Dig In: How AI Saved Her Plant-based Cheese Business $250,000 Dollars with Kirsten Maitland Co-Owner at Rebel Cheese

Kirsten Maitland co-founded Rebel With Cheese out of necessity

— she went plant-based overnight, went looking for real artisanal vegan cheese,

and couldn’t find any. So she started making it herself, first in a wine

fridge, now in a full-scale cheese cave (the only vegan one of its kind,

designed with a 40-year dairy expert). The cave-aged brie takes two weeks to

make, gets touched by hand every single day, and convinced both Mark Cuban and

Mr. Wonderful on Shark Tank.

But this episode isn’t just

about cheese. Kirsten made Fast Company’s radar for something else: using AI to

fight back against the notoriously opaque distributor model that quietly bleeds

small CPG brands dry. After discovering she’d been overcharged by a quarter

million dollars in shipping fees buried across hundreds of pages of invoices,