Mexico's cat food market is USD 715.0 million in 2026 and reaches USD 1,177.7 million by 2033 — 7.39 per cent a year — on 246,000 tonnes growing to 359,993 at 5.59 per cent. Value grows faster than tonnage because spend per cat rises from USD 35.22 to USD 44.62, and that rise is a penetration statistic rather than a price: a Mexican cat eats about 12.81 kilograms of packaged food a year, roughly a third to a half of a fully packaged diet. The rest is scraps and unbranded kibble bought by the kilo at a forrajería.
Mexico City is the reason the category has a shape at all. It holds 1,784,601 of the country's 19.2 million cats — more than any other federal entity — at 1,194 cats per square kilometre against the State of Mexico's 71, and it is the only large entity where cats approach parity with dogs at 0.66 against a national 0.47. The capital is 9.29 per cent of the cats and 13.66 per cent of the value, growing at 8.93 per cent.
Two plants supply most of it. Mars's Querétaro site, at 522,000 tonnes the largest Mars pet food plant in the world, and Nestlé Purina's Silao site at 285,000 tonnes of dry plus 50,000 of wet, together represent 62.6 per cent of CONAFAB's national production estimate. Wet is the growth line — 25 per cent of value today to 31 per cent by 2033 at 10.75 per cent — and online is the growth channel, 11 to 20 per cent at 16.96 per cent.
" toc: "Three organisations account for the Mexican cat food market, and two of them account for most of the country's manufacturing capacity. That is unusual for a consumer category and it is the single most important structural fact in this report.
Mars Pet Nutrition runs the Querétaro plant it opened in 1995 and has just finished expanding: 522,000 tonnes of annual production, up 74 per cent since start-up, on fourteen new lines turning out more than 70 products under Pedigree and Whiskas. The company describes it as the largest Mars pet food plant in the world and treats Mexico as one of its five largest markets globally, with Querétaro as an export base for Latin America. The recent expansion cost MXN 3,500 million over three years. The site is FSSC 22000 certified, runs on 100 per cent renewable electricity and reuses 80 per cent of its water.
Nestlé Purina runs Silao in Guanajuato, and is spending USD 220 million (CHF 200 million) on a third wet line and a fourth dry line. That takes wet capacity up 40 per cent to about 50,000 tonnes and dry up 25 per cent to 285,000 tonnes, alongside the purchase of 48 adjacent hectares for further expansion and a new distribution centre. Mexico is 45 per cent of Purina's Latin American sales and its fourth-largest market worldwide; Nestlé has put roughly USD 800 million into Silao over a decade. The plant makes 125 dry and 45 wet varieties.
Put those two numbers against CONAFAB's national production estimate of 1,370,000 tonnes and the arithmetic is stark: 62.6 per cent of Mexico's pet food output, in tonnage terms, is attributable to two sites in two states. Treat that ratio as a ceiling test rather than an identity — installed capacity is not output, and both plants export — but the order of magnitude holds, and it explains the market's shape: a category with two very large scale players, a long tail selling through forrajerías, and almost nothing in between.
The third player is the interesting one because it competes without a plant of that scale. ADM Nutrición para Mascotas, with Minino and Ganador, holds 28 per cent of dry cat food by volume and 29 per cent by value — first place in the segment — on Nielsen and ISCAM data for mid-2026, while sitting fourth in wet at about 8 per cent. Minino is growing 12 per cent a year against a category growing around 10. The company's own read on the opportunity is not more food: it names cat litter, supplements and complementary products as the underdeveloped categories, which is a strategy for a challenger that cannot out-build Mars and Purina and has stopped trying.
Our tier-one count is three, and the competitive intensity reading is high. The reason it is not five is that the two names that would fill the list in most directories are not competitive facts. Private-label and regional feed millers supply the bulk and sack trade that the panels do not see, which is a price competitor rather than a brand competitor, and no second-tier branded player holds enough of the measured market to be named as a tier-one participant.
" value_chain_content: "Mexico's pet food value chain is a feed business wearing a consumer brand. That is not a metaphor — pet food is counted inside the same national feed production statistics as poultry and swine, and it is the smallest of the major lines at 1,370,000 tonnes of a 41.4 million tonne feed industry, or 8.6 per cent of commercial mill output.
Link one is grain. Corn and sorghum, domestic and imported, plus the oilseed meals and by-product streams that give a kibble its protein — soybean meal, canola meal, corn gluten, meat and bone meal, fish meal, DDGs. Mexico imports a large share of its yellow corn and essentially all of its soybean meal, so the cost base of a Mexican cat food brand is set in Chicago and in the exchange rate before it is set in a supermarket. ANFACA's 2024 input accounting puts 28.7 million tonnes of forage grains and 8.1 million tonnes of oilseed meals into the national feed complex; pet food's share of that is small in tonnage and disproportionately valuable in output.
Link two is extrusion and retort. Dry food is a cooking and forming process: grain and meal are ground, preconditioned with steam, extruded under pressure, dried and coated with fat and palatants. Wet food is a filling and sterilisation process: chunks or pâté into a pouch or a can, sealed, retorted. The two are different factories. That is why the capacity announcements in this market come in pairs — Purina added a wet line and a dry line at Silao, not one or the other — and why a brand that wants a wet presence without a retort line imports, which is what drives the intra-company import flows visible in Mexican pet food trade data.
Link three is packaging, and it is where the format story becomes a cost story. A 10-kilogram dry bag is a commodity: printed polypropylene, a few pesos, sold on price per kilo. A four-pouch wet multipack is a foil laminate, a carton, a shelf-ready tray and a pallet configuration, and the packaging can be a fifth of the unit cost. The migration this report forecasts from dry to wet is therefore also a migration of value into packaging, and into the materials and packaging supply chain rather than the agricultural one.
Link four is distribution, and it splits in two. The modern chain — supermarkets, convenience, specialist pet retail, online — runs through a brand's own sales force or a broker into a retailer's distribution centre. The traditional chain runs through a distributor into a forrajería, which opens a 20-kilogram sack and sells it into a plastic bag by the kilo. The second channel is cheaper for the buyer per kilo and more expensive for the brand per unit of control: no shelf position, no planogram, no price enforcement, no data.
Link five is the household. This is where the market actually transacts, and where the two channels diverge in behaviour. A supermarket buyer of cat food is buying a pet's diet; a forrajería buyer is buying an animal's calories, and switches on price. Everything in the forecast — the wet-mix shift, the online share, the premium line — depends on the second buyer becoming the first. That is a distribution question, not a formulation question, which is why the competitive battle in Mexico is being fought over listings and not over recipes.
