Haggen Food & Pharmacy is a grocery retailer in Washington State.
Haggen is headquartered in Bellingham, Washington, where it started in 1933 when Ben Haggen, Dorothy Haggen, and Doug Clark opened the first store on Bay Street in Bellingham. For many years, Haggen was the largest independent grocery retailer in the Pacific Northwest, with locations in Washington and Oregon. From 1982 through 2014, Haggen also operated Top Food & Drug.
In late 2014, Haggen agreed to purchase and rebrand 146 West Coast Vons, Pavilions, Albertsons, and Safeway Inc. locations. This expanded Haggen's territory in Oregon, and to southern California, Nevada and Arizona, increasing the chain's locations from 18 stores with 16 pharmacies to 164 stores with 106 pharmacies, and the number of its employees from about 2,000 to about 10,000. On September 1, 2015, Haggen filed suit against Albertsons for false representations and anti-competitive practices, and on September 8, 2015, Haggen Food & Pharmacy filed for bankruptcy. Subsequent to the bankruptcy filing, Haggen announced that they would abandon the new stores and revert to operating as a strictly Washington state grocery chain.
On March 11, 2016, Albertsons reached an agreement to acquire the 29 remaining "core" Haggen stores for $106 million. After this agreement, only 15 stores, all of them in Washington, retained the Haggen branding, though owned by Albertsons.
History
Early years
Haggen, Inc. began in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression by Benett and Dorothy Haggen, along with Dorothy's brother, Doug Clark, in downtown Bellingham, Washington. The store was first called the Economy Food Store. Business was good, and they moved to a larger location downtown at the corner of Railroad and Magnolia Streets and renamed it The White House Grocery. An in-store bakery was opened in 1941 and proved to be popular. By 1947, the store expanded again. The Haggens closed the White House and built the Town and Country Shopping center on Meridian Street between West Illinois and Maryland streets with Haggen's Thriftway, the store's third name, as the anchor tenant. This store still operates today.
Several years later, they changed the company's name to Haggen Inc. The store continued to prosper and by the 1960s, Haggen expanded beyond Bellingham. A store was opened in Everett, Washington, in 1962 and a store in Lynnwood, Washington, in 1968. Two more stores were opened in Lynnwood in 1971 from the acquired Grocery Boy chain. Expansion for the company was slow. Unlike other grocery stores who expanded through acquisition, Haggen mostly built stores from the ground up. In 1979, the flagship store in Bellingham was expanded to over , creating the chain's first superstore format with full-service departments which it still uses today.
In 1982, the Top Foods division was created by converting existing stores in Snohomish, Washington, and Wenatchee to the superstore format. This proved to be a huge success and the Top Brand was expanded greatly throughout the Puget Sound Region but avoided Seattle because QFC, upscale Larry's Markets, Albertsons, and Safeway saturated the metropolitan area.
Recent events
Haggen became the first grocery store in US with an in-store Starbucks coffee store in 1989. In 1995, they expanded to Portland, Oregon, opening stores under the Haggen moniker. In 2008 a joint investigation between the DEA, IRS, FDA and Edmonds police department uncovered a drug diversion scheme at the Edmonds pharmacy location. Ultimately, Haggen paid $425,000 in fines.
After two decades of aggressive expansion and innovation the company began to transition after the death of Dorothy Haggen in October 2008 and the appointment of CEO Jim Donald, former CEO of Starbucks Coffee Company, in September 2009. In January 2010, Haggen stores announced they would cease their longstanding practice of remaining open 24 hours with limited exceptions. The low amount of traffic was said to be the decision to change the store's hours so that the company overall could be more efficient. Haggen closed its Redmond location in July 2010 after operating for less than two years. The company previously but similarly operated a built-from-scratch location in Tigard for two years (2003–2005).