What Are Meat Meals in Dog Food?

Diet has such a huge impact on your dog's health and quality of life, and understanding meat meals is one of the keys to understanding the quality of your dog’s diet. 

Meat meal is actually a very important animal protein ingredient in dry dog food, but as you will read here, there is a huge variation in the quality of meat meals. Protein sources in dog food are by far the most expensive ingredients, so the key difference between cheap foods your dog might survive on, and the quality foods they can genuinely thrive on, largely comes down to the quality of the protein sources in them.   

Let’s find out what meat meals are and how to spot a good quality meat meal from a bad one. Read on to understand how meat meals for pet food are made, and what you should be looking out for when choosing your furbaby's food.

What Are Meat Meals and Why Use Them in Pet Food?

In a lot of pet foods (including ours), you might see the term ‘meals’ used in the ingredients list, besides a meat source like meat meal, chicken meal or beef meal. In this context the word ‘meal’ relates to the meaning ‘ground to a coarse powder’ similar to how it is used in terms like a wholemeal, wheat meal or cornmeal; except that, in this case, the coarse ingredient is derived from meat.

Using meals as a pet food ingredient has a specific purpose when it comes to creating dry food. To understand meat meals, it’s important to understand that any raw meat is around 70% water, and 25% protein (depending on the animal protein source). In order to bind a biscuit and create nutrient dense dry dog food, we need to remove most of the water in raw meat, which in turn greatly increases the concentration of its nutrients as a result. This process also removes harmful bacteria and provides a pet food manufacturer with a safe and stable ingredient to make pet food. 

In layman's terms, when a meat meal is created, it starts as raw meat with it’s high water content, and is effectively stewed under pressure to remove most of the moisture and then baked to leave you with a highly concentrated dry protein powder that can be used as an ingredient in pet food. For anyone that’s ever cooked a meal on camp as a kid... the best comparison to think of might be those dehydrated camp casseroles, or potato flakes.

When a meat meal is created, the finished ingredient (for use in a dog food recipe) will go from being 70% water and 25% protein to more like 10% water and 65% protein. It is now ready to be mixed with other ingredients in order to create a dry dog food (aka kibble).

Not All Meat Meals Are Made Equal

Again, this is a really important point - the quality of a meat meal is directly related to the quality of the raw material that goes into it. The meat content in pet food is by far the most expensive part - so it absolutely stands to reason that cheap dog foods use cheap meat sources and vice versa. Understanding the type of meat meals used in your dog’s dry food is one of the most important factors when comparing dog foods.

When it comes to meals, there is a huge range in the quality of meat meals being used in pet food - ranging from pretty awful to very good quality (like ours!). If you’ve read horror stories about meat meals, they may be true of the poor quality meals, but this certainly does not translate to good quality meals found in good quality dog food.

The thing to make sure of when you’re checking over ingredients lists is if the meal comes from a named meat source (i.e. Chicken Meal, Fish Meal or Beef Meal), not just generic terms like ‘Meat Meal’ or ‘Poultry Meal’. 

AAFCO (the Association of American Feed Control Officials) sets specific guidelines that pet food manufacturers have to follow in terms of how ingredients are named. So, for instance, we can only call a meal ‘chicken meal’ if it is exclusively “from a combination of clean flesh and skin with or without accompanying bone, derived from the parts or whole carcasses”; this means we can only use parts of a whole chicken (generally chicken carcass, once the prime cuts have been removed for human dinners). The definition for a named meat meal does not allow for the addition of other parts of animals and also expressly excludes the use of feathers, heads, feet and entrails.

The opposite is true of unnamed, or generically named meat meals. This is because a generic ‘meat meal’, ‘Animal Meal’ or ‘Meat and bone meal’ can literally come from any source and can have other parts of other animals added to it, so may contain discarded cuts, bone, or by-products, some of which aren’t good quality or nutritious. Because this spec allows for a much wider range of sources including slaughterhouse waste, spoiled meats even dead and diseased animals. Even the term ‘Poultry meal’ allows for a wide range of birds and bird parts to be used and is still far inferior to a named meal (eg ‘chicken meal’). 

With generically named ‘meat meals’, these ‘unnamed’ ingredients can also change at any time depending on what’s available (generally what is cheapest at the time!), which not only means the taste and quality of the food can change, but allergic reactions are more likely because you don’t know which animal protein sources are actually in the food.

Naturally, these generic meals are much cheaper - so you can start to understand that meat meals are really where you find the main difference in the price and quality of dog food.

Examples of meat ingredients you want to avoid:

• Meat meal
• Animal meal
• Meat and bone meal
• Poultry meal

Examples of meat ingredients you do want to look for:

• Chicken Meal
• Fish Meal
• Beef Meal
• Lamb meal

My Furbaby Only Uses Named Meat Sources

When the meat source is named you know exactly where this meal has come from and that it’s of higher quality – in our case, we use NZ cage-free chicken, grass-fed NZ beef, and wild-caught NZ fish. We use named meat sources meals because they are far better quality and therefore far better for your dog.

You also want to pay attention to where the ingredients are sourced and where the food is made. NZ ingredients are going to be much better quality than ingredients sourced from international markets and food that is made in NZ will always be much fresher.

High-quality NZ Ingredients

Feed My Furbaby's Chicken Dog Box recipe was developed by leading veterinary nutritionists who know exactly what your dog needs to thrive at all life stages. Our food is complete and balanced, uses locally sourced ingredients, and is perfect for puppies right through to senior dogs. It contains everything your dog needs, and nothing they don’t. 

The chicken meal used in Feed My Furbaby food is simply dehydrated chicken meat that excludes things like feathers and other unnecessary parts. Beef and fish meals are also included in the food for omega-3, calcium and iron. We then use plant-based starchy ingredients like peas and potatoes to add extra micronutrients and fibre. Our ingredients are 100% natural (with added vitamins and minerals) and we don't use any grainy fillers such as wheat or corn.

We've developed an all-breed, all-life stages food for all dogs to genuinely thrive on, and thousands of kiwi dogs are enjoying it and reaping the health benefits.