One link is conspicuously absent, and its absence is the market's main inefficiency: there is no measured data on the forrajería channel. Nielsen and ISCAM cover what they cover. The 62 per cent of the category that sits outside their panels is managed by feel, and any supplier setting national targets from panel shares alone is over-investing in the channels that report and under-investing in the ones that do not.
" investment_activity_content: "Mexican pet food has taken in more committed capital in the last three years than in the preceding two decades, and the money is overwhelmingly going into capacity for wet food and into export capability.
Mars completed the second phase of its Querétaro expansion in 2025 at a cost of MXN 3,500 million over three years, adding fourteen production lines and taking the site to 522,000 tonnes — a 74 per cent increase in capacity since 1995 on the same footprint, which is what a plant looks like when land is fixed and throughput is not. The strategic reading is in what the plant is for. Mars describes Mexico as one of its five largest markets globally and Querétaro as an export base for Latin America, which means a meaningful share of that 522,000 tonnes is not Mexican consumption at all. The country is a manufacturing platform, not just a market.
Nestlé Purina committed USD 220 million in May 2024 to a third wet line and a fourth dry line at Silao, plus 48 hectares of adjacent land and a new distribution centre to serve national and international customers. The numbers behind it: wet capacity up 40 per cent to about 50,000 tonnes, dry up 25 per cent to 285,000 tonnes, 94 new jobs on top of roughly 600, and 75 per cent of the engineering staff on the new wet line to be women. Nestlé has invested around USD 800 million in Silao over ten years. Both sites now run on 100 per cent renewable electricity and both reuse process water — investment that is being justified on operating cost and on customer requirements rather than on regulation.
Industry-wide, CONAFAB recorded USD 434 million of announced investment across 2024 and into 2025 to expand dry and wet capacity, and the association’s own framing is that the opportunity has moved from import substitution to export: about 90 per cent of the food Mexicans feed their pets is already made in Mexico, so the growth available to a Mexican plant is external. That reframes the capacity race. Two plants built to serve 130 million Mexicans would be over-built; two plants built to serve Latin America are not.
The spending that is missing is retail and cold-chain investment in the traditional channel. A forrajería sells dry food because dry food keeps. It does not stock pouches because a pouch needs a chiller, a rotation discipline and a shelf that a 30-square-metre shop does not have. The wet segment's 10.75 per cent growth therefore requires the modern chain to grow its footprint, not just its range — which is why online, which needs no shelf at all, is the fastest-growing channel in the forecast at 16.96 per cent.
One more commitment deserves recording because it points the other way. Mars, Purina and the Mexican industry generally have expanded into a category whose volume grew less than 1.5 per cent a year in 2023 and 2024. They are not building for tonnage. They are building for a mix shift from sack kibble into branded dry and branded wet, which is a share battle inside a nearly static volume base, and the capacity is the weapon.
" technology_innovation_content: "Nothing in Mexican cat food is technologically scarce. Extrusion, retort, palatants, vitamin premix and FSSC-certified food safety management are all available, and the two largest plants in the country operate at a standard that would pass anywhere. The innovation constraint sits in three other places: formulation for a price point, packaging for a channel, and measurement for a market that is a third unmeasured.
Formulation for a price point is the real technical discipline here. A Mexican dry cat food that must retail at a price a forrajería buyer will accept is a least-cost formulation problem — how much animal protein, from which rendering stream, at what digestibility, with which palatant to keep a cat eating it. The premium segment is roughly a fifth of the cat market and it is where the functional claims live: prebiotics, probiotics, antioxidants, hairball control, urinary health, breed and size specificity. Those claims are cheap to make and expensive to substantiate, and the regulatory pathway below is what separates the two.
Packaging is the second front, and it is where the wet segment's economics are decided. A pouch line is a capital item and a laminate specification, and the difference between a 3-peso pouch and a 5-peso pouch is often the film and the fill speed rather than the food. The single-serve and multipack architecture that a flat-dwelling, small-household buyer wants is a compact, shelf-ready, e-commerce-resilient pack — which is a different design brief from the 10-kilogram sack the market is currently built around.
Measurement is the third, and it is the one an entrant should treat as an opportunity. The retail panels that both major brands buy cover roughly 38 per cent of the category. A supplier that builds its own read on the forrajería channel — through distributor sell-through, through route data, through direct observation — knows something its competitors are estimating. In a market where the growth is defined as channel conversion, the firm with the better channel map wins, and no one currently has one.
Our technology maturity reading is mature for manufacturing and growth for product and channel. The distinction matters for timing. In a manufacturing-mature market the barrier is capital, and two competitors have spent it. In a product-immature market the barrier is insight, and that is available to anyone willing to do the fieldwork.
One technology is genuinely absent rather than merely underused: cold chain at small-format retail. Wet food's ceiling in Mexico is not a formulation ceiling or a consumer-preference ceiling; it is a chiller ceiling in 30-square-metre shops. Every scenario in which wet beats 31 per cent of the category by 2033 requires that constraint to loosen, whether through ambient-stable formats, through the modern chain's expansion or through online delivery. It is the assumption to test hardest.
" market_risk_content: "Four things could make this forecast wrong, and three of them are measurement problems rather than market problems.
The denominator. Mexico’s cat population is either 19.2 million or roughly 7.3 million, depending on method. INEGI’s household survey reports the first; a peer-reviewed constant-share extrapolation on the same official data, published in Veterinaria México OA, reports the second. We have argued that the tonnage actually sold corroborates the higher figure — 246,000 tonnes across 19.2 million cats is 12.81 kilograms a cat a year, and across 7.3 million it is 33.48 kilograms, which is more than a cat eats. But that test is an inference, not an observation, and a market model built on a survey whose own secondary reporting has produced two incompatible entity rankings is a model with a soft foundation. If the lower count is right, spend per cat is two and a half times what this report says it is and the conversion story is over before it starts.
The numerator. The 20 per cent cat share of pet food is a single company’s estimate, stated against a denominator it did not define precisely. At 18.6 per cent — the share the feline category carried in 2021 retail data — the whole forecast is 7 per cent lower. That is an acceptable band for a forecast and an unacceptable one for a business case built on a single year.
Two plants. 62.6 per cent of national production tonnage attributable to Querétaro and Silao is an efficient market and a fragile one. A fire, a labour dispute, a water allocation problem in the Bajío or a rail disruption at either site is a national supply event, and there is no second tier of contract manufacturers large enough to absorb it. Both sites also export, which means a Mexican shortage is resolved by allocation inside a multinational, not by the market.
