China is one of the few consumer markets that still grows every year, and the pet category is the clearest example. According to the 2026 China Pet Industry White Paper released in January 2026, urban dog and cat spending reached RMB 312.6 billion in 2025, up 4.1% over the previous year. The urban pet population hit 126 million animals: 72.89 million cats and 53.43 million dogs. The same report puts the market at RMB 405 billion by 2028. For comparison, back in 2017 the whole industry was worth RMB 167.8 billion, and Statista data on the Chinese pet market shows how steep that climb has been.
Pet ownership is no longer a luxury reserved for the rich. It is a normal urban household expense, and the money follows.
Written by Olivier Verot, founder of GMA. I have been based in Shanghai since 2012 and my team has taken pet food, pet supplement and pet accessory brands into Tmall Global, Douyin and Xiaohongshu, including the GACC paperwork most exporters discover too late.
Overview of the market
In China, owning a pet signals financial independence for some and provides companionship for others. The buyer is young. The 2026 white paper puts post-90s owners at 42.7% of the total, post-00s at 26.3% and post-80s at 24.5%. That contradicts the old idea that only retired people with spare time keep animals. Social media has done the rest: influencers turned pet ownership into an enviable lifestyle, and the pet became a content subject as much as an animal.
| Indicator (urban China, 2025) | Figure | Change vs 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Dog and cat consumer market | RMB 312.6 billion | +4.1% |
| Cat market | RMB 152.0 billion | +5.2% |
| Dog market | RMB 160.6 billion | +3.2% |
| Cats owned | 72.89 million | +1.9% |
| Dogs owned | 53.43 million | +1.6% |
| Annual spend per dog | RMB 3,006 | +1.5% |
| Annual spend per cat | RMB 2,085 | +3.2% |
| Share of spend going to food | 53.7% | stable |
| 2028 market forecast | RMB 405 billion | – |
Read the table twice. Animal numbers grow slowly now, under 2% a year. Spending per animal grows faster. The industry calls this “fewer pets, more money per pet”. It changes what a foreign brand should sell: volume plays are over, value per transaction is the game.
What is really driving this
Chinese media call it 它经济, the “it economy”, spending on the animal rather than on yourself. The engine behind it is demographic. Marriage registrations and birth rates have both fallen for years, and young urban professionals in Shanghai, Chengdu or Hangzhou are postponing children or skipping them. The affection goes somewhere. It goes to a British Shorthair in a 60 square metre apartment.
This produces the “pet parent” mentality. The owner does not call herself an owner. She calls herself 铲屎官, literally the poop-shovelling officer, and refers to the cat as 儿子 or 女儿. That vocabulary is not a joke, it is a purchasing signal. A parent does not buy the cheapest food. A parent reads ingredient labels, asks about protein sources, and pays for a check-up. That is why over 51% of cat owners and 54% of dog owners now plan a dedicated space in the home for the animal, and why more than 40% of households celebrate the pet’s birthday.
Household penetration is still low compared with mature markets. Roughly a quarter of Chinese urban households keep a pet, against around 70% in the United States. That gap is the whole investment case for the next decade.
Food is more than half the market, and it is going premium
Food takes 53.7% of total pet spending. Medical care takes 27.6%, supplies 12.2%, services 6.5%. Within food, the shift is away from standard dry kibble toward four segments that all carry better margin:
- Baked kibble (烘焙粮), low-temperature baked rather than extruded. Chinese owners believe it preserves nutrients better. Preference for it rose faster than any other format among dog owners.
- Freeze-dried (冻干), sold as raw-adjacent nutrition, usually as a topper mixed into kibble.
- Fresh and wet food (鲜粮, 湿粮), growing on the back of the same logic that drives human fresh food delivery.
- Functional food: joint support, urinary tract formulas for neutered cats, hairball control, skin and coat, and prescription diets. Some Chinese brands now add traditional Chinese medicine ingredients to dog food, which tells you how far the localisation goes.
The evolution of pet food purchases reflects changing attitudes and a better understanding of what animals should and should not eat. Owners want high-quality food that is good for the animal’s health. Natural and organic positioning is now a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator.
