Whole Foods faces shortage due to UNFI cyber outage

Whole Foods has advised its staff that operational disruption at its primary distributor’s facilities may take several days to resolve, temporarily impacting delivery schedules and product availability.

 

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Whole Foods is an American multinational supermarket chain that specialises in organic foods.

 

In a recent message to its staff, which was reviewed by TechCrunch, Whole Foods said that its main distributor, UNFI, experienced a major cybersecurity breach and is currently managing a ’nationwide technology system outage.

 

Whole Foods added that the incident has affected UNFI’s “ability to select and ship products from their warehouses”, which in turn will “impact our normal delivery schedules and product availability.” 

 

Following the revelation of UNFI’s security incident, multiple customers have reported empty shelves at various Whole Foods locations, as well as other grocery stores dependent on UNFI, with items being marked as ’temporarily out of stock.

 

In a statement shared with the media, Whole Foods spokesperson Nathan Cimbala said, “We are working to restock our shelves as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused for customers.”

 

On June 5, UNFI discovered a data security incident that forced the company to take parts of its critical system offline, resulting in disruptions to its supply chain operations.

 

“The incident has caused, and is expected to continue to cause, temporary disruptions to the Company’s business operations. 

 

“Pursuant to its business continuity plans, the Company has implemented workarounds for certain operations in order to continue servicing its customers where possible. The Company is continuing to work to restore its systems to safely bring them back online,” UNFI said in its SEC filing.

 

A UNFI spokesperson added that the company is “gradually bringing our ordering and receiving capabilities back online, with the goal of further increasing our capacity over the coming days.”