If your last order from a pet store felt more expensive than it used to, you weren't imagining it. Industry trackers reported "petflation," the pet-specific inflation rate, at 4.3 percent year over year in March 2026, up from 3.3 percent the month before and the highest reading since December 2023. That's well above the general Consumer Price Index of 3.3 percent for the same period, and pet prices overall now sit roughly 34 percent above where they were in 2019. Grocery inflation, by contrast, has actually been easing. Pet spending hasn't followed.
What's Actually Pushing Costs Up
There isn't one single villain here, which is part of why the increases feel so persistent. Feed costs for the animals that supply proteins have been volatile, and drought and flooding in major growing regions have squeezed corn, soy, and wheat yields, which raises the price of the grains and alternative starches that show up in treats and kibble alike. On top of that, packaging materials tied to aluminum, steel, and petroleum have all seen their own price swings, and a tight labor market has pushed up wages at manufacturing and processing facilities. None of these show up as a dramatic headline on their own. Stacked together, they add up to a bill that keeps creeping upward, month after month, even in categories where nothing about the product itself has changed.
Why Where Something Is Made Still Matters
There's a second, quieter factor: how traceable the supply chain is. Overseas treat manufacturing has had real safety failures worth remembering, including a 2007 contamination scandal and, between 2007 and 2015, thousands of FDA reports tied to imported jerky treats. Those cases mostly involved long, opaque supply chains where a finished treat passed through several unnamed processors before it reached a US shelf. The response from a lot of smaller treat makers has been to go the other direction: work with a small number of named farms or co-ops, keep the ingredient list short, and accept that this kind of sourcing costs more per unit than a mass-produced alternative. Our own Himalayan yak cheese chews are made this way, from a single ingredient traceable back to the herding communities that produce it, and that traceability is genuinely part of why a chew like it isn't priced like a bag of mystery-meat jerky. It's a trade-off worth naming plainly rather than dressing up as pure marketing.
What You Can Actually Do About It
A few things are within your control even while the broader market keeps climbing. Buying a larger format or a multi-pack usually lowers the cost per ounce compared to repeatedly restocking small single units, and a treat that lasts longer per session effectively lowers your cost per hour of chewing even if the sticker price looks higher. It's also worth being a little skeptical of "premium" labeling on its own. Sometimes it reflects a real, traceable ingredient story. Sometimes it's just a nicer bag around the same commodity ingredients everyone else is using. Reading the actual ingredient list, and asking where an item was made rather than just what it's called, tells you more than the word "premium" ever will.
None of this means every price increase is justified, and it doesn't mean the cheapest option is automatically the worst one either. But petflation isn't going away on its own, and understanding what's actually behind a higher price tag, rising input costs on one hand, and the real expense of a traceable supply chain on the other, makes it a lot easier to decide which increases are worth paying for.