From Tech to Cheese: How to Engineer a Plant-Based Business That Disrupts a Legacy Industry with Kirsten Maitland

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing marketing. Today, we'll be breaking down how to go from tech to cheese, how to engineer a plant-based business that disrupts a legacy industry. And to drop these value bombs, I brought Kirsten Maitland into EO Fire Studios. Kirsten is the founder of Rebel Cheese, pioneering artisan plant-based cheeses and scaling a national brand by turning viral moments into lasting growth through bold innovation and relentless customer focus. And today, we'll talk about disrupting a traditional industry.

0:38we'll also talk about translating tech into food owning the vertical lessons from overnight success and oh so much more and a big thank you for sponsoring our episode goes to Kirsten and our sponsors Fire Nation if you love stories that entertain and educate you've got to grab the book The Dealmaker's Will by Walker Thrash it reads like a novel but teaches like a masterclass packed with timeless lessons on power leverage and negotiation whether you're raising capital or closing deals this book will change how you play the game get it now on Amazon Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies?

1:14Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white-label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Kirsten, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Yes. So this is something I have dealt with my entire career and that is you don't have to be an expert in your field. This was something I fought against before I started Rebel Cheese in my IT career, continued to deal with this as an entrepreneur too. I believe that there are huge benefits to not being an expert in your field.

2:09I think being a beginner can actually be your biggest advantage. A lot of people, they think that you need decades of experience and all of these credentials and, you know, be the lead in authority before you can start a business. And I completely disagree with that. When you're new, you see things with, you know, these brand new fresh eyes, and you see things that you, you know, could otherwise miss. I think it's the key to disrupting an industry. You ask questions that experts dismiss because that's just how it's done. And you stay curious and hungry to learn instead of relying on outdated information or habits.

3:00And you're also more relatable because you are open to learning and trying new things. And Fire Nation, we have a lot to get to on this topic. And I'm really excited for Kirsten to be diving in because, man, your origin story is pretty amazing when it comes to Rebel Cheese. So what exactly inspired you to take on such a massive, entrenched industry with a plant-based approach, especially like you said, when you didn't have all the experience in the world? Yes, I myself went plant-based over a decade ago, and I couldn't find an artisanal plant-based cheese on the market. We used to love to have, you know, picnics and special occasions, and they were, you know, all centered around cheese.

3:49And when we went plant-based, we couldn't build that charcuterie board anymore. We couldn't find, you know, a plant-based brie or a plant-based aged cheddar or anything like that. So that's when we decided to dive right in and create that ourselves. I have to admit, though, you know, it's obviously been very challenging. The dairy industry has been around for a very long time. It's entrenched in our cultures and our routines. So it's been really hard to break that program in and get people to change. and the way that I feel like we've been able to do that is is by creating a product that is just as good if not better than the dairy equivalent and we've done that by you know studying the dairy techniques applying those to plant-based mediums we never compromise on quality to us if it doesn't deliver on flavor, texture, all of those things, then people, they're just not going to switch.

4:58So we've been laser focused on that to create a product that truly is artisanal. Well, I want to just jump in here and speak from first in experience because Kirsten was kind enough to send me a sample pack, Fire Nation. And let me tell you, incredible. My wife is obsessed with cheese. And I will say she was a little skeptical. She's like, okay, let's give this a whirl. But man, what exactly was the name of that one that I told you I loved? Kirsten was like the fig balsamic. Yes, that's one of our seasonal specials. And everything's handmade. So we hand stir in chopped figs, walnuts into that.

5:34And we make our own milk that we turn into the cheese base. Yeah, that's a seasonal special that we only offer, you know, once or twice a year. I mean, listen, my wife will buy cheese all the time. and like it'll just be in the fridge and she'll just know how much cheese is in the fridge because I just don't eat cheese. I'm not a big dairy person. She opened the fridge like a couple of weeks ago and she's like, where's the rest of the fig balsamic? And I was like, I ate it all last night. She's like, what? She's like, I never thought that like it would be gone when I opened up the fridge because you just don't consume that type of food.

6:09I'm like, well, I do this. So Fire Nation, I can just vouch again from firsthand experience just how mouth-watering and just how laser-focused they are on that, on the taste, on the experience. And that's what it takes, Kirsten, to disrupt a traditional industry. I want you to share with Fire Nation how realistic it is to disrupt something as deep-rooted as cheese. I mean, what does it actually take to make believers out of skeptics? Because again, my wife was not a hater. I mean, she was maybe a light skeptic, but it was quickly turned with just one bite. So what are you doing to make believers out of skeptics?

