What changed on the SuperZoo floor

SuperZoo opens this morning at Mandalay Bay, a show built around getting hot new products in front of buyers. WPA markets it as a gathering of more than 10,000 pre-qualified buyers across pet specialty, grocery, mass, club, online retail and other channels.

We pulled the official exhibitor directories for this year's show and last year's and matched the companies across both. From a distance, very little changed. SuperZoo had 1,230 exhibitors in 2025 and 1,195 as of August 10th, a decline of just 35 companies, or 2.8%.

Underneath that small net change, 573 of last year's exhibitors did not return and 538 arrived. Only 657 names appear on both lists, putting measured retention at 53.4%.

Across the entire show, SuperZoo replaced 94% of the exhibitors it lost. At the category level, almost nothing looks average.

Cat food and treats replaced 125% of its departures. Technology replaced 108%. Dog food and treats came close to a full refill at 89%. Move into hardgoods and services and the numbers fall quickly. Cat products replaced 77% of what they lost, dog products 73%, gifts 66%, day care and spa 63%, grooming 54%, training 53% and boarding 52%.

Because exhibitors can select more than one category, those rows should not be added together. Look at the broader groups with duplicate companies removed and the difference remains.

Consumables plus technology replaced 97% of their departures. Hardgoods plus services replaced 78%. Services alone replaced 52%, little more than half of what they lost.

There are several possible reasons for that gap, and the directory cannot tell us which matters most. But the economics of physical product discovery have changed. Amazon, Chewy and other large marketplaces give brands distribution and discovery channels that do not require putting a booth on a convention floor. For an established bed, toy, training or grooming brand already reaching buyers through distributors, marketplaces and direct relationships, another trade-show investment may produce diminishing returns.

That does not make the physical show obsolete. Quite the opposite for brands that need retail distribution. SuperZoo is specifically selling exhibitors on access to thousands of buyers and the opportunity to generate leads and put new products in front of retailers. A buyer being able to touch a product, meet its founder and discover something they were not searching for online is still a different function from digital distribution.

The split may simply tell us where companies currently see the most reason to spend for that access. This year, food and technology companies refilled their departures much more aggressively than most hardgoods and service categories.

The cat numbers sharpen that distinction. Cat food and treats lost 63 exhibitors and added 79, replacing 125% of what departed. That was the strongest replacement rate among the larger categories we measured. Cat products lost 184 and added 141, a 77% refill that looks much closer to dog hardgoods than cat food.

Dog food moved in the other direction but still came close to refilling, with 108 arrivals against 121 departures for an 89% replacement rate. Dog products replaced 73%.

The cat correction is happening in the bowl, not the aisle.

There is still a large species imbalance across the floor. Among exhibitors identifying with either cats or dogs, 36 identify with cats but not dogs, 227 with dogs but not cats, and 475 with both. Narrow the comparison to food and treats and only 13 exhibitors identify with cat food without also identifying with dog food.

So this is not suddenly a cat-first trade show. It is a floor where incoming food exhibitors are disproportionately replenishing the cat side of the business.

SuperZoo and Global Pet Expo are the Tyson & Holyfield of US pet trad shows, the two heavyweights that dominate conference conversation. Their floors, however, are surprisingly different.

We counted 1,079 exhibitors at Global Pet Expo this year after removing non-exhibitor entries from its official app list. Only 421 companies appear at both Global Pet Expo and SuperZoo, equal to 39% of the Global Pet Expo floor and 35% of SuperZoo.

That matters when looking at companies that do not return to Las Vegas. Of the SuperZoo 2025 exhibitors missing this year, 15.9% appeared at Global Pet Expo. Food companies were somewhat more likely to show up there. Roughly 1 in 4 departed dog food and cat food exhibitors appeared at Global Pet Expo, compared with about 1 in 7 across services.

Some familiar names illustrate the movement. KONG and Jolly Pets are absent from this year's SuperZoo directory but exhibited at Global Pet Expo. Andis, Artero, Utsumi and Groomers Helper are absent from SuperZoo but exhibited at Interzoo in Nuremberg in May.

Interzoo itself reported around 2,400 exhibitors from some 70 countries this year, alongside roughly 39,000 trade visitors. It was the largest edition in the show's history.

The three events compete for overlapping companies, budgets and calendars, but they are not interchangeable floors.

Grooming produces what initially looks like a contradiction between our count and John Gibbons' independent tracking of the show, but it isn't. We are measuring two different things.

