Freeze-dried stopped growing

For years, freeze-dried was one of the fastest-growing corners of the premium aisle. In 2025, that growth stopped.

According to Circana retail data compiled by Pet Food Processing, sales sat flat at roughly $304M in 2025, while the fresh food in the cooler a few feet away grew almost 18 percent to about $1.6B. The premium buyer did not leave the category. They changed aisles.

That migration makes it easy to overlook what is happening on the freeze-dried shelf itself. Line up nine of the bigger brands fighting over it and they are genuinely hard to tell apart.

Same raw-nutrition language, same earthy palette, same price that makes you blink at the shelf tag. Pull their public data, though, and the resemblance falls apart.

One runs like a content studio. One is really a subscription company. One has been around longer than most of its customers. They share a shelf, not a strategy.

Over the past few months we built competitive profiles on nine of the category's bigger freeze-dried and air-dried brands, compiling thousands of public data points across advertising, reviews, pricing, hiring, packaging, and more.

We are keeping the brand-by-brand findings in the vault for now. But the pattern doesn't require naming anyone. These companies buy customers differently, carry different operational risks, and quietly disagree about what they are even selling.

They arrived at the same premium price from completely different directions, and they defend it in completely different ways. Underneath a uniform front there are five or six separate businesses, and the floor beneath all of them is shifting at once.

It would be easy to read those numbers as a category in decline. That is the wrong conclusion.

Fresh food won the growth, but it won it carrying real baggage. Fresh has to live in the refrigerator or the freezer, has to be eaten within a few days of opening, and asks the owner to manage thawing, portioning, and the slow creep of spoilage.

PetMD's own rundown of fresh dog food lists that short shelf life and the freezer-space demand right next to the upsides.

That is the opening freeze-dried still has. It delivers most of the same raw, minimally processed story in a bag that lives in the pantry and scoops like kibble.

Plenty of fresh buyers chose the format for the nutrition, not for the cold-chain hassle, and those are exactly the people a convenient, shelf-stable alternative can pull back. The growth number says fresh is ahead today. It does not say the freeze-dried brands are out of moves.

So the real tension is not decline. It is positioning. Five smart playbooks, one shelf under pressure, and a clock running in the background.

The market underneath all of this is still enormous. The American Pet Products Association put total US pet spending at $158B in 2025 and expects $165B in 2026, with food and treats the largest single slice at $68.3B.

You already know the humanization story that built this category, so we will spare you the lecture. The point worth making is that the instinct has held up under real pressure. Even through tighter budgets, owners keep protecting pet food and health spending before almost anything else, and the buyers driving the next wave skew young. Gen Z owners are now the fastest-growing slice of the market, which says more about where the category is heading than any tidy trend line about pets as family.

What is newer, and less comfortable, is the ceiling. The willingness to spend is real, but in freeze-dried it runs out early. Fed as a full diet, the format can cost 10 to 15x as much per pound as premium kibble. That gap is the central fact of the category, and every one of the five playbooks below is, in its own way, an attempt to manage it.

The clearest place to watch the brands diverge is in how they run paid media, because advertising habits are hard to fake and expensive to maintain.

Inside one shelf we found two opposite philosophies running at the same time. One group treats creative like fashion. They rotate their entire ad set in waves, refreshing constantly, rarely letting a single ad live more than a month before it gets swapped out. Another group treats creative like an annuity.

They find an ad that converts and let it run for the better part of a year, quietly testing new material around the edges while the proven winner keeps earning. A third group barely runs new creative at all, leaning on an automated product catalog to do the heavy lifting.

These are not cosmetic differences. The wave-refresh approach implies a real creative team, a real production budget, and a bet that novelty drives performance. The evergreen approach implies maturity, patience, and enough data to know exactly what works.

Two brands can spend similar dollars and still be running completely different organizations. One is built like a content studio, treating a constant supply of fresh creative as the thing that moves product. The other runs like a direct-response operation, optimizing hard around the handful of ads that already convert. Both are deliberate strategies, not accidents of taste.

