Cahier.
The supply chain record book from Vinerals Technologies. Write it down once, where the work happens. Answer any buyer, inspector, or lender in an afternoon. And know where you would break before something breaks you.
Cahier is in development at Vinerals through mid-2026. Early-access engagements run in parallel. What we are building first is the record book, the answers, and the recall drill. Everything else on this page is built when a customer needs it, and we will tell you which is which.
Somebody with power over your revenue
asks a question you cannot answer quickly.
Everything lives in spreadsheets. Most Canadian SMEs run their supply chain across a few spreadsheets, a shared inbox, and a chat thread. It works until a buyer asks where a batch came from, an inspector asks for records you cannot produce in one afternoon, or a recall forces you to rebuild the story from memory.
The questions come from your customers first. Regulations get delayed and softened, and several of them just were. What does not soften is the retailer onboarding you, the European importer passing requests upstream, the large customer cascading attestations down to you, the hospital group asking about origin, the broker needing proof at the border. Each new rule lands on the big players, and the big players send you a questionnaire with a two-week deadline.
The good tools price you out. Serious supply chain software is priced per procurement department. The cheaper option is a separate tool per rule, priced per seat, that you then have to stitch together yourself. Growing Canadian SMEs need the same records the big companies keep, in a form and at a price a growing business can plan around.
What Cahier does
Record.
Receiving, processing, and shipping written down where the work happens, on a phone or a tablet, offline if the dock has no signal. Every batch keeps track of what it was made from.
Source.
A supplier map with origin, signed attestations, and the lead times you actually get rather than the ones you were promised. Answers ready before the buyer asks.
Answer.
A buyer questionnaire, an audit notice, a customs query: each one becomes a request in Cahier, assembled from your records, and kept so the next version of the same question takes minutes.
Drill.
Rehearse the recall on a quiet Tuesday instead of discovering the gaps on a bad Friday. Cahier times the trace, produces the package, and leaves a dated record auditors and insurers take seriously.
Know.
Which inputs have only one supplier, where your spend is concentrated, and how long you could keep shipping if a supplier stopped today. Calculated from your records, not from a survey you have to fill in.
Own.
You own the records. Documented, portable, with your own credentials. No vendor sitting between you and your data on the day a contract ends.
What Cahier Includes
- 01Records shaped around how work actually happens: receiving, processing, and shipping
- 02A request workflow, so every buyer or inspector question is tracked, answered, and reusable
- 03Recall and supplier-failure drills that leave a dated record behind
- 04An exposure view calculated from your own records: single-source inputs, concentration, real lead times
- 05Three build sizes: starter, shared with a group, and export-ready
- 06Québec and federal funding programmes mapped to eligible line items
Reference Stack
- 01Offline-first mobile capture for the loading dock and the packing line
- 02Postgres records with append-only movement events, portable by design
- 03Buyer- and regulator-shaped exports (PDF, JSON, CSV) generated from one source
- 04Batch lineage traced in milliseconds, which is what makes a timed drill possible
- 05Resilience figures calculated from the same records, never entered twice
- 06Two integrations at launch, chosen by the first group of customers
What You Get
- 01Your records, your code, your credentials, from day one
- 02A buyer questionnaire answered in a day instead of a fortnight, and filed for next time
- 03One-up one-back traces in the shape the CFIA and FSMA 204 expect
- 04A forced-labour attestation bundle, whether you report yourself or your customer asks
- 05A dated drill log you can hand to an auditor, an insurer, or a bank
- 06Documentation a future team can pick up without you in the room
Write it down once.
Send it out in whatever format each one asks for.
The most common request is not a regulator at all. It is a buyer’s questionnaire. But buyer questions and regulator formats mostly want the same underlying information, so recording it once where the work happens covers both. Below is the honest state of each regime as of July 2026, ordered by how often a Canadian food or beverage business actually runs into it.
CFIA SFCR
Safe Food for Canadians Regulations. Domestic traceability, one step forward and one step back. The obligation that is already real for every Canadian food processor.
Buyer questionnaires
Not a regulation, and the one you will answer most. Origin, attestations, batch history, emissions per shipment, on whatever form your customer happens to use.
UFLPA
Rebuttable presumption, meaning the burden of proof is on you. Origin evidence that keeps cross-border shipments moving.
FSMA 204
Key Data Elements on twenty-four hour notice, covering critical tracking events from harvest to distribution. Delayed twice, but large US retailers are onboarding suppliers against it now.
Bill S-211
Annual forced-labour report by May 31, but only for entities meeting two of three size thresholds. Below them, what you face is your reporting customers asking you to attest.
EUDR
Plot-level geolocation for cocoa, coffee, soy, timber, cattle, rubber, and palm. Delayed a year and simplified in 2026. Real for a bounded set of businesses; we build the pack for those who need it.
One deliberate omission. Europe’s carbon border mechanism, CBAM, is often sold to Canadian SMEs as urgent. It covers cement, steel, aluminium, fertilisers, hydrogen, and electricity, so it does not apply to food and beverage at all, and since October 2025 a fifty-tonne annual threshold exempts roughly nine in ten importers besides. If you are in a covered good, Cahier will produce the CBAM statement as one export among several. We are not going to build a pillar out of it.
What it unlocks
for Québec businesses.
Carbon numbers your buyers are already asking for.