The dog-food precedent. Mexican dog food grew about 3.2 per cent in 2025 while cat food grew 6, because dog ownership skews to smaller breeds and smaller households and the category has effectively saturated its packaged penetration. Cat food is on the same path with a lag: ADM expects the moderating effect to arrive within five years as penetration rises. Our 7.39 per cent forecast is deliberately front-loaded, and its later years are doing less work than its early ones.
Two secondary risks deserve a line each. Currency: a peso above 20 to the dollar raises the cost of imported soybean meal and of imported finished product at the same time as it compresses consumers’ real income, and the 2022 inflation episode is the template for how that plays through — value growth with volume stalling. And data: the retail panels cover 38 per cent of this category, so a brand can hold a rising panel share while losing share of the animal. That is not a modelling risk, it is a management risk, and it is live today for every participant in the market.
" regulatory_landscape_content: "Two rulebooks matter, and they govern different halves of the market.
The first is federal and covers what may be sold as animal food. NOM-012-SAG/ZOO-2020, published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on 6 November 2023 and now in force, sets the specifications for production, storage, distribution, commercialisation, quality control and verification of products for animal use or consumption across the whole national territory. It sits on top of SENASICA’s product authorisation regime, which requires a technical dossier for each product and additive — formulation, manufacturing protocol, physico-chemical testing, and for some categories field trials — before a product may be registered and sold. In practice the regime is a barrier that favours scale: an established quality system, a registered plant and a compliance function are fixed costs, and they fall more lightly on a company with 70 products than on one with three.
Two consequences follow that matter commercially. Registration is per product, so a range extension is a regulatory project, not a marketing decision — which slows the premium SKU proliferation this forecast assumes. And labelling claims, particularly functional and health-adjacent claims, are constrained in ways that make the premium segment more about substantiation and less about positioning than it is in unregulated categories.
The second rulebook is local, and it is new. On 2 May 2025 the Congress of Mexico City amended the Ley de Protección y Bienestar de los Animales de la Ciudad de México to create the legal category of animal comunitario — a dog or cat living in public space or in the common areas of a community, accepted, fed, supervised and cared for by a group of people in that community — and the parallel category of persona benefactora, the person who provides for such animals. The amendment obliges benefactors to supply adequate conditions of nutrition, sterilisation, environment, health and behaviour, and requires the animals to carry identification naming at least one person in the community. It also gives the city’s animal care agency, AGATAN, an explicit mandate to support a public policy of dignified treatment, sterilisation and responsible guardianship for community animals.
That is a small legal change with a specific market consequence. Before it, the cats fed on the street by a building’s residents were a private arrangement. After it, they are a recognised class of animal with a named person responsible for feeding them, in the country’s largest cat market, at 1,194 cats per square kilometre. Community feeding is a real and largely unmeasured source of demand for inexpensive dry food, and it is now a demand with a legal identity and an administering agency. Any assessment of the low-price end of the Mexican cat food market that stops at household surveys misses it.
There is a tension worth naming between the two rulebooks. The federal regime pushes toward fewer, better-substantiated, more expensive products; the local regime creates a category of animal that must be fed cheaply, by people doing so at their own expense. A market serving both is a market with a bifurcated product architecture, and the brands that win the premium segment and the brands that supply the community-feeding segment are unlikely to be the same brands.
" faq_question_1: "How large is Mexico’s cat food market?" faq_answer_1: "USD 715.0 million in 2026, reaching USD 1,177.7 million by 2033 at 7.39 per cent a year, on volume of 246,000 tonnes growing to 359,993 at 5.59 per cent. The 2026 base is derived as 20 per cent of a USD 3,575 million Mexican pet food market, using ADM’s estimate of the feline category’s share. Retail panels see only about 38 per cent of that value — MXN 5,000 million in the twelve months to June 2026 — because a third of the category sells through forrajerías and traditional trade that no scanner covers.
" faq_question_2: "Does Mexico City really have more cats than any state?" faq_answer_2: "Yes — 1,784,601 cats, ahead of the State of Mexico’s 1,582,120, Jalisco’s 1,096,784, Veracruz’s 1,013,455 and Nuevo León’s 849,103, on INEGI’s ENBIARE 2025. Strictly, Mexico City is a federal entity rather than one of the 31 states, so the comparison is across all 32. It is also the only large entity where cats approach parity with dogs, at 0.66 cats per dog against a national 0.47 and the State of Mexico’s 0.25 — and at 1,194 cats per square kilometre it is 16.9 times as dense as the State of Mexico.
" faq_question_3: "Why is cat food growing faster than dog food in Mexico?" faq_answer_3: "Cat food grew about 6 per cent in 2025 against 3.2 per cent for dog food, on ADM’s estimates. The mechanism is household formation rather than fashion: Mexican households are getting smaller, urban dwellings are increasingly flats, and the animal a small, time-poor household can keep is a cat. Pet care takes 2.3 hours a week, which is a budget a dog consumes and a cat does not. Dog food has already run this curve and is now in a mature phase; cat food is roughly where dog food was a decade ago, and ADM expects it to begin moderating within five years as penetration rises.
" faq_question_4: "Who leads the Mexican cat food market?" faq_answer_4: "Three companies. Mars makes Pedigree and Whiskas at Querétaro — 522,000 tonnes a year, the largest Mars pet food plant in the world. Nestlé Purina makes Cat Chow and Pro Plan at Silao, with 285,000 tonnes of dry and about 50,000 of wet capacity after a USD 220 million expansion. ADM, with Minino, leads dry cat food at 28 per cent of volume and 29 per cent of value and sits fourth in wet at about 8 per cent. Mars and Purina together represent 62.6 per cent of CONAFAB’s national production estimate.
