Major grocery distributor United Natural Foods (UNFI), which supplies Whole Foods and other stores, announced on Monday that it haIn a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, UNFI stated that it started implementing network shutdowns after learning of illegal access to its IT systems last Thursday. The company has “developed workarounds for certain activities in order to continue supplying its clients when possible,” the document claimed, but it also pointed out that the intrusion has left its business operations continuously disrupted.d been the target of a cyberattack and warned of possible interruptions to its capacity to process and deliver consumer orders.
One of the biggest grocery distributors in North America, the Providence, Rhode Island-based company supplies over 30,000 stores and supermarket locations in the United States and Canada with fresh fruit, goods, and food items.
Additionally, Whole Foods, a grocery store chain owned by Amazon, uses UNFI as its “principal distributor.” The two businesses’ long-term agreement was extended to May 2032 last year.
UNFI spokesperson Kristen Jimenez declined to comment on the specifics of the cyberattack or if the hacker had requested a ransom from the organization when contacted by TechCrunch.
Jimenez stated that the incident was reported to law police and that “we are evaluating the illegal activity and attempting to repair our systems to safely bring them back online.”
A request for comment on Monday was not immediately answered by a Whole Foods representative.
The UNFI incident is the most recent in a series of cyberattacks that have recently affected the larger supermarket and retail supply chain. Although it did not identify the impacted organizations, Google cautioned that hackers were also targeting U.S. stores in the wake of the data thefts at the Co-op and Marks & Spencer, two of the biggest retailers in the United Kingdom.
When asked, UNFI did not say when it expects to recover its systems.
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