Retailer scorecards and European importers want emissions per shipment, not an annual PDF. Cahier calculates them from the batches you already recorded, using the life-cycle engine our founder built at McGill. Where a buyer needs a specific regulatory format, that is one more export.
Aliments du Québec and institutional procurement.
Provincial buyers, hospitals, and school boards increasingly ask for traceability and origin. Cahier answers those questions the same way it answers export ones: once, from the same records.
A funded rollout, mapped to what is actually open.
ESSOR Component 1C, Fonds Écoleader, PME MTL’s social economy fund, and MAPAQ Innov’Action all cover line items Cahier is designed to fit. We re-check the list every quarter, because programmes close. Structured properly, year-one cash outlay drops materially.
A Québec social economy fit.
Cooperative purchasing across a group of SMEs is a native lane here, not an afterthought. Aligned with CDRQ, PME MTL, and the Chantier de l’économie sociale.
What it unlocks
from coast to coast.
The CFIA today, US retailers this year.
Safe Food for Canadians already requires one step forward and one step back. FSMA 204 arrives in July 2028, but the large US retailers are onboarding suppliers now, and that conversation happens years before the deadline does.
Forced-labour questions passed down the chain.
Most growing businesses sit below Bill S-211’s reporting thresholds. What reaches them is their large customers’ questionnaires and attestation requests. Cahier keeps the supplier declarations and sourcing evidence in one place all year, so answering is an export rather than a scramble, and generates the full report for the businesses that do have to file.
Origin evidence that keeps shipments moving.
A detention at the US border under UFLPA is expensive and slow, and the burden of proof sits with you. Cahier captures the origin evidence a Canadian exporter needs before the container is stopped, not after.
Working capital and the conversation with your bank.
Item-level visibility often frees cash that was sitting in stock. The exposure summary goes further: a lender or insurer reviewing your file can see that you know your concentration risk and have rehearsed for it. That is a different conversation than a spreadsheet.
Know where you would break
before something breaks you.
Every risk tool you could theoretically buy begins by asking you to fill something in: supplier surveys, self-assessments, questionnaires. You do not have the staff to feed those tools, which is the honest reason nothing in that category is built for businesses your size.
Cahier does it the other way round. Once you are keeping records to answer your buyers, the exposure is already in them. Your receiving log knows which supplier you lean on. Your batch history knows how long deliveries really take. Nothing extra to enter, and every number links back to the records it came from.
Where you are exposed.
Which inputs have only one qualified supplier. How much of your packaging spend sits with one firm. How many of your ingredient suppliers ship through the same port. In plain sentences, not a risk score.
How long you would last.
For each critical input: how long you could keep meeting committed orders if that supplier stopped today, against how long a replacement would realistically take. When the first number is smaller than the second, we tell you what revenue is sitting behind it.
The fire drill.
One button rehearses the thing you are afraid of. Recall a batch and Cahier times the full trace and produces the package. Fail a supplier and it walks you through the impact and records what you decided to do. Both leave a dated artifact.
A summary you can show.
Built to be handed to somebody: a bank looking at a working-capital facility, an insurer, a large customer’s supplier review. Evidence that you know your exposure and have rehearsed for it.
What this is not: no simulations dressed up as forecasts, no global risk feed resold at a markup, no score without the records behind it, and nothing that stays blank until you complete a survey.
One set of records,
shared across several SMEs.
A serious traceability system is often out of reach for one growing SME on its own. Split across a co-op or a group of similar businesses, the same setup lands somewhere a growing business can plan for.
Cahier has a shared version built in. The compliance information sits in one place for everyone in the group. Each member’s competitive information stays private to them. Cost-sharing and governance shaped for a Québec solidarity cooperative, a farmer co-op, or a sector association.
And a group gets something no single business can have: the exposure view, summed. Our thirty members average forty-one days of cover on shared inputs. That is the number that turns a co-op into a buying bloc and a shared buffer into a decision instead of an argument. No venture-backed competitor can offer it without first becoming a cooperative.
We know this shape because we are a solidarity cooperative ourselves. Aligned with CDRQ, PME MTL, and the Chantier de l’économie sociale.
Rollout
From walking the floor with you to answering your first buyer in a day. Four phases, each with a milestone you can show a board or a bank. From month six, once there is a year of movements to read, the exposure view and the supplier-failure drill come on.
Discovery
We walk the floor with you. Receiving to shipping, one lot from last month traced end to end. You leave with an honest gap analysis, whether you build with us or not.
Data Capture
Capture at the bench, not in a portal after the fact. Mobile, paper, or barcode: we connect what your team already touches.
The Records
One set of records covering suppliers, batches, movements, and processing. Then we run your first recall drill and put the timed result on record, so you know the number before anyone asks for it.
Answering People
Your biggest buyer’s questionnaire. A one-up one-back trace for the CFIA. Origin evidence for a broker. An attestation bundle for a customer who reports. Once, from the same records, in the format each one expects.
Questions we hear early.
What growing SMEs ask before joining early access.
If your supply chain runs on
spreadsheets and a chat thread.
Bring us one lot you shipped last month, and how you traced it. What paper touched it. Who logged what into which sheet. Which buyer asked which question, and how you answered.
We will walk it with you before anyone talks about software, and we will time it. That number is usually the whole conversation. If Cahier fits, we say so. If a lighter fix is closer to what you need, we say that too.