It might be called Beef Meal or Chicken Meal, but most ‘meat meals’ contain very little beef or chicken…meat.
It’s another frustrating challenge for pet owners. The pet food label says Beef Meal or Chicken Meal. That means it has beef or chicken in it right? Not quite. Beef Meal or Chicken Meal might have parts of a cow and parts of a chicken in it, but it’s not necessarily the same kind of beef or chicken as in human food. Not even close.
And the problem magnifies because pet food manufacturers are not required to tell pet owners exactly what is in their ‘meat’ meal.
What is a ‘meat’ meal? And what’s in a ‘meat’ meal?
Probably the biggest mistake is to term these ingredients a ‘meat’ meal. (I’ve made the same mistake many times.) This mistake is made because the language of pet food is very different than the language of pet owners (or any average consumer). To understand what you are feeding your pet, it’s (sad, but true) necessary to understand the language of pet food.
Any animal protein pet food ingredient that includes the word ‘meal’ behind it – is a rendered ingredient.
In the USDA document “Rendering, Carcass Disposal, a Comprehensive Review” rendering is defined as: “A process of using high temperature and pressure to convert whole animal and poultry carcasses or their by-products with no or very low value to safe, nutritional, and economically valuable products. It is a combination of mixing, cooking, pressurizing, fat melting, water evaporation, microbial and enzyme inactivation.“
From the rendering industry trade association, the rendering process itself is diagrammed below. Raw material is ground (sizing), cooked, pressed to remove fat, the remaining material is ground again and becomes a ‘meal’ ingredient.
The ‘meal’ ingredients are a powdery substance that looks (exactly) like this:
Though it has NO resemblance to meat, the above picture is a load of ‘meat’ meal being unloaded at a pet food manufacturing plant (provided by a pet food manufacturing employee).
Why do pet food manufacturers use ‘meal’ animal protein ingredients instead of meat ingredients?
One reason could be is that ‘meal’ ingredients are simpler to store and transport for pet food manufacturers. Meal ingredients are transported by rail cars or by truck dump trailers to pet food manufacturers un-refrigerated. Meat ingredients on the other hand would require freezing or refrigeration to prevent spoilage.
Meal ingredients are stored at a pet food plant in large bins that (can) look like this:
The picture below is a Google Earth image of a kibble pet food plant in Oklahoma. You can see similar bins in the image, along with two trucks and a rail car (left side) that appear to be delivering ingredients to this pet food plant.
Needless to say, it is A LOT more economical for a pet food manufacturer to have delivered and store animal protein ingredients un-refrigerated than refrigerated. But, convenience is not the only reason many pet food manufacturers use meat meal ingredients. From Purina: “If we tried to use all chicken breasts for example, which are about 75% moisture, to make kibble, it would be way too watery and would not come out properly through the extrusion process.”
What types of animal protein is in meal ingredients?
For the answer to that question, we turn to what the rendering industry itself tells the public. A rendering industry trade publication – Waste Advantage – states:
“The majority of the waste material that is processed in rendering comes from slaughterhouses and can include fatty tissue, bones and other processing offal. Offal is the parts of an animal that are not fit for human consumption, such as organs, blood and feathers. Almost 30 percent of an animal’s live weight ends up as offal, which would be expensive to dispose of and wasted if not for the rendering process.“
From a slaughtered cow, what is used for human food is diagrammed below (from Cattle-Empire.net).
Add into consideration, after the cuts of meat diagrammed above are removed, most of the remaining meat is then removed by mechanical separation and sold for human consumption (hot dogs, bologna).
This leaves – for rendering into a beef meal pet food ingredient – little to no actual muscle meat (meat). What’s left is basically bones and internal organs (those that are not used for human consumption such as liver). The same would be true for any other ‘meat’ meal ingredient (such as Chicken Meal, or Lamb Meal).
There is one more piece of pet food language that pet owners can benefit from regarding animal protein meal ingredients. And that is the type of rendering facility the animal protein parts are manufactured at.
In 2004, the Congressional Research Service provided a report to Congress titled “Animal Rendering: Economics and Policy“.
This report to Congress explains there are two types of rendering facilities; “Integrated plants” and “Independent operations“.
