Ownership investigation · Case TL-014

Who Owns Seventh Generation?

Unilever owns Seventh Generation. It completed the purchase on October 20, 2016, a month after announcing it. Unilever did not disclose the price.

Ownership checked · 7 sources. You don’t have to take our word for it: Seventh Generation’s own website names its parent.

Household cleaning spray bottles
Case TL-014 Ownership audit

Seventh Generation

Marketed as Mission-driven green cleaning
Actually owned by Unilever
Acquired 2016 Undisclosed

Ownership evidence

A month from agreement to ownership

Ownership record Acquired 2016
Seventh Generation Unilever
Legal name
Unilever PLC
Headquarters
London, United Kingdom
Control
Publicly listed: shares trade on the London Stock Exchange and in Amsterdam, and as American Depositary Receipts on the New York Stock Exchange
Price paid
Undisclosed
Checked September 24, 2026. Each fact links to its source below.
  1. 2016

    Unilever signs the agreement

    Unilever announced on September 19, 2016 that it had agreed to buy Seventh Generation, Inc., the Vermont-based home and personal care products company. The terms were not disclosed.

  2. 2016

    The purchase closes

    Unilever completed the acquisition on October 20, 2016, about a month later, and listed it in its 2016 full year results.

  3. 2026

    The brand names its parent

    Seventh Generation’s own website calls Unilever its parent company. The quotes are below.

Also owned by Unilever

Schmidt'sWildSheaMoistureLiving ProofLove Beauty and PlanetDr. SquatchNubian HeritagePaula's ChoiceDermalogicaTatcha +6 more

A certification, a plant-based label or a mission statement describes how a company says it works. None of them tells you who owns it. Ownership, in turn, does not show that any Seventh Generation formula changed after 2016.

In the brand’s own words

Seventh Generation says it too

Exhibit A · Its impact report

“As our banking and investment relationships are interconnected with our parent company Unilever, we knew we had to work together to tackle these hidden emissions.”

Seventh Generation describes Unilever as “our parent company” when it discusses the emissions tied to its banking and investments.

Exhibit B · Its website footer

“This website is directed only to U.S. consumers for products and services of Unilever United States.”

The legal line in the site’s footer names Unilever United States as the company behind the products.

Check any brand the same way

  1. Scroll to the very bottom of the brand’s website.
  2. Read the copyright and legal lines for a company name that isn’t the brand.
  3. Look that company up in our ownership files.

Evidence

Sources behind this file

Every ownership fact above traces to one of these pages.
SourceSupportsSite
Company record Unilever press release, September 2016 Acquisition (2016) web.archive.org Company record Unilever press release, October 2016 Current owner · Acquisition (2016) web.archive.org Company record Unilever 2016 full year results Acquisition (2016) unilever.com Reporting VTDigger, September 2016 Acquisition (2016) vtdigger.org Company record Seventh Generation impact report Current owner seventhgeneration.com Company record Unilever investor centre: Shares Legal name · Control unilever.com Reporting Wikipedia: Unilever Headquarters en.wikipedia.org

Decide for yourself

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Independent alternatives

Cleaning brands with no corporate parent

All cleaning reviews →

Four cleaning brands from our reviews that are independent, according to each brand review. Scores are for the products we reviewed. All four are among the six picks in our roundup of non-toxic cleaners from independent brands.

Seventh Generation isn’t the only green-cleaning name with a parent company. Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day belongs to SC Johnson, like Method, Ecover and Babyganics. See every cleaning brand’s parent company.

Read the Mrs. Meyer’s case →