Week in Review: Crime Pays in Power Tools & Chocolate Needs a Scientific Intervention

Your local hardware store might be selling stolen cargo, supply chain professionals are more anxious than ever, and pharmaceuticals are taking unplanned ocean swims. This week brought us a $4.5 million cargo theft operation masquerading as DJ General Tool & Wire, complete with stolen Dyson vacuums and Milwaukee drills. Procurement experts just hit their highest worry levels on record as geopolitical tensions send costs through the roof. Meanwhile, $1.6 million worth of temperature-controlled medicine went overboard off South Africa, Mars decided the chocolate supply crisis called for extreme gene-editing measures, and Schneider Electric proved you can make sustainability work by incentivizing 1,000 suppliers into cutting carbon emissions. Just another week in the world where everything you buy has a backstory.

Tools of the Trade: When Your Local Hardware Store is a Cargo Theft Front   

You walk into a hardware store expecting hammers and nails, not a criminal empire worth $4.5 million in stolen cargo. Yet that’s exactly what police discovered when they raided DJ General Tool & Wire’s two Los Angeles County locations.

The Ultimate DIY Project Gone Wrong

Owner Dojoon Park, 41, turned his storefronts into something far more lucrative than selling legitimate power tools. His shelves allegedly held stolen Dyson vacuums, Milwaukee drills, DeWalt sanders, and Makita equipment, all lifted from trains, trucks, and cargo ships before making their way to unsuspecting customers. Police Chief Jim McDonnell’s team worked with Union Pacific and Port of LA police to trace the goods from their original heists to Park’s retail operation, which reportedly sold the hot merchandise both in-store and online.  

Prison Time for Power Tools

District Attorney Nathan Hochman doesn’t mince words about Park’s future accommodations. The charges carry maximum sentences of years in state prison, and prosecutors plan to throw the book at everyone involved. This bust represents part of a larger crackdown, too. Police recovered nearly $4 million in stolen cargo this year alone, including $2.7 million worth of bitcoin-mining computers from another organized ring. Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton promises more arrests are coming, and everyone from the initial thieves to the final fence operators is fair game.  

Your Grocery Bill Just Got a Geopolitical Upgrade

The Q2 2025 CIPS Pulse Survey just came out, and the results are concerning to say the least. After the survey questioned 200 procurement experts to rate their supply chain panic levels on a scale of 1-7, the results suggest trouble is on hand for anyone who eats, drives, or buys goods. 

Procurement Managers Face “Unprecedented Challenges”

Procurement professionals cranked their worry meters up to 4.57 out of 7 for the next three months (up from Q1’s 4.36) and dialed it to 5.03 for the next 12 months (versus Q1’s 4.91). These represent the highest scores on record, which means seasoned supply chain veterans who’ve weathered countless storms are now checking their emergency kits twice. CIPS economist John Glen put it bluntly: procurement managers face “unprecedented challenges” as trade squabbles and Middle East tensions create a perfect storm of disruption. Unsurprisingly, 53% of respondents point fingers at geopolitical factors as the main culprit behind current shortages.

Five Categories Just Hit the Price Increase Jackpot

Brace yourself: five spending categories now predict price hikes exceeding 10% (compared to just three in Q1). Shipping and logistics, along with petroleum and mining, lead at 22%; while chemicals and pharmaceuticals clock in at 17%; food and beverages at 14%; and fabricated metal products round out the list at 13%. But no matter what people think will face harsher price hikes, reality is that shockwaves could hit everything from medicines to heating bills, creating what Glen called “unprecedented challenges.”

When $1.6 Million Worth of Medicine Takes an Unscheduled Dip in the Ocean

Sometimes cargo falls overboard. Sometimes that cargo happens to be temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals worth over $1.5 million. XL Specialty Insurance Company Limited found itself writing some big checks after the M/V MSC Antonia had a terrible day in the South Atlantic, and now it wants its money back from the shipping giants it blames for the mess.

Twenty Degrees & Sinking Fast

The trouble started on August 28, 2024, when containers loaded with medical solutions and pharmaceutical products decided to take an impromptu dive off the coast of South Africa. The cargo had traveled all the way from Nhava Sheva and Hyderabad, India, bound for Savannah, Georgia, and Memphis, Tennessee—with strict instructions to maintain a transport temperature of 20 degrees Celsius throughout (68 degrees Fahrenheit). Instead, multiple containers went overboard during what the lawsuit calls a “stow collapse,” while others suffered damage from the same incident.  

