When U.S. Pet Food Co-founder and CEO Scott Glover talks about industry experience, he’s going all the way back to his childhood.
“When I was born, my mom and dad had a feed mill,” says Glover. “They started the Glover Feed Mill in 1950. They had a dairy and were making feed for themselves, and then they made more feed than they needed so they started selling feed to other people, and they just grew their business.”
By the time Glover was 12 years old he was driving and loading trucks of dairy feed alongside his family, and after college he officially joined them in the family business.
“They were doing about $10–$11 million in sales,” he says of when he first started working at the family Mill. “And when they sold it to Pilgrim’s Pride, I think we’re doing about $24 million in sales and about 120,000 tons per year. It was a quite a sizable feed mill for complete line feeds.”
The long road to U.S. Pet Food
Glover stayed in the feed mill space long enough purchase his own mill (which burned to the ground two years after he bought it) and meet eventual U.S. Pet Food Co-owner Antoine Albin, but then unexpected challenges caused him to leave for other pursuits while he got himself sorted —in the back of his mind, however, he was always thinking about pet food.
“I was in financial trouble,” he says. “The plant burned down, the banks were trying to push me into bankruptcy, and it was just a low point in my life, really. And I didn’t know what to do. I love to fly, so I went out and bought myself some airplanes and I started a flight school. I ran that for two years, really busy, not making any money but it gave me a break. And I ended up flying for Pilgrim’s, the people who bought my mom and dad’s plant.”
All the time, he says, he was trying to figure out how to spark a long-held idea of building a pet food plant, something he’d wanted to do since he purchased his own feed mill but couldn’t quite get the money together to build the extrusion plant he needed.
“For years I put together a business plan to try to build a pet food plant,” says Glover. “And I went to nine banks. They all turned me down, all of them. I was flying airplanes, happy, making a good living, but I wanted to be in the pet food business. And I have no idea why; it was truly a calling, it really was, because I had a drive like you’ve never seen before. And then my parents, who were very close — I mean, I never asked them for a penny ever — sat me down one night. They said, ‘Man, we see you struggling with this, and we want to help you.’ And they sold an airplane that they had, and they put about $1.2 million in the checking account. I had about $300,000, and at that I went and borrowed the rest of it.”
That “rest of it” became Glover’s first pet food company, Mid America Pet Food, with Albin running the plant, Glover heading sales, and Glover’s mother, with all her years of feed mill experience, managing the purchasing and books.
“If any one of us three had died those first two years, we would have taken bankruptcy because, buddy, it was a three-legged stool, and we needed me, Antoine and her,” says Glover.
Eventually, Mid America Pet Food was purchased by U.S.-based private equity firm TA Associates, Glover and Albin stepped down, and the two found themselves at loose ends once again. But pet food was where they belonged, so Glover bought 75 acres of land in preparation for the future, and when his non-compete with Mid America ran out in December 2022 they got to work on what would become U.S. Pet Food.
Building it right the first time
The new manufacturing plant was going to be built on those 75 acres, and Glover and Albin had free rein to make it happen however they wanted, right down to how the roads were built. So, they got to work researching the most efficient ways to run their future plant.
“[Albin] and I looked at plants all over the United States, and we’d look at how the trucks entered and how the trucks went through the lab,” says Glover. “We looked at not only pet food plants, but also any food manufacturing plants. How do the trucks come in? How do the scales work? Where is the receiving done? If it’s a food plant, it doesn’t matter if it’s a pet food or human food. We looked at dozens and spent time and laid ours out exactly the way we wanted to lay it out. And it didn’t cost a nickel more to do it this — to do it right and to do it wrong is the same amount of concrete. Especially on plant design, it’s still steel and concrete, in the correct spot. Make it straight line. Make it efficient. These plants that I’ve gone through that are so convoluted that it scares me to death to try to run, that costs more money than our plant.”
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U.S. Pet Food’s community support efforts include U.S. military veterans and the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which “honors the sacrifice of firefighter Stephan Siller who laid down his life to save others on September 11, 2001.” Among other things, the organization has a Smart Home program aimed at building smart technology homes for U.S. armed services members returning from war who have been catastrophically injured. | Courtesy U.S. Pet Food
Of course, many of those plants have been added on to over the years, he says, thus highlighting another benefit of starting from scratch.
