maybe we’re nostalgic – we don’t want to leave our roots,” she said. “Who knows – maybe it would have been better if we moved a long time ago. But once you have the equipment in place, it’s hard to move. And it’s hard to shut down and reopen.”
Hartner has three sons – Ben, Nick and Ernie — but Nick is the only one involved in the bakery. A biomedical engineering major at Marquette University, Nick began working at the family business after he graduated and has been there ever since.
“He found he loved it – he loved baking, he loved the business and being part of something his grandfather was part of,” Mary Hartner said of her son.
Hartner certainly can relate. “I’m proud to work at the bakery, to help it survive over all these years and thrive,” she said. “We’re happy to have the support of Stowe Township.
“People say the bakery is iconic. I feel like I’m preserving that. I’m preserving the legacy.”
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