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, she built her own AI-powered auditing tool — no developer background required — that now automatically flags billing variances every week.

Adam and Kirsten get into how she did it, which tools she used (and why she uses Claude and Manus together rather than either alone), and the practical AI workflows she now runs across her whole business: weekly cash flow modeling, what-if scenario planning, brand handbooks, and her standout “100 questions” technique for building deep AI context from scratch.

Resources Kirsten mentioned:

Podcasts

•       Leveraging AI

•       AI Explored

Newsletters

•       Superhuman (superhuman.ai) — her favorite; quick, to-the-point, always valuable

•       The Rundown AI (therundown.ai)

•       Rubin Hassid — good for getting started (verify exact spelling)

Tools

•       Claude — projects, skills, cash flow modeling

•       Manus — vibe-coding and tool building

Find Kirsten

•       Substack: Rebel Founder — weekly writing on AI and hard business problems

•       Website: rebelcheese.com

•       Fast Company article — on using AI to audit distributor invoices

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