What is chicken meal in dog food?

The short answer

Chicken meal is chicken that has been cooked, dried, and ground into an ingredient for pet food. It adds protein and minerals to the recipe, and it still counts as chicken if that's something you're trying to avoid.¹

The word “meal” doesn't tell you much at first glance. Next to plain “chicken” on a bag, it can sound like the less appealing option. Understanding how it's made helps explain why both can appear in the same food, and why that alone won't tell you which bag to buy.

What goes into chicken meal?

Making chicken meal involves a process called rendering, which removes much of the water and fat. Under AAFCO's US ingredient definition, poultry meal can contain flesh, skin, and bone. Naming the bird makes it chicken meal.¹

You might also see chicken by-product meal, which has a different definition and can include parts such as feet and intestines. Those may sound unappetizing to us, but by-products can provide useful nutrients. The name alone doesn't tell you whether the finished food provides the nutrition your dog needs.^1,2

Why would a food contain both chicken and chicken meal?

Take Nutro Natural Choice Adult Chicken & Brown Rice Recipe. The US product page we checked lists chicken, chicken meal, brown rice, barley, and oatmeal as its first five ingredients. Seeing chicken twice in different forms can look confusing until you know that meal has already had much of its water removed.^3,1

The ingredient list puts ingredients in order by weight, but it doesn't give you the amount of each one. You can see that this recipe contains both forms of chicken; you can't work out how much protein each contributes just from its place on the list.^4,5

That's why the first few ingredients are useful when you're checking for something specific, such as chicken. Choosing a food also means looking at what the whole recipe provides.

What else should you look for on the bag?

Turn the package over and look for the small statement explaining whether the food is complete and balanced, and which dogs it's intended for. The formal name is the nutritional adequacy statement. It helps you check whether you're looking at a food for adult dogs, growing puppies, or another life stage.⁶

For a closer comparison, it also helps to know who develops the recipes and how the company checks its food. The World Small Animal Veterinary Association recommends asking about the food maker's nutrition expertise, quality checks, and research. These answers can tell you things that an ingredient list leaves out.⁷

PetRoot's guide to how we score pet food explains our own approach to evaluating a food. If you're comparing bags in a store, scanning the barcode in PetRoot brings up the food if it's in PetRoot's catalog. Check the recipe name matches the bag in your hand.

If you've saved a chicken allergy or sensitivity in your dog's profile, Pet Fit in PetRoot Plus flags every chicken ingredient in foods in PetRoot's catalog, chicken meal included.

So when you see chicken meal on a bag, read it as concentrated chicken, then move on to the parts of the label that tell you more: who the food is made for and how many calories it has.