Peter Green Chilled, a key distributor of chilled and fresh products to major UK supermarkets, including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Aldi, has experienced a ransomware attack. The cyber incident, attributed to an unidentified group, adds to the growing list of security breaches in the British retail sector.
Peter Green, initially a haulage company for Somerset dairy suppliers, has evolved over the past six decades into a significant entity within the UK’s cold chain sector, providing temperature-controlled warehousing and transport services. The company also offers IT services such as transport and warehouse management systems, electronic data interchange, stock and temperature control systems, and vehicle tracking.
As a result of the attack, Peter Green is currently unable to process new orders. While the company has refrained from commenting further, Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, founder of The Black Farmer and a customer of Peter Green expressed concerns about the ongoing situation. Emmanuel-Jones highlighted the lack of a resolution for distributing stock already delivered to Peter Green’s warehouses, estimating potential losses of up to £100,000 for his business.
“If they’re not delivered in the next couple of days, because they’re fresh products, they have to be thrown away,” Emmanuel-Jones told BBC News. “For a small business, it is pretty devastating. To make matters even worse is that we’ve just also got a delivery that’s come in from Sweden that is stuck at a port because Peter Green is not taking in any other stock from any suppliers, so we have to try to find some way of getting it to the supermarkets.”
Cybersecurity breaches continue to challenge UK retail sector
Earlier this month, Harrods confirmed it was targeted in a cyberattack, becoming the third major UK retailer, following M&S and the Co-op, to report such an incident. The department store stated that it implemented precautionary measures after threat actors attempted to breach its systems. Despite the attack, Harrods assured that all its retail locations, including the Knightsbridge store, H beauty branches, and airport outlets, remain open. Online shopping services are also continuing without disruption.
In a recent development, the cyberattack on Marks & Spencer (M&S) last month has been traced back to a third-party access point. This breach severely disrupted M&S’s back-end operations, causing significant financial losses and affecting online services. The retailer initially reported the incident on 22 April 2025 and subsequently paused online orders, took certain food-related systems offline, and experienced empty shelves in some stores. To mitigate the impact, M&S temporarily shut down various IT operations, locking itself out of core systems to address the breach.
Read more: Harrods becomes third UK retailer this week hit by cyberattack
