My guess, its a service contractor type situation, like getting a smart meter. You can opt out, you just wont have power.

They had a contract with a fridge company, and the service agreement required remote monitoring such that, the service company would be able to detect and troubleshoot remotely, and schedule calls.

The problem with situations like these is that your network security falls to the lowest common denominator, which in this case, is a group of HVAC technicians.

The conversation was something like this:

HVAC company: "Oh yeah, our software does this, and that, and we monitor everything, and thats why our contract is less, we dont waste time and we use sophisticated technology. And of course its 100% secure because expert boffins wrote it."

Grocer w/ 2% margins: "Sounds great."

To be clear, I'm not throwing shade on HVAC technicians. I'm only saying, they aren't network security specialists, thats all.

Yeah I feel like cheap enough AI will make having internet connected appliances such a huge liability that most devices will have to go back to as dumb as possible

someone, or something, needs to monitor the fridges remotely, which means networked thing with all the cute little details of the IOT tacked to it

edit: these are unlikely to be directly connected to the internet, but rather part of an internal network that got popped, likely a while a go too

Have you ever been to a grocery store?

These aren’t consumer refrigerators, it’s a collection of large cold rooms and cases with a bunch of refrigerant tubing and multiple condensers, evaporators, and sensors. It’s a bit more complex than a single home refrigerator.