Armstrong Cheese
CheeseGPT
- Armstrong Cheese (Saputo)
- Technical Strategy
- AI/ML Development
- RAG System Architecture
- UI/UX Design
- Frontend Development
- QA & Testing Framework
When a 120-year-old brand decided to talk back
Armstrong Cheese is a Canadian icon. When they came to us, they weren't shopping for chatbot vendors. They wanted a partner who could dream bigger. Together, we built CheeseGPT: an AI that transforms how people discover cheese, find recipes, and fall in love with the brand all over again.
It's playful. It's sharp. It handles cheese poetry requests and marriage counseling questions with equal grace. Behind the warmth and wit? A system built to be uncrackable. Because a heritage brand can't afford a single slip.
Zero Tolerance for Hallucinations
Saputo had seen what could go wrong. Chatbots that hallucinate. Brands embarrassed by their own AI going off-script. One wrong answer about allergens or a competitor mention slipping through, and a 120-year reputation takes the hit.
Armstrong is a beloved family brand. Any AI experience had to match that warmth while being completely locked down. Off-the-shelf solutions weren't going to cut it.
Teaching an AI to Think in Cheese
We built a custom RAG pipeline trained on Armstrong's entire catalog. Recipes, products, nutritional information, structured so the AI reasons intelligently across all of it. When someone asks for "quick dinner recipes with marble cheese that kids will like," the system doesn't keyword match. It understands the intent.
Domain-specific embedding fine-tuning taught the system cheese terminology in context. "Old cheddar," "aged cheddar," "sharp cheddar" handled intelligently, not as disconnected keywords. A validation layer cross-references every product mention against Armstrong's live database. When confidence drops below threshold, the system admits uncertainty rather than fabricating answers.
2,000 Ways to Break a Chatbot
Brand safety was non-negotiable. So we built a testing framework designed to break it.
2,000 prompts. Controversial topics. Competitor mentions. Dietary restriction edge cases. Rude users. Keyboard smashes. Requests for the Pythagorean theorem explained in cheese terms. Marriage counseling with cheddar puns. Every chaos scenario we could imagine. The result? A chatbot that deflects competitor questions with warmth, redirects political tangents back to cheese, and turns spam into an opportunity for a pun. Uncrackable, but never cold.
1,500 Cheese Lovers and Counting
Since launching in June 2025, CheeseGPT has engaged nearly 1,500 users. 245 conversations per month on average. BBQ recipes emerged as the most-requested topic. Real proof that people are finding genuine value, not just testing the novelty.
In production, users have thrown everything at it: 136-message spam sessions, requests for cheese chess boards, attempts to drag it into politics. Every time, CheeseGPT stays helpful, stays on-brand, and steers back to cheese with charm. That resilience in the wild is why Armstrong came back asking "what's next?" Phase 2 is already in development.
