This Startup Wants You to Eat Ground-Up Chicken Bones

 This startup wants you to eat chicken bones that have been ground up.

Of course, the possibility of producing more chicken nuggets for each bird slain will thrill meat producers the most. Another concern is whether or not this is financially viable.

 "In the animal protein industry, nothing goes to waste. "Everything has a home," says Jayson Lusk, a Purdue University agricultural economist. Chicken bone is frequently exported from the EU for use in pet food and livestock feed. 

The EU modified laws prohibiting the use of chicken by-products in animal feed in August 2021, making it acceptable to integrate chicken bones into pig feed. (It is still illegal to feed chicken by-products to cows or hens.)

It's only a matter of persuading them to consume it. Fast food companies are unlikely to want to be connected with a food product that may turn off some customers.

McDonald's discontinued using a mechanically separated meat technique, in which bones are mixed up with chicken flesh and then removed using a sieve, in 2003. Any meat produced in this manner must be labeled as such in the EU.

Mechanically separated beef is subject to particular restrictions in several nations, but Koskinen believes his product will not be included.

"Because our technique softens and grinds the bones, the calcium in the finished product is mainly dissolved and free of hard particles," he explains.

Even if their goods must be labeled in the same way that mechanically separated beef is, this may not be a death sentence. "In my opinion, people pay much too little attention to the ingredients list of the items they are already eating," Koskinen adds.

What is certain is that the demand for low-cost chicken will continue to rise. "You may often see a move from red meat to chicken when salaries are lower," says Harry Dee, a poultry specialist at the research firm IBISWorld.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that chicken production will increase by 17 percent over the next decade, outpacing that of any other meat source.

However, it's unclear how much of it will be driven by chicken nuggets. Ground chicken products, according to Lusk, make up only a minor portion of the entire meat industry.

Filling ground chicken with bone could improve efficiency a little, but it's not going to change the way meat is produced.

It's also unclear how much of an environmental impact it will have, given that most of that chicken bone wasn't going to waste in the first place.

However, Koskinen is optimistic that the first goods comprising his bone and chicken flesh will be available to consumers in 2023. "Without exaggeration, the meat industry's interest has exceeded all of our expectations," he adds.

SuperGround is currently only producing tiny batches of chicken—20 or 40 pounds at a time—but its production plant has the capacity to produce over 400,000 pounds of the mass each year. It's simply a matter of finding enough people to consume it now.