" global_schema: organization: "@id": MIWS-root#organization "@type": Organization url: "https://www.pheonixresearch.com/" name: Pheonix Research website: "@id": MIWS-root "@type": WebSite url: "https://www.pheonixresearch.com/" name: Pheonix Research api: "@id": MIWS-root#api "@type": WebAPI url: "https://www.pheonixresearch.com/" graph: node_id: MIMR-node_66d15fc graph_node_endpoint: "https://graph.pheonixresearch.com/api/v1/query/live/node/MIMR-node_66d15fc" graph_snapshot: "https://graph.pheonixresearch.com/api/v1/read/live/graph" graph_exclusions: "https://graph.pheonixresearch.com/api/v1/read/live/exclusions" graph_meta: "https://graph.pheonixresearch.com/api/v1/read/live/meta" graph_bundle: "https://graph.pheonixresearch.com/api/v1/read/live/bundle" discovery: discovery_json: "https://www.pheonixresearch.com/.well-known/pheonix-discovery.json" llms_txt: "https://www.pheonixresearch.com/llms.txt" sitemap: "https://www.pheonixresearch.com/sitemap.xml" --- # Mexico Cat Food Market Size, Share and Forecast 2026–2033 - **Market Size (Base Year):** 715.0 - **Forecast Value:** 1177.7 - **CAGR:** 7.39% - **Forecast Period:** 2027 - 2033 ## Executive Summary Mexico's cat food market is USD 715.0 million in 2026 and reaches USD 1,177.7 million by 2033 — 7.39 per cent a year — on 246,000 tonnes growing to 359,993 at 5.59 per cent. Value grows faster than tonnage because spend per cat rises from USD 35.22 to USD 44.62, and that rise is a penetration statistic rather than a price: a Mexican cat eats about 12.81 kilograms of packaged food a year, roughly a third to a half of a fully packaged diet. The rest is scraps and unbranded kibble bought by the kilo at a forrajería.Mexico City is the reason the category has a shape at all. It holds 1,784,601 of the country's 19.2 million cats — more than any other federal entity — at 1,194 cats per square kilometre against the State of Mexico's 71, and it is the only large entity where cats approach parity with dogs at 0.66 against a national 0.47. The capital is 9.29 per cent of the cats and 13.66 per cent of the value, growing at 8.93 per cent.Two plants supply most of it. Mars's Querétaro site, at 522,000 tonnes the largest Mars pet food plant in the world, and Nestlé Purina's Silao site at 285,000 tonnes of dry plus 50,000 of wet, together represent 62.6 per cent of CONAFAB's national production estimate. Wet is the growth line — 25 per cent of value today to 31 per cent by 2033 at 10.75 per cent — and online is the growth channel, 11 to 20 per cent at 16.96 per cent. ## Market Report ## What this report counts Packaged food sold for domestic cats in Mexico — dry, wet and treats — valued at retail, across five channels and five regions. It excludes non-commercial feeding from the market total: table scraps, home preparation, and loose sale out of bulk sacks. It does not exclude it from the analysis, because the size of that unrecorded volume is the single most important fact about this market and it is sized explicitly below. The base year is 2026 and the forecast runs to 2033. Values are US dollars at MXN 18.50 to the dollar, the modelling rate used throughout. ## The claim, checked Mexico City does have more cats than any other federal entity: **1,784,601**, against 1,582,120 in the State of Mexico, 1,096,784 in Jalisco, 1,013,455 in Veracruz and 849,103 in Nuevo León, on INEGI’s National Survey of Self-Reported Wellbeing (ENBIARE) 2025. One pedantic qualification and one that matters commercially. The pedantic one: Mexico City is a federal entity, not a state, so the proposition is true across the 32 federal entities rather than across the 31 states. The one that matters: summaries of the same survey in circulation disagree, and at least one widely syndicated account puts the State of Mexico first with 2.9 million cats. That figure does not reconcile with INEGI’s own entity totals. 2.9 million is close to Veracruz’s *dog* count of 2,892,581, and the ranking in which the State of Mexico leads with 6,424,814 animals is the dog ranking. INEGI’s note on the release draws the contrast itself — dogs concentrate in the State of Mexico, cats in the capital. Which is the finding. Nationally Mexico has 19.2 million cats against 41.2 million dogs, or 0.47 cats per dog. Mexico City’s ratio is 0.66. The State of Mexico’s is 0.25. | Federal entity | | Cats (2025) | | Dogs (2025) | | Cats per dog | | Cats per km² | | Mexico City | | 1,784,601 | | 2,710,483 | | 0.66 | | 1,194 | | State of Mexico | | 1,582,120 | | 6,424,814 | | 0.25 | | 71 | | Jalisco | | 1,096,784 | | 2,281,781 | | 0.48 | | — | | Veracruz | | 1,013,455 | | 2,892,581 | | 0.35 | | — | | Nuevo León | | 849,103 | | 1,563,835 | | 0.54 | | — | | **National** | | **19,200,000** | | **41,200,000** | | **0.47** | | — | Two commercial facts come out of that table. The first is density. Mexico City carries **1,194 cats per square kilometre** against the State of Mexico’s 71 — a multiple of 16.9. Density is what makes a veterinary clinic, a pet shop and a chilled wet-food shelf economic in Iztapalapa and uneconomic in Atlacomulco, and it is the reason a national cat food market in Mexico is really four regional markets and a capital. The second is composition. Mexico City is the only large entity where cats are near parity with dogs, which means it is the only large entity where a supplier can build a cat range rather than a dog range with cats attached. ## Why the cat, and why here Mexico City has the *lowest* pet-ownership rate in the country: 56.0 per cent of dwellings report at least one animal, against 73.0 per cent in Hidalgo and Tlaxcala. It has the most cats anyway. Those two facts are one fact. The capital is where Mexican households are smallest, where flats outnumber houses, and where the animal a household takes on is the one that tolerates being left alone for eleven hours. INEGI puts household pet care at 2.3 hours a week for people aged 12 and over — a time budget a dog consumes and a cat does not. The consequence for a food market is not that Mexico City buys more cat food. It is that Mexico City buys *different* cat food. A household with a garden, three children and a dog buys the largest sack that will fit in the boot. A household of one or two in a 60-square-metre flat buys a 1-kilogram bag and a four-pouch multipack, because it has nowhere to store 10 kilograms of kibble and no freezer space for a week of wet food. Same animal, four times the value density. ## The market | Measure | | 2026 | | 2033 | | CAGR 2026–2033 | | Market value (USD m) | | 715.0 | | 1,177.7 | | **+7.39%** | | Volume (tonnes) | | 246,000 | | 359,993 | | +5.59% | | Realised value per tonne (USD) | | 2,907 | | 3,271 | | +1.70% | | Cats (million) | | 20.3 | | 26.4 | | +3.82% | | Spend per cat (USD) | | 35.22 | | 44.62 | | +3.44% | Read the table in the right order. Mexico’s cat population is the fastest-moving input: 16.2 million cats in 2022 to 19.2 million in 2025 is 5.83 per cent a year, and we hold most of that momentum for another two years before tapering to 3.82 per cent across the forecast. Spend per cat then does the rest, at 3.44 per cent — 35.22 dollars a cat a year in 2026, 44.62 by 2033. Thirty-five dollars a year is the number to sit with. It is not a price point, it is a penetration statistic wearing a price. A cat eats roughly 12.81 kilograms of packaged food a year on our volume estimate — about 35 grams a day — which is a third to a half of what a fully packaged-fed cat consumes. The remainder is scraps, home food, and sack kibble bought by the kilo with no brand on it. The market is not going to grow mainly because Mexico acquires cats. It is going to grow because the cats Mexico already