Meat and Bone Meal

Protein meal · evidence: Neutral · on 28 of 2,354 verified labels

Meat and Bone Meal appears on 28 of the 2,354 pet food labels we have verified against the official product label — 1.2% of the corpus. That is 22 dog foods (2.0% of the dog corpus) and 6 cat foods (0.5% 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 of mammal tissue that also includes bone, giving it high mineral/ash content and lower crude protein (roughly 39-46%) than clean meat meals. Amino-acid availability varies substantially with rendering temperature and pressure — studies show good digestibility is achievable but not guaranteed across processing methods. It is an economical, nutritionally acceptable protein and mineral source that is more variable and lower-transparency than a named muscle meal.

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. Meat and Bone Meal is in the first five ingredients on 19 of the 28 foods that contain it — 68% — 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. 14 of the 28 foods containing meat and bone 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 28. 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. 22 verified dry dog foods list meat and bone meal; 628 do not. These are medians across those two groups.

Across every food that lists it, meat and bone meal sits at position 5 in the ingredient list on a median food. The brands using it most in our corpus are Pedigree (10), Fromm (9), Friskies (5), Purina Dog Chow (3), 9Lives (1). 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 meat and bone 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 meat and bone meal is present and roughly where it sits by weight, never how much.

The gap here is definitional. AAFCO ingredient names describe what went into the rendering process, not the quality of what came out, and two foods listing the same meal can sit far apart on digestibility and ash content. A label cannot tell you which you are holding. 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)
• de-Oliveira et al. — Digestibility for dogs and cats of meat and bone meal processed at two different temperature and pressure levels, Journal of Animal Physiology and Animal Nutrition (2012)
• Faber et al. — Prediction of crude protein digestibility of animal by-product meals for dogs by the protein solubility in pepsin method, Journal of Nutritional Science (2014)
• Prevalence figures: Verified Pet Food Data corpus, 2,354 labels verified against official product labels. Machine-readable, CC BY 4.0.

Related ingredients

• Named Meat/Poultry Meal (e.g., Chicken Meal, Lamb Meal)

  On 711 labels (30.2%). Well supported.

• Corn Gluten Meal

  On 115 labels (4.9%). Neutral.

• Generic "Meat Meal" / "Poultry Meal" (unspecified species)

  On 1 labels (0.0%). Worth knowing.

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.