Integrated rendering plants are defined as facilities that “operate in conjunction with animal slaughter and meat processing plants“. Integrated rendering facilities are attached to a USDA inspected slaughter facility and process what was described above – what is left over from the processing of an animal for human food.
From the CRS document: “These plants also render inedible byproducts (including slaughter floor waste) into fats and proteins for animal feeds and for other ingredients.” This means that the material that is rendered from integrated rendering plants (attached to a USDA inspected slaughter facility) is not only the parts of a USDA inspected and passed animal not consumed by humans, it is also parts of a slaughtered animal that were rejected for use in human food (condemned material).
Many pet foods will tell you their meal ingredients are “sourced from USDA inspected facilities“. “Sourced from” guarantees the pet owner nothing. The above described “waste” is sourced ‘from’ USDA inspected facilities, rendered on site and sold to pet food. Being ‘from’ a USDA inspected facility doesn’t guarantee a pet owner the meal is quality or meat; “waste” comes ‘from’ USDA inspected facilities.
While integrated rendering facilities “handle 65%-70% of all rendered material“, independent rendering facilities process the rest.
“These plants usually collect material from other sites using specially designed trucks. They pick up and process fat and bone trimmings, inedible meat scraps, blood, feathers, and dead animals from meat and poultry slaughter houses and processors (usually smaller ones without their own rendering operations), farms, ranches, feedlots, animal shelters, restaurants, butchers, and markets.”
These are some pictures of an independent rendering facility provided by a neighbor of the facility:
Should you give your pet a food with a ‘meal’ ingredient?
No one can make that decision for you. It’s a personal decision. However you can ask your pet food manufacturer for some clarity to exactly what is in their meal ingredients in order to make an informed decision.
Example questions are:
- is the meal sourced from an integrated rendering facility or an independent rendering facility?
- are ingredients used to make the meal from 100% edible sources (USDA inspected and passed sources)?
- can you guarantee me that NO waste or inedible material is included in the meal?
- what is the percentage of muscle meat in the meal?
What can pet owners do?
Improved pet food ingredient definitions have been submitted to AAFCO (Association of American Feed Control Officials) in hopes to provide clarity to pet owners in their pet food purchasing decisions. Our proposed definitions have just entered the first step of the AAFCO process. If they survive this step (we have high hopes), the next step will be submitting them for discussion to the AAFCO Ingredient Definitions Committee. When we move onto the next step, we’ll need pet owners to become active reaching out to the state AAFCO representatives to move through the process in a prompt manner.
In the meantime, ask your pet food manufacturer to provide you with a written guarantee to exactly what is included in their Beef Meal or Chicken Meal or any other meal ingredient. If you are trusting your pet’s life with their pet food, they SHOULD be more than willing to provide you with a written guarantee.
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
Become a member of our pet food consumer Association. Association for Truth in Pet Food is a a stakeholder organization representing the voice of pet food consumers at AAFCO and with FDA. Your membership helps representatives attend meetings and voice consumer concerns with regulatory authorities. Click Here to learn more.
What’s in Your Pet’s Food?
Is your dog or cat eating risk ingredients? Chinese imports? Petsumer
Report tells the ‘rest of the story’ on over 5,000 cat foods, dog foods,
and pet treats. 30 Day Satisfaction Guarantee. Click Here to preview Petsumer Report. www.PetsumerReport.com
The 2019 List
Susan’s List of trusted pet foods. Click Here to learn more.
Cooking pet food made easy, Dinner PAWsible
Find Healthy Pet Foods in Your Area Click Here
~Pet Owner~
March 22, 2019 at 3:06 pm
This is just revolting.
The only meat my dog gets is (1) ground sirloin and (2) raw (organ meat and ground bone).
Tell me again … whyM/b> are owners still feeding what they can not identify in their dog’s feed.
Jeff
March 24, 2019 at 9:09 am
They don’t care. People eat such highly processed food now. Do you think their pets are any different?
landsharkinnc
March 22, 2019 at 3:20 pm
offal — kidneys, heart, liver, lungs, tongue, spleen, and in beef, the stomach (tripe), are all edible by humans, but have been so degraded that in order to obtain said ‘offal’ aka ORGANS one has to have access to an abattoir or a producer. These are seldom sold in meat markets today.
