What bothers me is the fact that brands are not required to disclose their corporate owners on their labels or even websites. We as consumers have the right to know who is the ultimate producer of the stuff we buy, just as we get to know what ingredients are in food products thanks to the Nutrition Facts label.

This is something I blog about with some regularity -- my post about Naked/Pepsi (http://www.walletmouth.com/2007/10/naked-lies.html) includes an exchange with the company's customer service that reveals an all-too-common disingenuousness when it comes to such questions.

For more fun with corporate parentage, check out the charts at http://www.msu.edu/~howardp/ (where you'll learn, for example, that Annie's is owned by private-equity firm Solera Capital). Other good resources are hooze.org (which I can't get to load at the moment, but I'm sure it will be back up soon) and my own blog, walletmouth.com.