How Rebel Cheese Turns Sceptics into Loyal Customers with Social Proof

"When they try it, they nearly always convert. So anything we can do to overcome that hurdle — reviews, social proof — really does help us a lot."

— Kirsten Maitland, Co-founder, Rebel Cheese

The Challenge

Selling a premium product to customers who've been burned before.

Rebel Cheese makes artisanal plant-based cheeses — aged, cultured, and crafted using the same techniques as the dairy industry. Their brie has the rind. Their gruyère gets baked in a real oven. The product is exceptional. The problem: most shoppers don't know that yet.

Over 70% of their customers aren't vegan. They're dairy-avoiders who've tried vegan cheese before and were disappointed. Rebel Cheese is also premium-priced and ships perishables nationwide — meaning customers can't taste before they buy.

Every new visitor arrives with the same unspoken question: But is vegan cheese actually good?

Without a fast, credible answer to that question, visitors run straight into a wall of hesitation.

The Solution

A review presence built to convert at every stage of the funnel.

Rebel Cheese uses Judge.me to collect, display, and activate customer reviews across their storefront, email flows, paid ad creative, and Google Shopping — turning social proof into a conversion engine that works at every touchpoint.

How they collect reviews

Review requests are triggered automatically through their Klaviyo integration. Days after an order is fulfilled, a branded review request email goes out via an existing Klaviyo flow — slotting cleanly into the automation infrastructure Rebel Cheese had already built post-Shark Tank. 

Store reviews are collected separately via the Judge.me review site, capturing the end-to-end brand experience alongside product-level feedback. The result is a review engine that runs in the background at scale: 571 reviews collected in a single recent month.

"5 days after they've received their order, we send out an email asking for their feedback. We want to hear everything — good, bad, in between — because their opinions matter."

Kirsten reads most reviews herself. For her, reviews are a live feedback channel — the written equivalent of watching a customer's reaction at the counter. Patterns in the data surface product issues before they compound. And when something needs addressing, the review trail makes it possible to close the loop personally. When a process change caused a subtle texture shift in their gruyère, it was the reviews that caught it. The team fixed the recipe and followed up directly with the customers who'd flagged it.

"Not getting reviews is also an indicator of a problem. Passion drives reviews — people write them because they feel strongly, because they want you to fix something and buy again. If they're not writing, that means they don't feel strongly about your product."

How they display reviews

Most Rebel Cheese customers shop on mobile. Social proof is placed deliberately — wherever hesitation is highest and purchase decisions get made.

• Star Rating Badge above the fold on product pages, visible before the scroll

• Review Widget on product pages for shoppers who want to read deeper

• Reviews Carousel surfacing customer voices on the homepage and across the site

• Review Snippets Widget surfacing rotating 5-star reviews near the purchase decision point

• Dedicated All Reviews page for full transparency and deeper-funnel confidence

"Social proof needs to be number one. Our customers are approaching our page on the lens of: is this good? Is it worth this price point? We need to answer those questions as quickly as possible."

How they use reviews in ads — and on Google

The majority of Rebel Cheese's paid media budget goes toward cold audience prospecting. Verified customer reviews are front and centre in that creative — and the word "verified" matters. Every review collected through Judge.me's Klaviyo integration is automatically verified against a real purchase, giving Rebel Cheese something more than a star rating: proof that a real buyer, with their own reasons to be sceptical, tried the product and came back to say it was worth it.

"We nearly always include a review from a verified customer in the ad. Sometimes we'll do videos where multiple reviews cycle through. Nearly always — if it's a static — we have the star rating or a customer quote front and centre."

That same verified review corpus also powers Rebel Cheese's Google Shopping presence. Judge.me feeds product review data directly into Google's product listings — so the social proof that converts shoppers on-site also appears when a new customer searches for vegan cheese on Google. For a brand whose growth depends on reaching cold audiences who've never heard of them, having verified reviews surface in search is an extension of the same trust-building strategy, just on a different channel.

How reviews feed the business

Reviews aren't just for shoppers. Her customer service manager runs regular sentiment analysis across the full review corpus — using AI tools to surface trending topics, flag emerging issues, and identify themes the team needs to act on. Review data is already informing product development decisions, and the team is planning to make it a formal input into a centralised data lake this year — bringing together reviews, Klaviyo data, Shopify order history, and customer support transcripts for deeper customer segmentation and personalised marketing.

What's Next

With the review infrastructure running at scale, Rebel Cheese has four clear opportunities to go further with Judge.me:

• AI-powered review summaries. Judge.me can automatically synthesise Rebel Cheese's 8,591 reviews into a snapshot displayed in the Review Widget and Reviews Carousel — answering "but is it actually good?" before shoppers even start scrolling.

• Smarter publishing workflow. At 571 reviews a month, autopublishing 4 and 5-star reviews while routing lower-rated ones to a moderation queue keeps feedback flowing at scale — without losing the close eye on critical feedback that matters to the team.

• Dedicated store reviews flow. Judge.me can automatically prompt a store review immediately after a product review is submitted — separating delivery and service feedback from product feedback, and giving Rebel Cheese a cleaner signal on both.

• Multilingual review display. Judge.me automatically translates reviews into the shopper's language with no manual work required — a natural next step for a brand selling to a diverse nationwide customer base.