Erin Cauchi

Erin Cauchi works in the fast-moving world of CBS News’s Crime and Public Safety Unit in New York, New York, where her role as a producer places her at the center of investigative journalism. It is a beat defined by pressure, precision, and the steady unspooling of complicated stories, and Cauchi’s credits suggest a reporterly curiosity that moves comfortably between systems, supply chains, and the hidden machinery behind what people consume. Her work has traced not only the visible surface of a story, but the structures beneath it—those quieter networks of trade, trust, and deception that can shape everything from a grocery aisle to a wine list. Among her credits is Rotten – The Avocado War, a 2020 Netflix reporting project that examined food politics and the supply chain. The title itself carries the tension of the subject: a familiar, everyday product becomes the entry point into a wider investigation of how food moves, who benefits, and where pressure accumulates along the way. In that same investigative spirit, Cauchi also worked on Reign of Terroir, a 2018 Rotten episode focused on wine fraud and the CRAV. Together, the two projects show a producer attuned to the way consumer goods can become the backdrop for conflict, fraud, and larger questions about accountability. What is notable in these credits is the range of her focus, and the consistency of her method. Food and drink are often treated as pleasures, luxuries, or casual choices; in Cauchi’s reporting, they become portals into broader public-interest narratives. The avocado story opens onto questions of politics and supply chains, while the wine piece turns to fraud and the CRAV, revealing how even a refined, seemingly stable category can contain its own web of uncertainty and manipulation. Her work sits at the intersection of narrative and scrutiny, where the details of an ingredient, a label, or a market can carry the weight of a much larger investigation. At CBS News’s Crime and Public Safety Unit, that instinct for looking past the obvious feels especially fitting. The unit’s remit demands reporters who can follow evidence, map complexity, and hold competing threads in focus, and Cauchi’s credits reflect precisely that discipline. Her reporting does not merely catalog subjects; it connects them to the systems that produce them. In that sense, her portfolio reads as a study in investigative range: from avocados to wine, from consumer culture to organized deception, from the language of food politics to the mechanics of fraud.