United Natural Foods Inc., a distributor for Whole Foods and other grocers, disclosed this week that it suffered a cyber incident, causing temporary disruptions in its operations.
The company announced the cyber incident on Monday, saying in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing it had detected “unauthorized activity” on certain information technology systems on June 5.
UNFI said it “proactively” shut down some of its systems as part of its response to the cyber incident and was “actively working to assess, mitigate, and remediate” the situation with the help of cybersecurity professionals. Taking systems offline has “temporarily impacted the Company’s ability to fulfill and distribute customer orders,” the filing said.
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In UNFI’s third-quarter earnings release the following day, CEO Sandy Douglas said the grocery wholesaler was “focused on diligently managing through the cyber incident we announced yesterday to rapidly and safely restore our capabilities, while helping our customers with short-term solutions wherever possible.”
The company provides products to more than 30,000 customer locations, including those for large and small grocery retailers.
UNFI has “implemented workarounds for certain operations in order to continue servicing our customers where possible, and we’re continuing to safely bring our systems back online and restore broad-based customer service as soon as possible,” Douglas told analysts and investors Tuesday.
Asked whether the company was shipping goods to its customers, he said UNFI was “on a limited basis,” noting it “depends on the technology platform.”
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“Some are further along on the recovery than others, but we are partnering with customers across the country and across our formats in various short-term modes to serve their needs as best as we possibly can, and it’s getting increasingly positive each day, but still a work in progress,” he said.
A spokesperson for UNFI told FOX Business on Wednesday that the company “continue[s] working steadily to safely restore our systems and provide the services our customers and suppliers know and expect from us.”
“As of today, we’re gradually bringing our ordering and receiving capabilities back online, with the goal of further increasing our capacity over the coming days,” the UNFI spokesperson said. “The investigation is ongoing with the support of leading forensic experts. Our customers, suppliers, and associates are our highest priority. We continue to work closely with them to minimize disruptions as much as possible.”
Some social media users have reported encountering empty shelves at Whole Foods this week. Others posted photos of signage at the Amazon-owned grocery chain of items being out of stock.
Whole Foods is working to stock its shelves back up as fast as possible, according to a Whole Foods Market spokesperson.
Whole Foods operates over 500 grocery stores in the U.S., plus nearly two dozen across Canada and the U.K., according to its website.
The company has belonged to Amazon since 2017, when the tech company spent about $13.7 billion to acquire it.
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