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Probably most of them had exactly zero inhouse expertise in cybersec and just pretended there’s nothing to worry about because having to worry would be inconvenient. Maybe some of them made a call to their cold chain supplier and were told that there’s nothing to worry about.
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I wonder how many people working in any given supermarket chain actually know that their fridges are connected to a network at all.
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Not many, probably, but their cold chain people definitely would have known. Instrumented and remote monitored cold chains are standard these days because keeping stuff refridgerated end to end is a pretty big deal.
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I bet most managers don't even know you can even connect a fridge to the internet.
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have you seen how big enterprises operate? It would generally take much longer from a decision to do something to any action happening, budget approvals etc.

And for anything infosec, unfortunately people who know a lot about infosec have a habit of 'crying wolf' and talking about infosec as some kind of absolute rule that everything has to bow down to with no willingness to balance against other business risks, so probably leadership is used to ignoring the people who knew that this was a big deal and were calling for action.

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Their cybersecurity departments (next to fresh produce) are all over this.

Snark aside, supermarkets are not in the tech business. The extent of their involvement is ringing their IT vendor to complain about it.

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Depends. Lidl wants to be a tech company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarz_Digits

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It really depends on the grocery. Kroger gets a big chunk of their profits from their data stack.
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I wouldn't be surprised if its their own agencies hacking these systems preemptively in order to force the issue and increase robustness against a larger multi-pronged attack.
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I’m still trying to figure out why these freezers are connected to the Internet in the first place…
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Monitoring, alerting, remote diagnostics and trouble shooting.

Commercial cold chains are expensive, high value collections of equipment that even small errors at the edges can cause huge monetary losses. And grocery stores are in an extremely low margin business.

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Those are read-only. None of those things require the ability to heat up a fridge remotely.
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Diagnostics and troubleshooting are not necessarily read only. Some of these systems have temperature controls that are centrally managed for operations centers for instance.
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Monitoring should be in a DNZ that can talk to the otherwise “airgapped” network and push metrics out to the SaaS platform or whatever. Send a technician if something needs to be adjusted, or (only if some kind of remote access super critical) give the customer the ability to grant temp access to technicians for remote troubleshooting (but require someone to be in the facility).

None of this requires the customer to be technical, the ORM could ship the equipment with the network setup, and installation would just be connecting the DMZ device to the Internet.

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The question wasn’t why these systems are setup insecurely (which has an obvious answer about cost prioritization).

Of course there are ways to setup these things securely, same with smart tvs and doorbell cameras and whatever else is getting hacked. People just have a bad time figuring out the cost benefit of all of this. And frankly we don’t know if that cost benefit has even been crossed yet, perhaps this doesn’t rate.

You yourself are engaging in cost prioritizing without adequate information. Sending a technician on site may be extremely expensive (opportunity costs and inventory risk on cold chains are wild).

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