Sonae's Musti Acquires ICA's Three Gaston Pet Stores in Sweden and Folds Them Into Arken Zoo
Sonae's Finnish pet-care arm Musti has agreed to buy three Gaston pet stores from ICA, Sweden's largest retailer, folding them into its Arken Zoo chain. The deal ends ICA's short-lived pet pilot and extends a pan-European buying spree that already includes Portugal's ZU.
Sonae has pushed its pet-care business deeper into the Nordic market, with its Finnish subsidiary Musti agreeing to buy three pet stores from ICA Gruppen, Sweden's largest retailer. The shops — in Uppsala, Västerås and Norrköping — trade under the Gaston banner and will be rebranded and absorbed into Arken Zoo, Musti's established Swedish chain. Neither side disclosed the price.
A pilot changes hands
The deal brings the curtain down on a short-lived experiment. ICA launched Gaston in October 2024 as a pilot venture into specialist pet retail, testing whether a grocery giant could carve out space in a growing niche. Less than two years on, it has decided the category is better left to a dedicated operator and is handing the stores to Musti, which owns 80% of and is controlled by the Portuguese group Sonae.
Rather than a clean exit, ICA is framing the sale as the start of a working relationship. David Rönnberg, the retailer's chief executive, said the company expected to "establish a long-term partnership" that could see new Arken Zoo outlets open close to ICA supermarkets across Sweden — an arrangement that would give Musti prime footfall and give ICA's customers a pet-care option next door without the operational burden.
Building a European pet empire
The acquisition is a small piece of a much larger consolidation. Sonae, the Maia-based group best known in Portugal for the Continente supermarkets and the NOS telecoms operator, has spent the past two years assembling one of Europe's biggest specialist pet-care networks under the Musti umbrella. The portfolio now spans the Musti ja Mirri chain in Finland, Arken Zoo in Sweden, Musti in Norway, and Pet City across the Baltics.
The expansion has been relentless. In May 2026 Musti bought the Norwegian operator Petco Retail AS for €2.3 million, and the group has been steadily adding stores market by market. Sweden, where Arken Zoo already leads, is a natural place to keep growing, and folding in three ready-made locations from a well-known grocer is a low-friction way to do it.
The Portuguese anchor
For readers at home, the most visible sign of Sonae's pet ambitions arrived at the end of last year. In December 2025 the group paid €13.5 million for ZU, the Portuguese pet-retail chain, bringing 65 stores — 24 of them with integrated veterinary clinics — under its control. That purchase turned Sonae from a Nordic specialist into a genuinely pan-European one, with a strong base in its home market alongside its Scandinavian and Baltic operations.
The strategic logic is straightforward. Pet ownership, and the spending that comes with it, has proved unusually resilient across Europe even as households trim other discretionary budgets, and the market remains fragmented enough that a well-capitalised consolidator can keep bolting on regional players. Each acquisition — whether a €13.5 million chain in Portugal or three shops in central Sweden — adds density to a network that Sonae is betting will become one of the continent's dominant pet-care platforms. The Gaston stores are a modest addition on their own, but they fit the pattern exactly: buy where the brand already leads, and turn a rival's abandoned experiment into another few points of market share.
