There’s a fresh wave of pet-food M&A, and the subscription data shows what’s actually worth the premium

Pet is pulling in serious buyers again. There’s a fresh wave of acquisitions moving through the category, from fresh food to supplements, and the buyers doing these deals don’t act on a hunch. When someone pays up for a pet brand today, they’re betting on what will still be generating revenue years from now.

You don’t have to be selling your company to care about that bet. The traits that make a pet brand worth buying are the same ones that make it worth building: repeat revenue that’s predictable and holds up over time. So we looked at subscription data across thousands of pet brands to find where that staying power actually comes from.

Two things stood out in the data. One is an advantage most operators underrate. The other is a retention gap that’s worth knowing before you build or buy in this category.

The advantage is in the reorder

Let’s do some quick math. Over a year, the average subscriber to pet food or supplements places about 5.4 orders. The average subscriber to a durable product, a toy, a bowl, a bed, places about 3.7.

That looks like a small gap until you annualize it: it’s roughly 45% more orders from the same subscriber, every single year. A food subscriber isn’t a touch more valuable than a durables subscriber. They’re worth close to half again as much in repeat orders, year after year. That’s where the long-term value of a pet subscription lives.

The behavior driving that gap isn’t complicated. Pet owners don’t gamble on their animal going hungry, food has to show up on a schedule, no negotiating. A toy or a bed isn’t like that: it’s a nice-to-have with a lifecycle measured in years, not weeks. Consumables bring the customer back on a schedule, and every reorder is revenue you don’t have to win twice.

A single sale is a one-time number. A subscriber who reorders five times a year behaves more like an annuity, and a base of subscribers like that is the kind of predictable revenue that builds long-term company value. It’s why the consumable end of pet, the food and the supplements, is where buyers keep putting their money, and why it’s the stronger place to build a subscription.

One nuance worth stating plainly: it isn’t that food subscribers are more loyal than durables subscribers on any given renewal. Cycle to cycle, the two hold on at about the same rate. Food and supplements simply come up for reorder far more often, so that loyalty gets many more chances to pay off.

Pet is one of subscription’s steadier categories

The second pattern is about consistency. Across pet brands on our platform, about 76% of subscriptions renew, and that figure holds for the average brand, not just the giants at the top.

Not every category behaves that way. In food and beverage, a handful of very large brands can pull up the average and make subscriptions look healthier than they’d be for an ordinary store. Pet holds up more evenly, and it’s worth understanding why.

Most of it comes down to the relationship. People don’t experiment with their pet’s food the way they graze across snack or drink brands. Once a dog or cat does well on a formula, the owner stays put, because switching feels like a risk to something they love. That loyalty isn’t reserved for the household names. It shows up for the average pet brand too, which means the subscription model is dependable here early, not something that only starts working once you’re at scale.

If you sell for cats, read this twice

Now, cat lovers, brace yourselves.

Among pet food and supplement brands, dog subscriptions hold onto their customers better than cat subscriptions do. The gap is big enough to plan around: cat subscriptions churn at about 17% while dogs sit closer to 14%, and dogs renew at 78% versus cat’s 76%.

Here’s what that means day to day. A cat brand is running with a leakier funnel. You have to work harder to hold onto every subscriber you win, because more of them slip away each cycle. So what does that mean for your business? The dollars a cat brand would pour into chasing new subscribers usually go further protecting the ones it already has.

That’s where retention earns its keep. A few levers do most of the work:

Get people to their next order. A small nudge, a credit or a discount on the next shipment, keeps a subscriber in the routine long enough for the habit to hold.

Catch cancellations as they happen. Cancellation-prevention flows that offer a pause, a skip, or a product swap the moment someone clicks cancel recover a meaningful chunk of would-be churn.

Win back the ones who go. A lapsed subscriber already knows and trusts you, so a well-timed offer costs far less than a cold acquisition.

None of this is cat-specific. But if you sell to cats, it isn’t optional.

If you’re building a pet brand, here’s the playbook

Lean into what gets reordered. Food and supplements are where subscription revenue holds and grows, which is exactly why buyers chase them. Durables can round out a catalog, but they won’t carry a subscription business on their own.

And if you’re on the cat side of pet, treat retention as the main event from day one. The pets category is one of the more dependable places to build a subscription. The pet brands built to last are the ones that keep getting reordered, and they hold onto the customers they earn. That, in a sentence, is pet food subscription retention: winning the reorder and keeping the customer.

The short version

People reorder pet food and supplements about 45% more than durables, so that’s where subscription value is built. Pet is also one of the steadier categories to build in. The catch: cat subscriptions are harder to keep than dog ones, so if you sell for cats, put your energy into retention before acquisition.

About the data

This covers pet subscriptions across the Recharge platform over the trailing 12 months (July 2025 to June 2026). Reorder frequency is the number of orders the average subscriber places in that window. The consumable-versus-durable and cat-versus-dog splits are grouped by product keywords and should be read as directional. Renewal and churn figures are aggregate at the category level.