Distribution6 min readJuly 20, 2026

The Pet Distribution Roll-Up: Every Deal, 2019-2026

Phillips, Animal Supply Company, Pet Food Experts, and Central Garden & Pet spent six years buying, merging, and re-merging pet distribution into fewer, bigger networks. Here is every verified deal, and what it means for the store still counting cases by hand.

Photo: Henry Söderlund · CC BY 2.0

Ask an independent pet store owner who their delivery driver works for these days, and you'll sometimes get a pause before the answer. Distribution used to be the boring, stable part of the pet business: the same regional company, the same route, the same rep who knew your shelf by name. That stability is the thing that has quietly gone away.

2019-2020: The Merger That Wasn't

On February 25, 2020, Phillips Pet Food & Supplies and Animal Supply Company (ASC) - at the time widely described as the two largest national pet product distributors - announced plans to merge into a single company. Six months later, on August 25, 2020, they walked away, citing "economic uncertainties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic" that made it hard to close deals of any size that year. At the time, Phillips ran 10 U.S. distribution centers; ASC operated 18, including 10 with e-commerce fulfillment, serving roughly 7,000 independent retail customers running more than 15,000 retail outlets across the U.S. and Caribbean.

The deal that would have combined the industry's two biggest distributors fell apart, but the pressure that produced it didn't. Both companies kept growing on their own, just more slowly, and mostly one acquisition at a time.

2021-2025: One Distributor Buys Its Way to the Top

While Phillips and ASC regrouped separately, Pet Food Experts (PFX), a Rhode Island distributor founded in 1989, started rolling up regional players instead. In April 2021, PFX bought United Pacific Pet, a 103-year-old Colton, California distributor serving about 1,500 independent retailers across California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii - PFX's largest deal to that point, pushing its own reach to more than 6,000 independent retailers across 38 states. "This will be a monumental acquisition for PFX," CEO Michael Baker said at the time. In March 2022, Dot Family Holdings - the investment office of Wisconsin's Tracy family - put growth capital into PFX specifically earmarked for more add-on acquisitions.

The biggest of those add-ons closed on February 26, 2025: PFX acquired select assets of Animal Supply Company - the same ASC it had once tried to merge with - from private equity owners Summit Partners and Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The deal made PFX the largest pet specialty distributor in the country, expanding its reach from 6,500 retailers in 39 states to more than 10,000 pet retail locations nationwide, plus what the company calls the industry's largest cold-chain (temperature-controlled, for fresh and frozen pet food) network. ASC's direct-to-consumer fulfillment and veterinary-clinic distribution business came with it. Baker, who returned as PFX's CEO to run the combined company, called the deal a combination "nearly a decade in the making."

April 2026: Central Garden & Pet Bets on Phillips

Phillips wasn't standing still either. On April 13, 2026, Central Garden & Pet - the public company behind Nylabone, Kaytee and Aqueon - announced it would fold its own pet distribution business into a new joint venture with Phillips, operating under the Phillips name as an independent company. Central takes a 20% stake and cash proceeds; Phillips and its existing investors, led by private equity firm Axar Capital Management, hold the remaining 80%. The combined platform runs on Phillips' 11 U.S. distribution centers and, according to Phillips, reaches all 50 states across every major channel - pet specialty, big box, e-commerce, farm and feed, and third-party logistics - covering dog, cat, aquatics, small animal, equine and reptile categories. Central's own pet segment posted $3.1 billion in net sales in fiscal 2025.

In roughly six years, the pet industry went from two companies trying to become one super-distributor to two very different roll-ups actually getting there.

What Fewer Distributors Means at the Loading Dock

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The U.S. pet industry hit $158 billion in 2025, up 3.7% from the prior year, and APPA projects $165 billion in 2026. More dollars moving through the category is exactly what makes a distribution network worth owning, or worth merging with a rival's.

For a store that used to have two or three national options plus a regional distributor to play off each other, fewer distributors means less leverage on the things retailers actually negotiate: price, order minimums, and delivery frequency. A bigger distributor standardizes minimums and routes across a wider territory, which is efficient for the distributor and not always convenient for a single-location store used to a low-minimum, once-a-week drop. It also tends to mean fewer, busier reps covering more accounts each - the person who used to walk your aisles and flag a slow SKU now has more stores on their route than they used to.

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That pressure has left room, not closed it, for distributors built around what the roll-ups deprioritize. Pet Palette Distribution sells 99% of its catalog as single units rather than full cases, with a $99 order minimum and free shipping above $299 - a structure aimed at stores too small to hit a national distributor's case-pack minimums. Regional players like AFCO, which serves more than 600 feed and pet retailers across eight Western states, and others still active in the space - Southeast Pet, Bradley Caldwell, Fauna Foods, Frontier Distributing, Independent Pet Supply, among the names industry trade coverage lists as independently owned - are the backup plan for stores that don't want to be one account among 10,000.

What this means for the shelf

For the store owner: Expect your rep, your minimum order, or your delivery day to change at least once as this settles - ask now whether your account is moving to a new platform, and get the new minimum in writing before you plan a reset.

For the buyer/category manager: Brand access is the real risk, not price. A distributor juggling 10,000-plus accounts prioritizes SKUs that already move at scale; a slower-turning niche brand you carry for differentiation may need a direct account or a regional distributor to stay on shelf.

For the brand/DTC operator: Fewer national distributors means fewer doors to knock on for broad specialty-channel reach, but it also means one relationship can now put your product in front of a much larger share of the independent channel than it could in 2019.

For the distributor: National scale is table stakes for reaching the biggest brand relationships now. Regional and niche players that can't compete on scale are competing on service instead - low minimums, fast turnaround, or categories the roll-ups don't prioritize.

How we're thinking about it

We don't read this as the end of independent distribution. Pet Palette, AFCO, and the rest of the regional bench prove there's still a real business in being small, fast, and local. What's changed is the ceiling: five years ago a distributor needed regional density to compete for pet specialty accounts. Today it increasingly needs a national footprint and outside capital to compete for the biggest brand relationships and the biggest retail chains, which is exactly why a public company like Central Garden & Pet decided a joint venture beat running its own distribution network solo.

The pattern across every deal in this piece - the failed 2020 merger, PFX's five-year rollup, the 2026 Central/Phillips venture - is the same: companies that couldn't get bigger together in one shot got bigger anyway, just slower and through different doors. That's worth remembering the next time a distributor pitches a "merger of equals." It rarely stays equal, and it rarely stays two companies for long.

The Bottom Line

Since the 2020 merger attempt, the number of pet distributors big enough to matter nationally has settled into two roll-ups: PFX, built acquisition by acquisition, and the new Phillips/Central Garden venture. Both survivors got there by buying or merging with companies they once tried to out-compete.

Sources

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