Stop & Shop customers may notice some barren-looking shelves during their next grocery run.
New England’s largest supermarket chain says it’s still dealing with product shortages in the wake of a “cybersecurity issue” that hit its parent company Ahold Delhaize last week.
Stop & Shop spokesperson Caroline Medeiros said in a statement Thursday that customers “may continue to see more limited inventory than usual for certain products” due to the disruption caused by the incident.
Medeiros declined to give an exact timeline for when shelves would be restocked or say which products were most affected, noting “availability is going to vary by store.”
Shortages have persisted through the week at stores in the Boston area.
On Thursday, empty shelves were widespread across the fresh produce section at Shop & Shop stores in Brookline and Somerville, affecting items such as bagged salads, whole peppers and avocados. Some milk and dairy products were also in short supply. Boston 25 News reported similar shortages across the produce and meat sections this week at the store in Dedham.
“We are working to restock our shelves as quickly as possible,” the store wrote in a note to shoppers in the affected sections. “Thanks for your patience.”
Ahold Delhaize first reported the cybersecurity issue with its U.S. operations last Friday. In a statement, the Dutch company said it had notified law enforcement and is conducting its own investigation with outside cybersecurity experts.
In order to “mitigate the issue,” the company said Friday it took “some systems offline to help protect them.” The outages delayed the shipment of various products to stores, Medeiros said. The disruptions have not forced stores to close or reduce hours.
“We will continue to take actions to further protect our systems,” she said. “The security of our customers, associates and partners remains a top priority.”
Stop & Shop recently closed over 30 stores in the region, but the chain maintains 365 locations across the Northeast, including 117 in Massachusetts, 83 in Connecticut and 25 in Rhode Island.
Meanwhile, the incident has caused a different problems for Hannaford Supermarkets, which is also owned by Ahold Delhaize and has a heavy presence in Maine and New Hampshire.
Hannaford’s website and app have been down for a week, and the company has been unable to process online orders.
Hannaford wrote on Facebook last week that some of its pharmacies were unable to process orders or take phone calls due to the outage.
WMUR reports that Doordash and Instacart orders are also affected. Hannaford says it is working to refund in-progress orders that were canceled last Thursday.