Maple Leaf CEO, CFO encouraged by cyberattack recovery

Executives with Maple Leaf Foods expressed confidence in the way the company’s staff has responded to a weekend cyberattack against the Canadian meat and poultry producer.

Roy Graber Headshot
(Maple Leaf Foods)
(Maple Leaf Foods)

Executives with Maple Leaf Foods expressed confidence in the way the company’s staff has responded to a weekend cyberattack against the Canadian meat and poultry producer.

During a quarterly earnings call, held on November 8, Maple Leaf Foods CEO Michael McCain and Chief Financial Officer Geert Verellen addressed the cyberattack and the related recovery process.

“Our team of (information professionals is) working diligently with third-party experts to resolve the situation, and our business and operations teams are doing a remarkable job finding manual workarounds to keep our operations going and to try to minimize the impact,” said Verellen, “And while we expect a full resolution to the outage will take time and will result in some operational service disruptions, we will continue to work through this with our customers and vendors.”

McCain noted that all of the company’s plants were in operation on the Monday following the weekend attack, but things at first did not run “optimally.” However, he has been impressed with what the teams have been able to accomplish so far.

“We all walked away from our calls last night thinking how impressed we were with how much they got done in the matter of one day,” said McCain, who added, “Every day will improve after that.”

“We have very seasoned professionals, both in our response team in business continuity and in our IT professionals. They are focused on recovering the integrity of the systems as rapidly as we can, and th business continuity team is figuring out process-by-process manual workarounds which we have tested, and in most cases done before.”

When asked by one analyst if all operations were affected and if so, which ones were affected the most, McCain said some functions were affected more than others, but he declined to “get into the granularity of that.”

Cyberattacks such as this one are not unexpected in the meat and poultry industry today, McCain acknowledged.

The attack on Maple Leaf Foods followed another against JBS USA in June 2021, which temporarily idled operations at meat processing plants in the U.S., Canada and Australia.

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