Distribution7 min readJuly 20, 2026

Pet Trade Shows Since 2020: The Recovery, and What a Floor Buys You

SuperZoo and Global Pet Expo both went dark or virtual in 2020 and 2021. Five years and several attendance records later, here is what the recovered floor is actually worth to a store or a brand, and how to work it.

Photo: The Fun Chronicles · CC0

Walk the floor at Mandalay Bay in mid-August now and it is easy to forget any of this was ever in doubt. Five years ago, the same convention center sat dark during what should have been the pet industry's biggest week of the year.

2020: The Year the Calendar Broke

Global Pet Expo, the joint production of the American Pet Products Association (APPA, the trade group for pet product makers) and the Pet Industry Distributors Association (PIDA, the trade group for pet product wholesalers), got its show in just ahead of the shutdown. The 16th annual event ran February 26 to 28, 2020, in Orlando, drawing 6,041 buyers from 78 countries even as a COVID-19 travel ban kept some China-based exhibitors out of the country, per organizer-reported post-show numbers. The floor held 1,066 exhibiting companies across 354,100 net square feet.

SuperZoo, the Las Vegas counterpart run by the World Pet Association (WPA), did not get that timing. Originally set for August 31 to September 3, 2020, it was postponed on June 4, 2020, to August 17 to 19, 2021. Interim WPA president Vic Mason's reasoning was blunt: reworking the show around pandemic health rules "will compromise too many components for us to deliver the experience...that makes this show the biggest and the best." In its place, WPA launched WPA365, a year-round virtual marketplace meant to keep vendors and retailers connected between shows.

2021: One Show Goes Digital, the Other Comes Back Half Full

APPA and PIDA made the opposite call for 2021. On December 15, 2020, APPA executive Andy Darmohraj announced Global Pet Expo would skip an in-person edition entirely, becoming "Global Pet Expo Digital Access", online only, March 24 to 26, 2021.

SuperZoo did return in person on its rescheduled August dates, but into a Clark County mask mandate and a show floor the Las Vegas Review-Journal estimated was running at roughly 70% of normal capacity. It was a real show. It just was not yet the show.

2022-2023: Building Back, at Different Speeds

2022 was the first real test of pre-pandemic recovery, and the two shows moved at different speeds. Global Pet Expo's 18th annual edition, March 2022, pulled more than 5,400 buyers and 722 exhibiting companies across 269,500 net square feet. Organizers pegged that as roughly a 20% attendance decline from pre-pandemic levels, well ahead of other trade shows reporting drops as steep as 40%.

SuperZoo's August 23 to 25, 2022 show snapped back harder: more than 16,000 pet professionals from 25-plus countries and all 50 states, on a 331,500-square-foot floor with 1,000-plus exhibitors. By August 2023, SuperZoo had grown to 1,100-plus exhibitors, 520 of them showing exclusively there, across 300,000-plus square feet.

2024-2025: Records, Not Just Recovery

By its 20th annual show, March 2024, Global Pet Expo had a sold-out floor: nearly 20,000 attendees from 85-plus countries, 1,100-plus exhibitors, and an estimated $45 million in local economic impact. A year later, it broke its own record again: nearly 20,000 attendees reaching 105-plus countries and $50.7 million in local impact.

SuperZoo hit its own milestones on the same clock: 22,000-plus registrants in August 2024, about 4,000 more than 2023. Its 75th-anniversary edition, August 2025, sold out the floor entirely: 22,000-plus participants, 1,200 exhibitors including a record 474 first-time brands, 350,000-plus square feet (a 9% jump over 2024), and an estimated $55 million in Las Vegas economic impact. The show's Emerging Brands section alone grew 50% year over year.

What a Show Actually Earns You in 2026

Here is the part the press releases do not headline: a trade show floor is a different tool than it was in 2019, and what you get out of walking it depends on what you came for.

SuperZoo's own attendee survey, fielded around its 2024 show, found that 72.52% of surveyed attendees placed an order during the show, so real order-writing still happens on the floor. But look at who: roughly half of surveyed attendees manage annual purchasing budgets over $100,000, and a quarter control $1 million or more. That is a floor increasingly built around a smaller set of high-volume buyers, not a broad cross-section of every independent operator in the aisle.

What almost everyone says they are actually there for is discovery. More than 94% of surveyed attendees say they have bought, or plan to buy, from a supplier they found at SuperZoo. "The main thing is probably looking out for brand new innovations," AK Bark's Mark Robokoff told the show's own team. "We want to be the first store to have the coolest new things." That is the real product of a 2026 trade show floor: less a place to write a season's orders, more a curated filter for hundreds of new SKUs (stock-keeping units, the individual products a retailer stocks) a buyer would otherwise vet cold off a rep's email.

A trade show floor is not where independent retail writes its orders anymore. It is where it decides what is worth ordering.

That split shows up in who runs which show. Global Pet Expo and SuperZoo are open floors: any qualified retailer, distributor or press credential gets in. Distributors run their own closed events for the actual transaction. Phillips Pet Food & Supplies, for one, holds separate East Coast and West Coast buying shows open exclusively to its own customers, pairing 100-plus brands with a cash-payout rebate program. That is where a lot of real order volume moves, quietly, restricted to accounts the distributor already services.

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How to Work a Show

Treat the floor as three separate jobs. Order-writing, discovery and education pull in different directions, and trying to do all three at once is how a buyer comes home with a bag of catalogs and nothing decided.

Book before you land. Pre-set 8 to 12 target-vendor meetings before the show opens. A 350,000-square-foot floor punishes cold wandering.
Separate discovery time from order time. Walk emerging brands first with no purchasing authority in hand, note names, and decide what to order later.
Go to the free education. It exists because most buyers are not there to write six-figure orders; they are there to see what is changing.
Save the transaction for a closed distributor show. If your distributor runs a buying show, that is where the real order gets written, cashback and all.
Watch the first-time exhibitors. A new-brand surge, like SuperZoo's 50% jump in Emerging Brands, tells you where the category is moving before it hits your sales data.

What this means for the shelf

For the store owner: the trip pays off for discovery and education more than for writing your season's orders; do that math with your distributor instead.

For the buyer/category manager: the biggest budgets in the room are increasingly concentrated among fewer attendees; know where you sit in that mix before planning how hard to work the floor.

For the brand/DTC operator: a first-time exhibitor slot buys discovery, not distribution. Convert leads fast, since the buyers who found you there are actively shopping for something new.

For the distributor: open shows are where relationships start; the closed buying show is where volume moves. Conflating the two wastes the trip.

How we're thinking about it

The headline number every year is attendance, and it is real: both shows have posted verified, organizer-reported records in the last two cycles. But "did the show recover" is a different question from "what is the show for," and both properties are quietly answering that second question the same way: less transaction, more curation.

That tracks with what changed around them. Ordering infrastructure, distributor portals, rep relationships, EDI systems, gets faster every year, while the thing a floor still does better than a screen, letting a buyer physically handle over a thousand new products in three days, has not been replicated anywhere else. The shows leaning into that, bigger emerging-brands sections, more education hours, are the ones setting records. Whether that keeps scaling with the guest list, or a 22,000-person floor eventually gets too big to discover anything on, is a question nobody has published data on yet.

The Bottom Line

Pet trade shows did not just survive 2020 and 2021; they came back bigger and are still growing, but the job they do changed: less where the order gets written, more where the buyer decides what is worth ordering next.

Sources

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