In 1983, Houston-based Randall's Food Markets opened a new facility at the corner of Telge Road and North Berwick Drive (10700 Telge Road). The new plant was easily visible and accessible from Northwest Freeway and as Randalls continued to grow, so did the distribution center. After a small expansion in the early 1990s, a large traditional warehouse to the south and a freezer addition to the north (the old building had just perishables), consolidating from a location at 3350 Rogerdale Road. This came at about the same time as the chain was purchased by California-based Safeway Inc., which continued to operate the Randalls distribution center as one of two Texas facilities (the other was in the Dallas area, purchased from Food Lion) to serve primarily the Austin and Houston areas.
However, as you may know, Safeway's mismanagement caused Randalls to go from a close #2 in grocery market share (around 20%)1 to an irrelevant, distant number2, and unfortunately, despite Albertsons initial attempt to reposition Safeway's "Texas" division to the new "Houston" division (handing off the Tom Thumb stores in the Dallas area to Albertsons' "South" division while taking the Louisiana Albertsons stores), further sales and divesting doomed the division and a year after the "Houston" division was folded into "South", the distribution center closed.
Redeveloped into "Highland Grove Business Park", the iconic water tank with the Randalls logo and large lawn letting the distribution center be clearly seen from the highway was replaced with the new 10704 Telge Road (despite having no Telge Road access). The old 10700 building now holds Gold Star Foods (apparently a distribution facility for K-12 lunch programs) and a distribution center for Restaurant Depot.
The 1999 expansion was severed from the 1983 building and rebadged as 10620 Telge Road (as of this writing, suite 200 holds Sunbelt Marketing, which Google informs me is a plumbing supplies operation). 10600 Telge Road was built in front of that, while two more warehouses were built behind them on an adjacent plot of land.
1. "'Right' store was ripe for picking - Randalls joins trend with deal", Houston Chronicle 7/24/1999
2. Just a year after the Safeway deal closed, Randalls had shrunk to less than 4%. A previous version had linked here, which is a 404 link, and as of press time, Archive.org is not working.
UPDATE 09-20-2026: Rewrote post to conform to modern standards and new tags