Home / Dog food / Merrick / Backcountry Grain Free Hero's Banquet Wet Dog Food
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Backcountry Grain Free Hero's Banquet Wet Dog Food
A formulated-to-meet, deboned-first wet food — $11.49 a day for your 40-lb adult dog.
THE FACTS, ONE SENTENCE — data as JSON · reference dog 40 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. Corpus dot-anchors currently cover dry food only — this is a wet food, so anchors are omitted below rather than compared across forms.
verified 2026-07-12
Composition — dry-matter basis
why dry matter
Calories & cost — for your 40-lb adult dog
Cost per 1,000 kcal: $11.67. Corpus cost comparisons currently cover dry food only. Serving math uses standard veterinary energy formulas — see the formula.
Standards & ingredients
what this means
why unknown
Safety
Source: official label source (official)· price: Amazon, 2026-07-12 · anchors: 494 verified dry dog foods (360 priced) · how to read this label
The fit
For your dog, specifically
Checked for a 40-lb adult with a sensitive stomach — the same published criteria our finder uses. Change your dog above and these update.
The source material
The full ingredient list
Every flag on the Verified Label is computed from this list. Ingredients are ordered by pre-cooking weight — the first five carry the most information.
Deboned Beef, Beef Broth, Turkey Broth, Beef Liver, Lamb, Green Beans, Carrots, Natural Flavor, Dried Egg Product, Potato Starch, Salt, Guar Gum, Fruit Juice Color, Calcium Carbonate, Sodium Phosphate, Fish Oil (Preserved With Mixed Tocopherols), Potassium Chloride, MINERALS [Zinc Proteinate, Iron Proteinate, Cobalt Proteinate, Copper Proteinate, Manganese Proteinate, Sodium Selenite, Potassium Iodide], Sunflower Oil, VITAMINS [Vitamin E Supplement, Thiamine Mononitrate (Vitamin B-1), Niacin (Vitamin B-3), Calcium Pantothenate (Vitamin B-5), Vitamin A Supplement, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B-6), Riboflavin Supplement (Vitamin B-2), Biotin (Vitamin B-7), Vitamin B-12 Supplement, Vitamin D-3 Supplement, Folic Acid (Vitamin B-9)], Yucca Schidigera Extract, Cinnamon, Flaxseed Oil, Choline Chloride, Xanthan Gum, Magnesium Sulfate
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 →