The modern food supply chain was engineered to be invisible. The design was intentional, built for efficiency rather than visibility. Moving food from farm to plate on a global scale depends on systems running in the background, unnoticed. That invisibility runs in both directions.
As consumers and as a security industry, our relationship with food infrastructure is almost entirely reactive. We notice empty shelves; we rarely notice what emptied them. In June 2025, a cyberattack on United Natural Foods (UNFI), the primary distributor for Whole Foods, took forklifts offline and kept delivery trucks idle, disrupting supply to 30,000 retail locations, including every Whole Foods in this city. Most people restocked their carts the next week and forgot about it.
Adversaries were not waiting. JBS was deliberately targeted because food supply chains are worth pressuring, and it was not an isolated case. These systems were not built with security visibility as a priority, and the regulatory frameworks governing them were designed for food safety rather than cybersecurity.
This talk is a systems-level look at the global food supply chain for a general security audience. No OT/ICS background required, just an honest look at what the threat model actually is and what changes when you take food infrastructure as seriously as the adversaries already do.