Haggen Food & Pharmacy

Haggen, Inc.

Type	Division of Albertsons Grocery Stores
Industry	Retail (grocery)
Fate	Acquired by Albertsons after West Coast Expansion failure
Founded	Bellingham, Washington, U.S. (1933)
Headquarters	Bellingham, Washington, U.S.
Number of locations	15
Products	Bakery, dairy, deli, flowers, frozen foods, grocery, liquor, lottery, pharmacy, photographic processing, produce, seafood, snacks and Western Union
Owner	Albertsons
Website	www.haggen.com

Haggen Food & Pharmacy is an independent grocery retailer in the Pacific Northwest.

Haggen was headquartered in Bellingham, Washington, and got its start there 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 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 Pacific Northwest 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 retained the Haggen branding.

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 did well enough that 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 very popular. By 1947, the store was ready to expand 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 would change the company's name to Haggen Inc. The store continued to prosper and by the 1960s, Haggen was ready to expand beyond Bellingham. A store was opened in Everett, Washington in 1962 and a 20,000-square-foot (1,900 m²) 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 would be slow because, 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 40,000 square feet (3,700 m²), creating the chain's first superstore format with full-service departments which it still uses today.