The Barn Door Is Open: Private Equity Has Entered the Equine Supplement Space

If you’re running an equine supplement brand and you weren’t paying close attention to industry news last fall, you may have missed something important: Chewy, the $11 billion e-commerce giant best known for delivering dog food to suburban doorsteps, acquired SmartEquine (formerly SmartPak), the largest equine supplement subscription platform in the United States. The all-cash deal closed in November 2025. A few months earlier, CVC Capital Partners, one of Europe’s most formidable private equity (PE) firms, acquired a controlling stake in Equine Network, a U.S.-based organization behind 40+ equestrian competitions and 800+ sanctioned events, at a valuation of $300 million.

Two deals. Two very different buyers. One unmistakable message: institutional capital has decided the equestrian world is worth owning.

At BSM Partners, we’ve watched the pet supplement space go through exactly this cycle, from fragmented independent brands to strategic and PE interest to consolidation, and finally, to a dramatically different competitive environment for whoever’s left standing. We’re seeing the early stages of that same arc play out in equine supplements right now. If your brand hasn’t thought seriously about what that means, whether you want to sell, grow, or simply compete, this is need-to-know information.

The Investment Thesis Is Actually Pretty Simple

Private equity isn’t complicated. It follows a consistent logic: find a category with strong fundamentals, fragmented ownership, and recurring revenue; acquire, consolidate, and extract operational efficiencies; and exit at a multiple. The equine supplement category checks every one of those boxes.

A High-Value, Loyal Customer Base

Let’s start with the customer. The person buying equine supplements isn’t your typical consumer. According to Equine Network CEO Tom Winsor, a competitive horse owner spends roughly $35,000 per year on their horse, compared to approximately $6,000 for a recreational owner. That’s a 5x spending gap driven by a customer who is educated, brand-loyal, and highly resistant to trading down on products they believe are working. In the PE world, that customer profile is called “sticky.” In practice, it means lower churn, higher lifetime value, and a customer base that can support premium pricing in ways that mass-market supplement categories simply cannot.

Steady Growth, Strong Fundamentals

Now we can layer in the market fundamentals. The global equine supplement products market was valued at approximately $1.19 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $1.81 billion by 2032, growing 4.94% annually. That kind of steady, predictable growth—not explosive, but reliable—is exactly the profile that acquisition-oriented investors favor. 

North America dominates the category, accounting for over 37% of the global equine health market, with the U.S. equestrian industry alone estimated at $2.5 billion. Add in the business model characteristic that horses need consistent year-round supplementation, creating subscription-like recurring cash flows even for brands not running a formal subscription, and the investment appeal becomes clear.

The Roll-Up Opportunity

Finally, the category is fragmented. There is no single dominant equine supplement brand in the way there are dominant brands in dog joint supplements or human sports nutrition. That fragmentation is the opportunity roll-up platforms are designed to capture. In a roll-up, a well-capitalized buyer, often a private equity firm, acquires multiple smaller brands within the same category, consolidates them under a single ownership structure, and extracts value through shared manufacturing relationships, unified distribution channels, and marketing scale that no individual brand could afford on its own. The result is a platform that competes very differently from the independent brands it absorbed.

It's also worth noting that not every acquisition in a consolidating category happens from a position of strength. Some brands enter the market with undercapitalized ownership, operational debt, or infrastructure never built to scale, and when the pressure mounts, a sale becomes less of a strategic choice and more of a survival move. In those cases, the brand typically sells at a significant discount, on the buyer's terms, with little negotiating leverage. Private equity and strategic acquirers know how to identify these situations and price accordingly. The distinction between a brand acquired because it's desirable and one acquired because it's available is significant, and it almost always comes down to the same foundational work: clean financials, defensible products, and documented quality systems.

This Has Been Building for Years

The deals that made headlines in 2025 and 2026 didn’t happen in a vacuum. Consolidation of the equine supplement and animal health space has been building for more than a decade. And it’s important to be precise about who is buying, because not every acquirer is a private equity firm. Strategic buyers (large, publicly traded companies deploying their own capital) and PE-backed platforms play different roles, but together they tell the same story: this category commands serious acquisition multiples, and the pace is accelerating.

