A glitch in the Sainsbury’s supplier portal has given users access to the sales data of all the supermarket’s suppliers, The Grocer can exclusively reveal.
At least a week’s worth of data from Sainsbury’s entire supplier base was able to be viewed and downloaded by brands logging into the supermarket’s SupplyHub platform for several hours on Wednesday, it is understood.
It means brands could have viewed the data of category competitors, including sales value and volume, availability, pricing, and waste.
Sainsbury’s supplier portal has been managed and operated by US business Circana since 2024.
A Sainsbury’s spokesperson told The Grocer that Circana “resolved a temporary issue with the SupplyHub data platform they manage and we are working closely with them to understand what happened and ensure it does not happen again”.
A Circana spokesperson said: “For a temporary period yesterday [Wednesday] some users may have seen data they would not usually have access to on the SupplyHub platform.
“We resolved the problem quickly and all services are fully operational,” they added.
SupplyHub replaced the supermarket’s Horizon supplier platform two years ago. The switchover was not entirely smooth – the supermarket was forced to extend the date of the planned decommissioning of Horizon due to a “high volume of sign-ups from our suppliers”, it said at the time.
Many suppliers were upset by the tiered subscription model adopted by Sainsburys, which required an outlay of thousands of pounds to access store-level forecast data they had previously received from the supermarket for free.
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