The brain of your industrial bakery. From the proofer to the cold room, one single AI.

Plant OS for industrial bakeries

Rela AI is a conversational Plant OS designed for small and mid-size industrial bakeries (€5–100M revenue) that need to bring HACCP, cold chain, OEE and maintenance under one platform — without replacing the ERP, without changing the PLCs, without hiring an integrator for every new piece of equipment.

Why this vertical?

Rela's anchor customer in industrial bakery is COLIP, an Italian OEM manufacturer of proofing chambers, blast chillers and cooling tunnels selling to bakeries across Italy and exporting throughout Southern Europe. Italy hosts roughly 6,800 food machinery OEMs and 58,000 food manufacturing SMEs, a meaningful share of which are industrial bakeries running semi-continuous production. It is a real, fragmented market with budget for digitalisation but without the IT muscle of a multinational group.

These bakeries share a profile:

• 1 to 3 plants with mixed lines (bread, pastry, frozen dough).
• 5 to 20 PLCs per plant, from different brands depending on who installed each piece of equipment (Carel on chambers, Schneider on ovens, WAGO on packaging lines).
• HACCP on paper or in a shared spreadsheet.
• Cold chain critical for frozen dough and finished product.
• 1 maintenance technician covering the whole plant — no redundancy.

Rela exists for that reality. Not for Mondelez, not for an artisan neighbourhood bakery.

Typical equipment in an industrial bakery

Rela natively reads all 7 industrial protocols: Modbus TCP/RTU, OPC UA, S7 (ISO-on-TCP), EtherNet/IP, MQTT, MQTT+OPC UA Pub/Sub, OPC UA Reverse Connect. Reading is always read-only — Rela never writes to the PLC, by design and by contract.

Critical processes Rela covers

• Controlled fermentation. Temperature/humidity curve per recipe, active phase (block, conservation, wake-up, leavening, holding), time per phase, T-probe alarms, door-open longer than 30 seconds.
• Baking. Internal temperature curve, oven dwell time, belt speed, energy consumption per batch.
• Controlled cooling. Cooling tunnel with temperature profile per product type, alarm if product exits above setpoint.
• Storage room. 24/7 cold chain, excursion alarms with configurable grace time, automatic audit-ready reports.
• Shipping. Lot traceability, truck-loading temperature, FSMA Rule 204 documentation when exporting to the USA.

Typical HACCP CCPs in industrial bakery

CCPs vary by recipe and country, but these are the most frequent in European industrial bakeries:

Rela learns ranges during the first 14 days of operation (bootstrap mode), even if the recipe was not documented in the previous HACCP plan. After that, ranges can be tuned manually from the dashboard without touching the PLC.

Documented use cases

Pricing — which tier fits your bakery

Detailed pricing and onboarding packs are in the getting-started section.

Deploying Rela in a bakery — 7 steps

1. Initial workshop (1h, remote). We list how many machines exist, which PLC brand they run, which CCPs the current HACCP plan covers. Output: prioritised list of assets to connect.
2. VPN setup (15 min). We generate the WireGuard .conf, the customer's IT applies it to the router. One tunnel for the whole plant. Your IT does not share corporate credentials — the tunnel is dedicated, per IEC 62443 and NIS2 expectations.
3. Modbus / OPC UA mapping (30 min per machine). We confirm register addresses against the manufacturer's manual. For Carel pCO5+ and Schneider Modicon we already ship pre-built mappings.
4. Bootstrap (14 days). Rela observes normal operation and learns the ranges. No alarms during this period, only data collection.
5. HACCP + cold chain activation. You define CCPs and ranges, assign a responsible owner per asset, configure the technician's WhatsApp/email channel.
6. First assisted audit. At day 30 Rela produces the first complete HACCP report with every reading, excursion and signed corrective action.
7. Scale-up. As confidence grows, more assets are added. Each new piece of equipment is mapped in under 1 hour if the brand is already in the catalogue.

Key benefits

• −60% HACCP audit time. The report comes out generated, signed and traceable. No need to assemble paper sheets.
• 0 undetected excursions. WhatsApp arrives in under 2 minutes from the moment temperature steps out of range.
• +15% OEE on lines with chronic stops. The alert aggregator points to root cause (drifting probe, low pressure, motor with abnormal vibration) before the operator notices.
• Predictive maintenance from day 14. No need to wait 6 months of history — bootstrap mode starts with baselines computed on initial operation.
• Multi-brand without penalty. Schneider + Carel + WAGO live in the same dashboard without duplicated rules.
• Self-service setup. No integrator dependency for each new machine. The customer or OEM handles the mapping by following the manuals.

Limitations and assumptions

• Rela is a decision-support system. It does not write to PLCs, does not replace SIL/PL, does not act on actuators. Every recommendation goes through human approval.
• Modbus / OPC UA mapping depends on the PLC firmware. If the OEM customised standard addresses, the mapping must be adjusted in the dashboard (without touching the PLC).
• Cold chain detects excursions at 1-minute resolution. Processes requiring second-level resolution should keep a dedicated datalogger as well.
• Rela does not certify HACCP before the regulator — it produces the evidence trail the auditor will inspect.

Frequently asked questions

Does it work if my PLC doesn't speak Modbus? Yes — Rela supports OPC UA, S7, EtherNet/IP, MQTT and Reverse Connect. If the PLC uses any standard industrial protocol, we read it.

Do I have to migrate my current HACCP plan? No. Rela coexists with the existing HACCP and complements it with real-time data. Transition is gradual, CCP by CCP.

Does it work without permanent internet? It needs connectivity to send alerts and upload readings. On connectivity loss, the local listener buffers up to 4 hours; on reconnect it uploads everything.

How is it connected in a bakery without internal IT? Through a router with WireGuard. The VPN install can be done by a field electrician following the manual.