Meat and animal by-products

Meat and animal by-products is a European labelling category covering animal tissues, including edible parts other than skeletal muscle, and its single most important lesson is that the word by-product does not, in itself, signal poor nutritional quality. Defined within the EU feed framework under Regulation (EC) 767/2009, the category can include organ tissues such as liver, lung, and kidney, several of which are among the most nutrient-dense parts of a carcass (Regulation (EC) 767/2009). This is genuinely counterintuitive to many owners, who read by-product as a euphemism for waste, when in fact a wild cat or dog eating prey consumes precisely these organ tissues and often values them above lean muscle for their vitamin and mineral content. The legitimate criticism is not the category itself but its vagueness: a generic meat and animal by-products entry tells you neither the species nor which tissues are used, so it offers less transparency than a named ingredient such as chicken liver. For a premium buyer, the sensible stance is therefore nuanced: do not dismiss by-products as inherently inferior, but do prefer labels that specify the animal source, since specificity, not the by-product label, is the real quality signal. The term should be read together with the [ingredient order](/glossary/ingredient-order) and the [analytical constituents](/glossary/analytical-constituents), and understood against the [crude protein](/glossary/crude-protein) figure it helps generate. For more on decoding ingredient language, see the [Petipedia glossary](/glossary).

Petipedia · Editorial team

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