The Private-Label Opportunity on the SuperZoo 2026 Floor

Chewy and the big chains did not win the private-label game by being clever. They won it by being big enough to book factory capacity an independent never sees. The one week a year that changes is the week a few hundred manufacturers set up booths in the same building as a few hundred buyers. SuperZoo 2026 runs August 12-14 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, three weeks out, and its exhibitor directory is the cheapest sourcing trip an independent will take all year, if you know which rows on the list are actually manufacturers and not just brands.

What's actually on this floor

Pull the SuperZoo 2026 exhibitor directory apart by category and two numbers matter. Sixty companies list themselves under Manufacturing / OEM / Private Label, the show's own bucket for contract manufacturers and white-label suppliers. Separately, 43 companies across the entire floor, in any category, explicitly flag private-label capability in their own listing description - 31 of those already sit inside the Manufacturing / OEM / Private Label bucket, and 12 are finished-goods brands (COG / Product) who also happen to run a private-label side of the business. Net those two lists together and you get 72 distinct companies on the floor with some declared private-label or OEM capacity: about 1 in every 16 exhibitors at the show.

Of the core 60 Manufacturing / OEM / Private Label companies, 44 are US-based, 11 are Chinese, 2 are Pakistani and one each are Canadian, Taiwanese and Italian. That is a real geographic spread of sourcing options in one building: domestic SQF-certified co-packers a few states away, and overseas OEM/ODM shops that already build for other brands at volume.

Twelve places to start

These are not endorsements, they are what is on the public floor plan right now, described in the exhibitors' own words.

Food, treats and consumables manufacturing:

• BCFoods, Inc (Santa Rosa, CA, booth 4338) - ingredient supplier for pet food and treats (dehydrated vegetables, fruits, proteins) that also runs turnkey private-label manufacturing for treats.
• Bimini Pet Health (Topeka, KS, booth 10872EB) - contract manufacturer and private-label provider of pet health supplements and treats, made at an FDA-registered, USDA/APHIS-inspected US facility.
• BrightPet Nutrition Group (Lisbon, OH, booth 2731) - manufactures premium and super-premium pet food, treats and care products as branded, private-label and contract-manufactured lines side by side.
• Muenster Pet Freeze-Dried (Denton, TX, booth 4605) - co-manufacturer and retail private-label supplier of freeze-dried meals and treats, SQF-certified in 2024.
• GBI USA CO. (Sanger, CA, booth 3345) - SQF-certified maker of all-natural dog chews and treats, offering flexible-size private-label programs alongside its own Cal Premium line.
• Jones Natural Chews (Rockford, IL, booth 4242) - natural dog chews and treats maker that runs private label alongside its own Jones Natural Chews and Country Butcher brands.
• Nomad Chews (Los Angeles, CA, booth 10873EB) - premium natural dog chews from pasture-raised cattle, offering private-label manufacturing and bulk wholesale across 50-plus SKUs.
• Golden Daisy Goods (San Jose, CA, booth 6470) - runs its own manufacturing plant in Indonesia and offers private labeling for retailers alongside its own Pawfection brand.

Supplements:

• Nutrition Formulators (Miramar, FL, booth 2120) - contract manufacturer and private-label supplier founded in 1997, specializing in supplements for people and pets.
• Icelandirect (Clifton, NJ, booth 3763) - US contract manufacturer of premium human-grade pet supplements, vitamins and food toppers, with custom formulations across liquids, powders, softgels and chewables.

Hard goods, packaging and licensed brands:

• Miramar LLC / Mirapet (Cheyenne, WY, booth 8161) - Made-in-USA manufacturing offering custom molds, private-label opportunities and domestic contract production.
• EUROPEAN HOME DESIGNS LLC (BOW-WOW PET) (New York, NY, booth 8152) - manufactures licensed and private-label pet products, including AKC and ASPCA-branded lines.
• AlphaPoly Packaging (Brampton, ON, Canada, booth 4303) - flexible packaging for pet food and treats, including sustainable stand-up pouch and barrier packaging a private-label launch needs before it can ship anything.

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What a private-label conversation on this floor actually looks like

Walk up to any of these booths and the conversation runs the same shape every time, and it is worth knowing the shape before you get there. A manufacturer wants to know your minimum order quantity tolerance, your target retail price point, and whether you are bringing a formulation or need one built. SQF certification (Safe Quality Food, the audited standard several of these companies cite, like GBI USA and Muenster Pet) is the fastest credibility check on a food or treat co-packer; ask for it before you ask about price. Packaging is a separate conversation from formulation, and companies like AlphaPoly exist specifically because a lot of private-label launches stall on packaging lead times, not product development.

None of this requires you to build a national house brand. A single-store or small-chain private label does not need to compete with WholeHearted or Chewy's owned brands on volume. It needs one SKU, in a category your customers already ask about, sourced from a manufacturer who will do a small enough run to make sense for one storefront. That is precisely the size of relationship most of these 72 companies are built to serve, since almost none of them are courting national-chain-scale volume as their primary customer.

Why this is the trip, not a nice-to-have

Independent retailers cannot out-discount Chewy or Amazon, and they increasingly cannot out-assort the big chains' own private-label programs on commodity categories like litter boxes, crates and leashes either. The lane that stays open is a curated house brand: a product a customer cannot find online, priced to protect margin instead of racing it to the floor. Sourcing that normally means cold outreach, plane tickets, and months of vetting a factory you have never seen. SuperZoo puts 72 candidate manufacturers in one building for three days, already vetted enough to have paid for a booth and built out a listing. That is the actual value of the trip this year: not the new-product aisle, the sourcing aisle most buyers walk past on the way to it.

The number is 72, not 60

The number that should reframe how a store owner reads this floor is not 60, it is 72 - the manufacturing bucket plus the finished-goods brands that quietly also run a private-label arm. Most buyers will never see that second group unless they read every listing's description, because the show's own categorization puts them in with the 969 finished-product brands. That is the gap this piece exists to close: the floor's own taxonomy undercounts its private-label supply by about a fifth, and the fastest way to find the other fifth is exactly what this piece just did, reading descriptions instead of category tags.

The geographic spread matters too. Forty-four domestic manufacturers means a retailer can build a house brand without touching an overseas supply chain at all, if a Made-in-USA claim matters to their customer base. Eleven Chinese and two Pakistani manufacturers mean the volume-driven end of the spectrum, larger minimum orders, lower unit costs, is also in the building for the retailer or small chain ready to go there. Neither path requires the retailer to be Chewy-sized first.

Seventy-two house-brand partners in one building

Sixty companies on this floor are built to manufacture someone else's brand, and another twelve finished-goods exhibitors quietly do the same on the side - 72 potential house-brand partners in one building for three days, which is the cheapest and fastest sourcing trip an independent retailer will get all year.

Sources

• SuperZoo 2026 Official Exhibitor Floorplan (a2z, WPA)
• SZ2026 Exhibitor Marketplace
• SuperZoo (World Pet Association)

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