Methodology

Every ownership statement on this site comes from a document you can open and read yourself. This page explains how those documents are chosen, how conflicting evidence is resolved, and what the confidence labels mean.

The source hierarchy

When two sources disagree, the higher one wins. In order:

1. Subsidiary exhibits to annual filings. Exhibit 21 of a Form 10-K, or Exhibit 8.1 of a Form 20-F, is a list of the registrant's subsidiaries signed off as part of an audited annual report. It is the single most reliable public statement of what a listed company owns.
2. The annual report itself. Business descriptions, segment notes and intangible-asset disclosures name brands directly and date acquisitions.
3. Transaction filings. A Form 8-K reporting a change in control, a merger proxy, a tender offer statement or a Form 15 deregistration establishes the exact date ownership passed and often the price.
4. Regulator decisions. European Commission merger decisions, Department of Justice consent decrees and Federal Trade Commission orders are authoritative on what was sold, to whom and when, and they are the only reliable record of divestitures forced as a condition of clearance.
5. Company registries. Companies House records for the United Kingdom, including persons with significant control, establish corporate parentage where no securities filing exists.
6. Trademark registrants. The owner of record for a trademark is evidence about who controls a brand name in a jurisdiction, but the registrant is often a dormant holding entity rather than the operating parent, so this never establishes a parent on its own.
7. Official company statements. A press release or a company's own brand directory is a statement of fact by the party best placed to know, but it is not a filing and carries no legal consequence for inaccuracy.

Anything below this list, including news reports, encyclopedias and industry databases, is used only to find leads. It never appears as a source.

What the confidence labels mean

Each ownership relationship carries one of three labels, and the label is shown on the page next to the fact.

Verified means at least one source of type filing, annual report, regulator decision, company registry or trademark registry supports the relationship. This is enforced in code: the build fails if a relationship is marked verified without such a source.

Reported means the only supporting source is an official company statement. This is the normal state for privately held companies such as Mars, Ferrero, Bacardi and SC Johnson, which publish no securities filings at all. A reported relationship is shown as fact, but labelled, so you can see the difference.

Unverified relationships are never published. They stay in the repository so the work is not lost, and they are excluded from every page, every count and every download.

Ownership is stored with dates, not as a parent field

A brand does not have "a parent". It has a sequence of owners, each with a start date and, unless it is the current one, an end date. Storing it this way is what lets the site answer "who owned this in 2010" and show a timeline rather than a single name.

It also handles the cases a flat parent field gets wrong:

• Territorial splits. Corona belongs to AB InBev everywhere except the United States, where Constellation Brands holds perpetual rights because a court-approved divestiture required it. Persil belongs to Henkel across continental Europe and North America and to Unilever in the United Kingdom, Ireland and France. These relationships carry an explicit territory and both are shown.
• Intermediate entities. Unilever did not buy Ben & Jerry's directly; its subsidiary Conopco did, through a merger vehicle. The chain is preserved rather than flattened.
• Licences that look like ownership. Hershey makes and sells KitKat and Cadbury in the United States under licence. Nestlé and Mondelēz own those brands. The relationship type distinguishes them.

Deal values

A deal value appears only where a party to the transaction or a filing disclosed it. Where a price was not disclosed, the page says so rather than repeating a figure from press coverage. Where a filing states a price per share but no aggregate, the per-share price is recorded and the total is left empty. Nothing is estimated or back-calculated.

How the numbers are counted

Each figure on the site uses one definition, and a figure that counts something narrower says so where it appears.

Brand pages are brands with a published page. A brand gets one when it has a current owner, licensee or stakeholder that is not unverified, and enough recorded about it to be worth a page: a description of at least 40 words, a recorded deal, or more than one owner in its history. Brand records that do not meet this stay in the downloadable dataset but have no page.

Brand owners are companies that directly own, or hold a majority of, at least one brand. A subsidiary that holds brands on its parent's behalf is counted here in its own right, because it is the company named in the filing. Companies that appear only as holding entities, sellers or minority investors are in the dataset and have pages, but are not brand owners.

Concentration figures ("so many companies control half the brands") count only brands with a controlling owner on record, and group each brand under its ultimate parent rather than the subsidiary that holds it. Brands held under licence, or in which the largest holder has a minority stake, are left out, because the question is who controls them. This is why the number of brands in those figures is smaller than the number of brand pages.

Deals count every acquisition, merger, spin-off, divestiture and rebrand recorded, closed or not.

Re-verification

Every record carries the date it was last checked. Every week, each source URL is fetched again. A link that no longer opens its document — a 404, or a redirect to a homepage or an index page — is replaced on the page by the Internet Archive's copy of the document where one exists, and marked as no longer opening where none does. A dead link is treated as a citation to repair, not as evidence that the ownership fact has changed, so it does not by itself change what a page says; the fact is re-sourced from the owner's current documents. A link that cannot be checked automatically, because the site blocks automated requests, is left as it is. Relationships that have not been re-checked in eighteen months are flagged in the build output.

Where the data comes from and where it goes

The canonical data is plain YAML in a public repository, one file per company, brand, deal, regulatory decision and source. It is compiled into a database at build time, and the website is a pure function of those files: there is no separate content database and nothing can appear on a page that is not in the repository. The same data is published as CSV and JSON under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, so anyone can check the site's claims against the underlying records or reuse them.

Corrections

If a fact here is wrong, the correction link on every entity page opens a pre-filled issue naming the specific record and data file. Corrections that change a published fact are logged publicly with what changed and why. See the editorial policy for how corrections are handled and what disclosure applies to model-assisted drafting.