~Reader~
March 22, 2019 at 3:52 pm
For my dog (if I wish) it’s easy to purchase heart, kidney, liver, tripe, tongue. But have never seen spleen or lungs (thank heavens). As a kid, I remember brains (ugh) & pig’s feet in the butcher case (head cheese too … don’t ask).. It’s just a whole lot easier to buy the raw (a combination of organ meats) then I don’t have to look at of it!
Iva Kimmelman
March 22, 2019 at 5:04 pm
You are correct Landsharkkinnc. Our dogs and cats would benefit from raw internal organs and so would all dogs and cats. But getting them fresh and safe is impossible. People are eating them, for goodness sake!
guest
March 22, 2019 at 3:33 pm
Get to the Meat of the meat meal.
Most meal meal contains the FREE killed dead dogs and cats from animal shelters. The rendering trucks offer a free pick up service as animal shelter killing centers have dumpsters full of all the freshly murdered innocents dogs and cats and they are given away for free pick up service to be ground up with collars and tags on, into large blenders. The moldy cereal with rats, rat poop and rat pee, and bugs, any grains that cannot be sold to humans, is free for pick up from the pet industry. Free grains, another free ingredient. Then they pick up the free barrels of used fat from fast food restaurants that has been sitting in the sun for months with bacteria producing toxins, and these toxins cannot be cooked out. With all these free ingredients, no wonder Big Pet Food, Nestle Purina, Blue Buffalo, Iams, Rachel Rae, Pedigree, store brands are so profitable. Would you not love a business with FREE ingredients?
Read more at Pet Food Pets Die For by Ann Martin at amazon. Ann Martin went into the pet industry manufacturing to see this done first hand. Truck drivers get to pick up truck loads of dead dogs and cats from Killing Centers, Veterinarians, etc. If you leave your pet that died at the vets, your pet will be picked up and used as a free ingredient for pet food. So don’t leave a pet that died at the vets, because the vet puts them in the freezer and once a week the pet food rendering service will send trucks out on a route to pick up any dead pets left at vets office to be turned into pet food. I worked for a vet years ago, and this is what happened to the dead pets the owners did not take home. The vets love the free service, obviously the vet doesn’t tell the paying customers what will happen if they don’t pick up their dead pets, but the vets want the pets picked up, and they prefer a free pick up service, like rendering companies that can use the free meat protein. The Animal Shelters provide the most free meat protein then most any other source. The truth of the matter, if you feed kibble, you are feeding dead dogs and dead cats to your pets.
Its easy to change, feed real food, Raw or Cooked Organic Pastured Chicken Eggs for protein, Organic Frozen Green Beans for veggies, a teaspoon to tablespoon of Cod Liver Oil or Salmon Oil, Coconut Oil for fat, a teaspoon of Chia Seeds for Fiber and firm poop. It is very simple to feed real food, after awhile you will never feed kibble again. Once you get use to feeding real food and your dogs will love real food. If you must feed a dry food, buy the dehydrated or freeze dried pet food, but most pets don’t really like it unless you dribble Cod Liver Oil or Salmon Oil on it, or Coconut Oil and mix a raw or cooked egg with Dehydrated Pet Food or Freeze Dried Pet Food at OnlyNaturalPet Buy a dog or cat powder supplement, like Greens Powder with spirulina, chorella, kelp and seaweed, and buy a Red Powder supplement with cranberry, to prevent urinary tract infections. Put the powder supplement in with the food. Add Kelp tablets for iodine and a Selenium tablet.
Susan Thixton
March 22, 2019 at 4:17 pm
Dead pets in a meal ingredients would only come from independent renderers. I have no doubt it happens, but the integrated plants don’t source anything – everything comes directly from the slaughter facility it is attached to.
baseball bat, not needed
March 22, 2019 at 4:19 pm
You’ve sensationalized (for shock value) what could be said in 2 simple sentences. (One) that rendered protein (meaning what’s turned into meat meal) is also obtained from animal shelters, road kill and pure garbage. And (two) included are expired, spoiled and toxic ingredients worse than unfit for human consumption. But do readers really have to be reminded of … putting dead pets into the freezer. Do you have any clue as to how traumatizing it is for an owner to end a pet’s life. And what Vets go through during the process.
