Home / Dog food / Merrick / Slow-Cooked BBQ Braised Beef Wet Dog Food
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Merrick Slow-Cooked BBQ Braised Beef Wet Dog Food
A formulated-to-meet, deboned-first wet food — $11.89 a day for your 40-lb adult dog.
THE FACTS, ONE SENTENCE — data as JSON · reference dog 40 lb · updated 2026-10-18
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 2026-10-18
Composition — dry-matter basis
why dry matter
Calories & cost — for your 40-lb adult dog
Cost per 1,000 kcal: $12.08. Our cost comparisons cover dry food only for now. 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, 2026-10-18 · 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 →
Deboned Beef, Beef Broth, Vegetable Broth, Beef Liver, Sweet Potatoes, Green Beans, Dried Egg Product, Natural Flavor, Potato Starch, Dried Peas, Guar Gum, Salt, Fruit Juice Color, Dried Tomato, Potassium Chloride, Sodium Phosphate, Calcium Carbonate, Sunflower Oil, Natural Smoke Flavor, MINERALS [Zinc Proteinate, Iron Proteinate, Copper Proteinate, Cobalt Proteinate, Manganese Proteinate, Sodium Selenite, Potassium Iodide], Fish Oil (Preserved With Mixed Tocopherols), Flaxseed Oil, VITAMINS [Vitamin E Supplement, Thiamine Mononitrate (Vitamin B-1), Niacin (Vitamin B-3), Calcium Pantothenate (Vitamin B-5), Vitamin A Supplement, Riboflavin Supplement (Vitamin B-2), Biotin (Vitamin B-7), Vitamin B-12 Supplement, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B-6), Vitamin D-3 Supplement, Folic Acid (Vitamin B-9)], Cane Molasses, Magnesium Sulfate, Cumin, Cinnamon, Choline Chloride
7 ingredients in this list are ones we hold sourced evidence on , and 2 of them are genuinely contested rather than merely unpopular online.
- Potato · ingredient 9ContestedA 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.
- Peas · ingredient 10ContestedA pulse (legume) used in many grain-free foods as a plant protein and carbohydrate source. Peas are central to an open FDA investigation, begun in July 2018, into a possible link between diets high in peas, other pulses, and potatoes and canine dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM); 93% of reported products contained peas and/or lentils.
- Named Muscle Meat (e.g., Deboned Chicken, Beef, Salmon) · ingredient 1Well supportedA named fresh muscle meat identifies both the species and that it is clean flesh (AAFCO defines 'meat' as the clean flesh of a specified slaughtered mammal, and 'poultry' as clean flesh and skin). Naming the species is what lets an owner verify a protein for allergy avoidance.
- Mixed tocopherols (natural vitamin E) · ingredient 21Well supportedA blend of vitamin E forms (alpha-, beta-, gamma-, delta-tocopherol) used as a natural-source antioxidant to slow fat rancidity, commonly chosen as an alternative to synthetic preservatives. EFSA concluded that tocopherol-rich extracts are safe for all animal species and the consumer and are efficacious antioxidants in feed.
- Sweet potato · ingredient 5NeutralA starchy root used as a carbohydrate source and a source of fiber and beta-carotene in grain-free foods (a vegetable, not a cereal grain). The FDA's 2018 DCM investigation grouped 'potatoes (including sweet potatoes)' within its ingredients of interest, but the reported cases were dominated by pulses and white potato, and evidence isolating sweet potato specifically is limited.
- Guar Gum · ingredient 11NeutralA 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.
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 →