CYBERSECURITY IN FOOD
Digital technology has become part of the daily machinery of food. Automated lines manage speed and precision. Sensors monitor temperature. ERP platforms organise purchasing and stock. Traceability software follows ingredients from supplier to finished product. B2B e-commerce connects brands with buyers, while AI-assisted quality tools promise faster decisions and fewer errors.
This transformation has made the industry more efficient, but also more exposed. Each connected system creates another possible point of entry. In a sector built on timing, safety and trust, a cyberattack does not remain abstract for long. It can stop production, delay deliveries, disrupt the cold chain, expose supplier data or weaken confidence in a brand that may have taken decades to build.
A wider digital surface, a sharper industrial risk
Food companies are attractive targets because their operations cannot easily pause. A factory producing fresh products, chilled meals, meat, dairy or frozen goods depends on continuous flows of raw materials, labour, packaging, transport and temperature control. A few hours of disruption can quickly become wasted stock, missed orders and contractual pressure.
Cybercriminals understand this urgency. Ransomware, one of the most visible threats, blocks access to systems and demands payment for restoration. According to Food and Ag-ISAC, the food and agriculture sector was targeted by 265 ransomware attacks in 2025, representing 4.2% of recorded ransomware incidents across critical sectors. The organisation also points to the risk created by interconnected supply chains, where one compromised supplier can affect several businesses at once.
The FBI has identified ransomware, foreign malware, theft of data and intellectual property, and bioterrorism as major threats facing agriculture and food-related critical infrastructure. These risks may sound technical, but their consequences are concrete. A frozen food warehouse unable to access its logistics system cannot ship normally. A processor that loses production planning data may have staff and ingredients ready, but no reliable way to run the line. A traceability platform that becomes unavailable can slow recalls, audits and customer assurance.
From phishing emails to factory shutdowns
The most common entry point is often simple. A fraudulent email, a fake supplier invoice or a message pretending to come from IT support can lead an employee to reveal login details. IBM found in its Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 that phishing was the most frequent initial attack vector, while the global average cost of a breach reached $4.44 million.
In food, that cost is rarely limited to the ransom or technical repair. In 2021, meat giant JBS paid $11 million after a ransomware attack temporarily disrupted operations in North America and Australia. The incident showed how a cyberattack on a single major food group can have market-level consequences, particularly when production capacity is concentrated.
More recently, UK retailers Marks & Spencer and Co-op were hit by cyber incidents in 2025. The Cyber Monitoring Centre classified the combined disruption as a Category 2 systemic event and estimated the financial impact across affected parties at between £270 million and £440 million, around €312 million to €509 million. M&S temporarily suspended online and app orders during the incident, while Co-op confirmed customer data had been extracted. The cases underlined how cyber risk can move quickly from online systems to empty shelves, manual processes, delayed orders and damaged confidence.
Cybersecurity belongs beyond IT
The lesson for food industry sectors is that cybersecurity is not only an IT responsibility. When an attack stops a line, it becomes a production issue. When delivery schedules fail, it becomes a logistics issue. When customer or supplier data is exposed, it becomes a commercial and legal issue. When traceability is weakened, quality and food safety teams are directly concerned.
This changes governance. General management must understand the business risk. Factory managers need visibility over which systems are critical to production. Maintenance teams must know which machines are connected and how they are updated. Buyers should assess the digital reliability of suppliers and service providers. Communications teams need a plan for explaining disruption without fuelling panic.
The practical response does not have to begin with expensive complexity. It begins with knowing what must keep working. Companies need to map critical systems, from ERP and order management to recipe databases, industrial control systems, cold chain monitoring and traceability platforms. Access should be limited according to role, so that one stolen password cannot open the whole organisation. Staff should be trained with realistic examples, not abstract warnings. Backups should be offline, encrypted and regularly tested, as recommended by the United States Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in its ransomware guidance.
Trust as a competitive asset
For SMEs, the challenge is sharper because budgets and specialist teams are smaller. Yet smaller size is not a shield. A staged approach can still make a significant difference. Training staff to spot phishing, enabling multi-factor authentication, updating software, limiting administrator access and testing recovery procedures are practical first steps. The aim is not to build a perfect fortress, but to reduce the most common routes of attack and recover faster when something goes wrong.
Cybersecurity is also becoming part of business credibility. Retailers, manufacturers and logistics partners increasingly need assurance that shared data, production continuity and traceability systems are protected. A company that can demonstrate strong cyber governance is not only reducing risk. It is proving that it can remain reliable under pressure.
This matters across the whole value chain. Recipes, supplier terms, customer records, certification documents and batch histories all carry value. If these assets are lost, stolen or altered, the damage may go beyond a single operational incident. It can affect negotiations, audits, food safety procedures and consumer trust.
As digitalisation deepens, cybersecurity will sit alongside automation, sustainability, food safety and supply chain resilience as a core marker of industrial performance. For a food industry trade show such as Sial Paris, where the sector gathers to discuss innovation, production, distribution and future business models, the subject now belongs firmly on the agenda. The connected food economy will only grow. Its resilience will depend not just on faster systems, but on safer ones.
Image credits:
Nataliya Vaitkevich - Pexels
FlyD - Unsplash
Ron Lach - Pexels