SuperZoo 2026 opens August 12-14 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, three weeks from today. The badges are not scanned yet, but the exhibitor directory is already public, and it tells you more than most of the show's own preview copy does. We pulled all 1,180 listings from the public a2z floorplan and the SZ2026 marketplace and read the floor the way a buyer should before landing in Vegas: not as a list of booths to wander past, but as a dataset of who is actually building, moving and selling into independent pet retail right now.
The floor by category
Sort the 1,180 exhibitors by how the show itself categorizes them and the shape is stark:
- COG / Product (finished goods brands): 969 companies, 82.1% of the floor
- Distribution / Wholesale: 84 companies, 7.1%
- Manufacturing / OEM / Private Label: 60 companies, 5.1%
- Services (3PL, packaging, consulting, software-adjacent): 45 companies, 3.8%
- Tech / Software: 17 companies, 1.4%
- Marketing / Media: 5 companies, 0.4%
Four out of every five listings on this floor is a finished product looking for shelf space. That is the headline, and it is not a new fact about trade shows in general, it is a specific fact about this one, this year: SuperZoo is still overwhelmingly a product-discovery floor, not a services or technology floor, even in a year every other B2B trade show is adding an "AI pavilion." Seventeen tech/software exhibitors, out of 1,180, is a rounding error next to the product count.
The international signal: who is actually manufacturing this
Geography tells the more useful story. Of the 1,180 exhibitors, 952 (80.7%) list a US city; the rest split across 62 Canadian companies (5.3%), 57 Chinese companies (4.8%), 31 from South Korea (2.6%), 10 from Australia (0.8%) and 7 from New Zealand (0.6%), with the remainder scattered across Taiwan, Singapore, the UK, Germany and elsewhere.
Break the China and Korea cohorts down by category and the pattern sharpens: of China's 57 exhibitors, 38 are finished-product brands and 11 are dedicated Manufacturing / OEM / Private Label companies, like Nanjing DM Technology (electric interactive cat toys, OEM/ODM plus its own Migipaws brand) and CIXI RUBERCENTER TRADE CO. / FIDERRO, which designs and manufactures travel, feeding, grooming and toy products with OEM, ODM and private-label programs built into the pitch. Korea's 31 exhibitors are almost entirely finished-goods brands (29 of 31), a different profile entirely. China is showing up at SuperZoo as a manufacturing floor, not just a product floor; Korea is showing up as a brand floor. For a retailer sourcing private label or OEM product, that difference tells you which aisle to prioritize before you have walked either one.
The ratio that should change how you walk the floor
Here is the number that matters more than attendance projections: for every one of the show's 60 dedicated manufacturers, there are roughly 16 finished-product brands on the floor competing to get into your store. For every one of its 17 tech/software vendors, there are 57 product brands. Distribution and wholesale, the 84 companies that actually move freight and carry lines into an independent's back room, sit above manufacturing (7.1% of the floor vs. 5.1%) but still get a fraction of the walking time most buyers spend on new-product aisles.
That ratio is the floor telling you what it is actually built for. SuperZoo, at this scale, is a demand-generation event for brands first, a sourcing event for private label second, and a technology showcase a distant third. A buyer walking in expecting equal parts should recalibrate: the overwhelming majority of the show's square footage exists to get a new SKU in front of you, not to sell you software or freight capacity.
Real names, one row each
A directory listing does not distinguish between a three-person startup and a company with a billion-dollar P&L, and that flattening is itself worth knowing before you walk. Chewy (booth 3900), Amazon (booth MR111, filed under Tech / Software), Mars Petcare (4352), Nestle Purina Petcare (11352), Hill's Pet Nutrition (10947), Central Garden & Pet (7545), Champion Petfoods (3545), Wellness Pet Company (3945) and Diamond Pet Foods (6745) are all on the floor, filed in the exact same "COG / Product" category as a Wyoming startup selling personalized 3D crystal pet-photo keepsakes or a Las Vegas team selling football-themed dog tailgate gear. Every one of them gets one row in the directory.
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That flattening is exactly why category and geography are more useful filters than the exhibitor list alone. The big manufacturers already have your buyer's attention through their own reps; the floor's actual value to an independent is in the long tail the directory makes searchable for the first time all year - the 900-plus other product brands, the 60 manufacturers who will build you a private label line, and the handful of distributors carrying lines you cannot get anywhere else.
How to plan the floor by category
- Budget your time by the real ratio, not by booth count. If 82% of the floor is finished product, do not spend equal time in the smaller categories; spend a fixed block, an hour or two, on distribution and manufacturing specifically, since that is where the floor's information is most asymmetric to what a rep would tell you cold.
- Use country as a sourcing filter, not a curiosity. If you are hunting private label or OEM capacity, the China cohort (57 exhibitors, 11 of them dedicated manufacturers) is a denser vein than the Korea cohort (31 exhibitors, almost all finished brands).
- Do not skip Manufacturing / OEM / Private Label because it is the smallest category. At 60 companies, it is also the one whose value compounds every year you have a relationship, unlike a single season's new SKU.
- Treat the 17 tech/software booths as a fast pass, not a project. With this few exhibitors in the category, you can realistically see all of them in an afternoon and compare live rather than researching from a hotel room afterward.
- Pre-flag the recognizable manufacturer names and skip past them faster. Chewy, Amazon and the major CPGs are not why you are walking a 350,000-square-foot floor; the unlisted, unfamiliar rows are.
How we're thinking about it
The story a trade-show press release tells is attendance and square footage. The story the exhibitor directory tells is different: a floor is 82% finished product because that is what still gets a company in the door fastest, and a floor is only 5% manufacturing because building a private label supply relationship is a slower, less glamorous sell than launching a new SKU. Those two facts are related. The manufacturers who do show up, only 60 of them against 969 product brands, are disproportionately valuable exactly because everyone else on the floor is competing to avoid looking like them.
The international mix backs that up. China's manufacturing presence at SuperZoo (11 dedicated OEM/ODM companies, plus a chunk of its 38 product-brand exhibitors that also manufacture) is a supply-side signal, not just a labor-cost story: it is where a retailer can have an OEM conversation in person that would otherwise take months of email and a trade intermediary. Korea's near-total tilt toward finished brands (29 of 31) suggests a different national pet-industry structure, one further along toward its own consumer brands than toward being the world's contract manufacturer for someone else's.
The Bottom Line
Read as a dataset instead of a program guide, the SuperZoo 2026 floor is doing exactly what an 82%-product, 5%-manufacturing, 1.4%-tech ratio suggests: it exists mainly to launch new SKUs at you, and the sourcing and technology value is concentrated in a small slice worth deliberately seeking out rather than stumbling into.