Top 25 Brands in Missouri

The best estimates from the federal Small Business Administration and the Missouri Secretary of State place the number of companies operating in Missouri somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000. That, folks, is a densely populated neighborhood. While many of those are one-man or one-woman operations—hardly the stuff of Fortune 500 consideration—a field that crowded still has a lot of brands competing for customer eyeballs.
But who leads the pack with attention-getting brands? We think we’ve got a good feel for 25 of the most powerful brands. How do we get to such a bold proclamation? Part of it is metrics—brand duration, company size in employees and revenues, some of it comes from histories of civic engagement, and truthfully, some of it a gut sense from an editorial team with a combined more than a century of business news reporting and analysis. Of the Top Missouri Brands for 2021, many are national names that most everyone in America will recognize.
Some are names better-known to residents of Missouri and neighboring states, but perhaps not as fully appreciated across the nation. Regardless, among the many corporate brands that the Show-Me State can call its own, some have an elevated awareness with consumers. As expected, St. Louis tops the list of brands by hometown—not much of a surprise, considering it is home to nine of the 10 Missouri companies ranked on the most recent list of Fortune 500 companies.

But that’s a national perspective. For us, companies headquartered across the broad expanse of 69,704 square miles of this state, there are some intriguing brands that jump up and demand inclusion in a list such as this.

So here are our Top 25 Brands. If you disagree? Make the reasoned argument that compels us to reconsider for next year. Either way, that’s a discussion worth having, because it speaks to the broader conditions that support business success here and makes this region strong.

And when that conversation is taking place, Missouri shines with a type of brand recognition all its own.

Ameren Corp.

No utility has a bigger geographic footprint in Missouri than Ameren Corp., which provides power for more than 1.2 million Missourians across more than half of the state—63 of the 114 counties and the city of St. Louis. So it’s pretty clear where the brand recognition comes from—the power that lights and heats all those homes and businesses. In the Show-Me State, that coverage comes from Ameren Missouri, the electric utility originally founded as Union Electric in 1902; across the Mississippi, sister company Ameren Illinois does likewise in Illinois. St. Louis and the St. Louis County area account for more than half of the in-state customers for this publicly traded company. In addition to its stable of coal-fired power plants, Ameren operates the state’s only commercial nuclear-power plant— Callaway Energy Center. While keeping the electrical lines juiced, Ameren is also the state’s largest distributor of natural gas, and
its power-generation muscle includes several hydro-electric facilities around the state. 

American Century Investments

One way to build a brand: Have a focused, defined and easily understood mission, and stick to it without wavering. At American Century, the brand flows from this: “Investment management is our sole business focus. No ancillary businesses compete with our clients or dilute our resources from adding value for our clients.” More than half a century after its founding with $100,000 in seed money from 24 investors, American Century Investments provides that investment management for clients worldwide, with $209 billion in combined wealth. The firm has more than 1,400 employees in offices at financial capitals across the planet, including New York, London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Sydney. But for people in Kansas City, the brand has a particular resonance: Before Jim Stowers died in 2014, he and his wife Virginia, who died earlier this summer, provided the start-up money to create the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, focused on breakthrough research in the fight against cancer, from which both had been treated—$2 billion in family wealth. On top of that, the firm continues to fund the institute, donating 40 percent of its profits to the cause.

Anheuser-Busch Companies

When it comes to identifying readily recognized brands, this one is a gimme: Anheuser-Busch can claim to being the best-known name in brewing and production of adult beverages by simply pointing to the industry metrics. AmeicanCraftBeer.com lists parent AB InBev with four of the top-selling brands in America last year including No. 1 Budweiser and No. 2 Michelob. Combined, those Top 10 brands bagged more than $13 billion in sales. That’s more than twice the sales volume of its competitors in that rarified industry. The brand cards in its deck also include the Busch and Natural Light labels as Top 10 sellers, but those are just a few of more than two dozen other brands that are part of this Belgium mega-conglomerate that bought AB back
in 2008. The parent, by the  way, owns more than 300 other brands and breweries worldwide, including Bass Pale Ale, Labatt’s and Stella Artois.

Bass Pro Shops

Capitalism? Johnny Morris gets it: It’s been said that if you give a man a fish, he eats for a day, but if you teach him to fish, you create markets for bass boats and trailers, fishing rods, reels and tackle, ice chests and light beer—you get the idea. Bass Pro started out as back-door outlet for fishing tackle, but today, the company is all about the great outdoors, writ large—it’s not just the angling. It’s about fishing, yes, but also hunting, camping, boating, hiking, and much more. Morris executed a $4 billion acquisition of competing Cabela’s in 2017, giving the combined entity a presence in nearly every U.S. state, with more than 100 retail locations. A visit to either brand is the adult version of a kid in the toy store, with supplies and accessories for most every outdoor activity you can think of, plus watercraft, ATVs, clothing lines and other outdoor goods. More than just fostering an urge to get people outside, the company stokes passions for conservation among its customers.

