Is anyone on HN familiar with this industry? Are there any reasons that simple GPS tracking of the goods wouldn't work? Or is it simply not as big of an issue as this article is making it out to be?
I worked in the retail food industry as a starving student and one of the few nice things about megacorporate control of the food supply is corporate had an excellent idea of how many boxes of granola they shipped us vs how many we sold and questions would be raised if the sales figures didn't at least vaguely match the single source shipping figures.
Some independent ethnic market, or a restaurant, well, all bets are off, but they're a very small part of a very huge industry.
Most of the anecdotes are variations on very old insurance ripoff schemes which is why they're getting caught. The concept of ripping off an insurance company is not new nor specific to food and they're pretty good at figuring it out.
The guy who sold $32K of stolen shrimp gets to do that once in his entire life... meanwhile the regular seafood guy who was selling legal shrimp is pissed off and motivated to rat out the thief, so the problem is kinda self correcting. Remember that the average small business restaurant goes out of business in three years or less unlike the supply companies who have been around forever. The restaurant has no loyalty to the supplier, but the supplier has no loyalty to the restaurant.
Could be that many of the truckers are independent contractors. Also apparently the losses are sufficient to warrant the extra cost. Eventually rates for insurance may force it or the state may decide it has a real problem.
