- Remote alerting for the store manager/head office to quickly respond to a refrigerator failure after hours, providing options for saving valuable stock (e.g. move stock to another refrigerator).
- Maintaining an audit trail for cold chain management (e.g. regulator says you must keep an audit trail proving that a frozen fish has been kept below -30oC since it was processed on a ship all the way up to point of sale in a supermarket).
- Refrigerator manufacturer says a condition of warranty is that the refrigerator must provide remote telemetry proving some warranty condition has been met (e.g. regular cleaning cycle operated).
Note: all these speculated reasons are unidirectional data flows. So even if a valid reason exists for Internet connectivity, why can't it be limited to unidirectional data flows?
My org has lots of freezers that need to be at precise temperatures. Sometimes they drift so you have to check them a few times per day, log the check, and adjust as necessary. Doing this for a thousand freezers is tedious and error prone. Networking helps. “Cloud” lets it all be done remotely without getting IT very involved for vpns to be set up with specific vendors. It also helps with patching and auditing security so seems odd that these supermarket ones were out of date.