BJC Healthcare

With two flagship hospitals in the St. Louis market—Barnes-Jewish Hospital and St. Louis Children’s Hospital—with more 30,647 employees and with the added muscle of an affiliation with the prestigious Washington University School of Medicine, BJC Healthcare is the titan of health-care systems in the state of Missouri. They simply don’t come any bigger, or with a broader mandate than to deliver world-class care, world-class research and world-class instruction. Barnes-Jewish and Children’s are
just two of the 15 facilities in the BJC fold, and to their mission they bring an army of 4,734 physicians, plus 3,026 staffed beds. Each year, the system admits more than 130,000 patients, and despite the challenges of 2020 and the global pandemic, produced revenues of $5.5 billion. As a health-care anchor in the Gateway City, BJC is also the biggest provider of charity care, unreimbursed care and community benefit, totaling more than $750 million a year in such assistance.

Boeing Co.

It’s America’s biggest plane builder, thanks to the jets popular with millions of air travelers worldwide, planes cranked out for commercial aviation at facilities in Washington state and Wichita. But trust us, one brand nobody wants to see approaching for its intended purpose is Boeing and its F/A-18 Super Hornet, and now the F15-EX fighter jets being turned out at the company’s plant in St. Louis. That production facility makes Boeing one of the biggest employers in the St. Louis area, with 14,500 on the payroll, hiring more than 2,000 of them in recent years as production expanded. On the commercial side, the brand itself took a bruising—and corporate revenues took a beating—when the MAX series of planes was grounded in 2019 over safety concerns. But Boeing has worked to get that line back in service, with flights resuming earlier this year.  The defense unit traces its roots back to the hometown McDonnell Douglas Corp., which was acquired by Boeing in 1997.

Burns & McDonnell

Burns & McDonnell, one might say, chose not to participate in the Great Recession, coming out of that downturn more than a decade ago poised for growth. And it has delivered on that promise, soaring to No. 1 status as the largest engineering firm, based on revenues, in the Kansas City region. What started as an engineering firm in 1898 is now a multifaceted design-build/engineering giant. In recent years, the employee-owned firm has undergone a major facelift and expansion of its south Kansas City headquarters. It takes a special dynamic for a company that large to also be an annual contender for—and frequent winner of—recognition on the Ingram’s Corporate Report 100 list of the region’s fastest-growing companies, but Burns & Mac has been in the running each year for more than a decade. Under CEO/Chairman Ray Kowalik, employment has surged to more than 7,600 firmwide, about half of that in Kansas City. Employees enjoy a culture and
benefits that routinely earn a spot on Fortune’s list of the top 100 employers in America.

Centene Corp.

Just eight years elapsed between Betty Brinn’s founding of a non-profit Medicaid plan in 1984 and the passing of that former bookkeeper in 1992. How she might marvel today at what her labors delivered: Centene Corp., which last year posted revenues of $111 billion. It boasts the title of the nation’s largest Medicaid managed-care organization. Brinn was raised in an orphanage in Milwaukee, and was employed doing the books there when she grew up. That work inspired her to create Family Hospital Physician Associates, but the real growth took off after her death. In 1996, the company named Michael Neidorff as president and CEO, exponential growth followed. It rebranded as Centene Corp. and moved to St. Louis, then became a public company in 2001. Besides its footprint in Medicaid services, it is the nation’s largest insurance carrier on the federal Health Insurance Marketplace, created as part of the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010. It also serves the Defense Department as one of the nation’s largest providers of managed-care services for military families and veterans.

Cerner Corp.

Though considerably younger than well-known Kansas City entrepreneurial legacies like Hallmark and H&R Block, Cerner Corp. years ago eclipsed those—and nearly all the rest—on its way to becoming the metro area’s largest local private-sector employer. A global company with more than $5.5 billion in annual revenue, Cerner stands as the nation’s No. 1 health-care information-technology company, according to market-intelligence firm Meticulous Research. Since its founding in 1979 by three former Arthur Andersen employees—the late Neal Patterson, Cliff Illig and Paul Gorup—the company has focused on transforming the business of health-care with its suite of IT products and services. And 27,000 provider clients around the world have responded with their orders. Originally named PGI & Associates, it adopted the Cerner brand in 1984. The company’s goal has always been to bring the nation’s health-care records system into the computer age. That they do today for millions worldwide.

