Haggen

Haggen Food & Pharmacy is a grocery retailer in Washington state. Haggen is 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 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.