Portland has long been a place to test out new ideas in the grocery game, ideas that come to shape the way Americans shop for food. In the early 1900s, local women helped spearhead a nationwide campaign to require health inspections of grocery stores. It wouldn’t be long before a man named Fred Meyer revolutionized the way Portlanders shopped, letting them hit different departments in one store instead of having to visit at separate businesses for bread, meat, and produce. 

With its reputation for progressive ideals and generally warm attitude toward fringe lifestyles, the city has also been a great place to be a health food nut. Portland had four vegetarian restaurants by 1900. In the early days, though, the health food scene was mostly run by Seventh Day Adventists and weight-loss charlatans. 

That changed in the late 1960s, when hippies brought their arsenal of natural foods to the West Coast. Local health nuts and secular vegetarians could shop at Rose City Nutrition Center, which advertised papaya enzymes, yogurt, and vitamins in addition to “fresh fruit and organic veg. juices.” Sure, they also sold diet products, but a more holistic approach to diet and nutrition was emerging. 

In 1970, principled co-ops like the Southeast Food Conspiracy (later renamed People’s Food Cooperative, or just People’s) opened on the east side of the river, and would soon be joined by Food Front co-op in Northwest. That year, The Oregonian ran an article on Sunshine Natural Food Company, freshly opened at SW Madison and Broadway. “Organic Food Store Taps New Market,” read the headline. The window of the store featured a sign that defined the word “ecology.” The O provided a description of the scene inside the store, where a “young man taps his fingers on the lunch counter to the tempo of the East Indian music and a loose fitting young lady in a mother hubbard skirt makes ’sprouts and avocado sandwiches; and a redhead, who looks out of place in a tailored skirt, puts up an order at the herb counter.” 

One of Sunshine’s owners, 26-year-old former department store buyer Michael Bidwell, offered journalist (and, later, president of Fred Meyer Savings and Loan) Gerry Pratt a shot of unfiltered apple juice and chatted him up. “The idea is to teach people to eat local products, as much as possible,” Bidwell explained, not seeming to recall that Oregon does not grow avocados. 

The good vibes didn’t last long; the store was put up for sale the next year. Teamaker Steven Smith, who worked as a manager at the store until it shuttered, bought out the Sunshine’s remaining herb inventory and used it to found Stash Tea.

Other health food stores and cooperatives soon followed, opening new opportunities to seize the wellness zeitgeist. Adventist-owned Daily Grind Natural Foods and its Urban Onion deli opened at SE 40th and Hawthorne in 1973, selling the same dense breads and canned meat analogs as the old sanitarium on Mount Tabor had in the 1890s, as well as the best vegan brownies Portland had ever tasted. 

In the health foods market, Fred Meyer saw a new opportunity for innovation. The same year that Daily Grind opened its doors (just a stone’s throw from the Hawthorne Freddy’s), Meyer’s stores added their own Nutrition Centers—a separate section of the store where health-conscious shoppers could find wheat germ and yogurt makers just a few aisles down from Oreos and Hamburger Helper. Just as the local chain had with the “one-stop shopping” concept decades earlier, Freddy’s had pioneered selling health food under the same roof as conventional groceries. 

The year before Daily Grind debuted, Nature’s Food and Tool opened in Southwest Portland’s Corbett neighborhood, then burned down after just a few months, leaving an opportunity in the ashes—one seized in the 1970s by a group that included Stan Amy. Amy was no seasoned businessman—only a few years earlier, he was an idealistic urban studies major at Portland State, using his skills in statistics to fight a law imposing curfews in public parks. At 23, he secured a $3 million federal loan for student housing and became a founding member of College Housing Northwest. 

Nature’s Food and Tool became Nature’s Fresh Northwest, but everyone still called it Nature’s. Behind the scenes, Amy aimed to make his stores crisp and clean while being simultaneously warm and friendly (New Seasons later adopted “the friendliest store in town” as its motto). He wore a beard, but kept it neatly trimmed. When Nature’s first dedicated dine-in deli opened in 1987, it showed Portlanders that ready-made grocery store food didn’t have to be a cop-out from cooking, nor did it mean a sacrifice of quality—in fact, it could be kind of gourmet. 

