16% of Freshpet households drive 71% of sales

Freshpet’s latest customer data, through June 28, puts its buying base at 15.9M households.

Only 2.6M of them qualify as MVPs, or Most Valuable Pet Parents.

Those MVPs make up roughly 16% of Freshpet households and generate 71% of its sales. They spend an average of $515 a year, compared with $117 across the entire Freshpet customer base. That 16% is carrying tremendous weight.

For some perspective, Costco had 41.2M Executive memberships (top tier membership @ $130/yr) out of 82.9M paid memberships in its latest quarter. That’s roughly half of its paid membership base. Executive members accounted for 75% of Costco sales.

Freshpet gets almost the same sales concentration, 71%, from just 16% of households.

Not apples to apples, obviously. But it gives some sense of just how much purchasing power sits inside Freshpet’s best customer cohort.

Freshpet spent years doing what it had to do to build this category. Get fresh food into more stores, install more fridges, and make people aware that fresh dog food was even an option. Get them to try it.

It’s still doing all of that. But Freshpet’s August 2026 investor presentation now puts a different priority right on the page:

“Buy Rate Acceleration > Penetration.”

Or more simply put, how much of an individual food bowl can Freshpet own?

Freshpet had 10.2M buying households in 2022.

It has 15.9M today. That works out to roughly 12% annual growth. Its MVP population grew from 1.2M to 2.6M over the same stretch, or roughly 21% a year.

Freshpet has more than doubled its population of MVPs while growing its total customer base by about 56%.

What hasn’t doubled is how much an individual MVP spends. Average MVP buy rate moved from $437 in 2022 to $515 today. That’s only about 4% annual growth. Freshpet’s average buy rate across all households actually grew faster, from $81 to $117.

That makes sense when more of the customer base is shifting into the higher-spending group. Freshpet hasn’t suddenly taught an existing $437 customer to spend $1,000. It has created a lot more $500 customers.

MVPs went from 11% of Freshpet households in 2022 to 16% today. They are becoming the heavy-hitters of the franchise.

It would be easy to bucket this as a retention story, but Freshpet doesn’t give us enough information to do that outright.

The company does not publicly disclose first-to-second-purchase rates, 6 or 12-month household retention, annual MVP churn, average time to reach MVP status or what percentage of today’s MVPs started as lighter Freshpet buyers.

There is no public table showing a household move cleanly through:

trial → repeat → regular buyer → MVP.

A few different things could be happening at once. Existing buyers could gradually feed more Freshpet. They could also be bringing in more heavy users through club retailers like Costco, Sam’s Club and BJ’s, through e-commerce, or through its own delivery business. It could also be hanging onto established MVPs while adding new ones.

Freshpet itself uses both acquisition and retention language. Its strategy is to attract new MVPs and retain the ones it already has. So I suppose the more useful lens here isn’t retention at all. It’s share of bowl. Retention just tells you whether someone came back. Share of bowl tells you how much of the feeding routine you actually won.

A Freshpet customer can buy a roll once and never return. They can add a little fresh food alongside kibble. They can make Freshpet a meaningful chunk of dinner. Or Freshpet can become the main meal.

Same household, very different economics.

Freshpet increasingly talks about MVPs in those terms. Its investor materials describe a franchise of “increasingly main meal consumers” and explicitly call out new main-meal households as a growth priority. That gives the $515 number some context.

An average MVP spends about $1.41 a day. Freshpet estimates that one of its lower-cost options, a 6lb Select roll, would cost around $2.06 a day to fully feed a healthy 30-lb dog. However that does not mean the typical MVP dog weighs less than 30 lbs. We don’t know how big those dogs are. We don’t know how many dogs are in the household. We don’t know what percentage of their calories come from Freshpet. A small dog could eat Freshpet as its primary food all year at $515. A larger dog could generate the same spend while eating Freshpet for only part of its diet.

The $515 is really just an outcome, not a full feeding profile.

Some Freshpet customers go much deeper. Freshpet now sells direct through Freshpet Delivery, its customized meal-plan business, and its investor materials show online-only DTC MVPs spending roughly $1,800 a year.

That’s about 3.5x the average MVP and nearly $5 a day. It’s a narrow cohort, not a stand-in for the typical Freshpet buyer, but it shows how far annual spend can stretch when Freshpet owns more of the feeding routine.

The ladder starts looking less like generic “loyalty” and more like this:

occasional use OR topper → partial meal → main meal.

Every move to the right gets more valuable without Freshpet having to acquire another household.

There’s plenty of room for Freshpet to play that game. APPA’s 2026 Dog Report puts U.S. dog ownership at 71M households in 2025, or 53% of U.S. households.

More relevant here is what those owners are actually feeding.