has move onto branded food, one household at a time. ## Two numbers that do not agree, and why that is the story The measured market is **MXN 5,000 million** in the twelve months to June 2026, growing around 10 per cent a year, on the Nielsen and ISCAM retail panels as reported by ADM’s Minino brand. Our modelled market for 2026 is about MXN 13.2 billion. The panel captures **37.8 per cent** of it. Neither number is wrong, and the gap is the most useful thing in this report. Mexican cat food is sold through a channel that no scanner reaches: the *forrajería*, the agricultural feed store on the corner of a colonia, which sells kibble out of a 20-kilogram sack into a plastic bag, by the kilo, at a price per kilo a supermarket cannot match. It is where a household that has just taken in a stray buys the first week of food, and it is where a considerable share of the country still buys all of it. That has three consequences. Growth in the measured market runs roughly twice growth in the real one, because the packaged segment is taking share from bulk rather than the category expanding. A brand’s panel share overstates its share of the animal. And the strategic prize is not a new customer — it is a customer who already spends money on cat food, converting from an unbranded sack to a branded bag. ## By format | Format | | 2026 (USD m) | | Share | | 2033 (USD m) | | Share | | CAGR | | Dry | | 500.5 | | 70.0% | | 753.7 | | 64.0% | | +6.03% | | Wet | | 178.8 | | 25.0% | | 365.1 | | 31.0% | | **+10.75%** | | Treats | | 35.8 | | 5.0% | | 58.9 | | 5.0% | | +7.39% | | **Total** | | **715.0** | | **100.0%** | | **1,177.7** | | **100.0%** | | **+7.39%** | The format mix is the forecast. Dry holds 70 per cent of the category today because dry is what a forrajería can sell by the kilo and what a household can store without refrigeration. Wet carries a quarter of the value on a small fraction of the tonnage, and it is the segment that moves when the buyer changes: a household buying a 1-kilogram bag for a flat in Narvarte is exactly the household that will pay for pouches. Wet grows at 10.75 per cent against dry’s 6.03, taking the mix from 25 to 31 per cent. This is where the adjacent categories matter more than their own size suggests — the same buyer, the same trip, the same shelf ([cat litter](https://www.pheonixresearch.com/consumer-goods-retail/pet-care-consumer-products/market-report/global-cat-litter-market/)). It is also the reason the forrajería’s decline is not a simple channel shift: pouches are a modern-retail and online product, and a wet-food-led market redistributes value away from the channel that currently holds a third of the category ([packaging](https://www.pheonixresearch.com/packaging/rigid-thermoformed-packaging/market-report/global-material-and-packaging-market-2025-2033/)). ## By channel | Channel | | 2026 (USD m) | | Share | | 2033 (USD m) | | Share | | CAGR | | Supermarkets and convenience (autoservicio) | | 271.7 | | 38.0% | | 471.1 | | 40.0% | | +8.16% | | Forrajerías and traditional trade | | 214.5 | | 30.0% | | 247.3 | | 21.0% | | +2.05% | | Specialist pet retail | | 93.0 | | 13.0% | | 141.3 | | 12.0% | | +6.17% | | Online | | 78.7 | | 11.0% | | 235.5 | | 20.0% | | **+16.96%** | | Veterinary | | 57.2 | | 8.0% | | 82.4 | | 7.0% | | +5.35% | | **Total** | | **715.0** | | **100.0%** | | **1,177.7** | | **100.0%** | | **+7.39%** | Two channels move. Online nearly triples its share, from 11 to 20 per cent, at 16.96 per cent a year — and it does so for a physical reason rather than a fashionable one: a 10-kilogram sack of kibble is heavy, the buyer is urban, and delivery solves a problem that a shop cannot. The forrajería does not disappear; it shrinks to a fifth of the market at 2.05 per cent growth, retaining the price-sensitive buyer and the household feeding four animals on a budget. ## By region | Region | | 2026 (USD m) | | Share | | 2033 (USD m) | | Share | | CAGR | | Mexico City | | 97.7 | | 13.7% | | 177.8 | | 15.1% | | +8.93% | | Rest of Centre (Edomex, Puebla, Morelos, Hidalgo, Tlaxcala) | | 231.9 | | 32.4% | | 394.5 | | 33.5% | | +7.90% | | West and Bajío | | 191.6 | | 26.8% | | 308.6 | | 26.2% | | +7.04% | | North | | 128.7 | | 18.0% | | 199.0 | | 16.9% | | +6.43% | | South and Southeast | | 65.1 | | 9.1% | | 97.7 | | 8.3% | | +5.97% | | **Total** | | **715.0** | | **100.0%** | | **1,177.7** | | **100.0%** | | **+7.39%** | Mexico City is 9.29 per cent of the cats and **13.66 per cent of the value**. Spend per cat in the capital is roughly 1.6 times the national figure, and the gap widens rather than closes: the capital grows at 8.93 per cent against 6.43 in the north and 5.97 in the south. A market whose fastest-growing region is also its richest is a market where premiumisation is doing the work, not population. ## Year by year | Year | | USD million | | Tonnes | | 2026 | | 715.0 | | 246,000 | | 2027 | | 767.8 | | 259,751 | | 2028 | | 824.6 | | 274,272 | | 2029 | | 885.5 | | 289,603 | | 2030 | | 951.0 | | 305,792 | | 2031 | | 1,021.2 | | 322,886 | | 2032 | | 1,096.7 | | 340,935 | | 2033 | | 1,177.7 | | 359,993 | ## How this market was measured The 2026 base is built top-down so that every part of it is attributable. The total Mexican pet food market is USD 3,575 million in 2026, which is CONAFAB’s reported USD 3,590 million of 2024 sales carried forward at low single-digit growth — the association puts category growth at 6 per cent in the first quarter of 2025 with value and volume within 0.2 points of each other, and ANFACA’s own 2025 figure is USD 3,290 million, so the total is a band rather than a point. The cat share of that total is **20 per cent**, ADM’s own estimate of the feline category’s weight in the market. 20 per cent of USD 3,575 million is USD 715.0 million. Two cautions attach to that multiplication. ADM states the 20 per cent against “the total pet market” rather than specifically against pet food; because food dominates that total, the difference is small, but it is a difference and it runs in one direction — if the denominator is the wider pet market, our cat figure is understated, not overstated. And the total itself has a 9 per cent spread between the two trade associations that publish it. The volume series is derived, not observed: USD 715.0 million at a realised USD 2,907 per tonne implies 246,000 tonnes. That derivation has one test worth running, and it is the reason this report is willing to forecast off a survey. INEGI’s household survey says Mexico has 19.2 million cats. A peer-reviewed extrapolation published in *Veterinaria México OA* in 2022, using a constant-share model on the same official data, puts the household cat population at **7,346,925** — a factor of two and a half apart, on the same country in the same period. Ask the volume data which is closer. 