Empirical Foods

Empirical Foods is the world's largest lean ground beef manufacturer, a family-owned operation running for over 45 years with more than 1,400 employees. The company operates massive production facilities - 290,000 sq ft in South Sioux City, Nebraska, and 280,000 sq ft in Garden City, Kansas - supplying major retail and foodservice partners nationwide from its Dakota Dunes, South Dakota headquarters.

The attack surface here is industrial: food manufacturing at scale means OT/ICS environments controlling production lines, cold chain logistics, and supply chain integrations with some of the country's largest retailers. Think SCADA systems on the plant floor, ERP platforms tying procurement to distribution, and EDI connections feeding order data to partners whose names you'd recognize. The threat model spans ransomware targeting operational continuity, supply chain compromise through partner integrations, and the regulatory pressure that comes with being a critical food infrastructure node.

For security practitioners, this is a chance to work in an environment where uptime isn't abstract - it's beef moving through a 290,000 sq ft facility. The scope covers IT and OT convergence, network segmentation between corporate and production networks, and securing data flows across a nationwide distribution footprint. No venture capital theatrics, no growth-at-all-costs nonsense - just a company that's been doing one thing at enormous scale for decades and needs its infrastructure defended accordingly.