Portuguese capital has just tightened its grip on Nordic pet care. Musti Group, the Finnish-headquartered pet-care leader controlled by Portugal’s Sonae, has acquired the Gaston pet-store business from ICA Gruppen, Sweden’s largest food retailer, according to a joint statement issued by the two companies on Friday, 10 July. The three Gaston stores — in Uppsala, Västerås and Norrköping — along with the brand’s e-commerce channel, will be folded into Arken Zoo, Sweden’s largest pet retail chain and a wholly owned Musti banner. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The transaction closes the book on ICA’s two-year experiment in specialist pet retail. Gaston was launched in October 2024 as a pilot to help the grocery giant understand how pet owners shop the category. Rather than scale the concept alone, ICA has chosen to hand it to the market leader — and, more significantly for the corridor, the two companies say they are negotiating new Arken Zoo locations adjacent to ICA supermarkets, the outline of a long-term strategic alliance between Musti and a retailer with roughly 1,300 stores and about a third of Sweden’s grocery market.
“We look forward to establishing a long-term partnership so that customers benefit from having more Arken Zoo stores near them across Sweden,” said Musti Group CEO David Rönnberg in the joint statement.
The Portuguese platform behind the Nordic leader
The Gaston deal is small in absolute terms, but it is the latest move in one of the most distinctive Portugal → Nordics stories on the corridor. Sonae, the Maia-based conglomerate, paid roughly €700 million in 2024 for a stake of just over 80% in Musti through a public tender offer in Helsinki — the largest Portuguese acquisition of a Nordic listed company on record. Musti leads the pet-care market across the region under the Musti ja Mirri brand in Finland, Arken Zoo in Sweden and Musti in Norway, and operates Pet City in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Since then, Sonae has used the Finnish platform as its consolidation vehicle. In May 2026 Musti paid €2.3 million for Norwegian retailer Petco Retail AS. In December 2025, Sonae concentrated its entire pet-care business under Musti, transferring the Portuguese ZU chain — then 65 stores, 24 of them with integrated veterinary clinics, and a team of 348 — from its MC retail arm for a final price of €13.5 million. ZU remains led by Tobias Azevedo, who has joined Musti’s management team.
Why ICA matters
ICA Gruppen is not an ordinary counterparty. Its store network gives it a physical footprint in practically every Swedish municipality, and its loyalty programme is among the most penetrated in European grocery. If the mooted co-location plan materialises — Arken Zoo stores opening in retail parks and shopping locations anchored by ICA supermarkets — Musti would gain a pipeline of high-traffic sites that no standalone pet retailer in Sweden could assemble on its own.
For ICA, the logic is symmetrical: it keeps a share of the fast-growing pet category in its ecosystem without carrying the inventory depth, veterinary services and specialist staffing that the segment increasingly demands. Pet care has been one of the most resilient consumer categories in the Nordics through the post-pandemic cycle, with premiumisation in food and services offsetting soft discretionary spending.
Reading the corridor signal
For Portuguese observers, the deal is a reminder that the corridor runs on capital as much as on containers. Sonae’s Nordic strategy — buy the regional champion, keep local management, then bolt on tuck-in acquisitions country by country — is arguably the most sophisticated Portuguese play in Scandinavia today. It contrasts with the export-led route taken by Portuguese wine, cork and industrial suppliers: instead of selling into the Nordics, Sonae owns the shelf itself.
The move also shows how quickly a Portuguese owner can become an insider in Nordic retail politics. Negotiating shop-adjacency deals with ICA is the kind of relationship-driven arrangement that usually takes decades of local presence. Musti brings that presence; Sonae brings the balance sheet. Eighteen months after the Helsinki takeover, the combination is now setting the consolidation agenda in a €5 billion-plus regional category — and doing it from Maia as much as from Helsinki.