Every purchase sends money somewhere.

Usually somewhere you cannot see from the shelf. A jar of mustard on a Canadian shelf, in a Canadian-looking package, made in a Canadian plant, can still send its profit to a holding company four countries away. OwnedBy exists to make that last step visible in the seconds you actually have while shopping.

Point the camera at a package or type a brand name, and the app traces the chain upward — brand, operating company, parent, ultimate beneficiary — and tells you where it lands, along with how sure we are and what that conclusion rests on.

It is built for Canada first, because “is this one ours?” is the question people here started asking out loud. The machinery is not Canada-specific; the emphasis is.

What we hold ourselves to

A claim needs a sourceEvery published ownership conclusion rests on admitted public evidence — a filing, a registry entry, or a company's own statement. The record exposes its primary evidence and says when the chain remains incomplete.

Uncertainty is shown, not hiddenConfirmed, Likely, Checking, and Unconfirmed mean different things and are never blurred together. An honest 'we do not know yet' beats a confident wrong answer.

Three separate questionsWho owns it, who controls it, who operates it here, and where it is made are different facts. Conflating them is the most common way a shopper is misled, so each stays explicit.

Sponsorship cannot buy a conclusionNo paid placement is active today. Before sponsorship appears, it must be visibly labelled and kept separate from ownership findings, confidence, evidence, organic search ranking, and record inclusion.

Where it falls short

A tool that only advertises its strengths is not being straight with you, so here is the other list.

Ownership moves faster than records doCompanies are bought and sold constantly, and the public record lags. A record checked last month can be out of date today. Answers carry the date they rest on, and the app re-checks the ones most likely to have moved.

Private companies disclose the leastPublic companies must file who controls them. Privately held ones often need not. Where the chain runs into a private holding company, we can sometimes get no further, and we would rather say that than invent the end of it.

Complex structures resist a single answerJoint ventures, co-operatives, trusts, dual-class shares, and licensing deals can mean the company whose name is on the package is not the one that benefits. The app names the structure rather than flattening it into one flag.

An ownership finding is not a verdict on a companyCanadian-owned is a fact about where the money lands. It says nothing about how a company treats its workers, its suppliers, or the environment. Those are worth knowing too; this is not the tool that tells you.

If we get one wrong

On a researched search result, use This answer looks wrong. That sends the exact record to the correction queue for re-research; it does not edit the published answer. If the business is absent, use Add a missing business.

A shared record changes only after the ordinary evidence process supports a new conclusion. A report is a signal to check, not a vote on who owns a company.

Who is behind it

OwnedBy is independently operated. It may accept commercial support in future, but no sponsored placement is active today. Commercial support cannot change research conclusions. We do not sell personal lookup histories. The privacy page sets out in full.