A new app called 'Buycott' lets users scan barcodes at supermarkets as they put them into their shopping carts and trace the makers of the products, their manufactuer's policies, and the causes they have supported. 'Buycott' seeks to clear up shopping cart confusion for many. Corprorate structures are murky at best, and the new free app will trace ownership of any product all the way up to the parent company, including monolithic conglomerates like Koch Industries and Monstanto. 

As companies own other companies and principles of a parent company may differ from the purported mission of a subsidiary - McDonld's and Chipotle are classic examples - the app seeks to inform customers about where their money is going. It lets them vote with their wallet in the supermarket.

The app has grown in popularity enormously, and the Android version had to be removed after the use exploded and servers crashed. The surge of customers exposed a bug that the developer, Los Angeles-based 26-year-old freelance programmer, Ivan Pardo, 26, is working around-the-clock to fix. Pardo has devoted the last 16 months to Buycott. He says that "the app is now #10 in the App Store overall, which is pretty unbelievable. I simply didn't set up the servers to be prepared to handle 10+ new users every second.  I was expecting a more manageable rise."

Once customers scan an item before putting it into their shopping cart, Buycott will show its corporate family tree on the screen of the phone. Scan a box of Splenda sweetener, for instance, and you'll see its parent, McNeil Nutritionals, is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, or that Brawny Paper Towels is a Georgia Pacific brand, which is owned by Monsanto.

Users can also join Buycott campaigns that violate their principles rather than only targeting specific companies. One campaign, Demand GMO Labeling, will tell app users whether scanned items were made by one of the 36 corporations that donated more than $150,000 to oppose the mandatory labeling of genetically modified food.

It's not all doom and gloom, though - there are also ways to make sure the items in your shopping cart are from companies that have done things they support. One such campaign is for companies that have supported equal marriage and LGBT rights like Starbucks.

"I don't want to push any single point of view with the app," said Pardo. "For me, it was critical to allow users to create campaigns because I don't think it's Buycott's role to tell people what to buy. We simply want to provide a platform that empowers consumers to make well-informed purchasing decisions."

The app includes almost all major companies, such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nestle, Heinz, Kellogg's, Johnson &  Johnson, and more.

After the app was taken down, it is being fine-tuned to fix glitches. In addition, corporate ownership structures can be murky. Most companies in Buycott's database own more brands than the app can even record so far. Thus, they're crowd-sourcing customers to add names of products the app doesn't recognize immediately.

Monsanto and Koch Industries have, thus far, declined to comment.