Home / Dog food / Merrick / Lil' Plates Small Breed Surf & Turf Wet Dog Food
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Merrick Lil' Plates Small Breed Surf & Turf Wet Dog Food
A formulated-to-meet, beef-first wet food from Merrick. Pricing and/or calorie data haven't been independently confirmed for this SKU yet, so cost-per-day isn't shown.
THE FACTS, ONE SENTENCE — data as JSON · reference dog 40 lb · updated 2026-07-11
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 2026-07-11
Composition — dry-matter basis
why dry matter
Calories & cost — for your 40-lb adult dog
No cost per 1,000 kcal yet: we haven't matched this food to a current Amazon listing. Serving math uses standard veterinary energy formulas — see the formula.
Standards & ingredients
what this means
why unknown
Safety
Source: official label source (official) · 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 above is computed from this list. Why order is by pre-cooking weight, and how splitting bends it →
BEEF, BEEF BROTH, SALMON BROTH, BEEF LIVER, GREEN BEANS, DRIED EGG WHITES, SALMON, POTATO STARCH, GUAR GUM, SUNFLOWER OIL, SODIUM PHOSPHATE, SALT, NATURAL FLAVOR, CALCIUM CARBONATE, POTASSIUM CHLORIDE, MINERALS (ZINC AMINO ACID CHELATE, IRON AMINO ACID CHELATE, COPPER AMINO ACID CHELATE, MANGANESE AMINO ACID CHELATE, SODIUM SELENITE, COBALT AMINO ACID CHELATE, POTASSIUM IODIDE), CHOLINE CHLORIDE, VITAMINS (THIAMINE MONONITRATE, VITAMIN E SUPPLEMENT, NIACIN SUPPLEMENT, d-CALCIUM PANTOTHENATE, VITAMIN A SUPPLEMENT, RIBOFLAVIN SUPPLEMENT, BIOTIN, VITAMIN B12 SUPPLEMENT, PYRIDOXINE HYDROCHLORIDE, VITAMIN D3 SUPPLEMENT, FOLIC ACID), CINNAMON, CUMIN, XANTHAN GUM
3 ingredients in this list are ones we hold sourced evidence on , and 1 of them is genuinely contested rather than merely unpopular online.
- Potato · ingredient 8ContestedA starchy tuber used as the carbohydrate base in many grain-free foods (it is a vegetable, not a cereal grain). The FDA's open 2018 investigation into diet-associated canine DCM listed potatoes 'in various forms' as main ingredients of interest alongside pulses such as peas and lentils.
- Guar Gum · ingredient 9NeutralA soluble, viscous fiber from the guar bean used in small amounts to thicken and stabilize foods, mostly wet formulas. At higher dietary inclusion it can lower the digestibility of dry matter and protein in dogs, but it also produces metabolic effects such as reduced post-meal insulin and cholesterol; at the low levels used as a thickener these effects are minor.
- Xanthan Gum · ingredient 21NeutralA 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.
Nutritional twins
Priced close matches
This food has no verified price yet — these are the closest label matches that do.
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 five 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 →We could not confirm this from a public source.
source →No feeding-trial AAFCO statement found on the 105 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.
merrickpetcare.com home/about pages show no QC text; /faq is 404 (2026-09-29). Parent purina.com blocked automated fetches.
144 PubMed papers (animal/pet filtered) list Nestlé Purina in an author address; we checked 144 and 143 really name the company. A floor, not a total.
source →Full company scorecard, sources, and every SKU we've verified for this brand: Merrick brand page →