Home / Cat food / Merrick / Purrfect Bistro Simmered Beef in Gravy Wet Cat Food
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Merrick Purrfect Bistro Simmered Beef in Gravy Wet Cat Food
A formulated-to-meet, beef-first wet food from Merrick, lighter per can than 57% of the wet cat foods we've verified. Price-matched at $13.95 per 1,000 kcal, verified 2026-07-12.
THE FACTS, ONE SENTENCE — data as JSON · reference cat 10 lb · updated 2026-07-12
The evidence
The Verified Label
Every food on this site gets this exact panel — same fields, same order, sourced from the official label — so brands finally become comparable. Dots show where this food sits among all 732 wet cat foods we've verified.
verified 2026-07-12
Composition — dry-matter basis
why dry matter
why 0.12% DM
Calories & cost — for your 10-lb adult cat
Cost per 1,000 kcal: $13.95 — price-matched to a current retail listing, verified 2026-07-12. Serving math uses standard veterinary energy formulas — see the formula.
Standards & ingredients
what this means
why unknown
Safety
Source: official label source (official) · anchors: 732 verified wet cat foods · how to read this label
The fit
For your cat, specifically
Checked for a 10-lb adult cat with urinary health + a low-carb goal — the same published criteria our finder uses. Change your cat above and these update.
The source material
The full ingredient list
Every flag above is computed from this list. Why order is by pre-cooking weight, and how splitting bends it →
Beef broth, beef, wheat gluten, liver, chicken, tomatoes, wild rice, natural flavor, egg product, tricalcium phosphate, MINERALS [potassium chloride, magnesium proteinate, zinc sulfate, ferrous sulfate, manganese sulfate, copper sulfate, potassium iodide], xanthan gum, carrageenan, taurine, choline chloride, VITAMINS [thiamine mononitrate (Vitamin B-1), Vitamin E supplement, niacin (Vitamin B-3), calcium pantothenate (Vitamin B-5), pyridoxine hydrochloride (Vitamin B-6), riboflavin supplement (Vitamin B-2), Vitamin B-12 supplement, biotin (Vitamin B-7), Vitamin A supplement, folic acid (Vitamin B-9), menadione sodium bisulfite complex (Vitamin K), Vitamin D-3 supplement], salt
4 ingredients in this list are ones we hold sourced evidence on , and 1 of them is genuinely contested rather than merely unpopular online.
- Carrageenan · ingredient 13Worth knowingA seaweed-derived (Chondrus crispus) thickener and gelling agent used mainly in some wet and canned dog foods. Low-molecular-weight 'degraded' carrageenan (poligeenan) is inflammatory in lab-animal studies and is not permitted as a food additive, but food-grade undegraded carrageenan (E 407) is authorized by regulators; EFSA's 2018 re-evaluation kept only a temporary group ADI of 75 mg/kg body weight per day pending better data, and its specific effect in dogs is unresolved.
- Wheat Gluten · ingredient 3NeutralThe concentrated protein fraction of wheat, used as a plant protein and binder; it is highly digestible in dogs (about 88% crude-protein digestibility in one feeding study). The 2007 pet-food deaths linked to wheat gluten were caused by criminal melamine adulteration of imported product to fake protein readings, a contamination event rather than a property of wheat gluten itself.
- Xanthan Gum · ingredient 12NeutralA fermentation-derived polysaccharide used as a thickener and stabilizer, mainly in wet and gravy-style foods. EFSA's 2017 re-evaluation found no safety concern and concluded no numerical ADI was needed; direct studies in dogs are limited, but at the small amounts used it acts as a non-absorbed, largely fermentable fiber.
- Taurine (supplemental) · ingredient 14NeutralA sulfur amino acid that dogs can normally synthesize from methionine and cysteine, so it is not classically essential for them. However, some breeds (e.g., golden retrievers) and some diets are linked to low taurine status and dilated cardiomyopathy: an observational study (Ontiveros 2020) associated non-traditional, largely grain-free diets with taurine deficiency and DCM-consistent echocardiographic changes in golden retrievers, though causation and mechanism remain under investigation.
Nutritional twins
Cheaper close matches
Verified foods with a closely matching label at a meaningfully lower cost per 1,000 kcal.
Label-composition matches only: same species, form, and growth stage; same primary protein where both are known; grain-free preserved; protein within 4 points and fat within 4 points, and estimated carbs within 8 points, on a dry-matter basis. Not a medical or quality recommendation.
The maker
Who makes this — and how they back it up
The four questions the WSAVA nutrition guidelines tell you to ask a pet-food company. Every answer is sourced or marked as an undisclosed gap — never guessed. This is the "is it made competently?" axis that star-rating sites skip.
Merrick owns and operates its own dry plant and wet cannery in Hereford, Texas.
source →Merrick's parent Nestlé Purina PetCare employs a board-certified veterinary nutritionist (Arleigh Reynolds, DVM), but Merrick operates as an independent business and no fetched source names a board-certified veterinary nutritionist or PhD animal nutritionist on Merrick's own staff, so value is null.
source →No feeding-trial AAFCO statement found on the 123 labels we’ve verified for this brand, and no company-wide claim was found either. Most pet foods are only "formulated to meet" AAFCO profiles (a paper calculation) rather than fed to real animals in trials — this is common, not necessarily a red flag.
Count of PubMed-indexed records with the entity in an author affiliation (animal/pet-domain filtered). A reproducible FLOOR, not a total: affiliation strings vary and some research is published under institute names. research_entity_affiliation is recorded only for manufacturers with a dedicated pet-nutrition research arm; brand_affiliation.count is null where the brand name is an ambiguous homonym.
Full company scorecard, sources, and every SKU we've verified for this brand: Merrick brand page →