Gibbons counts the companies physically located inside the Groomers section of the floor. We count every exhibitor that selected a grooming category at registration regardless of where its booth is located. Some grooming suppliers are still exhibiting but are no longer concentrated inside the designated grooming neighborhood.

Gibbons counted the Groomers section falling from 80 exhibitors in 2025 to 35 this year, a 56% decline. Across the entire floor, our count of companies identifying with grooming fell from 205 to 159, or 22%.

The grooming neighborhood therefore emptied roughly twice as fast as the population of companies selling grooming products. The companies have thinned out, but their clustering has thinned much faster.

That also makes GROOM'D part of the conversation. The standalone grooming show gives companies in the category another event built specifically around their buyer and professional audience. But it cannot explain the broader services pattern by itself. Boarding, training and day care also posted some of the weakest replacement rates on the SuperZoo floor without an equivalent dedicated show pulling those categories away.

Directory comparisons get messy when ownership changes. Ryan's Pet Supplies is a good example. Search for Ryan's on the 2026 floor and it looks like a departure. It is actually represented inside parent Nexus Brands Group at booth 6156. Other brands under Nexus, including Chris Christensen, Nature's Specialties and iGroom, retain separate presences.

The same mechanism can work in other directions as companies buy brands, consolidate booths or retire names. It is one reason these numbers are better read as movement in exhibitor identities than a literal count of businesses entering and exiting the industry.

M&A has been active this year, but the category mix does not provide a clean explanation for what happened on this floor. Capstone Partners' pet industry M&A research counted 18 transactions through April 10. Our own tracking extends through the summer and catches additional transactions, with some overlap between the two datasets giving us a current total of 38 pet deals made through early August.

The combined picture remains weighted toward food, veterinary services, technology, distribution and other areas rather than a broad hardgoods consolidation wave. Hardgoods activity has started to surface, though.

H.I.G. Capital took majority ownership of Outward Hound on July 9, adding capital behind a portfolio that includes Outward Hound, Best Friends by Sheri, Catstages, Nina Ottosson and Planet Dog. Central Garden & Pet acquired a stake in TRIXIE later in July. The Farmer's Dog acquired Woof a week ago. Paw Prosper had already acquired Blue-9 Pet Products in February.

Those deals are notable because they put capital behind physical pet products even as this year's hardgoods exhibitor base refilled more slowly. They also landed too recently to explain much of the 2026 floor. The more interesting question is whether that investment creates even a small ripple in the hardgoods side of next year's show as consumables continues to saturate.

Trade-show presence is expensive before a company sells a single unit.

WPA's 2025 prospectus priced booth space at $32 per square foot for members and $37 for non-members, with additional charges for corners and island configurations. A basic 10-by-20 non-member booth therefore started at $7,400 before carpet, furniture, electrical, freight, material handling, travel, hotels and labor.

Those additional costs matter. Material handling costs have risen since 2022, while Teamsters Local 631 ratified a new Las Vegas convention contract this year that increased wages and benefits. Dewar Gaines of Gaines Family Farmstead said his brand's all-in cost to exhibit at SuperZoo last year exceeded $50,000 before flights, hotels and food.

That is one exhibitor, not an industry benchmark. But it illustrates the hurdle. A company deciding whether to return is not comparing a booth fee against zero. It is comparing the total cost and expected return of several days in Las Vegas against every other place that money could go.

For an emerging food brand trying to meet distributors and independent retailers, that calculation may still look attractive. For an established hardgoods company with mature wholesale relationships and large digital channels, it may look different. The category data is consistent with that possibility, but it cannot prove it.

It would be easy to look at 573 departures and conclude that something is wrong with the show. The 538 arrivals argue against that simple take.

SuperZoo has almost completely replenished the number of exhibitors it lost. The more interesting change is where that replenishment occurred. Food came back. Technology came back. Cat food more than came back. Hardgoods and services generally did not replace departures at the same rate.

The result is a floor only 2.8% smaller than last year's but meaningfully different underneath. Some of that is normal trade-show churn. Some reflects companies choosing between Las Vegas, Orlando, Nuremberg and category-specific events. Some may reflect consolidation. And some may reflect a distribution environment where being physically present at a major trade show carries a different return depending on what you sell.

One year cannot tell us which of those forces will persist. If we run the same analysis next August and we will have something much more useful than a snapshot.

For everyone walking the floor this week, enjoy the show and let us know what you're seeing!