Can Britain afford to take its supermarket fridges offline?

and declaring that ‘smart fridges are one of the dumbest things ever’, a chorus which will only grow in the coming months if our supermarkets can’t provide food.

The big advantage of having your supermarket fridges connected to the internet is that it allows engineers to deal with some issues remotely.

The connections also allow companies to monitor what is happening in their fridges around the clock.

When these sorts of small individual maintenance efficiencies are multiplied over huge supermarket estates the savings are substantial.

But this will come with tradeoffs, namely increasing the cost of food and demand on the grid – two pressures which Britain, with its inflation and net zero-addled energy grid – is poorly equipped to manage.