Meat meals: a controversial commodity protein

What exactly is a meat meal?

Meat meals are rendered, high-protein ingredients derived from animal tissue that isn't sold as meat for human consumption. Many people equate meals to all of pet food – mystery meat sources that come from the slaughterhouse floor. That's unfortunately mostly true.

Starting with a positive about meals: they are an efficient way to get more crude protein in pet food, are extremely affordable for mass production, and are concentrated for better shipping, label economy and protein density.

That's about it.

The key to identifying a meal is – well, it says meal after the species or animal part. Meat meal, byproduct meal, bone meal, and so on. But on the supply side, the key to meals is rendering, essentially a process of turning a meat slurry/wet ingredient into a powder.

Generic rendered ingredients such as “poultry meal” or “meat and bone meal” may contain multiple species within their regulatory category. Which is how chicken ends up in everything. Like byproduct, composition varies. A rendered meal can be different depending on input stream, facility and season.

Rendering systems process large volumes of mixed material. They produce both edible (approved for human consumption, like lard or tallow for gelatins/cosmetics, or "human grade" pet food) and inedible products (like non-human grade pet food). They take items from slaughterhouses, but also collect raw animal materials like offal, grease, blood, feathers, and expired meat from a variety of off-site sources, such as butcher shops, supermarkets, restaurants, and other slaughterhouses.

Pet food manufacturers are not required to disclose what percentage of a rendered ingredient is meat, what percentage is bone or organs or any of the other materials. Rendered pet food ingredients generally have any range of acceptable content – no minimum level of meat or maximum level of bone. The final composition of rendered ingredients is solely up to the supplier of the meal.

So quite clearly, there are issues with meals. Rendered meals don’t have the nutrition of meat, per se. Rendered meals fluctuate in freshness, composition and mineral content (depending on the bone content), and are not always reliable in terms of what else can make it into the ingredient. Meals are simply tools to achieve crude protein targets – even if the animal can't even digest a lot of the protein in meals.

Efficient and economical, but nutritionally, meals earn their bad name.