Follow the Money Trail

XL Specialty paid out $1,346,886.52 for one batch of lost cargo and $263,149.12 for another (roughly $1.6 million total), then promptly filed suit on August 18, 2025, against MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company S.A., Expeditors International of Washington Inc., and DSV Ocean Transport A/S. The insurer stepped into the shoes of the original cargo owners through subrogation rights, and now wants the defendants to reimburse them for every penny. With bills of lading and contractual obligations pointing toward New York courts as the proper venue, XL Specialty has laid out its case and now it waits to see how the shipping companies will respond to its price tab.

Mars Goes Full Science Mode to Save Your Snickers

Mars just made a deal that sounds like science fiction but tastes like survival. The candy empire behind your favorite chocolate fix is teaming up with Pairwise, a seven-year-old biotech startup, to rewrite cocoa plant DNA using CRISPR gene-editing. Clearly, desperate times call for desperate means: chocolate is in serious trouble, and nobody wants to live in a world where one Snickers bar costs $10.

The Chocolate Apocalypse is Real

The global chocolate crisis is hitting hard. West Africa produces 70% of the world’s cocoa, but drought, disease, and dying trees are decimating crops. The desperation is real. Hershey slapped retailers with massive price hikes in July, calling cocoa costs “unprecedented,” while secretly stuffing more peanut butter and wafers into bars to stretch their chocolate further. Swiss giant Lindt isn’t faring any better, watching customers flee as prices soar near record highs. Lindt’s CEO even acknowledged on August 1 that relentless plant diseases continue ravaging West African farms, leaving the entire market “volatile.”

Enter the Gene Hackers

Mars isn’t sitting around hoping cocoa farmers figure it out. It licensed Pairwise’s Fulcrum platform, which speeds up crop development way faster than old-school plant breeding. Pairwise already proved they can pull this off with seedless blackberries and mustard greens. Carl Jones from Mars’ plant sciences team says they want CRISPR to help crops “better adapt to climate challenges, disease pressures, and resource constraints.” In other words, they’re engineering super-resilient cocoa that can weather whatever climate disruption comes next—while keeping chocolate habits from breaking the bank.

How Schneider Electric Turned Sustainability into Supply Chain Gold

Most companies talk a big sustainability game, then watch their supply chains pump out carbon like it’s 1995. Schneider Electric, however, decided to fix the problem for real.

The 1,000-Supplier Wake-Up Call

Schneider Electric’s chief procurement officer, Ard Verboon, didn’t mess around when launching The Zero Carbon Project in 2021. He rounded up Schneider’s top 1,000 global suppliers—the ones responsible for 65% of its Scope 3 emissions—and gave them a road map to decarbonization. The three-step process (Analytics, Ambition, Action) sounds simple, but the results speak volumes: a 42% reduction in global operational emissions and 700 organizations now tracking their carbon impacts. “We cannot afford to not make our supply chain more sustainable,” Verboon explains, “and we won’t achieve it alone.”  

The Numbers Don’t Lie About Materials

Global material extraction jumped from 30.9 billion tons in 1970 to 95.1 billion tons in 2020, and we’re headed for a 60% spike by 2060 if nobody changes course. Schneider Electric saw the math and pivoted hard. Its 2025 target: 50% low-carbon materials in products, 100% recycled cardboard packaging, and partnerships that clean up plastics, steel, and aluminum extraction. Since 2022, Schneider’s Decent Work program has pushed suppliers past bare-minimum standards, while its 2024 WageIndicator Foundation partnership tackles fair wages directly. Smart companies fix problems before they explode.

Know More Than Just Where Your Stuff Is

Hardware stores running theft rings, medicine tumbling into the ocean, supply chains in meltdown mode. All share a common thread: nobody knew where their cargo was until it was too late, let alone any clue about its condition. But with real-time shipment visibility and real-time tracking in your arsenal, you can stop goods from becoming someone else’s payday, nip nasty surprises in the bud, and prevent yourself from becoming the next headline-making, million-dollar disaster story. 

Arm yourself with innovation: let Tive lead the way in transforming your supply chain operations. Embrace the future of logistics—get started with Tive today.