Unless you’re selling the Book for profit, I’d like to know exactly which brands have the highest percentage of this mixture to which you’re referring. Let’s spend some time getting some facts that people can actually use. Renderers and Suppliers have a very poor reputation (too true). Government doesn’t want animals in the landfill (thus Compliance Policies). After 10 years of reading all this, I get it. But your narrative is simplistic. Insulting to Veterinarians. And emotionally charged. I do it, but it is NOT easy to feed as you’ve explained. Not all dogs can handle higher amounts of oil and individualized ingredients, so it takes experimentation and patience. The dog’s digestive process has to be fit. Still others can only feed kibble (not personally endorsed) but for economic reasons. Owners should be encouraged to follow Susan’s 2019 List to find better choices. And to make incremental compromises in their dog’s diet as well as they can implement them.
Iva Kimmelman
March 22, 2019 at 5:02 pm
Thank you Baseball Bat Not Needed. You sound like a reasonable person.
herbneu
March 23, 2019 at 8:14 pm
I’m with you. How can we find out exactly which brands have the highest percentage of garbage, aka meat meal. But so many people think of their pets as objects and choose the convenience of kibble. I now prepare homemade foods comprised of chicken, beef liver, rice, oatmeal, cranberries, blue berries, apple, kale, carrots, and other items. With it my three dogs also get a small amount of kibble from a holistic brand. But somehow the practice of producing feed from garbage must be reined in.
Iva Kimmelman
March 22, 2019 at 5:00 pm
Guest, you are not credible with your opinion without telling us who you are. I agree with what Susan has said. She is the voice of reason, you are much too reactionary. These tactics don’t help anyone.
Norm Starr
March 24, 2019 at 1:43 pm
The dead dogs and cats from kill shelters also come with the euth drug and, I’m sure the needle still attached. UGH!!
Been feeding homemade raw for over 20 yrs and never gonna look back.
Faith Jones
March 23, 2019 at 11:05 am
Susan, Thank you for your time, investigations , expertise and writing this report. I am afraid of most commercial food and mostly home cook. But this is valuable information for pet consumers to know! So many are impressed with all the “vet nutritionist and scientific research” bull being promoted by WSAVA, that they are blind sided. Truthfully, I will do my share to recycle and be green, but not in my precious dogs food. They eat balanced real food!
Know Better Do Better
March 23, 2019 at 1:55 pm
I work at a beef slaughterhouse that has an integrated rendering facility on site at the location I work at. You know what happens to the 3D animals? They are shipped off to a DIFFERENT rendering facility (I presume an independent one, but I cannot confirm that). Susan is spot on.
Awful
March 23, 2019 at 3:25 pm
I often wonder if that’s the stuff that goes into the PF sold in “Dollar Stores!”
Pingback: Slaughterhouse | Dr. Josie's 5 Elements
Darla
March 24, 2019 at 12:20 pm
What are 3D animals?
~Pet Owner~
March 24, 2019 at 2:12 pm
Animals which have died other than by intentional slaughter meant for feed. (“Dead, Dying, Diseased”) and diverted from landfill.
Will
March 25, 2019 at 5:48 pm
Meat meals are not always bad ingredients and rendering isn’t always a bad process. Meals can contribute concentrated protein and amino acids to the food. You just have to be sure that the meal contains a named animal protein (like chicken meal), no by products, and is made with only muscle tissue.
andy
March 26, 2019 at 11:33 pm
thank you! named protein source meals are an incredibly good ingredient. they’re better than the first ingredient being just chicken/beef/salmon/etc, because that includes the water weight- the meals concentrate the protein without all the extra water
DSF
April 2, 2022 at 4:19 pm
My previous understanding is what Will had said about designated animal meals being acceptable. However, according to this article there is hardly anything left on the carcass after it is processed for human consumption.
The part of the process that surprised me is the mechanical removal of any meat after butchering. How is this performed and how efficiently?
Organs are suppose to be highly nutritious but many are also high in fat. I would not expect much product would be left after rendering organs and too many bones would result in being unable to meet AAFCO guidelines for calcium.
It is my understanding that fur, feathers, feet, hooves, & hide are considered byproducts. It seems they are being used to make dog treats ie rawhide chews, dried chicken feet, etc.
Until AAFCO and consumers demand more oversight of pet food manufacturing, we will never get a definitive answer of what is in the pet food we are buying.