Co-op CEO Shirine Khoury-Haq has said the business is nearing a “full and complete recovery” following the cyber attack that hit the retailer in late April.

Last month, the convenience chain was forced to shut down parts of its IT systems after detecting a malicious access attempt, which later led to data exposure.

The fallout from the attack had impacted all areas of the business, including supplier operations and customer data. The group confirmed that while customer names and contact details had been accessed, no financial data or passwords were compromised.

However, in an update published on its website today (5 June) and addressed to its member-owners, Khoury-Haq said the business had made “significant progress” in restoring operations, with systems now stabilised and stores seeing improved product availability.

“While there is still work to do to unwind the operational and technical impacts of the actions we had to take to block the criminals, our systems are now stable, our Food stores again have more of the products our customers want and all our businesses are continuing to serve our member-owners,” she said.

A message from Co-op’s CEO to its member-owners

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She praised customers and members for their patience, adding that the support shown by the public had helped colleagues through a “really difficult time”.

“We are all grateful to our member-owners, clients and customers, for their patience… and we have all felt very much supported and cared for throughout. I will be forever thankful to all of you.”

Khoury-Haq also paid tribute to the Co-op’s tech and security teams, calling their efforts “nothing short of heroic”. “Teams across our Co-op have worked day and night to recover – and our technology and information security colleagues are true superheroes.”

With most of the remaining recovery work now focused on back-end systems, Khoury-Haq said the business is “coming out of this stronger and more effective than before”, and thanked store and support teams for their continued resilience.

The news follows fellow grocery retailer M&S last month revealing that the fallout from its cyber attack is likely to continue until July, with the impact thought to be around £300m.

Despite this, CEO Stuart Machin said the business’ balance sheet was “stronger than ever” and vowed to steamroll through two years’ worth of IT transformation in just six months.