What am I missing? Of course the user cares if their food has been stored at the proper temperature from production to transit to the shelf. They don't care that this specific implementation clearly had a security vulnerability, they just want to check out and get back to their lives (and not get sick), but there's no way this whole setup was completely unnecessary to produce that desired outcome, flawed or not.

Maybe we throw it all away and go to 1990s-style grocery chain management, hire a bunch of people, and costs go up while reliability and monitoring shifts to humans. But that doesn't mesh with consumer expectations on price, which is probably how the whole system originated.