By-Product Meal (Meat / Poultry By-Product Meal)

By-product · evidence: Neutral · on 337 of 2,354 verified labels

By-Product Meal (Meat / Poultry By-Product Meal) appears on 337 of the 2,354 pet food labels we have verified against the official product label — 14.3% of the corpus. That is 210 dog foods (18.9% of the dog corpus) and 127 cat foods (10.2% of the cat corpus), which makes it substantially more a dog-food ingredient than most discussion admits. Nobody publishes that split because computing it means reading every label.

What it is, and why it is in the food

A rendered concentrate made from clean, non-muscle parts of the carcass (organs, necks, feet, and similar), defined by AAFCO. It is more variable and lower-transparency than a named muscle meal, but it is not inherently unsafe or low-nutrition: controlled feeding trials in dogs report high protein digestibility (roughly 92-95%) for poultry by-product-based diets, and some by-product organs are nutrient-dense. Digestibility depends heavily on raw material and rendering temperature.

The evidence base is moderate: real studies exist, but the number of them is small enough that a single new trial could move the picture.

How common it is, and where it sits on the label

Ingredients are listed by pre-cooking weight, so position carries information: something in the first five is present in bulk, something near the end is a trace addition. By-Product Meal (Meat / Poultry By-Product Meal) is in the first five ingredients on 323 of the 337 foods that contain it — 96% — so on those it is a structural part of the recipe rather than an additive.

Every food that contains it, cheapest calories first

Ranked by cost per 1,000 kcal, which is the only price basis that survives different bag sizes and moisture levels. 184 of the 337 foods containing by-product meal (meat / poultry by-product meal) have a matched price; the rest are verified but unpriced.

“Check price” links go to a retailer and we may earn a commission — it does not change what is in this table, which is ranked purely on verified cost per 1,000 kcal. Full affiliate disclosure.

Showing the 12 cheapest of 337. The complete list, including unpriced foods, is in the JSON endpoint.

What actually differs about the foods that use it

Held to one species and one form — dry dog food — so the comparison is not just measuring moisture. 156 verified dry dog foods list by-product meal (meat / poultry by-product meal); 494 do not. These are medians across those two groups.

Across every food that lists it, by-product meal (meat / poultry by-product meal) sits at position 3 in the ingredient list on a median food. The brands using it most in our corpus are Royal Canin (137), Purina Pro Plan (45), Iams (41), Pedigree (35), Fancy Feast (18). A difference in this table is an association, not a cause: brands that reach for one ingredient tend to make similar formulation choices across the whole recipe.

Comparable foods that do not list it

Most people searching an ingredient name want the other half of the answer: what to buy instead. These are verified dry dog foods — the same species and form as most of the foods above, so the comparison is like for like — that do not list by-product meal (meat / poultry by-product meal) anywhere in their ingredients, cheapest per 1,000 kcal first.

Avoiding one ingredient is rarely a good reason to switch on its own. Use this table the way you would use any other single filter — alongside the AAFCO statement, the protein figure and the recall record, all of which are on each food's page.

What we don’t know

Our figure counts what manufacturers print. An ingredient that arrives inside another component — a preservative already in the fish meal, say — does not have to be declared separately by the pet-food maker, so a count from labels is a floor, not a ceiling. We also cannot see inclusion rate: a label tells you by-product meal (meat / poultry by-product meal) is present and roughly where it sits by weight, never how much.

The gap here is definitional. "By-product" is an AAFCO category, not a quality grade — it can mean nutrient-dense organ meat or it can mean much less, and the label uses one word for both. Nothing printed on the bag distinguishes them. We do not translate any of this into a score. There is no honest way to weigh one ingredient against a food’s AAFCO substantiation, its recall history and its cost, and sites that do it anyway are making the weighting up.

Sources

• AAFCO — What's in the Ingredients List? (2024)
• Impact of Animal By-Products on Diet Digestibility and Fecal Quality in Beagle Dogs, Life (Basel) (2023)
• Effects of Poultry By-Product Composition and Processing on Nutrient Digestibility and Fecal Characteristics of High-Protein Dry Dog Food, Animals (Basel) (2025)
• WSAVA Global Nutrition Committee — Frequently Asked Questions & Myths (2018)
• Prevalence figures: Verified Pet Food Data corpus, 2,354 labels verified against official product labels. Machine-readable, CC BY 4.0.

Frequently asked

All 35 ingredients we found on a real label are indexed on the ingredient hub. To see how these fields are read off a label in the first place, start with how to read a pet food label.