Thieves have quietly shifted their appetite. The freight they target most now isn't electronics or metals — it's the food and drink on the truck ahead of you.
By the Sentrick Cargo team · Published July 20, 2026
When people picture cargo theft, they tend to imagine a trailer full of televisions or a load of copper. But the category that criminals hit hardest today is far more mundane and far harder to defend: food and beverage. According to Verisk CargoNet's 2025 year-end analysis (reported January 2026), food and beverage was the single most-targeted commodity group of the year, with roughly 708 recorded thefts — a 47% jump over 2024, and by some quarterly measures accounting for more than one in five of all cargo thefts. This came in a year when overall estimated losses reached nearly $725 million, up about 60%, with the average theft worth around $273,990. Meat, seafood, produce, tree nuts, energy drinks, and alcohol led the surge. For any shipper or carrier moving edibles, that trend isn't abstract — it means your commodity has become the one thieves want most.
Food and beverage checks every box a cargo thief looks for. It is high-volume, moving in enormous quantities across the country every day, which means there is always a load to hit. It is hard to trace — a pallet of ground beef, energy drinks, or almonds carries no serial number, no registration, nothing that ties a specific case to a specific theft once it leaves the trailer. It is easy to resell, because it disappears into secondary markets, small retailers, and online channels almost instantly, and unlike electronics it is quite literally consumed, erasing the evidence. And much of it is perishable, which pressures everyone to move fast and ask fewer questions — a stolen reefer load of seafood has to be sold within days, and the speed that pressures the thief also works against investigators. Cheap to acquire, simple to move, impossible to track: for organized cargo crews, food is close to an ideal product.
Food and beverage loads are lost the same two ways all freight is, but their profile makes both easier. In straight theft, a loaded reefer or dry van is left at a truck stop, a drop yard, or an unsecured lot, and thieves either break in and offload or hook up the whole trailer and drive off. Perishables invite this because they often sit staged and waiting for delivery windows. In strategic theft — the faster-growing form — criminals use fake carrier identities, fictitious pickups, and double-brokering scams to get a legitimate shipper to hand the load over willingly, then vanish with it. Because food doesn't need to be laundered or stripped for parts, a strategically stolen produce or meat load can be sold before anyone even realizes the "carrier" was a fraud. Both routes end the same way: a shipment that leaves the supply chain and is gone before an alarm is raised.
Refrigerated food adds a second failure mode that dry freight doesn't have. A reefer load can be effectively destroyed without ever being stolen, simply by the temperature drifting out of range — a unit that fails, a door left ajar, a setpoint that's wrong. From a loss standpoint, a trailer of spoiled seafood is nearly as bad as a stolen one, and thieves who breach a trailer to steal part of a load frequently leave the rest to spoil. This is why monitoring food shipments means watching more than location. Whether the cargo is warm or cold, whether the doors are sealed, and whether the reefer is holding temperature are all part of whether the load will actually arrive in sellable condition.
Plenty of food shipments already carry a GPS dot, and it rarely helps, because a location on a map answers the wrong question. By the time a dispatcher notices a trailer parked somewhere it shouldn't be, the reefer has been open for an hour or the load is already being offloaded. Knowing where a shipment is does not tell you whether it is behaving the way it should. The gap that food and beverage thieves exploit is the same one that plagues all cargo: a stretch of time during which the load is doing something wrong — moving when it should be parked, opening when it should be sealed, warming when it should be cold, leaving a route it was meant to follow — and no one is watching closely enough to catch it while there's still time to act.
That is the logic Sentrick Cargo applies to freight security. Rather than simply plotting a location, the aim is to understand whether a shipment's movement, door status, temperature, and route fit the pattern it should be following — and to escalate the instant they don't. A reefer trailer that starts moving during a scheduled rest, doors that open away from an authorized stop, a temperature climbing out of its safe band, a load drifting off its planned corridor: for food and beverage cargo, these are the early signatures of both theft and spoilage. Catching them as they begin, rather than discovering them at delivery, is the difference between a recovered load and a total loss claim.
Food and beverage didn't become the most-stolen freight by accident. It is everywhere, it can't be traced, it sells itself, and — when refrigerated — it can be ruined as easily as it can be robbed. The 2025 CargoNet data makes the trend hard to ignore, and there is no reason to expect thieves to lose their taste for it. The shippers and carriers who lose the least will be the ones who stop treating a location dot as protection and start monitoring how their loads actually behave in transit — because for a commodity this fast-moving and this untraceable, the only defense that matters is the one that raises the alarm while the food is still on the truck.