The brain of your meat plant. From deboning to the freezer, one single AI.

Plant OS for small/mid meat processing plants

Rela AI is a conversational Plant OS for small and mid-size meat processing plants (€10–100M revenue) — cured meats, ham, cooked products, frozen — that need to lock down HACCP, cold chain and lot traceability under BRCGS Issue 9 and US export requirements (FSMA Rule 204).

Why this vertical?

Spain has more than 3,000 registered meat industries (ham producers in Salamanca, Aragón, Extremadura; cured-meat producers in Catalonia, La Rioja; cooked products in Murcia and Galicia). Italy adds hundreds of mid-size salumifici in Emilia, Veneto, Tuscany. LATAM (Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico) hosts a huge meat-export industry with USDA and FSMA pressure.

These plants share a profile:

• 1 site, multi-zone (reception, deboning, curing, cooking, cooling, packaging).
• 5 to 15 refrigerated rooms and 2 to 5 cooking ovens.
• Cold chain critical from reception to shipping.
• Strict BRCGS audits renewed every 12 months, with surprise visits.
• If exporting: FSMA, USDA-FSIS, sanitary certificates per container.
• HACCP on paper + Excel sheets — the shift operator fills out a sheet, then it gets digitised late.
• 1 maintenance technician + 1 quality manager — no redundancy.

Rela exists so that plant doesn't fail a surprise audit, doesn't lose a lot to an undetected overnight excursion, and doesn't take 3 weeks to assemble a FSMA dossier for a US shipment.

Typical equipment in a meat processing plant

Rela reads Modbus TCP/RTU, OPC UA, S7, EtherNet/IP, MQTT and Reverse Connect — the protocols relevant in any modern meat plant. Always read-only.

Critical processes Rela covers

• Reception. Truck temperature on arrival (must be under 7 °C for refrigerated meat). Rela logs every delivery.
• Deboning. Time meat is exposed to ambient temperature — alarm if it exceeds the limit due to a line interruption.
• Curing. Rooms at 2–4 °C with controlled humidity, for days or weeks. Rela watches the curve 24/7.
• Cooking. The central CCP for cooked products: product core must reach over 70 °C for over 2 minutes (varies by country and regulation). Rela records every batch with internal curve and outcome.
• Rapid cooling. Controlled temperature drop after cooking to avoid the danger zone (10–60 °C). Rela measures the per-minute drop.
• Freezing. Freezer held at -18 °C. Any excursion triggers an alert.
• Packaging. Lot traceability, vacuum integrity, correct weight.
• Shipping. Truck temperature at loading, waybill with lot data.

Typical HACCP CCPs in meat processing

Specific regulatory compliance

A typical European meat-export plant is subject to:

• BRCGS Issue 9 (retail audit with strict clauses, surprise visits). Covered in /docs/compliance/brcgs.
• EC Regulation 853/2004 (specific hygiene rules for products of animal origin — meat products).
• EC Regulation 854/2004 (official controls).
• IFS Food (alternative or complement to BRCGS, especially in the German market).
• FSSC 22000 v6 if the customer chain requires it. Covered in /docs/compliance/fssc-22000.
• FSMA Rule 117 + Rule 204 if exporting to the USA. Covered in /docs/compliance/fsma.
• USDA-FSIS for US exports (audits the plant on site).

Rela produces the consolidated evidence trail for the operational CCPs of these standards. Lot traceability for meat products (Critical Tracking Events under FSMA Rule 204) is built automatically.

Documented use cases

Pricing — which tier fits

Deploying Rela in a meat plant — 7 steps

1. Initial workshop (1.5h, remote). We list: how many rooms, which ovens, which line, which external audit is coming up (BRCGS, IFS, USDA), which export countries. Output: risk-based priority matrix.
2. VPN setup (15 min). WireGuard .conf for the whole site. One tunnel.
3. Modbus / OPC UA mapping for rooms and oven (1–2h). Curing and product rooms map quickly (Carel, Eliwell). The oven needs manufacturer-manual confirmation (Reich, Schneider, Siemens variants).
4. Bootstrap (14 days). Rela observes cookings, cooling cycles, 24/7 rooms. Learns ranges per recipe.
5. HACCP + cold chain + cooking activation. Define CCPs, ranges per recipe, owners, WhatsApp/email channels.
6. First assisted audit. At day 30: complete cooking report (core curve per batch), room excursions, metal-detector tests, lot by lot.
7. If exporting to the USA: activate FSMA Rule 204. Automatic capture of CTEs (Critical Tracking Events) and KDEs (Key Data Elements) per lot. Report exportable as CSV / Sortable Spreadsheet per FDA format.

Key benefits

• Surprise BRCGS audit without panic. The auditor arrives, asks for the last month's records — Rela shows them filtered by CCP in 3 clicks.
• 0 lots lost to undetected overnight excursions. The night operator steps out, a room rises from 4 to 8 °C: WhatsApp arrives in under 2 minutes to the on-call technician.
• Auditable cooking lot by lot. Every batch with its internal temperature curve, timestamp and validated outcome. BRCGS Clause 5.3 met without paperwork.
• Automated FSMA Rule 204 traceability. CTEs (reception, transformation, shipping) and KDEs (lot, date, weight, temperature) captured automatically. Export dossier produced in hours, not weeks.
• Predictive maintenance on the refrigeration compressor. #1 cause of massive product loss in meat plants. Rela detects drift weeks ahead.
• Multi-zone without friction. Reception, deboning, curing, cooking, cooling, packaging — all in the same dashboard.

Limitations and assumptions

• Rela does not operate the cooking oven or the valves — it reads and records. Safety and process logic stays on the oven's PLC.
• For on-site USDA-FSIS audits, Rela contributes a digital evidence trail but the inspector also reviews the physical flow on the floor.
• Core probes during cooking depend on physical thermometers wired to the oven's PLC. If the oven does not expose them via Modbus/OPC UA, an additional acquisition module is needed.
• Rela does not certify BRCGS or FSMA — it produces the evidence trail the auditor reviews.

Frequently asked questions

My cooking oven is from the 80s — can it be connected? If it has a PLC with any industrial output, yes. If it has no PLC at all, we install an additional lightweight PLC with our own sensors (more expensive but viable).

Does it cover genetic traceability of the source animal? Not directly. Genetic traceability typically lives in the supplier-management system / ERP. Rela covers from carcass/deboning reception inside the plant.

How much does the FSMA module cost? +€500/month over the base tier. Includes automatic capture of CTEs/KDEs per lot and CSV export per FDA format.

Does it work for an artisan 2-year cured-ham plant? Yes — slow curing especially benefits from continuous temperature/humidity monitoring. Room stability over 18–24 months is exactly where the deviations that ruin a lot appear.

What if I have IFS Food instead of BRCGS? The operational CCPs are very similar. The BRCGS page covers how Rela produces the evidence; the report format adapts to IFS.