Whole Foods told its employees that the ongoing outages and disruptions at its primary distributor, United Natural Foods (UNFI), may take “several days to resolve.”
The Amazon-owned retail giant told staff in an internal communication, seen by TechCrunch, that UNFI was experiencing a “nationwide technology system outage,” which UNFI has for its part described as a cybersecurity incident.
Whole Foods said in the communication to staff that the cyberattack is affecting UNFI’s “ability to select and ship products from their warehouses,” and that this will “impact our normal delivery schedules and product availability.”
The missive to staff included instructions to limit communications with customers. The “only single approved customer talking point” that Whole Foods employees can share with customers, according to the communication, is that the grocery giant is having “temporary supply challenges.”
When reached by TechCrunch, Whole Foods spokesperson Nathan Cimbala said: “We are working to restock our shelves as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused for customers.”
UNFI has not responded to TechCrunch’s request for comment on Tuesday, nor given a timeline for its recovery. Whole Foods’ spokesperson did not say how the company reached its claim that the situation may resolve in a few days.
UNFI is one of the largest food distributors in North America, supplying grocery goods and fresh produce to more than 30,000 stores and supermarkets across the U.S. and Canada. The company disclosed the cyberattack on Monday in a filing with federal regulators, and UNFI’s chief executive, Sandy Douglas, told investors Tuesday that the company took its entire network offline on Friday after detecting the intrusion.
The company also on Tuesday reported $8.1 billion in net sales in the quarter ended May 3, 2025.
As we reported earlier Tuesday, TechCrunch has heard anecdotal reports of empty shelves at some Whole Foods stores and other grocery stores reliant on UNFI.
A Whole Foods store visited by this reporter on Tuesday displayed notices in several aisles saying that the store was experiencing an unspecified “temporary out of stock issue” for some products.
Much of the downstream real-world impact on grocery stores and their customers may not be seen until later this week.
Do you know more about the cyberattack at UNFI? Are you a corporate customer affected by the disruption? You can securely contact this reporter via encrypted message at zackwhittaker.1337 on Signal.
