You don't need remote command and control to tell you if your single truck chiller is working, you can just go look at the thermostat. But a company needs it to confirm that the chillers are working and at a safe temperature across all 1,000 trucks in their fleet.

What am I missing? Of course the user cares if their food has been stored at the proper temperature from production to transit to the shelf. They don't care that this specific implementation clearly had a security vulnerability, they just want to check out and get back to their lives (and not get sick), but there's no way this whole setup was completely unnecessary to produce that desired outcome, flawed or not.

Maybe we throw it all away and go to 1990s-style grocery chain management, hire a bunch of people, and costs go up while reliability and monitoring shifts to humans. But that doesn't mesh with consumer expectations on price, which is probably how the whole system originated.

But you’re going to adopt a platform that meets the needs across your enterprise, so the capability is often there even if one situation may only call for monitoring.

Further, once you have hundreds or thousands of devices, “just call someone to turn it up/down/off” doesn’t scale.

And you know what the customer needs? Or is this just a personal feeling. There’s multiple people from the industry chiming in on these threads as to why this is needed.