The Meat Rots While the Firewalls Fail: How a Hack Took Out the Backbone of UK Chilled Logistics

Written By Noel Bradford

Right then. Strap in, because this one deserves the full firestorm. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if the UK's food supply chain tripped over its own digital shoelaces, congratulations — we’re living it.

Peter Green Chilled, a logistics company moving refrigerated goods to major UK supermarkets, just got absolutely wrecked by a ransomware attack. And no, this isn’t some nerdy IT corner case. This is "thousands of pounds of meat and dairy left rotting in crates" level catastrophic.

This wasn’t just an attack. This was a gut punch to the entire supply chain. But more importantly, it’s a symptom — not the disease. The disease is negligence. Complacency. Years of pretending that IT is a cost centre and not a strategic function.

From Chilled to F***ed: What We Know

The BBC broke the story: Peter Green Chilled, which supplies major supermarkets like Tesco and Sainsbury's, was hit by a cyberattack that stopped them from processing orders. Transport kept moving (because wheels still roll), but with no way to process anything new, everything ground to a halt.

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, the founder of The Black Farmer, put it best: "This has been a nightmare." He’s got thousands of sausages and steaks just sitting around, going bad, because a logistics firm’s digital infrastructure got pancaked by ransomware.

"We are talking about a lot of stock. The stuff was picked up on Wednesday but never made it to the supermarkets," he said.

The Real Cost: Meat, Money and Mayhem

Let’s be blunt. The financial damage to suppliers will be catastrophic. If you’re a small farmer or an independent producer, every day your product doesn’t hit the shelves is a day closer to bankruptcy. You don’t get reimbursed for digital incompetence. No ransomware clause in your Tesco delivery contract.

Meanwhile, the supermarkets themselves? Business as usual. Because they always have backup suppliers, right? Right?! Well, not really. Because cold chain logistics — that is, the art of keeping food chilled from farm to fork — is already stretched tighter than a politician’s tax return.

Half of the UK’s food passes through the cold chain, according to the Cold Chain Federation. That’s not a typo. Half. So when a link in the chain like Peter Green Chilled goes down, it’s not a blip. It’s a systemic threat.

Oh Look, Another SME Gets Shafted

And here’s the thing: this wasn’t a one-off. This follows hot on the heels of the M&S customer data breach and the Co-op meltdown. Retail and logistics firms are now on a hacker’s Christmas card list.

Why? Because they’re juicy targets. They’ve got:

  • Data.

  • Infrastructure.

  • A dependency on uptime.

  • And usually, shite cybersecurity.

Let’s be honest — most of these companies outsourced IT to whatever bargain-bin MSP pitched the lowest quote and could spell "endpoint." No internal SOC. No proper segmentation. No meaningful detection and response. And let’s not even talk about patch management — it’s usually a spreadsheet and a prayer.

Still Think Cyber Essentials is Optional?

This. This right here. This is why schemes like Cyber Essentials matter. Not because it’s perfect. Not because it’s a silver bullet. But it forces you to pretend at least to care about basic controls.

Peter Green Chilled does not have Cyber Essentials. Let that sink in. A critical national supplier, touching the food chain of nearly every major supermarket, has no formal cybersecurity certification in place.

And before anyone makes excuses, Peter Green Chilled is a subsidiary of Peter Green Haulage, a group with over £25 million in turnover, £4.5 million gross profit, and £1.5 million in operating profit. As of 2023, they had over £1.5 million in the bank and employed around 210 staff, including roughly 60 administrative staff.

Let’s put that in perspective. For the admin headcount alone, a decent MSP would expect to charge in the region of £100 per head per month for support and licensing. That’s £6,000 a month. £72,000 a year. You could double that and still be under 5% of the company’s gross profit. And yet here we are — with entire refrigerated loads of food left to spoil because someone somewhere decided to cheap out on cyber.

This isn’t some micro outfit scraping by. This profitable, established business could’ve easily invested in cybersecurity and chose not to.

And to hammer this in: on their website, Peter Green Chilled boasts about their "industry leading bespoke IT systems"—systems that weren’t good enough to withstand a fairly standard ransomware attack. That level of delusion deserves its paragraph.

Multi-factor authentication? Segregated admin accounts? Patch your bloody systems? Backups that work? Not asking for much, but apparently, even these basics are beyond reach for many mid-sized logistics outfits.

