On the Shelf7 min readJuly 20, 2026

The Premiumization Decade: How Price, Not Volume, Grew Pet Retail

APPA's numbers show a pet industry that grew from $95.7 billion to $158 billion in six years. Pull the unit-level data from Circana and NielsenIQ, and much of that growth looks like price, not volume.

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A decade ago, the center aisle of a pet store was mostly one thing: a large bag of dry kibble, priced by the pound, sold by the case. Today that same footprint holds a topper, a supplement chew, a freeze-dried medallion, and a subscription box that never asks the shopper to buy more - only to buy better. The industry has spent ten years calling that growth.

The Decade in Dollars

The American Pet Products Association's (APPA, the industry's trade group) annual tally is the closest thing pet retail has to a single scoreboard, and the scoreboard has only moved one direction. U.S. pet industry spending was $95.7 billion in 2019, climbed to $123.6 billion in 2021 (up 13.5% that year alone), reached $147 billion in 2023, and hit $152 billion in 2024, up 3.4% year over year. APPA's most recent State of the Industry report put 2025 spending at $158 billion (+3.7%) and projects $165 billion for 2026.

Food and treats, the category most stores live and die by, moved the same way: $36.9 billion in 2019, $64.4 billion by 2023, and $65.8 billion in 2024 (+2.8%), with 2025 projected near $67.8 billion. On paper, that is a category that grew faster than the industry around it. On the shelf, it looked different.

Where the Growth Actually Came From

APPA's own leadership has said the quiet part out loud. President Pete Scott described prior years of category growth as "mainly inflationary growth with not a lot of real growth," crediting 2025 with finally getting back to real growth. The pet food price index backs him up: it climbed roughly 10% in 2022 and 11% in 2023, then fell 1.7% in 2024. Two straight years of double-digit price inflation is not a footnote to this decade's growth story - it is most of the growth story.

NielsenIQ's read on the category, presented at the KibbleCon trade show in 2024, shows exactly where dollars and units split. Through September 2024, dog food dollar sales were up just 1.1% year over year, while units were down 1.7% and volume was down 0.9%. Translated: stores sold fewer bags and fewer pounds of dog food, and the register barely moved because each of those fewer bags cost more. Cat food told a healthier version of the same story - dollars up 6.1%, units up only 1.9% - but dollars still outran units by more than three to one.

NielsenIQ found premium pet products posting 11.7% dollar growth against a 0.8% unit decline - the industry sold less and billed more for it, and called it growth.

What "Premium" Actually Bought

None of that premium dollar landed evenly across the shelf. It landed on specific formats. APPA's Dog & Cat Report 2025 found mixer and topper use - the pourable or crumbled add-ons spooned over a base meal - up 129% among dog owners and 138% among cat owners since 2018. Supplement adoption climbed with it: 53% of dog owners and 34% of cat owners now give vitamins or supplements, up 56% and 70% respectively since 2018, with prebiotic and probiotic use specifically up 18% for dogs and 9% for cats in 2024 alone. Circana's register data confirms the shift at the SKU level: dog supplement dollar sales hit $633 million in the year ending August 2025, up 9.2%, while the smaller cat supplement line grew 27.9% to $53.1 million.

The price-per-pound ladder is the clearest evidence of where premium dollars actually go. In the 52 weeks ending June 2024, traditional kibble averaged $2.52 a pound, "kibble plus" formats (kibble upgraded with freeze-dried or fresh inclusions) averaged $4.22 a pound, and 100% freeze-dried food averaged $35.23 a pound - a fourteen-fold spread for products that still, functionally, feed the same dog. A slice of that premium dollar also migrated toward fresh and frozen formats, and single-ingredient treats picked up real shelf space on the strength of the same clean-label instinct - both are their own story, but both drew from the identical humanization impulse: if we would not eat food we can't pronounce, why would the dog.

The Basket Behind the Number

Here is the part that should worry a store owner benchmarking their own comps against the industry's. Store brands and value tiers have quietly been doing the opposite of premium. NielsenIQ found private label pet products up 19.4% in dollars and 8.8% in units - both strong, but note which one is bigger. More recent Packaged Facts data on the first half of 2025 found private label dollar growth of 2% running behind unit growth of 3.3%: private label is winning basket count even where it isn't winning basket size. About a third of pet owners who switched brands in the past year moved to a cheaper national or store brand, and the share who believe store brands now match national-brand quality grew from 37% in October 2023 to 47%. Quality perception is converging exactly as the price gap between tiers widens.

A store whose dollar sales are up because its premium mix is up, while units per transaction and repeat-visit frequency sit flat, is not growing - it is extracting more from a customer base that isn't getting any bigger. That's a strategy with a ceiling, and the ceiling shows up first in traffic counts, not the P&L.

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What this means for the shelf

For the store owner: Pull unit velocity and transaction count alongside your dollar comp, not instead of it. A healthy-looking revenue line can be riding on fewer, pricier baskets from the same shopper pool - that's a different problem than growth, and it needs a different fix.

For the buyer/category manager: The kibble-to-kibble-plus-to-freeze-dried price ladder is real merchandising math. Stock the middle rung deliberately - it's where trade-down shoppers land first, and where you can hold a customer instead of losing them to private label.

For the brand/DTC operator: The fastest-growing attach categories are toppers, supplements, and single-ingredient add-ons, not the base food. The incremental sale increasingly looks like a $15 topper, not a $70 bag - build the innovation calendar around that.

For the distributor: Private label's unit growth outpacing its dollar growth is an early signal that your branded partners' volume floor is softer than their revenue line suggests. Watch unit share, not just sell-through dollars, when you're deciding which lines to protect shelf space for.

How we're thinking about it

Set side by side, APPA's decade of headline totals and the unit-level reads from Circana and NielsenIQ tell two different stories about the same industry. The APPA number is real money and belongs in every pitch deck. But it answers "how much did the category collect," not "how many pets got fed, or how often." For an industry whose retail base is still substantially independent stores living on foot traffic and repeat visits, the second question matters more.

Humanization - the trend of owners treating pets as family members whose food, health, and routines deserve the same scrutiny as their own - is the real, durable demand shift underneath all of this, and it isn't going away. Supplement adoption up 56-70% since 2018 and topper use up 129-138% aren't inflation artifacts; they're new spending categories that didn't meaningfully exist a decade ago. That's genuine category expansion, not a price trick.

But 2022 and 2023's double-digit pet food price inflation, layered on top of that real demand shift, made every operator's dollar comp look stronger than the underlying traffic actually was. APPA's own president now frames 2025 as the year the industry got back to "real" growth - which is a polite way of admitting the prior years mostly weren't. Heading into 2026, with pet food prices roughly flat and private label converging on branded quality, the stores that built their forecasts on dollar comps alone are the ones most exposed if that price cushion keeps unwinding.

The Bottom Line

Pet retail's spending chart has climbed for a decade, but the number that predicts whether a store is actually gaining customers - units sold - has been flat to shrinking through large stretches of it, and premium is not exempt from that math.

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