U.S. Pet Market Focus: Mass Market Channel Shoppers

The pet product shoe is officially on the other retail foot. After years of pet specialty superstores outperforming supermarkets and discount stores, in today’s humanized and pet parent-ized pet industry, the mass channels are now in the cat-bird’s seat. Two key developments, both intertwined with e-commerce, help explain this switch. First, mass retailers now feature very premiumized pet foods, including on-trend mass-market brands such as Rachel Ray Nutrish and Mars’ CRAVE; channel-straddling Freshpet, whose superpremium refrigerated fresh pet food requires heavy foot traffic and is big in Walmart; and formerly pet-specialty-exclusive brands such as Blue Buffalo and Nutro. Secondly, while e-commerce has grown the overall market and not merely cannibalized, there has nonetheless been an element of robbing Pet Stores to pay Paul as pet superstores take most of the e-commerce hit.

Focusing on the new landscape of competition and interplay between brick-and-mortar channels and the Internet, U.S. Pet Market Focus: Mass Market Shoppers examines dog- or cat-owner shopper dynamics in the following retail sectors:

• Supermarkets
• Discount stores (discount mass merchandisers/supercenters such as Walmart or Target)
• Warehouse clubs (Costco, Sam’s Club, and BJ’s Wholesale Club).

The analysis provided in U.S. Pet Market Focus: Mass Market Shoppers covers pet ownership patterns, demographics, and cross-channel shopping. Included are current (2019) and forecasted (2020 and 2024) dollar market sizes and market shares for each of these retail sectors, along with historically trended shopper shares. Coverage of pet owner shopping patterns are set in the context of current trends and future directions for retailing, drawing on Packaged Facts’ U.S. Pet Market Outlook 2019-2020 and overall catalog of pet and veterinary industry market reports.

The shopper data presented in U.S. Pet Market Focus: Mass Market Shoppers draw on two main sources: Simmons Research Summer 2019 booklet-based consumer surveys (with a sample size of nearly 23,000) and Packaged Facts’ online surveys of pet owners (with a sample size of 2,000). This data-rich report contains numerous tables, figures, and images corresponding to these key pet retailing channels and competitors.