Are your favorite homegrown brands as independent and All-American as you think they are? From skincare products and organic foods to the world's most used social media sites, click or scroll through to discover the real names behind the brands we love.

Kellogg's might be the household name when it comes to cereal, but it also owns some of our favorite snack brands too. Pringles, Nutri-Grain and Town House are some of the brands that fall under the Kellogg’s umbrella.

One glance at Aussie hair products and the kangaroo logo would tell you that the company’s products have a hint of the Australian about them, including all-Australian ingredients such as jojoba seed oil and eucalyptus. But did you know that the company was actually founded by an American businessman in 1979? And Aussie remains in American hands today as it was snapped up by Procter & Gamble in 2003.

Messaging app WhatsApp launched in 2009 and two years later it hit a record one billion messages in a single day. The app’s user base grew and grew as additional features such as group chats, voice notes and read receipts were added into the mix. Facebook was quick to pounce on the app's success, acquiring it for $16 billion in 2014.

YouTube is the world’s best-known video sharing site and Google snapped it up in 2006 for $1.65 billion. In 2020, Google parent company Alphabet revealed that the site had generated some $15 billion in the previous year, which made up around 10% of the company’s revenue. 

Aside from selling soft drinks, PepsiCo is also a multinational food and beverage company and owns dozens of brands. Among them is Stacy’s Pita Chips, which was acquired by the firm in 2006 for an undisclosed amount, joining a long list of small companies to be accused of selling out to the mainstream market. 

Disney bought ABC in 1995 after years of trying to poach the broadcaster through a number of different deals. ABC originally helped Disney to fund the building of Disneyland in exchange for a weekly Sunday night show, which was also called Disneyland. ABC then went on to air The Mickey Mouse Club and, years later, Disney acquired the media company for $19 billion.

Household cleaning product company Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day, which markets itself as being ‘earth-friendly’, is produced by the Caldrea company, but in 2008 Caldrea was acquired by S.C. Johnson, the global cleaning product supplier.

Another ‘earth-friendly’ skincare brand to have sold itself to a larger corporation is Burt’s Bees, which was bought by Clorox in 2007 for $913 million in today’s money. At the time, skeptics worried the acquisition would affect the ethical nature of Burt’s Bees, but it soon emerged that Burt’s had actually helped to enhance the sustainability of Clorox and pushed for more sustainable sourcing of ingredients.

Also on the list of small companies sold to large corporations is Seeds of Change, an organic seed and food company, which was bought by Mars in 1997 for an undisclosed amount. Mars has recently launched a Seeds of Change accelerator program, which helps to fast-track healthy and sustainable food start-ups into successful companies.

Eager to keep its brand range looking balanced with a portfolio of healthy products, PepsiCo bought Naked Juice in 2007. The acquisition followed on from Coca-Cola’s 2001 purchase of fellow juice brand Odwalla. PepsiCo certainly seems to have won this one, with Naked Juice making up 65.1% of refrigerated juice sales in America in 2019, while Odwalla made up just 3.8% of the market, according to Statista. Odwalla was then discontinued by its parent company in July 2020 after Coca-Cola decided it needed to “prune” its business.

Buying social reading site Goodreads was an attractive deal for Amazon in 2013, as it had more than 10 million members sharing their opinions on books they were reading – useful information for the company that went from a garage in 1994 to the world’s biggest book retailer. Amazon allegedly paid around $150 million for the website.

You might be surprised to learn that Quaker is also owned by PepsiCo. It acquired the oats company back in 2001 in exchange for $13.4 billion in stock because it wanted to add Quaker’s subsidiary Gatorade to its collection of sports drinks. Like Naked Juice, Quaker has also provided balance for the brand, as it serves as a healthier counterpart to other subsidiaries such as Frito-Lay, which owns a number of salty, and not-so-nutritious, snack brands.

Annie’s, the natural and organic specialty food-maker, joined a far larger group after General Mills bought the Berkeley-based firm in 2014 for $820 million.

Jimmy Rosenberg, who also founded Naked Juice, sold his other juice brand Evolution Fresh to Starbucks for $30 million in 2011. Starbucks opened its first Evolution Fresh store in March 2012, but the enterprise came among concerns that the juice bars would have much lower margins than Starbucks’ coffee shops in a highly competitive market. Those concerns weren’t unfounded, and in 2017 the company gave up on the concept, choosing instead just to stock the juices in its Starbucks outlets.

After competing with Instagram in the social media sphere since the app’s inception in 2010, Facebook was quick to acquire the photo-sharing app just two years later for $1 billion. In 2019, it was reported that Facebook owned the four most downloaded apps of the last decade in the form of Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, which caused concerns over the company’s apparent monopoly over social media users’ data.

In 1893 a small hotel opened in Cisco, Texas, and over the last 127 years it has evolved into the sprawling hospitality conglomerate that is Hilton. Company founder Conrad Hilton had long kept a photo of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York under his desk, inscribed with the words “The greatest of them all”, and in 1949 was able to add the hotel to his growing portfolio. There are now more than 30 Waldorf properties across the world, and its opulent residences are considered Hilton’s most luxurious brand.

