Ingredient order & splitting

Water weight, and why meals sit differently

A "meal" — chicken meal, salmon meal — has already had its water and most of its fat removed before it is weighed, so a kilogram of meal carries far more protein than a kilogram of fresh meat. That is why a food listing fresh chicken first and chicken meal second is often getting most of its animal protein from the second entry.

This is not a trick; it is how the rule works. It just means "chicken is the first ingredient" is a much weaker claim than the marketing around it implies.

Splitting

If a recipe contains a lot of one thing, listing it as several related entries puts each individually lower down. Peas, pea protein, pea starch and pea fibre are four entries; corn, corn gluten meal and ground corn are three. Combined, any of these might outweigh the meat at the top of the list.

You cannot undo splitting from a label — the inclusion rates are not published — but you can see it. Reading the first ten ingredients for repeats of the same base plant is the practical version, and it is exactly what our legume-load count automates.

Named versus generic

A named ingredient identifies its species: chicken meal, lamb meal, salmon. A generic one does not: "meat meal", "animal fat", "poultry by-product meal" describe a category. Generic entries are not automatically low quality, but they remove your ability to know what changed between batches — which matters a great deal if you are avoiding a specific protein. We found an unnamed by-product on 110 foods, 4.7% of the corpus.