Strategic Buyers Set the Valuation Precedent

Farnam Companies, the dominant name in equine supplements and health care products for over 75 years, was acquired by Central Garden & Pet in a transaction valued at more than $340 million. Central Garden & Pet is a publicly traded strategic acquirer, not a PE firm, but this deal matters because it established a clear valuation precedent for premium equine brands and demonstrated the category’s strategic value to large consumer health platforms. Farnam remains part of the Central Garden & Pet portfolio today.

Zoetis, the world’s largest standalone animal health company, acquired Platinum Performance, a veterinarian-developed equine and pet supplement brand. Zoetis is also a publicly traded strategic buyer, not a PE firm, but this deal is one of the most important signals in the equine supplement space. A company with nearly $8 billion in annual revenue made a deliberate move into equine nutritional supplements because it saw a premium, vet-backed formulation as a defensible asset worth owning. That judgment carries significant weight when assessing where the category is headed.

Private Equity Enters the Arena

Manna Pro, a legacy equine and livestock nutrition brand that had been in the market for generations, was rebranded as Compana Pet Brands under the ownership of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. Under Carlyle’s ownership, Compana has pursued an aggressive acquisition strategy, adding more than 15 brands to its portfolio. This is the roll-up playbook in motion: a PE firm buys a credible platform brand, uses it as an anchor, and acquires complementary brands to build scale and distribution leverage across pet and farm channels.

This trend continues as we harken back to the two most recent acquisitions noted at the top of this article.

SmartEquine, the horse supplement and supply company formerly known as SmartPak, was formerly owned by Covetrus. This global animal health technology company was taken private in a $4 billion transaction in October 2022. When Covetrus sold SmartEquine to Chewy in an all-cash deal announced on October 30, 2025, it was a PE-backed platform divesting an asset to a large strategic buyer. Chewy, for its part, was explicit in its announcement that the acquisition was intended to accelerate its expansion into “higher-margin health and wellness verticals,” a clear signal that it sees equine supplements as a premium growth category worth owning at scale.

CVC Capital Partners acquired a controlling stake in Equine Network, the largest U.S. equestrian competition and media platform, at a $300 million valuation. CVC cited expected revenue growth of approximately 10% per year and a clear thesis around the high-spending, participation-led global equestrian market. This is not a supplement deal directly. It is an infrastructure deal. But where institutional capital goes to own the competition platform of a sport, supplement, and health product, dollars follow. The brands distributed through equine events, endorsed by competitive riders, and recommended by the trainers and veterinarians serving that ecosystem will be shaped by whoever owns that infrastructure.

The Pattern Is Clear, And We're Early In It

The deals above are not isolated events. They are a pattern, and we are early in it. What's happening in equine supplements today looks a lot like what was happening in pet supplements a decade ago: a fragmented category, a few high-profile acquisitions, and a window of time that is narrowing faster than most brands realize. The independent brands that recognize the moment early will have choices. The ones that don't will find those choices made for them.

In a follow-up piece, we'll break down exactly what this consolidation wave means for your brand: what buyers actually look for, how to build something worth acquiring (or worth keeping!) and what separates the brands that will have choices from the ones that won't. If you're in equine supplements, this one's for you. Stay tuned!

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About the Authors

Neeley Bowden Lewis is a Manager of Special Services on the BSM Partners Product Innovation team. She earned her bachelor's degree in pet food production and her master's in food science. In her early career, she worked in product innovation of pet food ingredients, focusing on the development of palatability enhancers. Bowden Lewis calls Arizona home, along with her faithful canine, Allie. 

Dr. Sydney McCauley is a Board-Certified Companion Animal Nutritionist and earned both her bachelor’s and doctoral degrees at Virginia Tech in Animal and Poultry Sciences. McCauley’s research was in nutritional physiology with a focus on understanding the effects of low birth weight on glucose, fatty acid, carbohydrate, and amino acid metabolism in skeletal muscle and overall metabolic homeostasis during neonatal development.