6:46And it's been a process and it's taken time because like you said, everyone's tried, you know, vegan cheese before and, you know, have been burned to be quite honest. There's some great brands out there, but they serve a different purpose. The ones that have existed, they're more for pizzas and things like that. So there's a lot of hesitation out there. And what we've done, we actually started with a brick and mortar. We have two, one in Austin and one in New York. And we actually encourage people to try our products to help overcome that hesitation. It's like, look, just try it for yourself. You know, you don't have to believe us.

7:27So we encourage people to try it. But it also comes back to making the best tasting product out there. And we've been innovating since we've started. we still spend time every week on innovation even for our top selling products we own our end-to-end vertical so every step of the process we own and that's one of the reasons why is so we can continue to innovate and you know we're always asking ourselves is there anything else we can do to make this even better well i want to dive even deeper into that cursing because it's such an important topic is owning the vertical so why is controlling everything from production to customer delivery.

8:11Why is that such a game changer for innovation, for rapid iteration and long-term brand power? We're able to turn innovations around in hours, whereas if we didn't own our end-to-end vertical, it could take weeks or months. And not only that, it could be incredibly costly to run a new product on a line. You know, you're talking tens of thousands of dollars potentially. But for us, because we're doing it all internally, and sometimes we have tests running every single day, the cost is minimal. Plus, we have, you know, control of our margins. We have control on signing off on quality. On every little piece of the process, we're involved.

9:00And I think that's huge. And then we can also launch new SKUs very quickly, too. So we're always taking in our customer feedback. We're always listening and reacting to that feedback, trying new things. More fig balsamic, more fig balsamic. But I think this is important to talk about, Kirsten, because you've had some crazy success. I mean, literally overnight success. I mean, we're talking Shark Tank, New York Times features. I mean, the spotlight, when it comes, it comes fast. So what lessons did you learn about handling explosive demand while still protecting your quality and brand integrity?

9:38Yes. Before Shark Tank, so we were on Shark Tank a couple years ago, and before that, we were lucky enough to be featured in the New York Times twice, and that was basically a trial run for Shark Tank. And we didn't do as well with the New York Times overnight success as I would have liked to. One of them we didn't know about, so it was a surprise, and we were suddenly receiving all of these orders overnight, and we delivered on those orders, but we weren't able to sustain that newfound customer base. So we learned a lot from that experience that prepared us for Shark Tank and we were able to do much better with that errand.

10:22The key to maintaining our quality is to never, ever compromise on that, no matter what. So when we aired on Shark Tank, we received hundreds of thousands of orders. And what we did to maintain our quality, because we make everything by hand, some of our products take weeks to make, was we just communicated. And we told our customers right from the beginning, you know, we're experiencing a peak in sales. Your order may take a long time. and we just continued to communicate with them so they knew the status of their order and we maintain that quality. For us, we'd rather compromise on delivery speed or other things than we would on quality.

11:09We're never going to compromise on that because you get one chance to convert those customers and to prove to them that plant-based cheese can taste good and you don't want to jeopardize that one opportunity that you have. It's so true, Fire Nation. And we have a lot to talk about when it comes to pricing, automation, a founder's mindset, and a lot more. When we get back from thanking our sponsors. Imagine a story so gripping you can't put it down, yet every chapter quietly levels up your business mindset. That's the deal maker's will. It's storytelling that teaches. Fiction built on decades of hard-won negotiation wisdom.

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14:41So visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial and see why thousands of businesses are switching. That's highlevelfire.com, where marketing, sales, and automation finally come together. High Level, join the revolution. Kirsten, we're back, and I want to talk about bold pricing as a brand strategy. I mean, pricing is something that just makes entrepreneurs just grind their teeth at night because do you go premium? Do you go as low as possible while still eking out a profit? Or do you do something in the middle? Pricing can make or break a premium brand. So how did you approach bold pricing?

15:23And why was it pivotal for Rebel Cheese's sustainability and positioning? Pricing is definitely one of the hardest choices that we've ever had to make as a business because we did go bold with our pricing. For example, a wheel of a brie is somewhere between$18 and$20, depending on where you buy it. And if you look at our competitor products, the plant-based ones, they're average$8 a wheel. So that's obviously significantly higher. It is comparable to some of the dairy pricing, though. And one of the reasons why we stood by this pricing is because we believe in our value proposition, right? Pricing, to me, is not just about covering the cost.

16:13It's also signaling the value of your brand. And when we first launched Rebel Cheese, we knew we were offering something special. and we also know that our products are more expensive to make than traditional dairy cheese, right? We don't get subsidized. Everything's made by hand. We use organic ingredients. We use eco-friendly packaging. Premium pricing comes with all of those things and customers know that and they vote with their dollar. So I would argue that our customers respect our pricing and they understand it because they understand when they purchase a Will River Bree that they're not just supporting something that tastes really good.