Vet care and pet insurance: the second engine
Veterinary spending is the second biggest block. Chinese pet hospitals have consolidated into chains, prices in tier-1 cities are high, and owners complain constantly about opaque pricing. That complaint created a market: pet insurance. Chinese insurance press reported premiums above RMB 3 billion in 2025, growing around 40% a year, with medical cover the dominant product line. Penetration is still tiny, between 1% and 3% nationally, barely above 3% even in tier-1 cities.
Why this matters for a product brand. Insurers, vet chains and pet hospitals are distribution partners, not competitors. A prescription diet or a joint supplement sold through a vet chain carries authority that no ad buy can replicate. We have placed supplement brands into vet networks before the Tmall launch, precisely so the first Xiaohongshu reviews say “my vet recommended it”.
Services, grooming and accessories
Owners buy far more than food. Grooming salons, professional washing, spa treatments, nail care and boarding are all normal purchases in Chinese cities. Pet photo shoots exist as a real category. Boarding, where the animal stays in an experienced host’s home with video updates sent to the owner, runs at profit margins reported around 20%. Pet boarding, breeding and even pet cremation have all become organised businesses.
Two newer behaviours matter for accessory brands. 52.9% of cat owners now take the cat outside, which was almost unheard of five years ago. And 71% of owners say they are interested in travelling with their pet. That opens carriers, strollers, harnesses, travel bowls, pet-friendly hotel partnerships. It also opens the smart category: automatic feeders, litter boxes with app monitoring, cameras, water fountains.
Domestic brands caught up, and that changed everything
This is the part of the story most foreign brands have not updated in their heads. Ten years ago, imported food dominated because Chinese consumers did not trust local manufacturing after several domestic pet food scandals. Quality was the trigger for two thirds of buyers, and Mars and Nestlé held commanding share.
That is no longer the picture. Chinese groups such as Gambol and China Pet Foods built serious factories, hired nutritionists, and won share with R&D rather than price. During Double 11 in 2025, pet food GMV across marketplaces and livestream commerce reached about RMB 9.4 billion, up 59% year on year, with domestic brands taking most of the top ten slots on Tmall in both cat and dog food. Meanwhile China’s customs data for 2024 shows imported pet food volume at 75,300 tonnes, down 13.41%, and import value at RMB 3.56 billion, down 11.36%.
Read those two numbers together. The market grows, imports shrink. A foreign brand entering China in 2026 is not filling a vacuum. It is taking share from a competent, well-funded local competitor that understands Douyin better than you do.
The registration wall: GACC and MARA
Here is where most pet food projects die, and nobody warns the exporter early enough. You cannot simply ship pet food into China because a distributor wants it.
Two layers apply. First, the exporting country must have market access for that product category, negotiated government to government. Second, the individual manufacturing plant must be registered with the General Administration of Customs (GACC). Only product from a registered facility clears. The application goes through the competent authority in the exporting country, is recommended to GACC, and GACC may inspect the plant, remotely or on site, before granting a registration number. On top of that, formula feed and premix products need registration with the agriculture authority (MARA) through a local agent, which requires the full formula, safety data and often testing. The published GACC registration requirements for overseas feed and pet food manufacturers set out the document list.
Budget twelve to eighteen months if your plant is not registered. Two practical routes exist in the meantime. Sell non-food first: accessories, toys, grooming, smart devices, which face far lighter import rules. Or sell food through cross-border e-commerce, where the positive list and personal-import rules apply instead of general trade, which is faster but caps your volume and blocks offline retail. Our note on the new cross-border e-commerce rules for foreign brands covers what changed there.
Where a foreign brand still has the advantage
Three things still travel well, and only three.
- Perceived safety. Country of origin still means something in pet food. New Zealand, Netherlands, Germany, Canada, France read as safe. Show the plant, show the audits, show the traceability. Chinese owners will read that page.
- Nutritional science. Decades of published feeding trials, veterinary partnerships and clinical formulations are hard to replicate quickly. If you have a research team, put it on camera. A Chinese owner will watch a fifteen minute video of your nutritionist explaining taurine.
