On the Shelf7 min readJuly 20, 2026

How Fresh and Frozen Rewired the Pet Aisle, 2019-2026

Freshpet's branded fridges, frozen raw's takeover of the freezer aisle, and General Mills' and Mars' 2025 entry into fresh all point to the same shift: refrigeration became the pet aisle's most contested, most capital-intensive real estate.

Photo: Ken_Mayer · CC BY 2.0

Walk into a pet specialty store built any time after 2020 and the loudest thing in the room is usually a compressor. Somewhere in the last several years, refrigeration went from a rare oddity to a default fixture of the modern pet aisle.

2019-2020: A fridge nobody else could stock

Freshpet built the branded-fridge model before anyone else made it work: the company owns, installs and restocks the refrigerated case itself, and the retailer gives up floor space in return. Freshpet closed fiscal 2019 with net sales over $244 million, up more than 26 percent, and had product in 21,570 stores by year-end (Freshpet 8-K / ICR presentation). By the end of Q1 2020, roughly 21,900 of those stores had an actual Freshpet Fridge installed (Freshpet 10-Q, Q1 2020).

That early footprint ran almost entirely through channels that were not pet specialty. In Q1 2020, grocery (including online), mass and club made up 87 percent of Freshpet's net sales across 16,686 stores; pet specialty and natural stores were just 13 percent across 5,181 stores (same 10-Q). The fridge model started as a grocery and mass-market play - frozen raw, the category that would come to define "fresh and frozen" for independents, was building its footprint somewhere else entirely.

2021-2024: Frozen raw claims the freezer

While Freshpet chased grocery aisles, independent pet stores were filling freezers with raw. NielsenIQ data shows fresh dog food dollar sales rose 86.5 percent and fresh cat food 53.8 percent between 2021 and 2023, with the broader fresh/frozen segment up 21.4 percent in dollars and 14.3 percent in units in 2023 (Pet Food Processing). Dog owners feeding fresh food nearly doubled, from 4 percent in 2018 to 8 percent in 2024, while dry-only feeding slipped from 74 percent to 67 percent (same source).

By 2024, fresh and frozen was growing 16.1 percent in value and 15.8 percent in units, though it still held just 3.6 percent of total pet food dollars; freeze-dried, raw's shelf-stable cousin, grew even faster in units (up 18.6 percent) on a smaller 1.1 percent share (PetfoodIndustry).

Independent retailers lean into raw specifically, not gently cooked. A PETS+ Brain Squad survey of roughly 1,500 independent retailers, published in April 2025, found 79 percent sell more frozen raw than gently cooked, with staff who feed fresh themselves cited as the top sales driver, ahead of "increasing mainstream interest" and brand loyalty programs (PETS+ via PetfoodIndustry).

The freezer became the one fixture in a pet store that a shipping algorithm cannot compete with.

What a freezer actually costs

None of that space is free. A single commercial reach-in freezer runs several thousand dollars before installation: a 24-cubic-foot stainless unit lists for roughly $5,090, and Habco, a manufacturer that builds a line "purpose-built for the pet retail and veterinary space" with rust-resistant coated coils, markets itself directly to this channel (RussellHendrix; Habco). Running it isn't free either: annual electricity for a commercial reach-in freezer runs $800 to $850 for a one-door unit and $1,600 to $1,680 for a three-door model, and over five years the power bill on a single unit often equals or exceeds what it cost to buy (The Restaurant Warehouse).

If this is the kind of operator-level read you want every week, subscribe to PetRetailNews.

That math is why distributors, not retailers, increasingly own the freezer decision. Southeast Pet's program covers more than 22 frozen brands, including Stella & Chewy's, Primal, Answers and Bold By Nature: the distributor and brand split the unit's cost, the retailer covers the balance plus all utilities and maintenance, and the store commits to buying those brands exclusively through Southeast Pet for three years - swap brands early and the store owes back the original vendor's contribution (Southeast Pet). Brands sweeten the deal with freezer graphics, training and sampling kits (PETS+).

