How Cashel Blue replaced years of spreadsheets
in 30 days.
Cashel Farmhouse Cheesemakers is a multi-award-winning Tipperary farmhouse dairy with international distribution, family-run, supplying private-label variants to Irish multiple retailers. They built Keystone with us, on their floor, in one of the most operationally complex artisan dairies in the country. Cashel Blue® and Crozier Blue® are registered trademarks of J&L Grubb Ltd; brand and team references used with the written permission of J&L Grubb Ltd.
Excel built the cheese. Then it started breaking the dispatch.
By 2025, Cashel Blue's operation had grown faster than the spreadsheets behind it. 40+ internal SKUs cross-mapped to retailer private-label codes. Variable-weight wheels that didn't reconcile to whole-case orders. Nine export markets, each with its own dispatch-note layout, COA template and pallet-label format. The Excel workbook had become a 28-tab dependency where one wrong reference could brick a Tesco dispatch.
More importantly, the knowledge sat with one person. When BRCGS mock-recall requirements tightened in 2025, the "what happens when she's on holiday?" question stopped being theoretical.
We sat on their floor for two days. Then we built.
Keystone wasn't designed in a Dublin software office and pitched at Cashel Blue afterwards. It was built side-by-side, on the production floor in Fethard, against a real artisan dairy with a real Excel + macros legacy. Every screen was tested on the same Tuesday-morning dispatch run that had been running for fifteen years.
- Week 1, Discovery & data migrationTwo days on the floor mapping the workflow. Five days importing 12 months of historical batches, customers and dispatches from the existing Excel workbook.
- Week 2, Templates & customer codesPer-customer dispatch note templates (Tesco, M&S, Lidl, SuperValu, Centra, Musgrave, Aldi, plus eight export distributors). 40+ SKU → retailer private-label mappings configured.
- Week 3, Parallel runningOld system + Keystone running side-by-side. QA Manager training, dispatch ops training, founder line-availability every working day.
- Week 4, Go-liveFirst full week running dispatch entirely on Keystone. Cut-over support from the build team on every dispatch for the first three days.
Measured. Not vibes.
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Full-chain traceability lookup | ✗ ~2 hours, manual | ✓ Under 30 seconds, signed PDF |
| BRCGS mock-recall | ✗ Half a day, error-prone | ✓ 90 seconds |
| Dispatch note generation | ✗ 20 min per dispatch (manual Word) | ✓ Auto-generated, retailer-formatted |
| COA per batch | ✗ Manual copy-paste from Excel | ✓ Auto-attached on every dispatch |
| Customer code translation | ✗ Lookup spreadsheet, error-prone | ✓ Native bidirectional mapping |
| Handover risk | ✗ One person held the knowledge | ✓ Zero, system holds the workflow |
| Annual cost of audit prep | ✗ ~80 person-hours / year | ✓ Under 8 person-hours / year |
"We didn't want a piece of software. We wanted someone who'd sit on the floor with us for two days, understand how we actually run, and build us a system that fits. That's what we got."
Want to talk to Cashel Blue's QA team directly?
After a brief discovery call, we'll broker a direct intro. No sales pitch, they'll tell you, in their own words, what works and what doesn't.
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