246,000 tonnes spread across 19.2 million cats is 12.81 kilograms a cat a year, or 35 grams a day: consistent with a population where roughly half the animals eat partly packaged food. Spread the same tonnage across 7.3 million cats and it is 33.48 kilograms a cat, or 92 grams a day, which is more than a four-kilogram cat eats. The food that is actually sold corroborates the higher count. That is the cross-check the forecast rests on. Segment, channel and regional splits are ours. Format shares of 70/25/5 for dry, wet and treats are the Nielsen and ISCAM readings for June 2026 as published; the 2033 mix is our judgement that wet gains six points. Cat counts are ENBIARE 2025; dog counts by entity are the same survey; entity areas are the standard territorial measurements used to produce the density column. The MXN rate of 18.50 is a modelling convention held flat, so peso values in this report are conversions and should not be read as peso forecasts. ## What would move it The forecast is one share and one population, and both can be argued with. Take the cat share of pet food at **18.6 per cent** — the share the feline category carried in 2021 retail data, before the current growth run — instead of 20, and the 2026 base is USD 665.0 million rather than 715.0, with everything downstream 7 per cent lower. That is the honest range on the denominator. Freeze the cat population instead. Hold it at 20.3 million through 2033 and let spend per cat rise exactly as modelled, and the market reaches **USD 905.8 million** — 23 per cent below the base case, entirely from one input. Anyone who believes Mexican cat ownership has peaked should move that line and accept that they are making a claim about household formation and apartment supply, not about pet food. The upside case is not a larger cat population; it is faster conversion. Every percentage point of the forrajería’s 30 per cent share that moves into branded packaging is worth roughly USD 7.2 million of measured market in the first year. That is a retail-distribution question, and it is the one this market will actually be decided on. ## Table of Contents Market Overview What this report counts The claim, checked Why the cat, and why here The market Two numbers that do not agree, and why that is the story By format By channel By region Year by year How this market was measured What would move it Competitive Landscape Value Chain Investment Activity Technology and Innovation Market Risk Regulatory Landscape ## Competitive Landscape Three organisations account for the Mexican cat food market, and two of them account for most of the country’s manufacturing capacity. That is unusual for a consumer category and it is the single most important structural fact in this report. Mars Pet Nutrition runs the Querétaro plant it opened in 1995 and has just finished expanding: 522,000 tonnes of annual production, up 74 per cent since start-up, on fourteen new lines turning out more than 70 products under Pedigree and Whiskas. The company describes it as the largest Mars pet food plant in the world and treats Mexico as one of its five largest markets globally, with Querétaro as an export base for Latin America. The recent expansion cost MXN 3,500 million over three years. The site is FSSC 22000 certified, runs on 100 per cent renewable electricity and reuses 80 per cent of its water. Nestlé Purina runs Silao in Guanajuato, and is spending USD 220 million (CHF 200 million) on a third wet line and a fourth dry line. That takes wet capacity up 40 per cent to about 50,000 tonnes and dry up 25 per cent to 285,000 tonnes, alongside the purchase of 48 adjacent hectares for further expansion and a new distribution centre. Mexico is 45 per cent of Purina’s Latin American sales and its fourth-largest market worldwide; Nestlé has put roughly USD 800 million into Silao over a decade. The plant makes 125 dry and 45 wet varieties. Put those two numbers against CONAFAB’s national production estimate of 1,370,000 tonnes and the arithmetic is stark: 62.6 per cent of Mexico’s pet food output, in tonnage terms, is attributable to two sites in two states. Treat that ratio as a ceiling test rather than an identity — installed capacity is not output, and both plants export — but the order of magnitude holds, and it explains the market’s shape: a category with two very large scale players, a long tail selling through forrajerías, and almost nothing in between. The third player is the interesting one because it competes without a plant of that scale. ADM Nutrición para Mascotas, with Minino and Ganador, holds 28 per cent of dry cat food by volume and 29 per cent by value — first place in the segment — on Nielsen and ISCAM data for mid-2026, while sitting fourth in wet at about 8 per cent. Minino is growing 12 per cent a year against a category growing around 10. The company’s own read on the opportunity is not more food: it names cat litter, supplements and complementary products as the underdeveloped categories, which is a strategy for a challenger that cannot out-build Mars and Purina and has stopped trying. Our tier-one count is three, and the competitive intensity reading is high. The reason it is not five is that the two names that would fill the list in most directories are not competitive facts. Private-label and regional feed millers supply the bulk and sack trade that the panels do not see, which is a price competitor rather than a brand competitor, and no second-tier branded player holds enough of the measured market to be named as a tier-one participant. - **Structure:** consolidated - **Tier 1 Players:** 3 - **Intensity:** high ## Value Chain Mexico’s pet food value chain is a feed business wearing a consumer brand. That is not a metaphor — pet food is counted inside the same national feed production statistics as poultry and swine, and it is the smallest of the major lines at 1,370,000 tonnes of a 41.4 million tonne feed industry, or 8.6 per cent of commercial mill output. Link one is grain. Corn and sorghum, domestic and imported, plus the oilseed meals and by-product streams that give a kibble its protein — soybean meal, canola meal, corn gluten, meat and bone meal, fish meal, DDGs. Mexico imports a large share of its yellow corn and essentially all of its soybean meal, so the cost base of a Mexican cat food brand is set in Chicago and in the exchange rate before it is set in a supermarket. ANFACA’s 2024 input accounting puts 28.7 million tonnes of forage grains and 8.1 million tonnes of oilseed meals into the national feed complex; pet food’s share of that is small in tonnage and disproportionately valuable in output. Link two is extrusion and retort. Dry food is a cooking and forming process: grain and meal are ground, preconditioned with steam, extruded under pressure, dried and coated with fat and palatants. Wet food is a filling and sterilisation process: chunks or pâté into a pouch or a can, sealed, retorted. The two are different factories. That is why the capacity announcements in this market come in pairs — Purina added a wet line and a dry line at Silao, not one or the other — and why a brand that wants a wet presence without a retort line imports, which is what drives the intra-company import flows visible in Mexican pet food trade data. Link three is packaging, and it is where the format story becomes a cost story. A 10-kilogram dry bag is a commodity: printed polypropylene, a few pesos, sold on price per kilo. A four-pouch wet multipack is a foil laminate, a carton, a shelf-ready tray and a pallet configuration, and the packaging can be a fifth of the unit cost. The migration this report forecasts from dry to wet is therefore also a migration of value into packaging, and into the materials and packaging supply chain rather than the agricultural one. Link four is distribution, and it splits in two. The modern chain — supermarkets, convenience, specialist pet retail, online — runs through a brand’s own sales force or a broker into a retailer’s distribution centre. The traditional chain runs through a distributor into a forrajería, which opens a 20-kilogram sack and sells it into a plastic bag by the kilo. The second channel is cheaper for the buyer per kilo and more expensive for the brand per unit of control: no shelf position, no planogram, no price enforcement, no data. Link five is the household. This is where the market actually transacts, and where the two channels diverge in behaviour. A supermarket buyer of cat food is buying a pet’s diet; a forrajería buyer is buying an animal’s calories, and switches