A cyberattack earlier this month temporarily disrupted operations at United Natural Foods Inc. (UNFI), one of the largest food distributors in the United States and the primary supplier for Amazon.com Inc.’s Whole Foods Market.
The company disclosed in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Monday that it detected “unauthorized activity” in parts of its IT systems on June 5 and responded by enacting its incident response plan. UNFI took certain systems offline as a containment measure, which temporarily hindered its ability to fulfill and ship customer orders.
“The incident has caused, and is expected to continue to cause, temporary disruptions to the company’s business operations,” UNFI said in the filing. The company is working with third-party cybersecurity experts to assess, mitigate, and remediate the breach, and has notified law enforcement.
While the company investigates the attack, some of its systems remain shut down. In the meantime, UNFI said it has implemented workarounds under its business continuity plan to continue servicing customers where possible.
UNFI supplies approximately 250,000 products—including frozen and perishable goods, grocery items, and wellness products—through a network of 53 distribution centers and warehouses. It became the primary distributor for Whole Foods under an agreement announced last year. The company also expanded its national footprint through the $2.9 billion acquisition of Supervalu in 2018.
The full extent and source of the cyberattack have not been disclosed. But the company is taking steps for damage control with customers, CEO Sandy Douglas told analysts on the company’s first quarter earnings call based on a transcript from Seeking Alpha. “We promptly activated our incident response plan, implemented containment measures, and are working to assess, mitigate, and remediate the incident with the assistance of third-party cybersecurity professionals.” He added, “We have 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.”
UNFI has yet to disclose additional details. But the distributor said it did notify authorities, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), quickly after the market opened and has since filed updates with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “We began hyper analysis and awareness of diagnosing on just how broad that situation was,” UNFI told analysts. By late Friday afternoon, we made the decision to lock our systems down and we filed an 8-K on Monday morning before the market opened.”
UNFI also says some systems remained offline as of June 9, although it didn’t disclose any details. Amazon and Whole Foods have yet to respond in detail about the impact on any operations. A spokesperson for Whole Foods, however, told Reuters work to restock shelves is ongoing as quickly as possible. DSG has reached out to Amazon and Whole Foods for any additional comment.
For the fiscal third quarter ending May 4, UNFI reported sales of $8.1 billion, an increase of 7.5% from sales of $7.5 billion in the prior year. Net loss was $7 million compared with $21 million in the third fiscal quarter of 2024.
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