- Genuine premium. Not a higher price, a defensible reason for the price. Single-source protein, hypoallergenic, breed-specific, life-stage specific. Chinese owners segment their animals far more precisely than Western owners do.
What no longer works: arriving as “the European brand” with no story, at 2.5 times the local price, hoping the flag does the selling. That stopped working around 2020.
How to take part in this business
Conduct market research first. Understand how much you need to sell to be profitable, and whether that is realistic. Success comes when you have suitable products, the right way of marketing on Chinese platforms, and enough investment to attract traffic and buyers. Not before.
Chinese e-commerce
E-commerce platforms remain convenient for foreign companies. You can sell without a physical presence in China if the cross-border platform approves you. Tmall is the most reputable of them, and Chinese consumers associate it with authenticity in a market where counterfeits are a real worry. Tmall only accepts brands with an established presence and real sales, which is why many applications are rejected. There are two doors: Tmall.com if you have a Chinese entity, Tmall Global if you operate with overseas licences only.
JD is the second marketplace worth the effort, particularly for heavy goods such as litter and large bags of kibble, because its logistics network handles weight better.
Douyin interest e-commerce
Douyin does not work like a marketplace. Nobody searches for your product. The algorithm pushes a video to people whose watch history suggests they own a cat, and the purchase happens inside the video. The mechanism you have to feed is simple: the system tests your content on a small audience, measures watch-through rate, comments and conversion in the first hours, then decides whether to push it to a hundred times more people. So the format matters more than the production value. A ten second clip of a fussy cat finally eating your food outperforms a polished brand film every time. Pair it with a livestream schedule and a store inside Douyin, otherwise you are paying for other people’s traffic.
Xiaohongshu as the research layer
Xiaohongshu reported a pet-interest audience of 170 million by June 2025, double what it was in March 2024. Those users open the app 25 to 30 times a day and run 6 to 8 searches a day. That last number is the important one. Xiaohongshu is where a Chinese owner types “布偶猫 粮 推荐” before buying, and what she reads there decides the purchase. If your brand name returns nothing, or returns three complaints and no reviews, you lose the sale on a platform you never advertised on. Seeding real notes from mid-sized and small accounts, with photos of the actual bag and the actual cat, is the mechanism. We explained how this works in our guide to Xiaohongshu as a search engine for brands.
KOC and affiliation instead of celebrity KOL
Big pet influencers are expensive and their audiences overlap heavily. The better structure is volume of KOC, ordinary owners with 1,000 to 50,000 followers, paid partly in product and partly on commission through the platform’s affiliate tool. You get a wider spread of search results, more authentic photos, and costs tied to sales. A hundred KOC posts beat one celebrity post for a food brand, because food is a repeat purchase decided by trust, not by desire.
WeChat private domain
Pet food is bought again every four to six weeks. That makes retention worth more than acquisition. The mechanism: put a QR code in every parcel, offer something worth scanning such as a feeding-plan consultation, move the buyer into a WeChat group run by a real person, then send the reorder reminder at the right moment in the cycle. Chinese consumers scan QR codes reflexively, so use that habit. Brands we work with get 30 to 45% of repeat revenue through WeChat rather than through the marketplace, which means they stop paying platform commission on their own customers.
Baidu SEO and generative search
Chinese consumers still check a brand on Baidu before they trust it. Search engine optimisation ranks your official site in natural results over time, and good rankings build credibility. What is new is that a growing share of research now happens inside AI assistants: DeepSeek, Doubao, Kimi, and the DeepSeek integration inside WeChat search. These models answer “which imported cat food is safe” by summarising Chinese-language sources they can read. If your brand only exists in English, on a site hosted outside China, you are invisible to them. Generative engine optimisation means publishing structured Chinese content, with clear factual statements about ingredients, origin and certifications, on pages these models actually index. Our piece on WeChat’s DeepSeek integration and what it means for brands goes into the detail.
Your Chinese website
Aesthetic norms differ from Western preferences for clean design. Chinese users accept dense pages, lots of information, animation and images. Content has to be adapted into Mandarin, not translated word for word, because your buyers search in Mandarin keywords. A Mandarin site is also the condition for doing SEO at all. Host it in China, or at least in Hong Kong or Singapore, so it loads fast enough to be read.
