Home / Dog food / Merrick / Slow-Cooked BBQ Chopped Pork Wet Dog Food

Merrick Slow-Cooked BBQ Chopped Pork Wet Dog Food package official product image via Amazon

Merrick · brand facts & recall history →

Merrick Slow-Cooked BBQ Chopped Pork Wet Dog Food

Wet food · adult dogs · distributed by Merrick Pet Care

A formulated-to-meet, deboned-first wet food — $14.63 a day for your 40-lb adult dog.

THE FACTS, ONE SENTENCE — data as JSON · reference dog 40 lb · updated 2026-10-19

$51.99 · 9.5 lb $14.63/day as of 2026-10-19 Check price →
Tell us about your dogevery number on this page updates live ↓
40 lb
For a 40-lb adult: 3¼ cansper day $14.63per day 3 daysbag lasts passes 2 fit checks ↓

Joint, kidney, dental or heart concerns? Labels can't honestly answer those — that's vet territory. Why we don't checkmark them →

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 LabelThe standardized pet-food panel
VPFD № MERRIC
verified 2026-10-19

Composition — dry-matter basis

why dry matter
Kibble is ~10% water, canned food ~78%, so as-fed numbers are on two different scales. As-fed values shown small. How the conversion works →
Protein 44.4%label: 8% min no corpus anchor for this food form
Fat 8.3%label: 1.5% min no corpus anchor for this food form
Fiber 5.6%label: 1% max no corpus anchor for this food form
Est. carbohydrates ash not disclosed → 8% assumed, so this is an estimate ≈25%computed no corpus anchor for this food form
Calcium / Phosphorus extended guarantees: none verified yet Not yet verifiedcalcium/phosphorus no ratio to anchor

Calories & cost — for your 40-lb adult dog

Calorie density 292 kcal/can812 kcal/kg no corpus anchor for this food form
Daily serving3¼ cans
Cost per day$14.63
9.5-lb bag lasts3 days

Cost per 1,000 kcal: $14.86. Our cost comparisons cover dry food only for now. Serving math uses standard veterinary energy formulas — see the formula.

Standards & ingredients

AAFCO statement
what this means
Two claims exist: formulated to meet a profile, or fed to real dogs in an AAFCO trial. Which is stronger, and how rare it is →
Formulated to meet · maintenance
First five ingredients (by pre-cooking weight)Deboned Pork · Beef Broth · Vegetable Broth · Pork Liver · Dried Egg Product
Named animal protein first; named meals onlyYes
Legumes in first 10 (FDA DCM inquiry)None
BHA / BHT preservativesNone on label
Carrageenan (thickener)None
Ethoxyquin
why unknown
A preservative added by a fish-meal supplier need not appear on the finished label, so no label can prove its absence. Why we show gaps →
None — no fish meal in this recipe

Safety

FDA recalls — Merrick, since 2023None on record
ManufacturerMerrick Pet Care, Hereford, TX 79045 USA
Label transparency 8 of 15 standard fields
Green = verified favorable · amber = gap in the record · red = verified unfavorable · gray = not disclosed / neutral fact.
Source: official label source (official)· price: Amazon, 2026-10-19 · 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.

✓
Validated for adult dogsAAFCO statement covers adult maintenance.
✓
Passes our sensitive-stomach checksNamed animal protein first, and no unnamed by-products in the ingredient list.
·
Chicken-free recipeNot selected for your dog — but relevant if chicken sensitivity ever comes up.

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 Pork, Beef Broth, Vegetable Broth, Pork Liver, Dried Egg Product, Potatoes, Carrots, Natural Porcine Flavor, Potato Starch, Guar Gum, Calcium Carbonate, Dried Tomato, Salt, Sunflower Oil, Fruit Juice Color, Sodium Phosphate, Potassium Chloride, Cane Molasses, Fish Oil (Preserved With Mixed Tocopherols), Flaxseed Oil, Natural Smoke Flavor, MINERALS [Zinc Proteinate, Iron Proteinate, Copper Proteinate, Cobalt Proteinate, Manganese Proteinate, Sodium Selenite, Potassium Iodide], Apple Cider vinegar, VITAMINS [Vitamin E Supplement, Thiamine Mononitrate (Vitamin B-1), Niacin Supplement (Vitamin B-3), Calcium Pantothenate (Vitamin B-5), Vitamin A Supplement (Vitamin B-2), 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)], Choline Chloride, Magnesium Sulfate

4 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 6ContestedA 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.
  • Mixed tocopherols (natural vitamin E) · ingredient 19Well 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.
  • Guar Gum · ingredient 10NeutralA 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.
  • Flaxseed (ALA omega-3) · ingredient 20NeutralA plant source of the short-chain omega-3 ALA. Dogs convert ALA to the long-chain omega-3s inefficiently: a controlled feeding study (Dunbar 2010) found flaxseed raised serum EPA but produced no measurable DHA.

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.

Owns its manufacturing Owns its plants

Merrick owns and operates its own dry plant and wet cannery in Hereford, Texas.

source →
Employs a qualified nutritionist Undisclosed

We could not confirm this from a public source.

source →
AAFCO feeding trials Undisclosed

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.

Publishes quality-control testing Not found

merrickpetcare.com home/about pages show no QC text; /faq is 404 (2026-09-29). Parent purina.com blocked automated fetches.

Peer-reviewed research Yes — sourced

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 →
Parent company Nestlé Purina PetCare ↗ Founded 1988 ↗ Headquarters / plant Hereford, Texas, USA ↗ FDA recalls on record 6 on record

Full company scorecard, sources, and every SKU we've verified for this brand: Merrick brand page →