17:03They're also supporting a company that's ethical, sustainable, and bringing a lot of other values and integrity into the product. Fire Nation, something to really think about when you're building a brand that you want to last. And of course, stand for something. To me, when I look at Rebel Cheese, it's an experience. I'm not going for quantity. I'm not looking to just shove globs of fig balsamic into my mouth at a time. It's like, it's an experience. You know, I kind of look at it in a way of like, I look at fudge, like I want a little bit of fudge, but I want that little bit of fudge to taste amazing.

17:42And And that's how I love to look at premium products like that. Now, let's talk about tech and automation for scale. Because from Shopify infrastructure to AI-driven logistics, I mean, how have you leveraged technology to scale efficiently while keeping your team lean and nimble? This is one of my favorite topics, honestly. I'm a huge AI fan. It's helped us out tremendously. I'll give you an example. last year we were heads down focused on our holiday rush and getting orders out of the door it's our busiest time of year and we finally come up for air you know in January February and we start looking at our bills and we're like why are our shipping costs so high and we started to dig deeper and we realized we have been charged two hundred thousand dollars more than we were expecting, you know, based on our contracts.

18:44And, of course, for a small business, that's pretty devastating. So we looked at it some more and we're like, okay, this has happened. How do we prevent this from ever happening again? We cannot afford to let this happen. So I created a tool using AI that basically takes our invoices, some of which are hundreds of pages long, and it will go through our invoice each week and compare it to our contract and flag any discrepancies that then we can take to our shipping partner to get credits on. And it's been working great. It saved us tens of thousands of dollars. If I had to hire someone to do this, I would probably have to hire two full-time people to do this manual work, which we just, you know, we didn't have the budget for that.

19:36So it's been life-changing for us. Fire Nation, these are the type of things, like Kirsten said, can sink or swim a business. It can cause you to sink or it can cause you to swim at an incredible pace and level. So I love that you brought that into the game. That's just awesome to see. And that kind of takes me to the founder mindset. I mean, having that finger on the pulse. Why does obsessing over R &D and leaning really hard into community feedback, Why does that keep you ahead of the curve in an industry that is still full of skeptics? Yes, this is, I believe, been one of those key things that has made us successful.

20:16I love R &D. I live and breathe it. I think it's so important. Even like I mentioned earlier, even when you have a top selling product, I think it's important to still be learning and testing and seeing if you can make that product even better, right? Even if it's making it more efficient or more sustainable. There are so many different ways in which you can apply R &D. I mean, from day one, we have treated our customer feedback as fuel. When we opened our brick and mortar, we always offered samples and we always took that feedback almost to a fault, to be honest. I've had to teach myself as we've scaled ways to organize that feedback because obviously we can't address every single piece of feedback.

21:10But I think it's one of the most important things a founder can do is to gather as much feedback as possible and act on it and run constant small experiments to see what does and doesn't work. because you'll be surprised. We're always surprised. Something we thought wouldn't work ends up being a top seller and vice versa. And you're not going to know until you get that thing out there. Fire Nation, you have to keep that finger on the pulse. You have to be obsessed as a founder, especially when you're doing the type of things that Kirsten is doing. So give us a closing value bomb, Kirsten. If Fire Nation wants to disrupt a traditional space with a bold new idea, what's the one mindset or move they must embrace from day one?

22:02Building on what we were just talking about is getting it out there as quickly as possible, you know, getting that feedback. Don't let, you know, a lack of knowledge or expertise or anything else hold you back because at the end of the day, the most important thing is how the market and how the customer reacts to that idea. And the sooner you can measure that, you know, the better off you'll be. Kirsten, if Fire Nation wants to connect with you, of course, potentially wants to get some of that incredible Rebel Cheese at the Fig Balsamic Still Available Fire Nation. When you check it out, definitely dive in.

22:40What is your call to action for our listeners today? Just go to our website, rebelcheese.com. For first-time customers, We offer you two free wheels of cheese to your order. Or if you're in Austin or New York, stop by and give us a try. We're in the Lower East Side in New York, and we're in Central Austin. So we'd love to see you. Lower East Side. I love it. I used to live in Tribeca over on the West Side. So life was good back in the NYC days and Fire Nation. You're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with KM and JLD today. So keep up the heat.

23:17And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Kirsten in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And of course, go to rebelcheese.com and get that cheese en route and you'll get those two free wheels as a first time order. Now, Kirsten, I want to say thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Kirsten for sponsoring today's episode. and Fire Nation, are you ready to rock your very own podcast? Check out our free podcasting course where I will teach you how to create and launch your podcast for free.

23:55Freepodcastcourse.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Fire Nation, if you love stories that entertain and educate, you've got to grab the book The Dealmaker's Will by Walker Thrash. It reads like a novel but teaches like a masterclass packed with timeless lessons on power, leverage, and negotiation. Whether you're raising capital or closing deals, this book will change how you play the game. Get it now on Amazon. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software.

24:29Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today.

24:45Thank you.