Two of Portland's most recognizable grocery brands both picked the same three blocks of Raleigh Hills to try something for the first time, four decades apart. This October, it happens again.
Abby's Legendary Pizza is opening a parlor inside the Fred Meyer at 7700 SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, its second grocery-embedded location after an earlier 2026 debut inside the Hillsboro Fred Meyer on Tualatin Valley Highway. If you've lived in Raleigh Hills for any length of time, you already know this stretch of highway does not usually get news. It gets routine: Fred Meyer for the weekly run, New Seasons for the specialty stuff, maybe a stop at La Provence for pastries on the way home. What's easy to miss, because it never announces itself, is that this particular quarter mile of Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway has a documented habit of being where grocery retailers decide to try something new before anywhere else in the region does.
Three Firsts, Same Half Mile
Line up the dates and the pattern is hard to unsee.
| Year | Business | What Made It a First | Address |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1959 | Fred Meyer | One of founder Fred G. Meyer's early one-stop suburban shopping centers | 7700 SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy |
| 2000 | New Seasons Market | The company's very first store, opened inside a former Kienow's grocery building | 7300 SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy |
| 2026 | Abby's Legendary Pizza | Second-ever grocery-embedded pizza parlor concept, following Hillsboro | Inside the Fred Meyer at 7700 SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy |
Fred Meyer chose this address in 1959 back when the whole idea of a one-stop shop, bread and meat and produce under a single roof, was still a gamble. Four decades later, New Seasons opened its very first store 400 address numbers down the same highway, inside a shuttered Kienow's, betting that Portland shoppers wanted the opposite experience: smaller, locally sourced, community-focused. Now a national pizza chain is using the same Fred Meyer building to test whether shoppers want a slice while they're already there for the milk.
None of these were obligated to happen here. Fred Meyer had other suburban options in 1959. New Seasons could have opened its flagship anywhere with cheap real estate and foot traffic. Abby's picked Hillsboro first, then came back to Raleigh Hills specifically. Three separate companies, three separate decades, and all three landed on the same short stretch of road.
What Abby's Is Actually Betting On
The Raleigh Hills location is not a standalone gamble. It's a repeat of a formula Abby's already tested in Hillsboro earlier this year. Abby's President Mike Hudspeth said the response to that Hillsboro parlor "has exceeded our wildest expectations," and that he and Fred Meyer "quickly identified Raleigh Hills as another Portland-area community where we think this concept will be a great fit."
That framing matters if you live nearby. This isn't a company parachuting a new idea into an untested market. It's the second data point in what looks like a rollout plan, and Raleigh Hills was the second neighborhood picked, ahead of plenty of other Fred Meyer locations across the metro. Fred Meyer spokesperson Tiffany Sanders described the partnership as a chance to "support a local, family-owned business while giving our customers a convenient and delicious dining option," which tracks with how the Hillsboro location operates: dine-in, takeout, and delivery, positioned just past the entrance near the checkout stands rather than tucked in a back corner.
Job listings for the Raleigh Hills location are expected to go up at Abby's careers site in the coming weeks, with a mix of part-time and full-time roles. If you've been wondering what a pizza counter looks like wedged between a grocery entrance and a checkout line, you won't have to wonder much longer.
The Corridor It's Joining
The new pizza counter isn't opening into a food desert. It's dropping into a stretch of highway that already does a fair amount of the neighborhood's actual eating.
Walk that same section of Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway today and you'll pass:
- La Provence Bistro & Bakery, at 7424 SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, sitting almost exactly between the Fred Meyer and the New Seasons, serving breakfast through dinner with a bakery case of French pastries.
- McMenamins Raleigh Hills Pub, a few minutes away on SW Scholls Ferry Road, the neighborhood's long-running option for a pint and a burger.
- Ernesto's Italian Restaurant, known locally for hand-rolled meatballs and a full lounge.
- Raul's Family Mexican Restaurant, a longtime neighborhood favorite for margaritas and traditional family recipes.
- Raccoon Lodge & Brew Pub, the family-friendlier alternative to the McMenamins scene.
What's notable is that none of these compete directly with what's landing at Fred Meyer. Abby's isn't chasing dinner reservations away from La Provence or pulling regulars out of Ernesto's booth seating. It's filling a gap those sit-down spots don't cover: the fifteen-minute window between finishing your grocery list and getting back in the car, when a slice by the register is a faster answer than a table for two.
Why the Real Estate Keeps Saying Yes
There's a practical reason retailers keep circling back to this specific address, and it shows up in the commercial listings, not the marketing copy. The Fred Meyer-anchored center at 7700 SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway has retail suites listed for lease as part of an active, ongoing leasing effort at the property. That's the quiet infrastructure behind all three "firsts" in the table above. A grocery anchor guarantees a baseline of daily foot traffic that a standalone restaurant space can't promise on its own, which makes the attached suites a lower-risk bet for whoever wants to try something new. Fred Meyer supplies the traffic. Whatever concept plugs into the freed-up suite gets shoppers who were already committed to walking through the door.
That's the mechanism behind why New Seasons picked this exact spot for its first store in 2000, and it's the same mechanism Abby's is testing again in 2026. The neighborhood itself isn't unusually food-obsessed compared to its neighbors in Beaverton or West Slope. What's unusual is that this particular half mile keeps having grocery-anchored retail space available at the right moment for someone willing to gamble on a new format.
What Changes and What Doesn't
If you already shop at the Raleigh Hills Fred Meyer, the practical version of this story is simple: sometime in October, there will be a pizza counter near the front of the store, with dine-in, takeout, and delivery options, run by the same Abby's brand that's been operating in the Portland area for years under family ownership. Nothing about your usual grocery run changes except one more option for dinner on nights when cooking feels like too much.
The bigger version of the story is that Raleigh Hills has a quiet, decades-long track record of being where grocery chains land their new ideas before rolling them out elsewhere, and almost nobody who lives here has ever had reason to notice the pattern until three of them lined up on the same stretch of highway. Fred Meyer bet on one-stop shopping here in 1959. New Seasons bet on local and organic here in 2000. Now a pizza brand is betting that the checkout line is the best real estate in the store.
Whether that bet pays off the way Hillsboro did is something you'll be able to judge for yourself well before the rest of the region hears about it, because you'll be the one walking past it every week.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, beyond the headlines, TK Real Estate Group knows Raleigh Hills at the level of detail that doesn't show up on a listing sheet. Schedule a free consultation with Tamiko K. Warren's team to talk through what living on this side of Washington County actually looks like.
