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.

I wonder how many people working in any given supermarket chain actually know that their fridges are connected to a network at all.

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.

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.

I’m still trying to figure out why these freezers are connected to the Internet in the first place…

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.