Fifty years ago, poultry made up about 15 percent of all the world’s meat. Now that fraction has ballooned to more than 36 percent, while the share of beef halved over the same period. Plant-based and cultured meats might be feeding our imaginations, but cheap, industrially farmed chicken meat has captured our dinner plates.

The pursuit of a never-ending supply of low-cost lean protein has turned chickens into meat machines. Today’s chickens have been bred and fed to grow five times fatter than their mid-century ancestors.

Now a Finnish startup says it has come up with a new way to squeeze more meat out of a single chicken. All it takes is a little ground-up bone. In a small pilot plant in the Finnish city of Kotka, the founders of SuperGround have figured out how to process chicken bones so they can be incorporated into ground chicken products like nuggets or meatballs. It might sound a little gross, but the startup’s founders point out that using more of the bird lowers the environmental footprint of every pound of meat and drives the cost of it down at a time when chicken prices are soaring.

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This might not sound particularly appetizing, but Koskinen points out that plenty of people enjoy eating bone marrow and that chicken bones are already a key ingredient in stock.

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