Skip to content
Canadian flag
OwnedByBeta
A note from the founder

The label tells you everything except who owns the business behind it.

I’m a Canadian living abroad. This is the one fact I kept wanting at the shelf and couldn’t get — so I built the thing that finds it.

Try the betaTell me when it’s live.

OwnedBy is live in beta. Coverage is still being built, and every record says where its evidence stops.

The publication boundary
  1. A brand enteredLookup subject
  2. A working hypothesisInternal · not published
  3. A cited ownership recordPublished with receipts

The working hypothesis stays internal. An ownership link appears only after an admissible public source is attached.

You’re standing in an aisle somewhere in Canada holding two jars. The label will tell you the calories, the allergens, the recycling code and the plant it was packed in. It will not tell you which business sits behind the brand, who controls that business, or where that ownership chain ends.

Most of us are working from memory, and memory goes out of date quietly. Tim Hortons has been part of Restaurant Brands International since 2014 — the company created when Burger King’s owners, the Brazilian-founded investment firm 3G Capital, bought it. RBI is incorporated in Canada and has its principal executive offices in Miami, which is exactly the kind of detail that makes “is it Canadian?” harder than a flag on a cup. Canada Dry was invented in Toronto in 1904 and belongs to Keurig Dr Pepper, an American company.

Neither of those is a scandal, and neither is a reason to put anything back on the shelf. They’re just facts nobody handed you while you were deciding.

OwnedBy follows public records — corporate registries, regulatory filings, companies’ own published documents — to show who owns or controls the businesses behind a brand. It shows every supported link, its receipt, and where the documented chain ends. Where the evidence stops, it says so instead of guessing.

None of this was practical at the scale of a grocery store until very recently. Registry reading and filing cross-checks can now be attempted across far more brands, but public disclosure is uneven and some chains stop early. That is why the boundary is part of the answer. So I built it.

I want to be careful about what this is. Ownership isn’t the whole story of what a company means to a place — manufacturing, jobs, identity and community all count, and a foreign-owned plant can carry a town. But ownership was the missing piece, the one nobody could check. It isn’t a verdict on what to buy. It’s a fact you were owed.

OwnedBy is in beta. It works, and you can try it right now — but it is still being finished in public, and I’d rather tell you when it’s ready than have you meet it half-built. Leave your address below, and the brands you’ve been wondering about. We’ll send you a report on them as soon as we’re live.

— a Canadian living abroad

What we found building this

Even the official record is wrong — if you read it the lazy way.

26%

of our US head-brand cohort was stale at face value.

In our research cohort of 11,188 United States trademark serials, better than one record in four still showed a superseded holder on its face. The correction may sit in the assignment history. Until its row-specific receipt is attached, we withhold that record rather than publish the face-value holder.

46%

of assignment events in that cohort change no ownership.

Of 8,894 assignment events reviewed in that same cohort, nearly half were not sales at all. They were security interests or releases. That is why an assignment-corrected row stays out of the published chain until its complete reel-and-frame receipt is attached.

The registers are not the problem. They are the whole point — and reading them properly is the work.

Measured in OwnedBy’s US head-brand research cohort · 11,188 trademark serials · 8,894 assignment events · 2 September 2026

Tell me when it’s live.

One email when OwnedBy launches — with a report on the brands you name below.

We’ll run these first and send you what we find.

You’re asking us to email you, so we will — about the launch and occasionally about OwnedBy. Every message carries a one-click unsubscribe. What we do with your address

Browse Canadian brandsHow it works