We are way past the point of politely suggesting security standards. This should be mandated across every supplier connecting to national infrastructure, including food. No cert? No contract.

Let’s Talk About the Supply Chain Domino Effect

We don’t live in a vacuum. When Peter Green Chilled goes down, the impact cascades. Farmers lose revenue, supermarkets run leaner, and customers see higher prices or empty shelves. And the next attack could literally hit someone even higher up the food chain.

It’s not just the primary target who gets bruised; it’s everyone downstream. Welcome to cyber fragility.

Ransomware: Still Running Rings Around Businesses in 2025

It’s 2025. And ransomware is still winning. Why? Because we haven’t adapted. We’re still treating cybersecurity like an IT problem instead of what it is: a business continuity imperative.

Ransomware cartels run like fully staffed companies with helpdesks, marketing materials, and affiliate schemes. Some have better onboarding than most SaaS platforms. They’re innovating. Are you?

Are you segmenting your networks? Are you monitoring for lateral movement? Do you know how long someone could dwell in your systems before you notice?

Because they will get in. And if you don’t know what to do when that happens, you’ve already lost.

Everyone Talks About Incident Response — Few Do It Well

Let me guess. The incident response plan is on a SharePoint doc, last touched in 2021. The backup system works, but nobody’s tested restores in 12 months. The firewall logs are gibberish. And the only person who knows how the systems work left six months ago.

Does that sound about right?

And when the inevitable breach happens, here comes the playbook:

  1. Panic.

  2. Try to restore the systems manually.

  3. Pray, someone has a recent backup.

  4. Hope nobody tells the press.

It’s amateur hour every time. We need to professionalise our response.

Food Logistics Isn’t Optional — So Why Is the Security Budget?

Imagine if a fire had hit Peter Green Chilled. Or a flood. You’d have backup plans. Redundancy. Contingency strategies. So why is a cyberattack treated like some obscure corner-case risk rather than a guaranteed punch in the mouth?

If your entire business grinds to a halt because one server got encrypted, that’s not bad luck. That’s bad design.

Let’s Not Forget the Human Cost

This isn’t just about pork going warm or dairy turning sour. Real people lose wages. Drivers get sent home. Small producers get squeezed until they fold. All because someone opened a dodgy attachment or failed to patch a five-year-old bug.

We like to talk about "resilience" as if it’s a buzzword. Resilience actually means being able to take a hit without the entire business turning to ash.

A Final Word to Anyone Still Making Excuses

If you’re still running Windows Server 2012, or using RDP without 2FA, or haven’t looked at your firewall config since the Covid, then this is your wake-up call.

Not every business can afford enterprise-grade everything. But if you can afford to run chilled logistics across the country, you can damn well afford:

  • Regular vulnerability scans

  • Centralised logging and alerting

  • A proper EDR solution

  • Off-site tested backups

And if you can’t — then find a security partner who actually gives a shit.

Because the next attack? It’s already queued up.


Noel Bradford

Noel Bradford – Head of Technology at Equate Group, Professional Bullshit Detector, and Full-Time IT Cynic

As Head of Technology at Equate Group, my job description is technically “keeping the lights on,” but in reality, it’s more like “stopping people from setting their own house on fire.” With over 40 years in tech, I’ve seen every IT horror story imaginable—most of them self-inflicted by people who think cybersecurity is just installing antivirus and praying to Saint Norton.

I specialise in cybersecurity for UK businesses, which usually means explaining the difference between ‘MFA’ and ‘WTF’ to directors who still write their passwords on Post-it notes. On Tuesdays, I also help further education colleges navigate Cyber Essentials certification, a process so unnecessarily painful it makes root canal surgery look fun.

My natural habitat? Server rooms held together with zip ties and misplaced optimism, where every cable run is a “temporary fix” from 2012. My mortal enemies? Unmanaged switches, backups that only exist in someone’s imagination, and users who think clicking “Enable Macros” is just fine because it makes the spreadsheet work.

I’m blunt, sarcastic, and genuinely allergic to bullshit. If you want gentle hand-holding and reassuring corporate waffle, you’re in the wrong place. If you want someone who’ll fix your IT, tell you exactly why it broke, and throw in some unsolicited life advice, I’m your man.

Technology isn’t hard. People make it hard. And they make me drink.

https://noelbradford.com
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