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Pet Food Ingredients

How It’s Made – The Most Common Animal Ingredient in Dry Pet Foods

What you need to know about chicken meal, beef meal…

Rendered ingredients are one of the most commonly used (animal sourced) ingredients. These include: chicken meal, beef meal, pork meal, by-product meal, and animal fat. Rendered ingredients are touted by industry as “packed with protein“, but…how are they made? Are rendered ingredients safe?

We provide pet food consumers with this sharable PDF explaining rendered pet food ingredients, and the rendering process. All information provided in the document was taken from Animal Rendering: Economics and Policy, written by the Congressional Research Services and USDA Quarterly Enforcement Reports 2024.

Scroll on the document to fully view.

Click Here to download.

We (Association for Truth in Pet Food and TruthaboutPetFood.com) continue to argue with regulatory authorities for full disclosure of inedible ingredients on pet food labels. Click Here to view our Citizen Petition submitted to FDA in July 2022, we are still waiting for FDA to respond.

Wishing you and your pet(s) the best,

Susan Thixton
Pet Food Safety Advocate
Author Buyer Beware, Co-Author Dinner PAWsible
TruthaboutPetFood.com
Association for Truth in Pet Food


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6 Comments

6 Comments

  1. Sara

    February 11, 2025 at 1:13 pm

    I feel a certain satisfaction after Googling “Darling Ingredients, Crows Landing, CA” – clicking on Images and the majority are from TAPF

    • Susan Thixton

      February 11, 2025 at 1:43 pm

      You can go to Google Earth and type the same search in to see where I sourced the image.

  2. Erin

    February 11, 2025 at 2:05 pm

    Are any companies that make dry food with edible meals? The ones that are EU certified and made with meat coming from the human supply chain (fit for humans consumption?)such as Farmina, Annamaet, Open Farm etc.
    I am feeling very overwhelmed.

    • Susan Thixton

      February 11, 2025 at 3:02 pm

      There are companies that claim to use meat meals from edible sources, however I cannot personally validate those claims. I’d suggest asking any company for some type of evidence they are using edible raw materials. If they cannot prove it or are not willing to prove it…that speaks volumes to me.

      • Erin

        February 11, 2025 at 3:05 pm

        I understand. Thank you very much for your reply and care, Susan.

  3. T Allen

    February 11, 2025 at 2:53 pm

    This is a great PDF Susan! It will get shared widely and will help people understand more about the expensive toxic garbage being sold as pet food! Thank you!

    PS. To those of you using Firefox, it’s not showing in the browser (ok on Safari) but click the “download button” to see and save it.

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