A cyberattack on an organic food distributor to blame for lightly stocked or empty shelves at grocery stores.
United Natural Foods, a Rhode Island-based supplier to Whole Foods and other retailers, said hackers have disrupted its operations. The country's largest organic food distributor revealed earlier this week in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it became aware of the attack on June 5.
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WATCH HEREThe company said it took certain parts of its systems offline in recent days, which has hampered its ability to fulfill and distribute customer orders.
A spokesperson for United Natural Foods declined to share specifics about the cyberattack with NBC News, saying it was an "ongoing operation." The spokesperson said it wasn't clear when distribution would return to normal, but that on Thursday it had begun gradually bringing some systems back online.
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SIGN UP A Whole Foods spokesperson apologized in a statement and said the company is working to restock shelves as quickly as possible.
NBC News spoke with two Whole Foods employees, who were not authorized by the company to speak with the press about the incident. The employees said the shortages were significant.
“It’s affecting operations in a very, very significant way,” an employee at a Sacramento Whole Foods said. “Shelves don’t even have products in some places. The shipments we receive are not what we need, or we did need it but it’s too much of one product because UNFI can’t communicate with stores to get proper orders.”
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A Whole Foods employee in North Carolina said: “We had to shut down our sandwich station on Tuesday because we didn’t get any bread delivered. My store almost ran out of trash bags the other day.”
United Natural Foods signed an eight-year extension last year to be the primary distributor for Whole Foods.
While Whole Foods is its largest customer, United Natural Foods also distributes to smaller companies, which are also impacted by shortages, NBC News reports.
The Community Food Co-Op in Bellingham, Washington, told customers on Facebook Monday that “you’ll see sparsely stocked shelves in some of our aisles.” C.R. England, a trucking and logistics company, hasn't been able to to deliver refrigerated foods to a dairy processing customer.
“I have three drivers sitting stuck because of this whole UNFI debacle,” said Caitlin Smith, a logistics coordinator at C.R. England.
