Food and beverage is not an industry most people associate with sophisticated cybersecurity, which is precisely what makes it a compelling target. The supply chains are long and complex, the operational technology environments are often legacy-heavy, the regulatory landscape spans food safety, financial compliance, and data privacy simultaneously, and the brands are household names with reputations built over decades. The leaders in this feature are securing some of the most recognizable food and beverage companies in the country, from a global pizza franchise to an international baked goods manufacturer, and doing it across environments where a disruption is measured not just in data loss but in delivery failures, production shutdowns, and customer trust.
Andrew Albrecht — Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, Domino’s
Andrew Albrecht leads cybersecurity for the world’s largest pizza company, overseeing a program that spans more than 21,000 locations across 90-plus countries and $19.1 billion in global sales. His team of forty security professionals manages strategic planning, governance, control engineering, and a dedicated security operations center, while also maintaining franchise partner assurance across all global business operating systems. He brings more than twenty-eight years of cybersecurity experience, including fifteen-plus years of PCI compliance work, and presents regularly at regional and national events. He reports directly to the C-suite and board on strategy, metrics, and program status. Securing a franchise model at that scale is a fundamentally different challenge from securing a single enterprise: the attack surface includes thousands of independently operated locations, each representing a potential point of entry.
William Lucas — Chief Information Security Officer, Mastronardi Produce
William Lucas stepped into the CISO role at Mastronardi Produce in December 2025 after spending more than two years as senior director of cybersecurity at the same company, giving him a clear-eyed view of the environment before taking ownership of it. His background spans General Motors, where he led vulnerability management and security transformation for six years, Deloitte, where he worked as a senior cyber and risk management consultant, and Universal Logistics Holdings, where he served as director of IT security. He holds a master’s degree in information assurance with a focus on digital forensics and a CISSP certification. Bringing automotive-grade security discipline and enterprise consulting experience into a specialty produce company is an unusual combination, and it shapes how he approaches risk in an operational environment where cold chain integrity and supply chain continuity are as critical as data protection.
Sara Schmidt — Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, US Foods
Before joining US Foods as SVP and CISO in June 2022, Sara Schmidt spent nearly seven years at Farmers Insurance, progressing from business information security officer through director of governance, risk, and compliance to CISO. At Farmers, she co-founded the Women in Cyber Security employee affiliate, a program that reflects a sustained commitment to expanding the security talent pipeline that extends beyond her own organization. She now serves on the board of Mercantile Bank, adding governance experience alongside her operational CISO responsibilities at a food distribution company that serves restaurants, healthcare facilities, and hospitality businesses across the country. Her move from financial services into food distribution reflects a security leadership profile that travels well across sectors.
Brett Hoffman — Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, SpartanNash
Brett Hoffman joined SpartanNash as VP and CISO in August 2025, bringing a career that spans healthcare data protection, furniture and design, managed security services, and consumer goods. At MillerKnoll, he led information security for a global design company across three and a half years. Before that, he led data protection and privacy at HealthEquity in Arizona and served as Americas information security leader at Amway. In between his MillerKnoll and SpartanNash roles, he ran enterprise security solutions at Inspire Security Solutions. That breadth of industry experience, covering regulated financial health accounts, direct sales, and workplace design, gives him a cross-sector risk perspective that is relatively uncommon in grocery retail and food distribution security leadership.
Paul VanderWall — Enterprise Information Security Officer, Gordon Food Service
Twenty-eight years at Gordon Food Service is a career that most people in any profession would find remarkable. Paul VanderWall started as an application architect and engineer, moved through supply chain application development, application architecture and middleware management, and cybersecurity risk and compliance management before stepping into the enterprise information security officer role in July 2024. His technical depth spans GCP cloud security, CSPM, DSPM, application security, PCI, privacy, SOX, and Oracle database environments. That foundation, built across nearly three decades inside a single food distribution company, means he understands the business processes, the legacy systems, and the operational dependencies that most external security hires would spend years trying to learn. At Gordon Food Service, his institutional knowledge is the security program’s greatest structural advantage.
Bill Smith — Vice President of Infrastructure and Cybersecurity, Dawn Foods Global
Bill Smith has spent nearly eleven years at Dawn Foods Global, moving from server manager through director of global infrastructure before stepping into the VP of infrastructure and cybersecurity role in June 2023. His work spans AWS, GCP, Azure, CyberArk, MDR and EDR solutions, SD-WAN, and SAP S/4HANA migrations across an international baked goods manufacturer with a complex, multi-region operational environment. He has built Dawn’s cybersecurity program from initial maturity levels, covering team development, risk assessments, service deployment, and board-level reporting. His combination of infrastructure and security ownership under a single leadership mandate reflects the operational reality of many mid-market manufacturers, where the lines between keeping systems running and keeping them secure run directly through the same leader.
Michigan Feeds the World. These Leaders Help Keep It Safe.
The food and beverage sector sits at an uncomfortable intersection of physical operations, digital infrastructure, and public trust. A cyberattack on a food distribution network is not just a data breach. It is a supply chain disruption that can ripple from a data center to a restaurant kitchen to a hospital cafeteria in hours. The leaders in this feature are building the security programs that stand between that risk and the businesses, employees, and communities that depend on Michigan’s food industry every day.
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