One of the primary focuses of the new plant is its so-called “Hall of Separation,” which provides 100% separation between the pre-cook and post-cook spaces. When the Food Safety Modernization Act kicked in, plants that did not have sufficient separation had to pour concrete and build walls that met the new food safety rules, working within existing spaces not necessarily designed to accommodate those changes. With U.S. Pet Food, there’s an entire hallway doing the job.
“We wanted to have tremendous separation between pre-cook and post-cook,” says Glover. “It’s like two completely separate businesses at the plant. We built it around food safety.”
The other thing the plant is built around is ensuring the bottleneck is exactly where and what Glover and Albin want it to be: The extruders.
“The extruder should be the thing that’s the limiting factor in the plant,” says Glover. “Our plant can put in four extruders and they can each run 20 tons an hour, and the plant keeps up with that. We’ve got almost 200 tons an hour receiving, so receiving is never a bottleneck. Mixing is not a bottleneck. Extruders are your bottleneck, and then you have enough capacity downstream to take care of it. In plants that I’ve seen before, you start out, you build it, and then you grow and you grow your extruders, and you can’t grow your infrastructure behind it so you don’t have enough mixing capacity to take care of your distributor. You can’t unload the trucks fast enough. I’ve been in some big plants that can only unload one or two trucks an hour and they’re trying to produce three or four. It’s always a struggle. So we built this plant for capacity, for growth and then for efficiency.”
Walmart and the future of U.S. Pet Food
U.S. Pet Food’s brand, Next Level, is a superpremium pet food brand focusing on exacting nutrition for every stage of an animal’s life, be it puppy, active adult or senior. Another thing the line focuses on is bang for the buck, which is why it was such a win for the brand to get the Walmart seal of approval in 2024.
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Next Level, the company’s brand of superpremium pet food, offers formulations for every stage of life, from puppy to active adult to senior. The focus has always been on adjusting nutrition to the animal’s needs throughout its life, no matter its size or age. | Courtesy U.S. Pet Food
“How can you build a relationship with the world’s largest brick-and mortar-retailer?” says Glover. “You think you’d just be a number.”
But Walmart, says Glover, saw a need that Next Level could fulfill.
“If you’re feeding [economy brands], the less-than-a-dollar-per-pound dog foods — and they’ve got a purpose, there’s nothing wrong with them — and you want to take it to the next level, your choices are [brands that are] over $2 per pound,” he says. “We sit there at $1.30–$1.50 a pound. We’re a better nutritional value.”
Next Level entered 660 Walmart stores in March 2025, all across the south-central Southeast U.S. (from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Miami, Florida), and as far as Glover is concerned it’s U.S. Pet Food’s opportunity to shine.
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“Next Level” actually came from a lightbulb moment Scott Glover had while co-running a print t-shirt business with his ex-wife. The shirts they liked to print on came from a company called “Next Level Apparel” and Glover liked the idea of taking things one step up to the “next level.” | Courtesy U.S. Pet Food
“We’re at 18 distribution centers, but Walmart is putting us in the highest capacity pet stores within the area,” he says. [Walmart] wants to give us the best chance of success, and if we can succeed within these stores, it’s ours to lose.”
U.S. Pet Food has the plant, the product and the opportunity — what’s next?
“I think kibble is always where the majority of the market’s going to be,” says Glover. “And I tell you what I love: How we’re positioned. We’re positioned in that $1.50-per-pound range. I don’t want to be in that sub-dollar range because you can’t provide the nutrition. I’m a nutrition guy. And I don’t want to be in the plus-$2 because it becomes not a good value. Blue collar workers, they don’t need to spend any more money than they have to. I think we are positioned so beautifully within this market. It’s fun. I love it. I love the business.”
Fast Facts
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Headquarters: Pittsburg, Texas, USA
Officers: Scott Glover, co-founder; Antoine Albin, co-founder
Brand: Next Level
Website/Social Media: www.nextlevelpetfood.com; @nextlevelsuperpremiumpetfood on Facebook and Instagram
Notable: Co-founders Scott Glover and Antoine Albin have known each other and worked together since they were in their 20s.