Burt's Bees, Applegate and Honest Tea all got bought out. Here's what actually happened next - and 4 brands that never will
Clorox bought Burt's Bees and now faces a PFAS lawsuit. Coca-Cola bought Honest Tea and killed it. Here's what actually happened after 3 buyouts, and the co-ops that never sold.
Emily Harper
Cabot Creamery has been owned by the same Vermont farm families since 1919. Burt's Bees was too — until 2007, when Clorox paid $925 million for it. That single fact predicts almost everything that happened to each brand afterward, and it's worth tracing what actually changed, not what the acquisition press releases promised would stay the same.
Burt's Bees → Clorox, $925 million, and a PFAS lawsuit fifteen years later
Clorox agreed to buy Burt's Bees for $925 million in October 2007, the biggest single acquisition in the company's history at the time. Clorox's own line at the time was bleach, trash bags and Pine-Sol — buying Burt's Bees was explicitly a bet on "natural personal care," and Clorox has maintained ever since that the formulas didn't change.
Customers noticed something different anyway; a Change.org petition collecting complaints about odor and effectiveness has circulated for years, which Clorox has denied reflects any reformulation. But the harder fact showed up in court, not in a review section. A 2022 class action, Barrett et al. v. The Clorox Company, alleges Burt's Bees marketed mascara and lip products as "consciously crafted with ingredients from nature" and "over 95% natural origin" while independent testing found high levels of organic fluorine — a marker for PFAS, the "forever chemicals" linked to liver damage and reduced fertility — in All Aflutter Mascara, Nourishing Mascara and its lip shimmer line. The claim isn't that the products are illegal. It's the same gap that shows up in nearly every case like this: a marketing claim ("from nature") sitting on top of a lab result the label never mentioned.
Applegate → Hormel, $775 million, and the acquisition that actually held its promises
Not every buyout goes this way, and Applegate is the useful counter-example. Hormel closed its $775 million purchase of Applegate in July 2015, and both companies made the standard promises: no changes to how the meat is raised, antibiotic-free standards untouched. A decade later, that mostly held — Applegate's full product line is still produced entirely without antibiotics, and Hormel let Applegate go further than before, removing genetically modified ingredients across the board and converting its beef line to 100% grass-fed and grass-finished. A parent company with deep supply-chain leverage can fund standards a founder-run brand couldn't afford alone. It just isn't the way to bet.
Honest Tea → Coca-Cola: the buyout that ended in the product not existing anymore
Coca-Cola bought Honest Tea's remaining shares in 2011 after taking a minority stake in 2008. For over a decade the brand kept its "world's first organic, Fair Trade certified bottled tea" identity intact on shelves next to Coke's other holdings. Then in May 2022, Coca-Cola announced it was discontinuing the entire Honest Tea line by the end of that year, citing declining immediate-consumption sales and glass-supply constraints. Nothing was reformulated or relabeled — the product simply stopped being made. Co-founder Seth Goldman called it a "gut punch" and has since relaunched organic tea under a new company, Eat the Change, built outside any parent company's portfolio math. Honest Kids, the juice line, was kept — tea wasn't profitable enough at Coca-Cola's scale to survive, even carrying a recognizable name and a loyal following.
The brands that structured themselves so this can't happen to them
A lawsuit, a discontinuation notice and a quietly changed formula are three different failure modes, but they share one root cause: a public parent company answering to shareholders can decide a brand's fate for reasons that have nothing to do with the product. A handful of food and personal-care brands avoid that by never having outside shareholders to answer to in the first place.
Cabot Creamery has been farmer-owned since 1919, when 94 Vermont families pooled the milk they couldn't sell alone. It now operates as the consumer brand of Agri-Mark, a cooperative of roughly 1,200 farm families, and in 2012 became the world's first dairy cooperative to certify as a B Corp — there's no outside shareholder who can force a sale, because the farmers supplying the milk are the same people who'd have to vote for one.
Equal Exchange has been worker-owned since 1986. Around 140 worker-owners each hold one share of Class A voting stock, and each share carries exactly one vote — the CEO's vote counts the same as a warehouse packer's, structurally, not as a slogan.
Straus Family Creamery, founded in 1994, was the first certified-organic dairy west of the Mississippi and still buys its milk from a named list of organic family farms in California's Marin and Sonoma counties — not an anonymous supply chain a new owner could quietly swap out.
Lovebird Foods is smaller and newer: founder Parker Brook left a corporate job at General Mills to start it, and the cereal is both USDA Organic and third-party tested for glyphosate, heavy metals and gluten — the kind of testing regime a founder can commit to permanently and a newly acquired brand can lose the moment a parent company decides it isn't worth the line item.
What this actually tells you
- An acquisition is a bet, and the bet doesn't always go the way the press release says it will. Applegate mostly kept its promises and even improved. Honest Tea's promises held until the parent company's math changed, and then the product stopped existing. Burt's Bees' promises are now the subject of active litigation.
- Ownership structure is a checkable fact, not a marketing claim. A cooperative, a worker-owned company or a founder who never sold is something you can look up — it isn't printed on the front of the package, and the logo doesn't change when ownership does.
- "Natural" and "from nature" aren't regulated terms. The FDA has no formal legal definition of "natural" on a label, which is exactly the gap the Burt's Bees PFAS suit and the earlier Kashi "all natural" cereal settlement both sit inside — legal to claim, not necessarily what a shopper pictures when they read it.
The label won't tell you which owner is behind a brand today, or what got approved to cut a cost last quarter. Scan it on the Tallow app and see the lab-test history and ownership behind the products already in your cart.
Figures and facts in this post are sourced from company press releases, SEC filings, court records and press coverage linked above, current as of the time of writing. This is not financial or legal advice.