on price. Everything in the forecast — the wet-mix shift, the online share, the premium line — depends on the second buyer becoming the first. That is a distribution question, not a formulation question, which is why the competitive battle in Mexico is being fought over listings and not over recipes. One link is conspicuously absent, and its absence is the market’s main inefficiency: there is no measured data on the forrajería channel. Nielsen and ISCAM cover what they cover. The 62 per cent of the category that sits outside their panels is managed by feel, and any supplier setting national targets from panel shares alone is over-investing in the channels that report and under-investing in the ones that do not. - **Model:** hybrid - **Distribution:** indirect ## Investment Activity Mexican pet food has taken in more committed capital in the last three years than in the preceding two decades, and the money is overwhelmingly going into capacity for wet food and into export capability. Mars completed the second phase of its Querétaro expansion in 2025 at a cost of MXN 3,500 million over three years, adding fourteen production lines and taking the site to 522,000 tonnes — a 74 per cent increase in capacity since 1995 on the same footprint, which is what a plant looks like when land is fixed and throughput is not. The strategic reading is in what the plant is for. Mars describes Mexico as one of its five largest markets globally and Querétaro as an export base for Latin America, which means a meaningful share of that 522,000 tonnes is not Mexican consumption at all. The country is a manufacturing platform, not just a market. Nestlé Purina committed USD 220 million in May 2024 to a third wet line and a fourth dry line at Silao, plus 48 hectares of adjacent land and a new distribution centre to serve national and international customers. The numbers behind it: wet capacity up 40 per cent to about 50,000 tonnes, dry up 25 per cent to 285,000 tonnes, 94 new jobs on top of roughly 600, and 75 per cent of the engineering staff on the new wet line to be women. Nestlé has invested around USD 800 million in Silao over ten years. Both sites now run on 100 per cent renewable electricity and both reuse process water — investment that is being justified on operating cost and on customer requirements rather than on regulation. Industry-wide, CONAFAB recorded USD 434 million of announced investment across 2024 and into 2025 to expand dry and wet capacity, and the association’s own framing is that the opportunity has moved from import substitution to export: about 90 per cent of the food Mexicans feed their pets is already made in Mexico, so the growth available to a Mexican plant is external. That reframes the capacity race. Two plants built to serve 130 million Mexicans would be over-built; two plants built to serve Latin America are not. The spending that is missing is retail and cold-chain investment in the traditional channel. A forrajería sells dry food because dry food keeps. It does not stock pouches because a pouch needs a chiller, a rotation discipline and a shelf that a 30-square-metre shop does not have. The wet segment’s 10.75 per cent growth therefore requires the modern chain to grow its footprint, not just its range — which is why online, which needs no shelf at all, is the fastest-growing channel in the forecast at 16.96 per cent. One more commitment deserves recording because it points the other way. Mars, Purina and the Mexican industry generally have expanded into a category whose volume grew less than 1.5 per cent a year in 2023 and 2024. They are not building for tonnage. They are building for a mix shift from sack kibble into branded dry and branded wet, which is a share battle inside a nearly static volume base, and the capacity is the weapon. ## Technology & Innovation Nothing in Mexican cat food is technologically scarce. Extrusion, retort, palatants, vitamin premix and FSSC-certified food safety management are all available, and the two largest plants in the country operate at a standard that would pass anywhere. The innovation constraint sits in three other places: formulation for a price point, packaging for a channel, and measurement for a market that is a third unmeasured. Formulation for a price point is the real technical discipline here. A Mexican dry cat food that must retail at a price a forrajería buyer will accept is a least-cost formulation problem — how much animal protein, from which rendering stream, at what digestibility, with which palatant to keep a cat eating it. The premium segment is roughly a fifth of the cat market and it is where the functional claims live: prebiotics, probiotics, antioxidants, hairball control, urinary health, breed and size specificity. Those claims are cheap to make and expensive to substantiate, and the regulatory pathway below is what separates the two. Packaging is the second front, and it is where the wet segment’s economics are decided. A pouch line is a capital item and a laminate specification, and the difference between a 3-peso pouch and a 5-peso pouch is often the film and the fill speed rather than the food. The single-serve and multipack architecture that a flat-dwelling, small-household buyer wants is a compact, shelf-ready, e-commerce-resilient pack — which is a different design brief from the 10-kilogram sack the market is currently built around. Measurement is the third, and it is the one an entrant should treat as an opportunity. The retail panels that both major brands buy cover roughly 38 per cent of the category. A supplier that builds its own read on the forrajería channel — through distributor sell-through, through route data, through direct observation — knows something its competitors are estimating. In a market where the growth is defined as channel conversion, the firm with the better channel map wins, and no one currently has one. Our technology maturity reading is mature for manufacturing and growth for product and channel. The distinction matters for timing. In a manufacturing-mature market the barrier is capital, and two competitors have spent it. In a product-immature market the barrier is insight, and that is available to anyone willing to do the fieldwork. One technology is genuinely absent rather than merely underused: cold chain at small-format retail. Wet food’s ceiling in Mexico is not a formulation ceiling or a consumer-preference ceiling; it is a chiller ceiling in 30-square-metre shops. Every scenario in which wet beats 31 per cent of the category by 2033 requires that constraint to loosen, whether through ambient-stable formats, through the modern chain’s expansion or through online delivery. It is the assumption to test hardest. ## Market Risk Four things could make this forecast wrong, and three of them are measurement problems rather than market problems. The denominator. Mexico’s cat population is either 19.2 million or roughly 7.3 million, depending on method. INEGI’s household survey reports the first; a peer-reviewed constant-share extrapolation on the same official data, published in Veterinaria México OA, reports the second. We have argued that the tonnage actually sold corroborates the higher figure — 246,000 tonnes across 19.2 million cats is 12.81 kilograms a cat a year, and across 7.3 million it is 33.48 kilograms, which is more than a cat eats. But that test is an inference, not an observation, and a market model built on a survey whose own secondary reporting has produced two incompatible entity rankings is a model with a soft foundation. If the lower count is right, spend per cat is two and a half times what this report says it is and the conversion story is over before it starts. The numerator. The 20 per cent cat share of pet food is a single company’s estimate, stated against a denominator it did not define precisely. At 18.6 per cent — the share the feline category carried in 2021 retail data — the whole forecast is 7 per cent lower. That is an acceptable band for a forecast and an unacceptable one for a business case built on a single year. Two plants. 