A Dutch pet food brand that got it wrong, then right
Marnix runs a family-owned pet food company in the Netherlands. Grain-free dry food, one plant, strong position in Benelux specialty stores. He came to us after eighteen months in China with a Chinese distributor and RMB 1.9 million in cumulative sales, against a stock write-off of nearly RMB 600,000 on product that expired in a Shanghai bonded warehouse.
What he had tried: the distributor opened a Tmall Global store, ran a discount campaign, and hired one large pet KOL on Douyin for a single livestream. The livestream sold 4,000 bags in one evening and generated almost no repeat orders. Search volume for the brand name went back to near zero within three weeks. The distributor blamed the price.
The price was not the problem. Nothing existed between the ad and the purchase. A buyer who saw the livestream, searched the brand on Xiaohongshu, and found four posts in total, all of them paid, did not buy. So we rebuilt in that order: 140 KOC notes over four months from real cat and dog owners, all showing the bag and the feeding, plus a Chinese ingredient page explaining the Dutch plant, the protein source and the certifications, structured so DeepSeek and Doubao could read it. Then a Douyin account posting three short videos a week, self-shot, no agency polish. Then a WeChat group with a feeding-plan service, seeded by a QR code in every parcel.
It worked because the order was right. Content first, so that search returns something. Then traffic, so the search happens. Then retention, so the second bag is bought without paying for it. Fourteen months later Marnix was at RMB 11.4 million annualised, 38% of it repeat orders through WeChat, and the GACC plant registration finally came through, which opened offline pet stores in Chengdu and Hangzhou.
FAQ
Do I need GACC registration to sell pet food in China?
For general trade, yes. Only pet food produced in a facility registered with China’s General Administration of Customs can clear customs, and the exporting country must have market access for that product type. Formula feed also needs registration with the agriculture authority through a local agent. Cross-border e-commerce is the exception and lets you start faster, but it limits volume and keeps you out of offline retail. Plan twelve to eighteen months for a first registration.
Is it too late to enter now that Chinese brands dominate?
It is too late to win on being foreign. It is not too late to win on a specific position. Domestic brands took the mainstream premium tier with good products and better marketing. What they cover less well is narrow specialisation: therapeutic diets, single-protein hypoallergenic food, breed-specific formulas, senior nutrition. Household penetration is still around a quarter of urban homes against roughly 70% in the United States, so the pool of new owners keeps growing every year.
Should I sell cat products or dog products?
Cats, if you have to choose. There were 72.89 million cats against 53.43 million dogs in urban China in 2025, and the cat market grew 5.2% versus 3.2% for dogs. Cats suit small apartments, need no walking, and match the schedule of young office workers. Spend per dog is still higher at RMB 3,006 a year against RMB 2,085 per cat, so dogs remain worth targeting for premium and health products. Categories differ too: litter, hairball and urinary formulas for cats, walking gear and joint supplements for dogs.
What budget do I need for a serious first year?
For a cross-border launch, plan on a Tmall Global or Douyin store setup, Chinese content production, KOC seeding and paid traffic. Realistically, that means a sustained monthly spend rather than a one-off campaign, because the seeding layer takes three to four months before search results look credible. Brands that spend everything on one livestream and nothing on content get the Marnix result: a spike, then silence. Ask any agency for a twelve month plan with a monthly split, not a single number.
We help pet brands enter China
GMA is a Shanghai-based team that has taken pet food, supplement and accessory brands into Tmall Global, JD, Douyin and Xiaohongshu. We handle the Chinese content layer that decides whether your brand survives a search, the KOC seeding that builds it, and the WeChat retention that makes the second order profitable. We also point you to the right regulatory consultant early, before you ship anything.
Contact us and tell us your category and your current China status. We will tell you honestly whether the market is worth your budget.
Further reading:
- Pet Market in China: Pet Owners Spend 6600 Yuan on Their Pupils
- Pet Industry in China: how the sector reached billions
- KPMG China Pet Industry Market Report (June 2025, Chinese)