Edward Jones

This is Edward Jones today, a year shy of celebrating the centennial of its founding: 49,000 associates, including more than 19,000 financial advisers in the United States and Canada, managing a combined $1.55 trillion—with a “T”—in wealth for nearly 7 million investors. That’s a long way from where the firm was throughout the first 35 years of its existence, when it didn’t venture outside its St. Louis market. The first branch office opened in 1957 in Mexico, Mo., and nearly 50 years into its life, the wealth management firm still had just 100 brokers working for it. Expansion, if it would come, would be into small-town markets where competition was slim, if it existed at all. Since then, however, the founding family’s leadership has passed to a series of managing partners who have made Edward Jones the most accessible wealth manager in America—no other company boasts a higher U.S. office count of 11,000 (and 550 more in Canada).

Emerson

You know when a company’s brand has completed it’s evolution? When it can reposition itself by a single proper noun. Witness the case of Emerson. The St. Louis company, long known as Emerson Electric, is a global supplier of highly diversified products and services, data-center infrastructure and management. And, of course, the legacy enterprises selling electric appliances and parts. So you’ll find its 83,000 employees on the job (roughly 1,300 in St. Louis) at sites around the world, ranging from design and installation of industrial-scale production facilities to providing HVAC services in residential and commercial settings to producing small appliances like waste disposal units for the kitchen sink. That all added up to nearly $17 billion in revenues in 2020. Founded in St. Louis in 1890, just as the nation was embracing the technology of electrical power, the company grew through production of electric motors, floor and ceiling fans and blade design.

Energizer Holdings

Energizer, Eveready, Rayovac—all of those battery brands have big-time recognition in their own right, but all horses in the stable of the uber-brand in battery-power production, Energizer Holdings. This St. Louis-based conglomerate isn’t just about batteries, though—in addition to its market-dominating line of power supplies and portable-power options, it makes and distributes headlights, lanterns, children’s lights and area lights. The Energizer family includes such well-known vehicle-care consumer brands as ArmorAll, Eagle One, STP and Nu Finish. Combined, those product lines generated $2.7 billion in sales for this Fortune 1000 company during 2020, a healthy 10 percent increase during the global pandemic year. Worldwide, the parent employs 5,900 people, with about 2,400 of those in the U.S. Earlier this year, it welcomed Mark Lavigne as president and CEO, succeeding Alan Hoskins.

Commerce Bank

Only one other Missouri-based bank—co-Kemper family legacy UMB—has more assets, but Commerce Bank’s considerably bigger footprint with locations across the Show-Me State bolsters its claim to being the most-recognized banking-services brand in the state. As of this spring, Commerce had a healthy $33.15 billion in assets, an increase of on hand, nearly double where it was a decade ago; that, too, says something about the way its customers perceive the Commerce brand. Brand enhancement is an opportunity that comes with every transaction, but it’s also a function of operating hours, numbers of branch locations (Commerce has 169 statewide, well ahead of its closest competitor), ease of access and other factors, bankers say. The bank has enjoyed additional recognition with a run of appearances near the top of Forbes’ annual list of the best-managed banks in the nation. 

Enterprise Holdings

You may think your choice of a rental car entails competing brands, but you’re only about half-right: Choosing between the Alamo, National and Enterprise brands for your next vehicle rental means you’re doing business with Enterprise Holdings, whose three rental brands account for nearly 60 percent of the U.S. market. And depending on what happens with the financially struggling Hertz, Enterprise’s biggest competition as the No. 2 agency last year, a national market share of 60 percent could get even bigger. The combined Enterprise family fleet of nearly 1.7 million vehicles generated revenues of $22.4 billion in 2020, assuring its place as the world’s largest vehicle-renting interest. The company opened its doors in 1957 as a one-man operation—a 33-year-old Navy veteran named Jack Taylor, with a “fleet” of just seven vehicles. Pam Nicholson, who succeeded Jack’s son Andy, is the company’s chief executive officer today.

