The Cinelli Bagel Machine That Could Change the Industry

Every so often, you stumble across something at a trade show that makes you stop in your tracks. At IBIE 2025, that moment came courtesy of Cinelli, a bakery equipment company out of Toronto that’s been building machines for decades.

The innovation that left me buzzing was a conveyor-belt bagel machine that boils, seeds, and bakes in about 10 minutes - without a baker touching it.

I’ll be honest, this is the first version, and the bagels coming out of it aren’t perfect. But the idea behind the machine could be a game-changer.

How It Works

The setup is straightforward but kind of mesmerizing. You plop a shaped bagel onto one end of the conveyor. As it travels down the line, the machine takes care of the rest, by boiling the dough, seeding it, and baking it with precise top-and-bottom heat controls. The bagel sits on a steel plate that’s also temperature-controlled, crisping the bottom.

In other words, it mimics what the biggest industrial bagel lines do, just on a much smaller footprint. Instead of cranking out hundreds of thousands of bagels a day, this machine can handle about 300 bagels per hour.

Why It Matters

Here’s the interesting part: the machine costs about $70,000. That’s in the same ballpark as what many retail bagel shops already spend on ovens, kettles, and other equipment. And while traditional setups still require skilled bakers to manage the boiling, seeding, loading, and baking - all labor-intensive steps that are subject to human error - Cinelli’s system automates that chain of steps.

For a shop owner, this could shrink the footprint required for equipment, reduce reliance on skilled labor, and still produce bagels consistently and at scale.

And there’s an added twist: the customer experience. Imagine walking into a bagel shop and watching your bagel travel down the conveyor, getting boiled, seeded, and baked right before your eyes, and pulling it hot from the line minutes later. That “just-in-time” production could become a selling point in itself.

The Big Picture

Bagel shops are expensive to run. The equipment requires a large upfront investment, but the bigger expense is labor, particularly finding, training, and retaining bakers who know how to make bagels correctly and consistently.

Machines like this hint at a future where shops can maintain output and consistency while cutting down on labor costs, and even turn the production line into a customer-facing feature.

It’s not perfect yet, but if Cinelli continues refining this model, it could offer an intriguing new path for retail bagel shops: fewer labor bottlenecks, more consistency, and hot bagels made right in front of customers.