As someone living in the Midwest, the region trains you to be on alert for certain troubling phenomena: the right conditions for a tornado, impending winter weather and the potential for a shortage of ranch dressing (both at the dinner table and on a more national level, too).
We’re past tornado season and not yet quite eying down freezing fronts this year, which is maybe why I paid a bit more attention than usual to rumors of a Hidden Valley Ranch dressing shortage on the corners of the particular internet that care about such things.
On TikTok last week, user Larissa (@rissy_roo_) filmed herself in the condiment aisle at Target. While most of the shelves were fully-stocked, the segment that typically holds Hidden Valley Ranch was totally empty. “I heard there was a ranch shortage, and I’m at the Tar-jay, and look what there isn’t any of,” Larissa says. “There’s no Hidden Valley Ranch. Hidden Valley, I need to know what’s going on.”
Similar observations began to pop up on the r/condiment subreddit, in a text thread with my hot wing-obsessed brothers and even in the “Non-Vegas” chat section of a Las Vegas city forum message board. “What fresh hell is this?” even one concerned resident wrote “Last week I noticed there were no dry packets of any of the Hidden Valley Ranch flavors — dips or dressing at my local. The bottled was also low.”
I’ll admit, briefly there was a part of me that wondered if there was a genuine run on the condiment because of the Taylor Swift “seemingly ranch” incident. After being spotted eating a chicken tender at a recent Kansas City Chiefs football game, a Taylor Swift fan account reported that the singer was “eating a piece of chicken with ketchup and seemingly ranch!" The unusually precise wording caught the internet’s collective interest, sparking an abundance of memes and an entire Heinz campaign.
If anyone could single handedly break down the nation’s ranch dressing supply without lifting a finger, it would be Taylor Swift. However, the actual reason for the shortage is even weirder — and illuminates a troubling reality about our country’s food supply chain. It all starts with an August cybersecurity attack at Clorox.
As ABC News reported, The Clorox Company detected "unauthorized activity on some of its Information Technology" on Aug. 14. The company took steps to "remediate the activity, including taking certain systems offline," per a September securities filing reviewed by the publication.
"Clorox has already resumed production at the vast majority of its manufacturing sites and expects the ramp up to full production to occur over time. At this time, the Company cannot estimate how long it will take to resume fully normalized operations," the company said in the filing.
In addition to producing bleach and sanitizing products, The Clorox Company also owns brands like PineSol, Fresh Step cat litter and (you guessed it) Hidden Valley Ranch. Representatives from the company have not commented on if it is known who carried out the cyberattack, but as a result of the attack, customers have started reporting shortages across the company’s brands: In September, the Washington Post reported that there was a cat litter shortage hitting the country; a day later, NPR warned listeners that they would have a harder time than usual finding Clorox wipes. Now, we’re seeing the impact on the condiment aisle, too.
Because of the multilayered nature of this incident (the sentence “The Hidden Valley Ranch shortage is due to a cybersecurity attack at Clorox” is a weird one to write) it would be easy to think that it’s anomalous. However, if the current state of industrialized food production has shown us anything, it’s that as our supply chains continue to be both extended, and increasingly monopolized, the opportunity for bizarre breakdowns like this grows.
As Salon Food reported in September, it’s been an interesting year within the realm of food safety and recalls; at the time, Trader Joe's had issued six voluntary recalls in five weeks, while companies like Hillshire Farms, Banquet and Skippy were warning customers that their groceries may contain foreign objects like plastic, stainless steel and even bone fragments.
There are a number of reasons for this, but one omnipresent thread amidst discussions about changing technology and government oversight is that the distance between the origin point of our food and our plates is growing farther and farther apart with each passing decade; for instance, in 1870, 100% of all apples consumed in Iowa were also produced there, but by 1999, only 15% of apples consumed in Iowa were actually grown by Iowan farmers.
In the case of food safety, this can make tracing individual contaminants particularly difficult, especially if there are mismatches in technology usage throughout the process. But in the case of the Hidden Valley Ranch shortage, it’s a reminder that often, we as consumers are often ignorant of who actually owns, crafts and manufactures the brands that are in our homes on a daily basis.
In speaking with ABC News, Clorox has said they anticipate that this cybersecurity attack will impact 2023 and potentially 2024 profits.
"Due to the order processing delays and elevated level of product outages, the Company now believes the impact will be material on Q1 financial results," the filing said. "It is premature for the Company to determine longer-term impact, including fiscal year outlook, given the ongoing recovery."
