POWESHIEK COUNTY, Iowa — A cyberattack on a major North American food supplier resulted in a supply chain halt in two grocery stores in Poweshiek County for two weeks.

On June 5th, a cyberattack on United Natural Foods Inc., a major food supplier in the United States and Canada, caused the company to shut down its systems. UNFI supplies 30,000 grocery stores, including big chains like Whole Foods and even small-town grocery stores like McNally’s Foods in Grinnell and SuperValu Foods in Montezuma.

Julie Smith is the owner of McNally’s who said she was unable to place an order or have any food deliveries for about two weeks after the incident. It didn’t take long for shelves inside the downtown Grinnell grocery store to look bare.

“It was like a nightmare actually, because you don’t have product for your customers,” said Smith.

Some customers, like Karen Ashby and Marlene Peak, come to McNally’s frequently. Aside from providing groceries, the store also serves lunch and has coffee. Ashby and Peak come to the store about three times a week for coffee. During the two weeks of halted orders, they quickly noticed things looked different.

“Normally, we buy the bakeries, and that was almost always empty when we came in so we knew there was a big issue here,” said Ashby.

According to Smith, some customers were understanding about the situation. Many continued shopping for the limited items she still had in stock. Some even chose different brands of products than they normally would.

However, she did lose business. Many residents had to go to other grocery stores in the town. While Grinnell residents had other options for grocery shopping, the same can’t be said for Montezuma.

SuperValu is the town’s only grocery store. There are two other convenience stores in the town, but without SuperValu, residents would have to travel outside of town for the nearest groceries.

“I’ve noticed that things that you can reliably go in and pick up every day are not here, and they’re not the next day,” said Montezuma resident John Kercheval.

Last Thursday, McNally’s and SuperValu were able to place manual orders for food from UNFI. Smith said that the process to order food manually doubled the time the standard procedure normally takes.

Smith also said UNFI told her to limit how much food she ordered because the company is working to supply other grocers across Iowa and the country. As a result, while food is back on the shelf, it’s still not back to normal.

Despite the progress, Smith said the loss of business for two weeks will have a lingering effect.

“I’ve got employees that I am responsible for and my business that I’m responsible for and so when we lose business because we don’t have product, it’s a big deal,” she said.

UNFI provided the following statement to WHO 13 News:

“UNFI is receiving orders and delivering products to our grocery store customers across North America. Over the past few days, we’ve made significant progress to safely restore our electronic ordering systems, which will allow us to serve the customers that order through these systems in a more automated way and continue to increase our operational capacity.
Our customers, suppliers, and associates remain our highest priority, and we are working closely with them every step of the way.“

Kristin Jimenez, UNFI

The company did not specify when the issue would be fully resolved and when all systems would return to normal.