About Brandtree

Brandtree answers one question well: who owns this brand?

That question is harder to answer than it looks. Consumer brands change hands constantly, and the answer most people find is out of date, oversimplified or wrong. A brand can have one owner in the United States and another everywhere else. A brand can be made under licence by a company that does not own it. A famous parent can have spun the brand off years ago while every article still names it.

Ben & Jerry's is the clearest current example. Unilever bought it in 2000 and owned it for twenty-five years, so almost everything written about it says Unilever. Since 8 December 2025 it has belonged to The Magnum Ice Cream Company, a separately listed business that Unilever demerged. Both facts are true of different periods, and a useful answer has to say which.

How it works

Every ownership relationship is stored with the date it began, the date it ended if it has, the intermediate companies involved, and at least one primary source: a securities filing, an annual report, a regulator's decision, a company registry record or an official company statement. The site can render the ownership tree at any date because ownership is stored as dated relationships rather than as a single parent field.

The full method, including how conflicting sources are resolved and what the confidence labels mean, is on the methodology page.

The data is open

The entire dataset is published as CSV and JSON under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. You can download it, check any claim on this site against the underlying records, and reuse it in your own work. Being useful to check is the point.

Editor

Brandtree is edited by Alykhan Alidina, who is responsible for every published fact and for handling corrections. Corrections are welcome and are logged publicly at /corrections; the correction link on every entity page opens a pre-filled report naming the exact record.