US pet food total market sales

It is deeply reassuring to know that as China minted billionaires at a remarkable pace between 2010 and 2022, American pets were eating better than ever, with an r of 0.967 to prove it. One assumes the mechanism is indirect: Chinese economic growth drives global supply chains which fund American prosperity which gets spent on grain-free salmon kibble for a Labrador named Biscuit. The Forbes billionaire list has never included 'contributed to US pet food market' in a subject's biography, but perhaps it should. The dogs, at least, are grateful.

Both series are proxies for the same underlying phenomenon: global economic expansion in the 2010s. China's billionaire count grew from roughly 64 in 2010 to over 400 by 2021, reflecting its emergence as a dominant economic power. US pet food sales grew from approximately $18 billion to over $42 billion over the same period, driven by the 'humanization' of pets, premium product proliferation, and rising disposable incomes. Both trends accelerated through the same decade of global growth and slowed or paused around the same macroeconomic disruptions, including trade tensions in 2018–2019 and the pandemic in 2020.

Global GDP growth, when it occurs over a sustained period, will push nearly every positive economic indicator upward simultaneously. The billionaire and the Labrador have more in common than they know: both are beneficiaries of a rising tide.