In the first half of 2020, with the COVID sky coming down, who would have thought the U.S. pet industry would have its best year ever? During the “year of the pandemic,” the business as a whole grew by more than $9 billion, with the annual percentage gain edging over 9 percent compared with the 4 percent to 6 percent per-year growth of previous decades. In Packaged Facts’ February 2021 Survey of Pet Owners, across all four pet industry product and service sectors, a higher—and in most cases dramatically higher—percentage of pet owners reported spending more on their pets in 2020 as opposed to less, with 35 percent increasing spending and just 7 percent decreasing spending. The gap was widest for pet food, at 29 percent increasing versus 5 percent decreasing, and impressive as well for non-food pet supplies (22 percent versus 8 percent) and veterinary services (25 percent versus 10 percent). Even non-medical pet services, hard hit by the travel bust and at-home sheltering, saw slightly more pet owners spending more (14 percent) rather than less (11 percent).
The banner year has been widely and rightly attributed to the behaviors of homebound humans, who took in millions of dogs, cats, and other animals during the health crisis and allocated more time and money to pet health and pampering as a function of being in closer contact with…