APPA says 31% feed what its survey calls premium food, while 21% feed basic dog food and 19% purchased human-grade food. Those categories aren’t perfectly parallel. APPA’s public release doesn’t define premium or basic, while human-grade is a separate product claim that can overlap with premium.

Mixed feeding is growing too. APPA’s 2025 Dog & Cat Report found that 16% of dog owners purchased mixers or toppers in 2024, up 129% from 2018. Its newer 2026 Dog Report says Gen Z owners in particular continue to lean into mixers and toppers for customization and variety.

There’s a lot of room between trying Freshpet once and putting it in the bowl every night. That middle is where buy rate lives.

Freshpet’s overall customer base is also broader than the stereotypical picture of someone buying premium fresh food. Its current customer data puts roughly 21% of households in a lower-income group, 45% in the middle and 34% in a higher-income group.

Freshpet says growth has been particularly strong among younger consumers, higher-income households, club shoppers and online shoppers. We still don’t get that demographic breakdown specifically for MVPs.

We know exactly what an MVP spends and very little about what the average MVP household actually looks like.

Freshpet can chase more of the bowl because it has spent years putting the product almost everywhere. It now has roughly 40,000 company-owned fridges across more than 30,000 stores.

I got a very ordinary reminder of how far that network reaches recently in Cold Spring, New York. Cold Spring is a charming, quiet Hudson Valley village with about 2K residents, roughly a 75-minute train ride north of Grand Central.

I walked into the local Foodtown a couple of weeks ago and, nestled between shelves of kibble and other shelf-stable pet food, was a glowing Freshpet fridge.

Freshpet’s store locator currently lists 19 products at that small location. Foodtown isn’t one giant centrally operated chain either. The banner sits within Allegiance Retail Services, a retailer-owned cooperative serving regional supermarket operators.

Freshpet’s fridge network goes a lot deeper than Walmart, Costco and national grocery chains. Those national accounts still matter enormously. Walmart alone accounted for 25% of Freshpet’s 2025 net sales, with Costco adding another 10%. Freshpet doesn’t name the other eight, but its ten largest customer accounts collectively represented 68% of sales.

And Walmart is becoming interesting for another reason…

The Farmer’s Dog came at the retailer from the opposite direction. Since April, shoppers have been able to start a personalized fresh meal-plan subscription through Walmart.com. The transaction happens inside Walmart’s ecosystem, but The Farmer’s Dog still handles fulfillment of the fresh food.

The relationship is now moving closer to conventional e-commerce. The Farmer’s Dog has added standalone treats to Walmart.com that don’t require the meal-plan quiz or a fresh-food subscription. Shoppers can make a one-time purchase, and Walmart fulfills at least some of those treat SKUs directly. Its newest Crunchy Biscuits are part of that expansion. Nothing has moved into brick and mortar stores yet.

It’s a small but important difference. Freshpet spent years building physical retail and is layering on e-commerce and delivery. The Farmer’s Dog built the subscription first and is now giving shoppers more ways to buy individual products through a giant retailer.

Since 2019, Freshpet’s store footprint has grown about 42%, while its fridge count has grown 78%.

So the network hasn’t just gotten wider. Freshpet is putting more refrigerator capacity inside stores it already has. Around one-quarter of its locations now have a second or third fridge. That gives Freshpet room for more products, more pack sizes and more inventory without needing another retailer to say yes.

The fridge is increasingly doing double duty too. E-commerce reached 16.7% of Freshpet sales in Q2, but Freshpet said roughly 78% of its delivered sales volume still flowed through the fridge network.

In practice, a lot of Freshpet’s e-commerce business is an online grocery order picked from a Freshpet fridge at a nearby store for pickup or local delivery.

The point isn’t cheaper food. Freshpet hasn’t shown that online pricing is better. It’s purely convenience. The customer can replenish (alongside their usual grocery order) without walking into the store or even down the pet aisle, while Freshpet gets to use the local inventory it already has sitting there.

Freshpet says 70% of MVPs shop across channels.

The company breaks those channels into grocery, mass retailers like Walmart and Target, club retailers like Costco and Sam’s Club, pet specialty like Petco and PetSmart, and pure-play online through Amazon and Chewy.

Annual Freshpet buy rate rises almost every step across that list:

Grocery: ~$68
Mass: ~$132
Club: ~$162
Pet specialty: ~$225
Amazon + Chewy: ~$394

Freshpet also reports its dollar share of the dog-food category within each channel. That is not the percentage of Freshpet sales coming from each one. It’s Freshpet’s share against the rest of the dog-food category inside that channel.

Those numbers run almost in reverse:

Grocery: 23.0%
Mass: 9.6%
Club: 6.2%
Pet specialty: 2.1%
Amazon + Chewy: 0.4%

Freshpet has its strongest competitive position in the channel where its households have the lowest buy rate. And its smallest share is sitting inside some of its highest-spending channels.