This is worth watching closely because the audience is migrating to channels where the creative is the distribution. Younger pet owners increasingly find and buy food through social platforms, with pet products among the faster-growing categories on TikTok Shop.

The channel is now real enough to mint winners outside the legacy players. Premium dog brand King Lou Pets just picked up a Top Seller award from TikTok Shop, with founder Clayton Fournie framing it as proof that a brand built on quality and education can still reach scale there.

In a feed-first world, the brand that can keep making things people actually want to watch has a structural edge over the brand sitting on one good ad, no matter how well that ad once performed.

Here is a distinction the marketing flattens and the data refuses to. Freeze-dried and air-dried are not two flavors of the same thing. They are two different physical products made by two different processes.

Freeze-drying pulls moisture out under vacuum without real heat, which preserves a remarkable share of the original nutrients and leaves a light, crumbly piece that many dogs find intensely palatable.

Air-drying uses gentle warmth over time, closer to a slow oven, and produces a denser, chewier, jerky-like result with some nutrient trade-off.

On a shelf they look like cousins. In a bowl they behave like strangers.

That difference shows up in the reviews, loudly. Mine enough of them and a pattern emerges. Freeze-dried flagship products draw a recurring cluster of complaints about hardness, about nuggets that won't break apart, about pieces a dog struggles to chew. Air-dried products barely register the same friction. The processing method, in other words, quietly pre-loads each brand's most common customer complaint before a single bag ships. Buyers feel that difference even when the packaging works hard to erase it.

For an operator, it is a reminder that "premium" describes a price, not an experience, and the experience is where loyalty actually gets won or lost.

This is the finding that surprised us most, and it cuts straight to the difference between two kinds of company hiding on the same shelf.

Subscription is the dream model in pet food, for good reason. Recurring revenue smooths the business and compounds over time. Chewy built an empire on it. In its fiscal 2025 results filed with the SEC, Autoship reached 84% of total net sales in the fourth quarter. The direct-to-consumer fresh brand The Farmer's Dog rode the same logic to more than a billion dollars in annualized revenue. When a buyer signs up for a recurring bag, the math gets beautiful.

But that model carries a tax, and it is larger than most operators admit. When we sorted the critical reviews for the subscription-native brands in our set, nearly half of the one, two, and three star reviews had nothing to do with the food.

They were about billing.

Surprise charges, deliveries that kept arriving after a cancellation, cancellation flows that felt engineered to wear people down. Two different brands landed at almost exactly the same number, with roughly 45% of their worst reviews aimed at the mechanics of the subscription rather than the product inside the box.

Product-first brands simply do not carry this. Their unhappy customers are unhappy about the food. The subscription brands have effectively swapped one risk for another. They get the recurring revenue, and in exchange a large share of their public reputation gets shaped by their dunning logic and their cancellation experience.

The broader benchmark data backs this up. Subscription analysts consistently find that much of the churn comes from friction rather than genuine dissatisfaction, and that a striking share of cancellations cluster in the first 90 days.

The lesson for the category is almost counterintuitive. For these brands, retention is less a product problem than a billing-experience problem. The moat and the leak turn out to be the same wall.

Every brand in this category is selling a premium, and every brand is quietly paying for it. When we looked at sentiment across the nine, value-for-money ran negative almost everywhere, even for products customers clearly adored on taste and quality. Price resistance is not a weakness specific to one struggling brand. It is the tax the entire aisle pays just to exist.

For a while, premiumization felt like a one-way escalator. That story is getting more complicated. Private-label pet food, the store brands and value lines, grew unit sales 7.1% in 2025 while national brands managed just 0.3%, and now make up around 11% of the market. More shoppers believe the cheaper option is good enough, and the ones who trade down and watch their dog do just fine tend not to trade back up.

That leaves the premium brands in a vise.

The fresh category is pulling the high end of their buyers up and out, while credible value brands pull the price-sensitive end down and away. The brands that survive the squeeze will not be the ones that pretended price resistance didn't exist. They will be the ones that gave buyers a believable way to participate at a lower commitment, usually by repositioning the expensive food as a topper or a mixer rather than the whole bowl. That reframing is not a marketing trick. It is the unit economics of the category trying to find a price point people will actually keep paying.