2025-2026: The big names show up cold

Freshpet crossed $1 billion in annual net sales for the first time in fiscal 2025, closing at $1,102.0 million (up 13.0 percent) with net income of $139.1 million, a sharp jump from 2024's first-ever full-year profit of $46.9 million (Freshpet 8-K, FY2025; Freshpet FY2024 results). As of December 31, 2024, the company was in 28,141 stores, and 22 percent already carried a second or third Freshpet Fridge - growth had shifted from adding doors to multiplying units inside doors it already had (Freshpet 10-K). It's now testing "island fridges," which CEO Billy Cyr called "our most significant step change in retail visibility and availability," flagging that a large rollout could add $20 million to $50 million to 2026 capex already guided near $150 million (GlobalPETS). In the quarter ended March 31, 2026, net sales reached $297.6 million (up 13.1 percent), fridges grew 7 percent in count and cubic feet, and roughly 80 percent of "delivered sales" now move through that network, which functions less like a display case and more like a local fulfillment hub (StockTitan).

Big packaged-food players stopped watching from the sideline in 2025. General Mills launched Blue Buffalo's "Love Made Fresh" nationwide on October 23, 2025, in Walmart, Target, Kroger, Meijer and local grocery stores, targeting what it called a "$3 billion fresh pet food sub-category" (General Mills; WebWire). Mars' Royal Canin launched a competing gently cooked line, Fresh Health Nutrition, the same week, sold frozen with a 24-hour fridge thaw before serving (PetfoodIndustry). Raw pushed the other direction: Stella & Chewy's, long a pet-specialty freeze-dried-raw brand, expanded into 1,400 Publix stores across seven southeastern states on December 2, 2025, following earlier moves into Target and Sprouts Farmers Market (PetfoodIndustry).

Fresh's DTC wing keeps proving the demand is real without a store at all. The Farmer's Dog, a subscription-only fresh dog food company with no retail distribution as of mid-2025, generated an estimated $1.2 billion in annualized 2024 revenue, up 50 percent from about $800 million the year before, after raising $65 million in 2021 at a $1.5 billion valuation (Contrary Research).

What this means for the shelf

For the store owner: A freezer is now a financing decision, not just a merchandising one. Distributor programs like Southeast Pet's absorb most of the hardware cost but carry a three-year brand-exclusivity clause and the full utility bill, so vet the freezer partner as carefully as the food line.
For the buyer/category manager: Independents' customers already vote for frozen raw over gently cooked by a wide margin (79 to 21 in the PETS+ survey). Let assortment and freezer allocation follow that lean, not what grocery just launched.
For the brand/DTC operator: With General Mills and Mars both live in fresh as of late 2025, shelf visibility alone is no longer a defensible edge for a smaller brand. Distribution terms and specialty-only positioning, the lane Stella & Chewy's is now partly leaving, matter more.
For the distributor: Freezer-placement programs, not sell sheets, are the real exclusivity battleground now. Whoever owns the freezer relationship owns that store's raw assortment for three years at a time.

How we're thinking about it

Refrigeration didn't just add a category, it changed what a pet store's floor plan is for. A dry-goods aisle is infinitely flexible: swap a bag for a bag, no capital required. A fridge or freezer is a fixed, powered, financed asset that locks a retailer into a supplier relationship for years, which is why the biggest players in the category, Freshpet and the major distributors, have converged on owning or subsidizing that asset rather than asking the retailer to buy it outright.

The more interesting shift is which channel got there first. Freshpet built its fridge network mostly in grocery and mass from the start; frozen raw built its footprint almost entirely inside independent pet specialty. Those two cold chains are now colliding in the middle: General Mills and Mars are bringing fresh and gently cooked into supermarkets, and Stella & Chewy's is walking freeze-dried raw into Publix. The freezer aisle that used to be an independent's clearest point of differentiation from grocery is no longer exclusively theirs.

That doesn't make it worthless. It's expensive to replicate, tied up in multi-year distributor exclusivity, and dependent on the staff expertise the PETS+ survey ranks as the top sales driver, none of which a big-box or grocery chain bolts on overnight. The moat got narrower. It didn't disappear.

The Bottom Line

Cold space went from a novelty a handful of retailers stocked to the most contested, most capital-intensive real estate in the pet aisle, and 2025's arrival of General Mills and Mars means independents can no longer assume the freezer is theirs alone.

Sources

Get the next issue in your inbox. Free, weekly, no fluff.

Unsubscribe anytime.

← Back to the Newsdesk