6 days Ago By Martin Autuori
The story of what was and wasn’t on some Connecticut grocery shelves involves three main converging elements, the first of which starts in 1867 just outside Charleroi, Belgium, a city near the French border with a current population of about 200,000. That’s where and when the brothers Jules, Auguste, Edward and Adolphe Delhaize (with the help of a soon-to-be brother-in law, Jules Vieujant) founded a wholesale grocery business. It thrived.
A second branch of what may well have happened to many a Connecticut shopping list last week begins a mere 20 years later when Albert Heijn Sr. opened a family-run grocery store in Oostzaan, Netherlands, nowadays a town of about 9,600 people a stone’s throw east of Amsterdam. Like the Delhaize brothers’ business in neighboring Belgium, the Heijn family company prospered through the 20th century, becoming their nation’s largest grocery chain by the time it went public in 1948 and expanding as a holding company into related businesses such as liquor and cosmetics stores.
In 1973, the holding company changed its name to Ahold, a shortened form of Albert Heijn Holding. By then, the company had expanded into the United States, owning, among other retail outlets, the Edwards and Finast grocery chains in Connecticut and other parts of the New England. Last on the scene were Solomon and Jeanie Rabinowitz, who in 1892 opened the Greenie Store, a grocery in Boston’s North End.
By 1914 the family operation had shifted to neighboring Somerville as the Economy Grocery Stores Company. The company had 15 stores by 1917 and 85 of them in 1946 when it changed its name to Stop & Shop. In 1995, Ahold acquired Stop & Shop after resolving objections from Connecticut’s then attorney general and current U.
S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal that the combination with Edwards and Finast would give the Dutch holding company control of more than half of the state’s grocery business.
To help settle the matter, Ahold sold off Edwards and Finast locations, such as what’s now Adams on Main Street in Watertown. (Small curiosity point: The late William J. Grize, onetime president of Stop & Shop and eventually Ahold U.
S.A., grew up in Waterbury.
He died in January 2010 at the age of 63.) Ahold and Delhaize merged in 2016, creating Ahold Delhaize, an international conglomerate that includes drug stores, liquor stores and expanding online grocery and non-food retail operations. Two-thirds of the company’s revenue comes from the United States, where it also operates the Hannaford, Giant and Food Lion chains, but corporate headquarters remains just outside Amsterdam, currently in Zaandam.
That takes us to Friday, Nov. 8, when Ahold Delhaize said an otherwise unspecified “cybersecurity issue” had resulted in a disruption of its distribution systems that made many items, notably in the meat, dairy and produce departments, unavailable and even forced the cancellation of some online orders and prescriptions. The company has yet to say where or how the breach occurred and what information may have been compromised.
As Amy Panagakos of Granby told WFSB-TV, “It was kind of like COVID was coming back and it was kind of a little scary. I asked the guy, ‘Is there a snowstorm tomorrow? Is that why things are off the shelf?’ and he’s like, ‘no,’ and started laughing.” The current disruption at Stop & Shop needs to be treated not just a temporary nuisance but as a serious warning.
As things now stand, someone in a cubicle outside Amsterdam might accidentally open a malicious email, and suddenly nobody in Connecticut can find their favorite yogurt – or obtain their heart medication. State and federal officials promptly need to find out what happened and help figure out how to prevent a recurrence. Next time it might not be just yogurt.
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