Is Chicken Meal Bad for Cats? Meal vs. Fresh Chicken on the Label
By Pettings · Published Oct 29, 2026 · Scores and prices as of Nov 9, 2026
Chicken meal is not a lower grade of chicken. It is chicken that has been cooked down so the water and most of the fat are gone, which makes it a concentrated, dry form of the same meat. On Pettings, chicken meal and fresh chicken get the same rating: 5 out of 5.
The confusion comes from the word "meal". "Chicken" and "chicken meal" are two different ingredients on a cat food label, and they sit in different places in the ingredient list for a reason that has nothing to do with quality.
What the Two Words Mean
AAFCO, the organization that writes the model rules for US pet food labels, defines both on its ingredient list page:
- Poultry is the clean combination of flesh and skin, with or without the bone that comes with it, without feathers, heads, feet and entrails. If it comes from one species of bird, the label may use that bird's name, such as chicken.
- Poultry meal is the same material after dry rendering. Rendering means cooking it so that most of the water and fat are removed; what is left is ground into a dry powder. Chicken meal is poultry meal made only from chicken.
So the difference is processing, not which parts of the bird go in. Chicken meal is also not the same as chicken by-product meal. By-products are the parts other than the meat, and AAFCO's examples for by-product meal are necks, feet, undeveloped eggs and intestines. Our guide to poultry by-product meal covers those terms.
Why Fresh Chicken Can Come First and Still Add Less
Ingredients are listed from most to least by weight, and the weight of fresh chicken includes its water. Fresh chicken is mostly water, which is cooked off when the kibble is made. The Merck Veterinary Manual gives the example directly: chicken listed first at 75% moisture will add a much smaller share of the finished food than the same ingredient added in a dry form, such as chicken meal.
That makes the first line of the list a weak guide to where the protein comes from. Many foods use both forms. Instinct Original Kibble Chicken lists chicken first and chicken meal second, then turkey meal. Of the 149 dry foods on Pettings, 60 contain chicken meal, 50 have it in their first five ingredients, and 28 list fresh chicken first with chicken meal also in the first five.
How Pettings Rates Chicken Meal
Our Ingredient score rates every ingredient from 0 to 5 and weighs the first five ingredients at 70%. For animal ingredients, the main question is whether the label names the animal and the part. Chicken meal does both, so it gets the same rating as fresh chicken:
| Ingredient | What the label names | Our rating (0 to 5) |
|---|---|---|
| Chicken | The animal and the meat | 5 |
| Deboned chicken | The animal and the meat, bones removed | 5 |
| Chicken meal | The animal and the meat, rendered | 5 |
| Chicken by-product meal | The animal, but parts other than meat | 2 |
| Poultry by-product meal | Birds, but not which birds or parts | 2 |
This means a food does not gain or lose points for using meal instead of fresh meat. When two chicken foods score differently, the gap comes from the rest of the list. The 8 foods on Pettings that open with chicken meal show this well:
| Food | Next four ingredients | Ingred. /100 | Avoid List | $/lb |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Go! Solutions Carnivore Grain Free Chicken, Turkey + Duck Recipe | de-boned chicken, de-boned turkey, duck meal, turkey meal | 90 | 0 | $5.10 |
| Natural Balance Original Ultra Chicken Meal & Salmon Meal | Brown Rice, Chicken, Chicken Fat (Preserved with Mixed Tocopherols), Brewers Dried Yeast | 73 | 0 | $3.73 |
| Solid Gold Indigo Moon Chicken | Potatoes, Canola Oil (Preserved with Mixed Tocopherols), Peas, Chicken | 65 | 0 | $4.16 |
| Taste of the Wild Rocky Mountain Feline Recipe with Roasted Venison & Smoke-Flavored Salmon | Peas, Sweet Potatoes, Chicken Fat (preserved with mixed tocopherols), Pea Protein | 64 | 0 | $2.86 |
| Royal Canin Indoor Long Hair | brown rice, corn gluten meal, corn, brewers rice | 47 | 0 | $6.17 |
| Royal Canin Weight Care | pea fiber, wheat gluten, corn, corn gluten meal | 47 | 0 | $5.71 |
| Royal Canin Fit And Active | corn, corn gluten meal, brown rice, wheat | 46 | 0 | $8.00 |
| Royal Canin Indoor Adult | brewers rice, corn, wheat, corn protein meal | 45 | 0 | $4.53 |
All of them start with the same ingredient. The ones with corn or wheat in the next four score lowest, because those ingredients have lower ratings, not because of the chicken meal.
What the Label Cannot Tell You
The label shows whether the first ingredient is chicken, chicken meal or chicken by-product meal. It does not show how much of each is in the recipe, how digestible the protein is, or how much of the protein comes from chicken rather than from plant ingredients such as corn protein meal or pea protein. The WSAVA Global Nutrition Committee, a group of veterinary nutrition specialists, notes that the ingredient list gives no information on the quality of the ingredients. For a closer comparison, the guaranteed analysis on the bag gives the minimum protein for the whole food.
What to Check on the Bag
- The first five ingredients: is the animal named (chicken, chicken meal) or a group term (poultry, meat)?
- How many of the first five are animal ingredients, fresh or meal, and how many are grains or plant proteins.
- The guaranteed analysis for protein, and the nutritional adequacy statement for your cat's life stage.
If your cat has a medical condition, ask your veterinarian before changing foods.
Related: How to Read a Cat Food Label, and the chicken meal and chicken pages in our ingredient dictionary.
Sources
- AAFCO, "What's in the Ingredients List?": definitions of poultry, poultry meal and poultry by-product meal; ingredients listed from most to least by weight.
- Merck Veterinary Manual, "Dog and Cat Foods": ingredient order on an as-fed basis; fresh chicken at 75% moisture vs. chicken meal.
- WSAVA Global Nutrition Committee, "Global Nutrition Guidelines".
- Pettings, How We Score: ingredient ratings and the first five rule.
- Food figures from the Pettings food pages, copied from the makers' labels.
Scores describe what the label says. They are not medical advice.
