Chicken By-Product Meal
A dry rendered product made from chicken parts that do not include muscle meat — typically necks, feet, intestines, undeveloped eggs, and heads. Feathers are explicitly excluded under AAFCO definitions.
Why manufacturers use it
By-product meal is significantly cheaper than chicken breast or whole chicken. It is also a concentrated protein source — the rendering process removes most moisture, so the dry protein content is higher by weight than whole chicken. Manufacturers use it to hit protein percentages at lower cost.
What the evidence says
Chicken by-product meal is digestible and contains meaningful protein. Studies on digestibility (Murray et al., 1997; Herrick et al., 2022) have found that chicken by-product meal is generally well-digested by cats, though digestibility varies by the specific parts included and rendering quality. The main limitation is transparency: the term does not specify which parts are used, and quality varies considerably between suppliers and batches.
How it affects a product's score
By-product meal is not a separate risk factor, but it does trigger the protein-unspecified transparency deduction (−10 pts) when it appears in the top three ingredients, because the actual composition of the meal is not disclosed. A product where named chicken is the first ingredient and by-product meal appears later scores differently than one where by-product meal leads.
Reviewed products containing by-product meal (6)