The aisles of your local grocery store might look more sparse than usual going into the weekend.
The reason involves a food distribution company that few shoppers have probably heard of: United Natural Foods.
The grocery supplier, also known as UNFI, noticed “unauthorized activity” on its IT systems last week, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. UNFI shut down its network in response to the cyberattack, CEO Sandy Douglas said on the company’s earnings call Tuesday.
The result has snarled both its delivery system and stores’ ability to place orders. That’s leaving some supermarkets, from national chains like Whole Foods to family-run markets, out of stock on everything from milk to pasta this week.
In a video sent to customers on Wednesday and viewed by Business Insider, Douglas said that UNFI was “aiming to return to a state that resembles our previous operational capacity” by Sunday.
“We never want to be the reason that you’re out of stock on certain items,” he said in the video.
Alex Bitter/Business Insider
Still, at a Whole Foods store in Washington, DC that BI visited on Wednesday afternoon, shelves that normally contain breakfast cereal, pasta, and snacks were mostly bare. There were also empty spaces in coolers and freezers where some frozen corn, ice cream, and milk should be.
Alex Bitter/Business Insider
At each empty spot, store staff posted a sign apologizing. “We are experiencing a temporary out-of-stock issue for some products,” the signs read.
Similar signage was up on some cases containing juice, ice cream, and other cold items at a Whole Foods store in New York City that BI also visited on Wednesday.
A Whole Foods spokesperson said the company is “working to restock our shelves as quickly as possible” and directed additional questions to UNFI.
Grocery stores are scrambling to keep high-demand products in stock
Smaller grocery stores are also facing empty shelves — and finding new suppliers to solve the problem.
Linda Gommel, the CEO of Lucerne Valley Market and Hardware in Southern California, first noticed something was wrong last Friday when she couldn’t download invoices that she needed from UNFI’s digital system.
“It’s just gotten worse from there, because we got no grocery load Monday, and no frozen and refrigerated load Tuesday,” Gommel told BI. “We still don’t know about the rest of the week.”
Most canned and shelf-stable groceries were still in stock at Lucerne Valley Market on Tuesday, Gommel told BI. But some dairy products, such as cottage cheese and sour cream, were starting to run out.
The outage has forced Gommel to get creative to avoid running out of high-demand products that would normally come from UNFI.
She said she bought some fresh meat on Tuesday from Sysco, a company better known for supplying restaurants than supermarkets. She’s also stocking up on bottled water from a local supplier in case her normal shipment doesn’t come through.
For products, such as health and beauty items, she’s turning to two sources that are often competitors to smaller chains like hers: Amazon and Walmart. “That’s just little bits here and there,” she said.
One employee at a cooperative market in the Northeastern US said that management at the store where they work told them about the outage on Saturday morning. The co-op is a member of the National Co-op Grocers, or NCG, which negotiates supply contracts with UNFI for its stores.
The co-op was out of bulky paper goods when BI spoke to the employee on Tuesday afternoon.
“It’s a pretty small store, so we’re not going to have the same level of back-stock the way that a Kroger or Whole Foods is going to have,” the employee said. They asked not to be identified by name since they were not authorized to speak publicly, but their identity is known to BI.
The employee said UNFI had told the store that it would be sending a selection of 50 top-selling products this week to prevent the shelves from becoming too bare.
That’s an unusual strategy, the employee said. The store’s staff normally orders specific products from UNFI based on what’s selling well at that location.
Without regular orders coming in, products could continue to go out of stock over the next few days, the employee estimated.
“Our management is hoping that wraps up by the end of the week and that UNFI is back to normal,” the employee said. NCG did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.
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