Big food companies are buying up small ones. Honest Tea is now part of Coca-Cola. The French company Danone controls Stonyfield yogurt. Hormel owns Applegate natural and organic meats.

The Cornucopia Institute has put together a poster that shows the full extent of the merger wave, at least for the organic industry. In the latest deal, announced a few weeks ago, Perdue Farms, a big poultry producer based in Maryland, bought Niman Ranch, which started as an idealistic group of farmers protesting against companies like Perdue.

For shoppers who like their food natural, local and organic, though, these deals can be unsettling. Will they still trust a food brand if someone else now owns it?

As it happens, some of the founders of those companies wonder the same thing.

Take these three: Bill Niman, Gene Kahn and Grant Lundberg. Niman started Niman Ranch, Kahn founded Cascadian Farm, a pioneer of organic food, and Grant Lundberg is CEO of Lundberg Family Farms, which sells organic rice.

Each of these companies started with its own vision of a better way to grow food. “For us, the innovation was raising animals without the use of pharmaceuticals and chemicals,” Niman says.

At roughly the same time, in the early 1970s, Gene Kahn started a back-to-the-land experiment that turned into a business. “I became enamored by the whole notion of agriculture, and farming, and improving the environmental performance of agriculture,” he says. Grant Lundberg’s grandparents, for their part, were influenced by the trauma of the Dust Bowl. “Remembering some of those experiences, they started to farm a little different from their neighbors,” Lundberg says.