62.6 per cent of national production tonnage attributable to Querétaro and Silao is an efficient market and a fragile one. A fire, a labour dispute, a water allocation problem in the Bajío or a rail disruption at either site is a national supply event, and there is no second tier of contract manufacturers large enough to absorb it. Both sites also export, which means a Mexican shortage is resolved by allocation inside a multinational, not by the market. The dog-food precedent. Mexican dog food grew about 3.2 per cent in 2025 while cat food grew 6, because dog ownership skews to smaller breeds and smaller households and the category has effectively saturated its packaged penetration. Cat food is on the same path with a lag: ADM expects the moderating effect to arrive within five years as penetration rises. Our 7.39 per cent forecast is deliberately front-loaded, and its later years are doing less work than its early ones. Two secondary risks deserve a line each. Currency: a peso above 20 to the dollar raises the cost of imported soybean meal and of imported finished product at the same time as it compresses consumers’ real income, and the 2022 inflation episode is the template for how that plays through — value growth with volume stalling. And data: the retail panels cover 38 per cent of this category, so a brand can hold a rising panel share while losing share of the animal. That is not a modelling risk, it is a management risk, and it is live today for every participant in the market. - **Overall Risk:** moderate - **Geopolitical Exposure:** moderate - **Substitution Risk:** moderate ## Regulatory Landscape Two rulebooks matter, and they govern different halves of the market. The first is federal and covers what may be sold as animal food. NOM-012-SAG/ZOO-2020, published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on 6 November 2023 and now in force, sets the specifications for production, storage, distribution, commercialisation, quality control and verification of products for animal use or consumption across the whole national territory. It sits on top of SENASICA’s product authorisation regime, which requires a technical dossier for each product and additive — formulation, manufacturing protocol, physico-chemical testing, and for some categories field trials — before a product may be registered and sold. In practice the regime is a barrier that favours scale: an established quality system, a registered plant and a compliance function are fixed costs, and they fall more lightly on a company with 70 products than on one with three. Two consequences follow that matter commercially. Registration is per product, so a range extension is a regulatory project, not a marketing decision — which slows the premium SKU proliferation this forecast assumes. And labelling claims, particularly functional and health-adjacent claims, are constrained in ways that make the premium segment more about substantiation and less about positioning than it is in unregulated categories. The second rulebook is local, and it is new. On 2 May 2025 the Congress of Mexico City amended the Ley de Protección y Bienestar de los Animales de la Ciudad de México to create the legal category of animal comunitario — a dog or cat living in public space or in the common areas of a community, accepted, fed, supervised and cared for by a group of people in that community — and the parallel category of persona benefactora, the person who provides for such animals. The amendment obliges benefactors to supply adequate conditions of nutrition, sterilisation, environment, health and behaviour, and requires the animals to carry identification naming at least one person in the community. It also gives the city’s animal care agency, AGATAN, an explicit mandate to support a public policy of dignified treatment, sterilisation and responsible guardianship for community animals. That is a small legal change with a specific market consequence. Before it, the cats fed on the street by a building’s residents were a private arrangement. After it, they are a recognised class of animal with a named person responsible for feeding them, in the country’s largest cat market, at 1,194 cats per square kilometre. Community feeding is a real and largely unmeasured source of demand for inexpensive dry food, and it is now a demand with a legal identity and an administering agency. Any assessment of the low-price end of the Mexican cat food market that stops at household surveys misses it. There is a tension worth naming between the two rulebooks. The federal regime pushes toward fewer, better-substantiated, more expensive products; the local regime creates a category of animal that must be fed cheaply, by people doing so at their own expense. A market serving both is a market with a bifurcated product architecture, and the brands that win the premium segment and the brands that supply the community-feeding segment are unlikely to be the same brands. ## Frequently Asked Questions **Q: How large is Mexico’s cat food market?** USD 715.0 million in 2026, reaching USD 1,177.7 million by 2033 at 7.39 per cent a year, on volume of 246,000 tonnes growing to 359,993 at 5.59 per cent. The 2026 base is derived as 20 per cent of a USD 3,575 million Mexican pet food market, using ADM’s estimate of the feline category’s share. Retail panels see only about 38 per cent of that value — MXN 5,000 million in the twelve months to June 2026 — because a third of the category sells through forrajerías and traditional trade that no scanner covers. **Q: Does Mexico City really have more cats than any state?** Yes — 1,784,601 cats, ahead of the State of Mexico’s 1,582,120, Jalisco’s 1,096,784, Veracruz’s 1,013,455 and Nuevo León’s 849,103, on INEGI’s ENBIARE 2025. Strictly, Mexico City is a federal entity rather than one of the 31 states, so the comparison is across all 32. It is also the only large entity where cats approach parity with dogs, at 0.66 cats per dog against a national 0.47 and the State of Mexico’s 0.25 — and at 1,194 cats per square kilometre it is 16.9 times as dense as the State of Mexico. **Q: Why is cat food growing faster than dog food in Mexico?** Cat food grew about 6 per cent in 2025 against 3.2 per cent for dog food, on ADM’s estimates. The mechanism is household formation rather than fashion: Mexican households are getting smaller, urban dwellings are increasingly flats, and the animal a small, time-poor household can keep is a cat. Pet care takes 2.3 hours a week, which is a budget a dog consumes and a cat does not. Dog food has already run this curve and is now in a mature phase; cat food is roughly where dog food was a decade ago, and ADM expects it to begin moderating within five years as penetration rises. **Q: Who leads the Mexican cat food market?** Three companies. Mars makes Pedigree and Whiskas at Querétaro — 522,000 tonnes a year, the largest Mars pet food plant in the world. Nestlé Purina makes Cat Chow and Pro Plan at Silao, with 285,000 tonnes of dry and about 50,000 of wet capacity after a USD 220 million expansion. ADM, with Minino, leads dry cat food at 28 per cent of volume and 29 per cent of value and sits fourth in wet at about 8 per cent. Mars and Purina together represent 62.6 per cent of CONAFAB’s national production estimate.