By-products can be called upcycled pet food ingredients

"What is in a name?" Romeo Montague asked, "A rose by any other name would still smell sweet." However, if they were called stench blossoms people would think of them differently, as Bart Simpson noted. The same can be said for upcycled pet food ingredients compared to by-products. The difference between pet foods made from by-products versus upcycled ingredients largely comes down to semantics. In a 2021 paper in the journal Foods, scientists proposed defining upcycled ingredients as environmentally friendly foods containing safe ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, including damaged food produce, by-products and scraps from food preparation.