Slowly latching onto a number of organic brands, General Mills also acquired Humm Foods, the parent company of energy bar manufacturer Lärabar, in 2008 for around $56 million.

Coca-Cola purchased Honest Tea in 2011 for an undisclosed sum of money. This move triggered a number of calls to boycott the tea brand after its new parent donated money to defeat Proposition 37 – the GMO labeling initiative in California, which would have required brands to label medically-engineered food.

ABC had purchased ESPN in 1984, meaning that when Disney took ABC on board the sports channel came included in the package. The cost of the deal wasn't revealed, but in 2014 ESPN was valued at $51 billion and in the same year was named the world’s most valuable media company by Forbes.

Campbell’s bought famed Austrian-American chef Wolfgang Puck’s eponymous soup business in 2008 in an agreement that allowed Campbell’s to use the brand on soup, stock and broth products. Although the terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, Wolfgang Puck was averaging sales of around $22 million at the time of the acquisition.

In another big tech deal, fitness tracker titan Fitbit was bought up by Google earlier this year for $2.1 billion, following lots of debate around how Google could access users’ data. Google countered concerns by stressing that it was specifically Fitbit’s hardware that had made the acquisition appealing and that user privacy would be maintained.  

Organic cereal brand Cascadian Farm was also poached by General Mills for an undisclosed figure in 1999. There was controversy a decade later when people noticed that the sugar content in the company’s Purely O’s had tripled since the acquisition, prompting Cascadian Farm to change the recipe back to one gram of the sweet stuff per serving.

Granola company Bear Naked has been owned by Kellogg’s since 2007 when it was bought by Kashi Company, a subsidiary of the cereal giant. The founder of Bear Naked, Kelly Flatley, started and sold the business for $60 million before she hit 30.

Business social network LinkedIn was officially launched in 2003. By 2016, it had reportedly gained 433 million users worldwide. Many were surprised when Microsoft paid $26.2 billion for the site that year, making LinkedIn its priciest acquisition ever. The move paid off, however, as its user base grew an additional 50% in the next three years and revenue increased by 28% between 2018 and 2019, both of which gave a welcome boost to Microsoft’s revenues.

Unsurprisingly Ralph Lauren Corporation owns and runs its eponymous designer clothing brand, but its fragrance division, including the Polo collection, comes under the jurisdiction of beauty behemoth L’Oréal. The perfume brand is in good company as L’Oréal is one of the world’s biggest cosmetics conglomerates, also owning the likes of Maybelline New York, NYX, Garnier and Lancôme.

Skin care brand Aveeno was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 1999 for an undisclosed amount. Like many subsidiaries of the healthcare giant, Aveeno came under fire when Johnson & Johnson was accused of including potentially cancer-causing chemicals in some of its baby products. The most recent allegation of Johnson & Johnson products containing formaldehyde came in 2019, but the company strongly rejected the claim.

Berkshire Hathaway acquired Duracell from Procter & Gamble in 2014, in a complex deal that saw Berkshire pay P&G $4.7 billion of the stock it owned in the company instead of paying in cash. P&G then put $1.8 billion into Duracell before paying the remainder in 2015. It may seem a little convoluted, but it helped Berkshire Hathaway and its investor extraordinaire CEO Warren Buffett avoid a hefty tax bill.

Video call software Skype was founded in 2003. Just two years later, eBay paid $2.5 billion plus incentives for the communication tech. After a series of complicated deals with the original owners and a consortium of buyers, Microsoft acquired the entirety of Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011. 

Supermarket Whole Foods has always prided itself on the ethical reputation that comes with selling natural and organic products, and so there was a flurry of controversy when e-commerce behemoth Amazon took over the company in 2017 for $13.7 billion. One of Amazon’s promises upon taking over the grocery store was that products would become cheaper and that customers with Prime membership could secure additional discounts on their shopping.

The global burger chain behind the Whopper is these days owned by a holding company called Restaurant Brands International, based in Ottawa, Canada, which was formed by the merger of BK and Canadian coffee shop chain Tim Horton's in 2014. Restaurant Brands International also added chicken chain Popeyes to its roster in 2017.

Apple CEO Tim Cook this week said that the tech giant has bought around 100 companies over the last six years. Its most famous acquisition ever is arguably Beats by Dre, the headphone company co-founded by hip-hop star Dr Dre after he disliked Apple's earbuds, which it bought for $3.2 billion in 2014.

Founded back in 1978 by self-confessed "hippy capitalists" Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield in a converted gas station in Vermont, their eponymous ice cream brand was bought by British-based consumer goods company Unilever in 2013 for $326 million. At the time, there was a lot of talk about the duo "selling out" their ideals as well as their business but it has continued to thrive under corporate ownership. Ben & Jerry’s still prides itself on championing social and environmental causes such as Black Lives Matter and GMO labeling.

Now read about the industries that will boom after coronavirus