Foreign-Owned America
France has baguettes, Japan has sushi, and the U.S. has its own contributions to the world that are hard to imagine coming from anywhere else. But these products aren’t always everything they seem.
Some products, businesses and landmarks that are thought to be as American as hot dogs and apple pie are actually owned by companies in Europe, Asia or elsewhere. They all have their roots in the U.S., and they’re all symbols of authentic American ingenuity, but they’re owned by companies from across the globe.
CNBC.com presents a list of 10 foreign-owned brands, businesses and landmarks that are perceived by the public to be as American as it gets.
By Daniel Bukszpan
Posted 18 July 2012
Budweiser
It would be hard to imagine a beer that Americans have embraced more wholeheartedly than Budweiser. Bud Light and Budweiser are the number one and number three bestselling beers in America, respectively, and in September, the brewers of Bud will sponsor the “Budweiser Made In America” festival in Philadelphia, hosted by rapper Jay-Z.
Budweiser is owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev N.V., a Belgian and Brazilian company with headquarters in Leuven, Belgium. Its U.S. operations include managing 12 breweries plus hops farms, malt plants, barley elevators and a rice mill.
Alka-Seltzer
For most Americans, Alka-Seltzer is the go-to antacid and pain reliever when that extra slice of pizza doesn’t agree with you.
Part of its popularity comes from its U.S. television advertisements, which had tunes (“plop plop, fizz fizz”) and catchphrases (“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”) so memorable that decades later people still mention them in conversation.
Alka-Seltzer is owned by Bayer AG, a German pharmaceutical company. It operates multiple sites all over the U.S. for administration, marketing, research and development and manufacturing.
Good Humor
The Good Humor ice cream brand was introduced in Ohio during the 1920s. The product was sold from trucks and grew so popular that it went national within a decade.
In 1961, the Thomas J. Lipton Company acquired it, and Lipton’s parent company, the British and Dutch Unilever, merged Good Humor with its other ice cream brands, Breyers, Klondike Bar and Popsicle, in 1993.
The resulting company, Good Humor-Breyers, operates out of Unilever’s U.S. headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. The company says it employs 11,000 people in the U.S., including 2,300 in its Englewood Cliffs office.
7-Eleven
According to the National Association of Convenience Stores, 2011 was a good year for the industry. Sales exceeded $680 billion, prompting NACS Chairman Tom Robinson to conclude that “one-stop shopping and speed of service for refreshments, food and fuel … continues to resonate with our customers.”
Perhaps no convenience store chain in the U.S. is as well-known as 7-Eleven, originator of the Slurpee and the Big Gulp. It operates over 7,000 stores throughout the country, but nearly twice that amount is found in Japan, home of Seven & I Holdings Co., owner of the entire chain.
Gerber
The Gerber Products Company is one of the best-known makers of baby products in the U.S. The company was founded in Michigan in 1927, and its pureed bananas, pacifiers and baby bottles have been flying off U.S. store shelves ever since.
In 1994, the company merged with Sandoz Laboratories, which would merge with another company in 1996 to form Novartis. In 2007, the company sold off Gerber to the Swiss multinational Nestlé for $5.5 billion.
Firestone
Harvey Firestone founded his tire company in 1900 in Akron, Ohio. The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company hit the big time a few years later when it became the exclusive supplier of tires to the Ford Motor Company, and for decades it was profitable.
The company fell on hard times in 1979 and in 1988 it was sold to the Bridgestone Corp. in Japan. Firestone became successful again and now operates several businesses as Firestone Diversified Products. The company is based in Indianapolis and employs about 10,000 workers.
John Hancock Life Insurance Company
The founding of the John Hancock Life Insurance Company dates back to 1862.
Between its 150-year vintage and the founding father that provided its name, it would be hard to imagine a company with the history or the pedigree necessary to call itself “American” quite like John Hancock has.
John Hancock was acquired in 2004 by Manulife Financial Corporation, a Canadian insurance company headquartered in Toronto. Hancock continues to operate out of its Boston headquarters, where its 601 Congress St. office building has been given the AIA Excellence and Sustainable Design Award for its environmentally friendly design.
Frigidaire
Frigidaire was founded in 1918 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Anyone who wants to know why it’s an iconic American brand need look no further than the song "I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town," in which it’s mentioned by name by American music icon Ray Charles.
The company was owned by General Motors from 1919 until 1979, when it was sold to White Sewing Company. Seven years later, White Sewing, along with Frigidaire, was sold to Electrolux, the Swedish home appliance company.
The Chrysler Building
The Chrysler Building is one of the landmarks of the Manhattan skyline. Located on 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, it’s New York City’s third-tallest building and a towering tribute to both the Chrysler Corporation and the city that it calls home.
The Art Deco building has had two foreign owners in the last 11 years. TNW, a German investment group, bought a 75 percent stake in the building for $300 million in 2001. Seven years later, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council bought it, and now owns 90 percent of the building.
Holiday Inn
The first Holiday Inn opened in 1952 in Memphis, Tennessee and took its name from the 1942 Bing Crosby film of the same name.
Its uniquely lettered, curved sign that bore the company logo soon became a fixture of America’s highways.
Although they were phased out in the 1980s, they remain a memorable part of the U.S. landscape to anyone old enough to have seen them.
In 1988, Holiday Inn was purchased by Bass PLC, a U.K. company. Today, it’s owned by InterContinental Hotels Group in the U.K. and operates 1,315 U.S. hotels with 240,025 rooms.