Is Your Favorite Natural Brand Owned by a Mega Corporation?

Another exam­ple is Burt’s Bees, that ubiq­ui­tous line of organic balms and but­ters launched in the 1980s by Burt Shavitz, a Maine bee­keeper who lived in a turkey coop and sold his bees’ honey from the back of his truck. Fast-forward nearly 30 years, and what was once a lit­tle col­lec­tion of hand­made soaps and lotions is now a factory-produced beauty line adored by hip­pies and hip­sters alike and owned by the Clorox Co., another Fortune 500 com­pany with more than $5.5. bil­lion in rev­enues last year.

Similarly, behe­moth Johnson & Johnson owns Aveeno, L’Oreal owns The Body Shop, and Estee Lauder owns both Aveda and Origins, among other brands.

Large com­pa­nies are actively pur­su­ing sales of “green” beauty prod­ucts because con­sumers are buy­ing more of these prod­ucts, accord­ing to Heather Smith, a spokes­woman for New Hope Natural Media.

In 2010, U.S. con­sumers pur­chased $8.2 bil­lion in nat­ural and organic per­sonal care prod­ucts, rep­re­sent­ing a 6 per­cent increase in sales over the pre­vi­ous year, accord­ing to Nutrition Business Journal, which tracks indus­try sales.

“Tons of large com­pa­nies now have lines that they’re mar­ket­ing as green, nat­ural, or even organic,” wrote Smith in an email to The Huffington Post. “At this point most mass per­sonal care man­u­fac­tur­ers have at least one line that tries to snag a piece of the ‘green’ mar­ket as demand for nat­ural per­sonal care prod­ucts grows.”

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