Case study
How Cashel Blue moved off Excel onto Keystone — in 30 days.
Cashel Farmhouse Cheesemakers — a 40+ year-old multi-award-winning Tipperary farmhouse dairy with international distribution — replaced production spreadsheets with Keystone for batch traceability, dispatch and retailer pallet labels. Pilots scoped to go live in 30 days. Brand and team photography used with the written permission of J&L Grubb Ltd.
The setup
A 40-year-old dairy on spreadsheets.
Cashel Blue® exports to UK, France, Benelux, Denmark, Germany, USA, Canada, Middle East and Australia. 40+ internal SKUs. Private-label variants for every major Irish multiple. Until 2025, all of it was tracked in Excel and one production manager's head.
The risk
BRCGS Issue 9 was about to make this untenable.
BRCGS Issue 9 §3.9 / §3.11 / §5.4 expects forward and backward batch traceability with verifiable evidence. A working spreadsheet system is not enough to pass that audit cleanly. The risk was either a brittle audit pass or an audit fail — neither acceptable for an exporter.
The pilot
Live in 30 days on real data.
CloudVoro implemented the Keystone pilot directly with the Cashel Blue team. Day 1: scoping. Day 7: data shape locked. Day 14: dispatch templates per retailer. Day 21: full back-trace working. Day 30: first live dispatch through Keystone with a retailer-formatted pallet label and per-batch COA.
The outcome
Traceability in 30 seconds, not three days.
- Forward + backward trace — Any batch → milk delivery → silo → make-day → dispatch → retailer branch in under 30 seconds.
- Retailer dispatch automated — Tesco IE, M&S, SuperValu, Centra and SPAR formats — each customer in its expected layout.
- Pallet labels in-system — SSCC and GS1-128 designed in-app. Tested against real scanners before printing.
- Audit trail — Immutable log of every change, signed and timestamped. Direct evidence for BRCGS Issue 9.
In their words
Quotes used with written permission.
"It used to take half a day to answer the FSAI's simplest question — 'which customer received batch B-247?'. Now I have the answer before the call ends." — Louis Clifton Brown, QA & Operations Manager, J&L Grubb Ltd / Cashel Farmhouse Cheesemakers.