Cybersecurity executives used a panel at the International Foodservice Distributors Association's 2026 Solutions Conference in San Antonio — "The CISO Perspective: Navigating Cyber Risk in Foodservice Distribution" — to argue that cyberattacks on distributors should be planned for as operational disruptions affecting warehouses, trucks, customer orders and the physical movement of freight, not as IT incidents. The session covered the links between cybersecurity, transportation, warehouse operations, third-party vendors and business continuity, including the risk that carriers and other partners expose distributors to cargo theft as well as ransomware. Moderator Brett Perry, head of cybersecurity and network at Dot Foods, and the panel — Frank Smith (The Palmer Family of Companies), James Cusack (Van Eerden Foodservice) and Jeff Shaffer (Ben E. Keith) — pushed a resilience posture over prevention: "We know identities are going to get stolen. We know bad things are going to happen. But if we can alert and contain those types of incidents, we're going to be a much more resilient business without any operational impact."

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