Pet Food
Chicken meal is mainly used in pet foods, its protein content is much higher than regular chicken because most of the water has been removed.
Typically when it comes to pet food, all of the ingredients (meats, grains, vitamins, minerals) are mixed together and put through a machine called an extruder. The extruder cooks the mixture by adding steam and water. The result is the familiar kibble coming out of the extruder and is subsequently dried. Fat is added after drying. (This is the same process for making many breakfast cereals.) The final pet product has a moisture level of around 10%.
The processing of chicken meat along with the other ingredients essentially is converting it to chicken meal. However, there are some characteristics of regular chicken meat that makes it less flexible for use as an ingredient compared to chicken meal. The high moisture content of chicken limits the amount that can be formulated into a complete finished food. Chicken is generally stored frozen to minimize microbial growth. The frozen chicken is thawed and made into slurry before adding to the mix.
Chicken meal, however can be used in a finished food at levels much greater than chicken meat. Chicken meal in a finished food provides roughly 4-5 times the nutrients as the same weight of chicken meat because of the differences in moisture.
So, a pet food made of chicken meat may only have 20% of the chicken in the final product, providing only 3.6% protein. An equivalent proportion of chicken meal would provide 13% protein.
(For example, 100 lbs of chicken meal provides 65 lbs of protein while 100 lbs of chicken provides only 18 lbs of protein.)
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