What is meat and bone meal?
Meat and bone meal is a product that is made from animal processing offal. Offal are those parts of the animal that are not fit for human consumption; it contains among others fat, meat, organs, bones, blood and feathers. Almost 30% of the live weight of an animal ends up as offal. A renderer – in the Netherlands this is Sonac (daughter of the Vion group) – processes the offal to meat and bone meal. Sonac sells its MBM mainly to manufacturers of pet food and to countries in Asia. Sonac has a monopoly in the Netherlands, but six Dutch poultry processors have taken up the initiative to build a new plant for rendering their slaughtering offal. The new plant – Noblesse Protein – will render about 60% of Dutch poultry offal. MBM has a high energy value, high protein content and contains many minerals and vitamins. This makes it an interesting raw material for feed manufacturers. Before 2000, also dead animals were processed into meat and bone meal. That doesn’t happen anymore. In theory, th
