For a dog food, what could contain more protein than whole meat?

Well, surprisingly, a quality grade meat meal can actually be a more abundant source of protein than the whole meat from which it was made.

Here’s why…

Meat meal is a dried end-product of the cooking process known as rendering. Rendering is a lot like making stew — except that this stew is intentionally over-cooked.

With rendering, you start with a meat stew, cook away the water and bake the residue.  And you end up with a highly concentrated protein powder — or meat meal.

Now, check out this chart. Notice how whole chicken contains about 70% water and 18% protein.

Yet after rendering, the resulting chicken meal contains just 10% water and a whopping 65% protein.

That’s nearly four times more protein than whole chicken!