Powering Up: How RYE was the Essential Ingredient in Layla Bakery’s Growth

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Spare a thought for the bakers who make your morning croissant. Behind every buttery layer, is a team working through the night, battling heat, power outages and mountains of admin. For Layla Bakery founder Tessa Faulkner, the journey from one small site to three has been powered by passion, resilience and a little help from multi-site energy experts RYE.

“Business energy can be messy and very expensive, and if you don’t get on top of it from the beginning, it’ll catch up with you,” cautions Tessa, founder of Layla Bakery, the West London neighbourhood bakery that this year expanded from one site to two plus a production kitchen. “I was very fortunate when I opened our new kitchen that I had RYE to lead me. RYE has made running Layla so much easier, particularly as we’ve expanded. They’ve saved me so much time and money.”

RYE is an AI-powered energy management system built for multi-site hospitality businesses. By streamlining procurement, optimising usage and upgrading metering, RYE helps hospitality businesses cut costs, boost efficiency and grow sustainably. For Tessa, it’s been an invaluable support and trusted partner. While queues stretched down Portobello Road for her signature bow tie pastries and burnt honey tarts, behind the scenes, Tessa was juggling tedious energy admin that was taking her away from the work she loves: greeting her regulars, collaborating with her bakers, and growing her business.
“We had three power outages in about three months,” she recalls. “On three days, we had no power. The bakers couldn’t make anything; we couldn’t even do coffee. RYE has completely taken billing and disputes off my hands. I had previously moved to a new supplier and it took me ten months to get a credit payment from our old energy supplier. I was chasing them weekly for this payment. It was messy. When we onboarded RYE, they took all that off my hands.”

“They have saved me so much time and hundreds and hundreds of pounds,” she adds. “Finding us the most competitive energy supplier in the market, onboarding us with that energy supplier, and installing new meters. When we set up our production kitchen, we had to get three-phase power, and they coordinated with all the different parties to ensure that we had our meter installed in time.”

RYE’s team has 20 years’ experience working in retail energy and hospitality, so knows first-hand just how tangled hospitality energy can get. Their mission is to simplify all that. In practice, that means securing energy at the correct rate, managing power upgrades and meter installation, and smart monitoring to predict energy usage and flag potential equipment issues before they escalate. The approach is working: RYE now partners with growing brands including atis, The Salad Project, and Ria’s.

“Hospitality venues typically use three to four times more energy than other types of businesses but, for some reason, get the worst rates and the worst customer service,” says Rory Johnson, RYE’s Head of Operations and a former chef who knows the industry inside out. “Layla was spending far too much on energy bills. What most hospitality businesses don’t realise is that they’re using energy when energy is cheapest, and they should be getting much better rates than they do. At Layla for example, they start cooking at five in the morning and they’re finished by 11. They should be getting access to much cheaper rates, which they now are through RYE. When RYE works with businesses, we secure rates that are usually about 30% cheaper than what businesses are generally offered in the hospitality industry. RYE empowers hospitality companies by giving them peace of mind and the time to be able to focus on the things that matter for them.”

Tessa agrees. “Running energy efficiently can really impact your business. My advice to other bakery owners is to be on top of it. Don’t wait for the chaos to erupt before you do something about it.”

RYE automates multi-site energy management for hospitality operators. RYE meters new sites, secures multi-site exclusive prices and enables predictive maintenance so sites are always running at the lowest cost possible.

💵 Low cost energy: priced to match multi-site operations
🔋Efficient Expansion: manages new site power upgrades + metering
📲 Smart monitoring: connects remotely meter to predict kitchen equipment failures.