Shedding the hippie image went far in promoting Nature’s brand. The same types of products favored by the patchouli set were happily snatched up by suburbanites and bougie professionals when sold by cleaner-cut staff in a familiar setting. In 1993, Nature’s opened its fifth store, on SE Division, complete with juice bar and restaurant, putting it in direct competition with the nearby People’s Food Co-op. 

In 1996, a game of (organically grown) hot potato began when vitamin supplement megaretailer General Nutrition Center (GNC) announced its purchase of Nature’s for $17.5 million. In 1999, GNC offloaded Nature’s to Boulder-based Wild Oats for $57 million, which was in turn acquired by Whole Foods in a 2007 merger. Amazon bought Whole Foods 10 years later for $13.7 billion. 

The first New Seasons opened in Raleigh Hills in 2000, in an old Kienow’s. The store was conceived via a sort of health food love-in: Most of the starting capital was provided by Chuck Eggert (founder and CEO of Pacific Natural Foods, which would be acquired by Campbell’s in 2017) and former Nature’s president Stan Amy, who’d left after the Wild Oats purchase. The rest came from the third cofounder, Brian Rohter, who had been Nature’s general manager. (Rohter’s wife, Eileen Brady, later ran into some trouble when she also claimed to have been a founding co-owner during her unsuccessful bid for Portland mayor in 2012. Though Amy donated to her campaign and refused to speak publicly on the matter, Eggert broadly disputed her claims on the record.)

Once up and running, New Seasons opened branches in other defunct grocery stores throughout the Portland area: one had previously been a Piggly Wiggly, another was once a Red Apple. (After recovering from the brink of closing and undergoing a major expansion of its longtime home, People’s reopened shortly before New Seasons launched its Seven Corners store on SE Division, a few blocks from People’s and just down the street from Nature’s/Wild Oats.) A few years after the closure of Daily Grind, that site, too, became a New Seasons. 

New Seasons’ early success was largely thanks to the pioneering Fred Meyer and Nature’s had done in the natural foods industry—namely, the idea of normalizing natural foods for mainstream shoppers. But offering conventional brands on the same shelves as organic brands, as New Seasons did, was different. Trying to please everyone usually backfires. Natural foods die-hards didn’t want to shop in a store selling products that conflicted with their values. Regular neighborhood folks who just needed to pop in for milk and a loaf of bread didn’t love the prices. With every new store opened, neighbors worried about their rent prices going up.  

The business was growing fast, and investment firm Endeavour Capital took notice, pouring millions into the company, funding New Seasons’ 2013 takeover of California-based New Leaf Community Markets. 

At around the same time, those early fears of gentrification were somewhat confirmed by a Metro study, which found that home prices increased by around 20 percent within a year or two of adding a New Seasons–type store to the neighborhood. In a 2015 interview, head of store development Jerry Chevassus told The Oregonian that New Seasons intentionally targeted gentrifying neighborhoods for expansion. The news spread north; when New Seasons announced plans to open in Seattle’s historic Central District in 2017, they were blocked by protests from neighborhood and labor rights advocates. A year later, New Seasons backed out of plans for a large-scale expansion into California (opting to Trojan-horse its way in using newly acquired sister company New Leaf Community Market).

In 2019, New Seasons sold to Good Food Holdings, a subsidiary of megaconglomerate Emart, the largest retailer in South Korea. Other controversies followed: Endeavor Capital’s financial ties to the M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust, which has a history of funding anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ organizations. Anti-union tactics that began in 2017 were still making the news in 2026.

Just as Fred Meyer is now but a cog in the Kroger machine, maybe New Seasons isn’t as friendly or Portlandic as it once aimed to be. We still have these homegrown stores scattered around the city, but it’s the names alone that haven’t changed.  

Portions of this story are excerpted from the author’s Portland: A Food
Biography (2014).