Evergy

Well, that didn’t take long: Three years ago, Evergy was a new hatchling in the nest of brand-builders at what was once Great Plains Energy. Upon the 2018 merger with Topeka-based Westar Energy, the leadership saw a rare opportunity to build a new brand from scratch for an expanded audience. Each of the electric utilities had more than 500,000 customers, but the million-plus being serviced today in the broader Kansas City market now share a common brand awareness. Lost in that shift for Missouri-based customers was the familiar KCP&L designation, but little else has changed in the seamless transition to a $5 billion powerhouse company. Residential customers, for example, still get statements with each bill, comparing their home’s energy consumption with others in the neighborhood at large, and offering tips on how to get a better energy-use “grade.” And the region still benefits from a corporate citizen that makes targeted donations to non-profit and civic causes and promotes employee voluntarism, economic development and new businesses.

Evernorth

This is like an astronomer watching the birth of a black hole: In 2018, Cigna’s $65 billion acquisition of pharmacy-benefit management company Express Scripts—one of the biggest names in business in St. Louis—set the stage for the new brand in that space today: Evernorth. The founders were onto something big when they launched the enterprise in 1986—it took just four years to crack the Fortune 500. In 2010, the company grew its way into the Fortune 100; it needed just three years to make the Top 50, and burst into the Top 20 just a year later, in 2014. Along the way, it became the biggest employer in St. Louis—peaking at 30,000—and had $116 billion in revenue last year. For a client base comprising health maintenance organizations, health insurers, union-sponsored benefit plans, third-party administrators, workers’ compensation and governmental health programs, the company serves millions of Americans with its distribution of outpatient pharmaceuticals through its benefit management services to employers. It also offers home-delivery services and clinical management programs.

H&R Block

For 66 years, one brand has come to dominate the income-tax preparation world—and we mean the world, not just the home base of Kansas City. And that brand belongs to H&R Block. Operating in Canada, Australia and India, as well as domestically, H&R Block has 12,000 locations overall, with nearly 91,000 employees, full-time and seasonal.  The expansion into on-line tax filing services has included growth in consumer tax software, online tax preparation and assistance, and electronic tax filing from the company’s Web site. For commercial clients, H&R Block also provides payroll and business consulting services. That’s been good enough to maintain a top line of more than $3 billion (almost all of it from tax services) to ensure its place as one of the largest tax consulting firms in the world. Founded by brothers Richard and Henry Bloch in 1955. It continues to see itself as the natural solution to more complex tax returns for businesses and individuals, and less as the answer to the tax-filing needs of the no-deductions/Form 1040EZ crowd.

Hallmark

There might be a Kansas City brand more immediately recognizable to people around the country than Hallmark—but we’re hard-pressed to think of it. From its 1910 founding by young Joyce C. Hall—if you don’t know the story of the Nebraska native’s arrival here with the two shoeboxes full of greeting cards, you’re not an authentic Kansas Citian—the company has grown to iconic status with annual revenues of nearly $3.5 billion. Far more than just a greeting-card company; Hallmark is as well known for other personal-expressions products as it is for cards to celebrate Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day—heck, if it has “Day” in its name, Hallmark has a card for it. Its team of artists and designers cranks out 10,000 new and redesigned messages a year. The company also specializes in gift wrap, invitations, announcements, keepsakes and more—products that are available in dozens of languages at retail outlets in more than 100 countries. 

Helzberg Diamonds

With more than 210 stores in 36 states, Helzberg Diamonds has earned its sparkling brand status through more than a century of jewelry sales. And nothing that has happened since the doors first opened in 1915 has diminished that shine. The company offers a wide range of diamonds and other precious gems in pieces for engagements, weddings, graduations and other personal milestone moments, as well as watches and accessories. The company already had a long history and established fan base when, in 1967, the third-generation owner, Barnett Helzberg, took its awareness to the national level. Without even invoking the corporate name, he made Helzberg Diamonds part of a national fad by introducing the little red and white
“I Am Loved” buttons as a tribute to his bride-to-be, Shirley Bush. Less than a generation later, the chain of stores caught the eye of Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway came courting to buy the enterprise. 

JE Dunn Construction

For most of its nearly 100-year history, JE Dunn Construction has been a Kansas City and regional brand. It’s past time to stop thinking that way about a company with 20 offices nationwide and more than $4 billion in construction billings last year. After all, the folks at Engineering News Record see Dunn that way: The trade publication recognized JE Dunn in its Top 20 this year with publication of the 400 largest construction firms in the nation. But the name JE Dunn has a special place among business, civic and non-profit leaders in its home market. For decades, the company has been a stalwart force in philanthropy before extending that mission to other markets as the expansion unfolded. Philanthropy remained a core value through the adoption of an employee-ownership model; each year, JE Dunn still donates 10 percent of its profit to charitable causes. That hasn’t occurred in a silo: Other contractors have seen and embraced the business and civic value of such engagement.