Freshpet literally labels that side of the chart a “share growth opportunity.”

That doesn’t mean sending a grocery shopper to Chewy suddenly turns a $68 customer into a $394 customer.

Freshpet separately says some of its strongest growth is coming from higher-income households, Millennials, club shoppers and e-commerce. Broader grocery behavior points in a similar direction. USDA research found online grocery shoppers were more likely to be younger, more educated and in households not eligible for SNAP, with time constraints the most common reason for shopping online.

None of that proves Freshpet’s $394 online buyer is younger or wealthier. It does make convenience a plausible part of why its highest-value households show up across more channels.

As consumption grows, being easy to replenish starts to matter more. If a pet eats Freshpet once a month, one grocery store may be enough. If Freshpet becomes dinner most nights, being able to grab it at the supermarket, add it to a Walmart or H-E-B pickup order, autoship through Chewy or have it delivered directly starts to matter a lot more.

This is where Freshpet’s investor strategy and its current advertising get interesting. We looked at Freshpet’s active ads across Meta and Google.

The Meta pull produced 47 unique creative concepts after removing duplicates and relaunches. More than half were awareness-oriented. About 53% leaned heavily on the emotional relationship between owner and dog. Only 40% clearly showed or implied Freshpet as a main meal.

Those are shares of creative concepts, not shares of spend or impressions. And this isn’t mostly old creative hanging around from a previous strategy. A large chunk of Freshpet’s active brand and emotional Meta creative first appeared in late July or August. Several were relaunched in the first few days of September.

The creator push is even newer. Freshpet has active partnerships with a veterinarian, lifestyle creators and personalities including JoJo Fletcher, with most of those ads first appearing from mid-August onward.

So even while Freshpet tells investors it wants buy rate acceleration to take priority over penetration, the current ad machine is still working hard to introduce Freshpet to new people.

Google is doing something more straightforward.

In the ads we could verify, Freshpet is capturing category demand around puppies, small dogs, seniors and other life-stage or size-specific searches, then routing shoppers toward products, nearby stores and delivery.

Freshpet still needs new households. It just increasingly wants better ones too.

Further down the funnel, the messaging changes.

Freshpet Delivery is running as a distinct program across both Meta and Google. Every explicit promotional offer in the Meta sample came from the DTC delivery group. The recurring pitch is 50% off the first order, usually paired with delivery.

On Google, Freshpet’s delivery ads even run through a separate advertiser account operated by performance-marketing agency Cage Point, LLC, now operating as Mile Marker. Those ads push personalized fresh meal plans, home delivery and the same first-order offer.

Freshpet has also added a retention mechanic called The Pack. One current Meta ad tells delivery customers that as they hit order milestones, they unlock gifts like Freshpet gear and dog toys.

That is actual retention infrastructure. It’s a small part of the overall advertising mix, and Freshpet doesn’t tell us whether The Pack customers become MVPs at a higher rate. But it is a very different lever from showing another person a cute dog video.

Then there’s Walmart (again). Freshpet is running four Meta concepts that let users add the product directly to a Walmart cart. One of them puts the whole idea into five words: “From fridge to bowl in a snap.”

And perhaps the clearest main-meal ad in the dataset comes from Freshpet Custom Meals.

The testimonial opens:

“After years of kibble, I wanted something fresher for Levi.”

It walks through the switch to Freshpet delivery and ends with: “We’re never going back.”

That is a lot closer to what “buy rate acceleration” looks like in somebody’s kitchen. Replace more kibble, and win more meals. Own more of the bowl.

One other detail from the creative audit is that none of the Meta videos we reviewed clearly positioned Freshpet as a topper or mixer. When the feeding occasion was explicit, Freshpet was generally shown as the meal.

Freshpet estimates there could eventually be 10M MVP households. It has 2.6M today, or about 26% of the pool it thinks it can reach.

Freshpet obviously isn’t going to hand competitors the playbook for turning a light buyer into a $515 household. We don’t need that playbook to see what the company is building around.

Since 2022, MVP households have more than doubled and grown nearly twice as fast as Freshpet’s total customer base. Buy rate now gets top billing alongside penetration. More fridge capacity is going into existing stores. E-commerce and delivery are making replenishment easier. And Freshpet keeps pushing toward main-meal use, where the same household can become much more valuable without another acquisition.

So the takeaway isn’t that retention suddenly matters more than acquisition.

It’s to ask what happens after acquisition.

For a food brand, what moves someone from trial to repeat, then from repeat to a larger share of meals? And once that happens, how ridiculously easy are you making it for them to buy again?

Freshpet spent years winning the first bowl. The next leg is about winning more of the next 364.