If you want to know what a competitor is about to do, stop reading their press releases and start reading their careers page. Hiring is the cheapest forward-looking signal in the business, and across the nine brands the org charts told very different stories.

One brand was clearly ramping plant capacity, stacking up food-safety and quality-control roles in a pattern that lined up neatly with a rise in its review volume, a quiet tell that production was scaling to meet real demand.

Another, an international entrant, was standing up a US marketing organization from essentially nothing, posting its first senior marketing leaders in the country. A third, a direct-to-consumer brand, churned through a wave of director-level openings that filled and then closed, the signature of a turnaround cycle running its course.

And then there is the sheer range of operating models the hiring exposes. One of them is Badlands Ranch founded by the actor Katherine Heigl, built less like a traditional manufacturer and more like a celebrity-led, asset-light operation. Sitting a few feet away on the same shelf you might find a decades-old family manufacturer, or a venture-backed, software-style startup that happens to sell food.

They look like competitors. They are barely the same kind of company. Benchmark them as one group and you will misread all of them.

Not every brand on this shelf carries the same risk, and that unevenness is the point. The raw and minimally processed players, the ones whose entire pitch is uncooked nutrition, sit on a fault line the heat-treated brands do not. Freeze-drying and low-heat air-drying preserve food. They do not sterilize it the way cooking or high-pressure processing can.

The recall record keeps proving the point. Raaw Energy expanded a listeria recall to more than 180 lots and halted production this spring, and federal regulators have spent the past year pressing raw makers to treat bird flu as a known hazard. The American Veterinary Medical Association still keeps a standing policy that discourages raw and undercooked diets outright.

None of this is a reason to panic, and the sharper raw brands are already getting ahead of it by talking openly about pathogen testing and validated kill steps. But it is a real divide buyers are only starting to notice, and it runs right through the middle of this lineup. A brand that can prove its safety process has a story worth telling. A brand that stays quiet is one bad headline away from a rough month.

Step back and the freeze-dried and air-dried shelf resolves into something more interesting than a single contest. These brands diverge on how they buy attention, how their food feels in the bowl, how they handle the money, how they defend their price, and what their hiring quietly says about next year. They are not nine versions of one company. They are separate businesses that happen to share a price.

They are also running against a clock. Fresh keeps pulling buyers in one direction while value brands pull from the other. Recalls and safety questions keep testing the raw end of the lineup. And capital is paying attention.

The acquisition of fresh brand Ollie for more than $600M is a clear sign of where the smart money sees the premium dollar heading. Pressure like that tends to reward clarity and punish brands stuck in the muddy middle.

The brands that win the next few years will not be the ones with the prettiest bag. They will be the ones that understand which of these games they are actually playing, and that stop trying to win all five at once.

Everything above is the aggregate view, the patterns without the brand names attached. The full picture, with the names filled in, lives in a competitive directory we are building for this category. It tracks nine of the bigger freeze-dried and air-dried brands across advertising, reviews, pricing, hiring, and more, and we refresh it monthly.

We are starting here and expanding from there, into more brands and adjacent categories, fresh among them.

This piece only skimmed a few of those signals.

The directory carries the full version for each brand. Who owns it, what they have raised, and the timeline of how the company got to where it is. The ingredient decks, including the quiet reformulations that tend to show up before any announcement does. The paid creative and how it changes over time. The split between what a brand is winning organically and what it is propping up with ad spend. Where reviews are trending and the specific complaints moving the number. How pricing shifts across retailers. What the hiring pipeline says about the next couple of quarters.

The point is to see the whole operating picture for a competitor in one place, not stitch it together yourself across ten tabs.

We are opening a limited early-access group and, for now, mostly gauging interest. If you operate in this category, invest in it, or sell into it, and you want a look at the named version of this analysis, add your name to the early-access list. 👈

We cannot promise everyone a spot right away, but we read every signup and we will be in touch as we open access.