Fish meal is a protein-rich powder made by cooking, pressing, drying, and grinding whole fish or fish processing waste. It typically contains 50% to 65% protein, making it one of the most nutrient-dense feed ingredients available. Global production runs about 5.6 million tons per year, and the bulk of it goes into animal feed for farmed fish, poultry, and pigs.
What Fish Meal Contains
The nutritional profile is what makes fish meal valuable. A typical batch contains 50% to 60% protein, 5% to 10% fat, and significant amounts of calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium (since whole fish, bones included, go into the grinder). Moisture sits between 6% and 10% in the finished product, and ash content ranges from 12% to 35% depending on how much bone material is present. High-quality fish meal can reach nearly 70% crude protein.
What sets fish meal apart from plant-based protein sources like soybean meal is its amino acid balance. It contains high levels of both lysine and methionine, two building blocks that animals need for growth and disease resistance but that are hard to get from grains or legumes alone. Soybean meal, for instance, provides good lysine but falls short on methionine. Fish meal delivers both in a single ingredient.
The fat fraction matters too. Fish meal and its co-product, fish oil, are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, particularly EPA and DHA. Anchovy and sardine-based meals tend to have the highest concentrations of these fatty acids compared to meals made from other species.
How Fish Meal Is Made
The standard manufacturing method is called wet pressing, and it follows a consistent sequence across the industry: cooking, pressing, separating liquids, drying, and grinding.
Raw fish enters a steam cooker where it’s heated to roughly 95°C to 100°C over 15 to 20 minutes. This step coagulates the protein and breaks open fat cells, though research from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization shows that protein coagulation actually finishes at about 75°C, and fat cells rupture below 50°C. Heating beyond those thresholds doesn’t add much nutritional benefit.
After cooking, the material goes into a press that squeezes out liquid, leaving a solid “presscake” with around 50% moisture. The expelled liquid gets separated into three parts: a sludge that goes back into the meal, fish oil that’s collected as its own product, and a watery fraction called stickwater that gets evaporated down and recombined with the presscake.
Drying brings the moisture below 12%, which is the threshold needed to prevent microbial growth. The temperature of the meal during drying stays below about 90°C to avoid damaging the protein. Once dry, the material is ground into a uniform powder, treated with an antioxidant, cooled to room temperature, and stored in bulk.
Where the Raw Fish Comes From
Fish meal comes from two main sources. The first is dedicated fishing fleets that harvest small, oily species like anchovies, sardines, and menhaden specifically for processing into meal and oil. The second is waste from the seafood industry: heads, tails, bones, guts, and trimmings left over from filleting operations and canneries. This second category means fish meal production doubles as a way to use parts of the fish that would otherwise be discarded.
Uses in Aquaculture and Livestock Feed
Aquaculture is the largest consumer of fish meal globally. Farmed fish, especially carnivorous species like salmon, trout, and eel, need high-protein diets, and fish meal is the most efficient way to deliver it. Across various industry estimates, fish meal makes up roughly 6% to 21% of commercial aquaculture feed formulations, with carnivorous species requiring the highest inclusion rates. For some of these species, the weight of fish-based inputs in the feed actually exceeds twice the weight of farmed fish produced.
In livestock production, fish meal plays a targeted role. It’s most commonly added to diets for young pigs right after weaning, where its palatability helps encourage feed intake during a stressful transition. Research published in Translational Animal Science found that nursery pigs fed diets containing fish meal gained more weight and ate more feed than pigs on control diets without it. Inclusion rates in pig feed typically range from 3% to 6%, and the benefits are strongest at moderate levels. At 3% inclusion, one study observed improved weight gain and better feed efficiency, while doubling to 6% didn’t always produce additional gains depending on the fish meal source.
Poultry producers also use fish meal to fill amino acid gaps that plant-based feeds leave behind, particularly for methionine and lysine. Its balance of amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and omega-3 fatty acids makes it a compact nutritional package that’s difficult to fully replicate with plant ingredients alone.
Fish Meal as Fertilizer
Outside of animal feed, fish meal has a long history as an organic fertilizer. Fish-based fertilizers (often sold as fish emulsion, a liquid form) provide a typical nutrient ratio of about 2-4-1 for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, along with micronutrients like calcium, magnesium, and sulfur. Beyond the direct nutrient content, fish-based fertilizers feed soil microorganisms with protein, which can strengthen the soil food web and support long-term plant health. Gardeners working within organic certification standards often rely on fish meal because it’s a natural nitrogen source that breaks down gradually.
Stabilization and Safety During Transport
Fresh fish meal presents a real safety problem: the residual fish oil can oxidize, generating heat that builds up in bulk storage and, in extreme cases, causes the meal to spontaneously ignite. This is not a theoretical risk. It’s a well-documented hazard in maritime shipping.
The industry addresses this by adding antioxidants immediately after drying. The most widely used has historically been ethoxyquin, a synthetic compound that effectively stops the chain reaction of fat oxidation. Other synthetic options include BHT and BHA. Natural alternatives like tocopherols (a form of vitamin E), rosemary extract, lecithin, and citrate are increasingly common, partly driven by regulatory pressure in the European Union, which restricted ethoxyquin use in animal feed. Fish meal treated with approved antioxidants receives more relaxed stowage and ventilation requirements under the International Maritime Dangerous Goods Code, which governs ocean shipping safety.
Global Production Scale
World fish meal production in 2025 is estimated at 5.6 million tons, with fish oil production running alongside it at 1.2 to 1.3 million tons, according to IFFO, the marine ingredients industry organization. Peru has historically been the world’s largest producer, driven by its massive anchovy fishery off the Pacific coast, followed by other major producing nations in Northern Europe and Southeast Asia. Production volumes fluctuate year to year based on fishing quotas, ocean conditions, and the abundance of key forage fish stocks like Peruvian anchoveta.