US frozen pizza retail sales

One would like to assume that a freezer full of pizza and a shelf full of dog food were unrelated aspects of the modern American pantry, but the numbers suggest otherwise. Both, it appears, answer the question: what does a household buy when it can no longer leave? The answer, surprisingly, is everything.

Both boomed in 2020 for the same straightforward reason: lockdowns kept Americans at home with their families and their newly adopted pets, and the shopping list adjusted accordingly. Frozen pizza sales jumped as a suddenly-home workforce needed fast meals, while pet food revenue surged as pandemic adoption broke records. The two aisles shared a single customer profile: a person who wasn't going anywhere.

So the correlation is less mysterious than sincere: a country fed itself and its pets more, from home, because home was where they all were. Dinner, quietly, became a group activity.