We are very happy to welcome Church & Dwight to the conference. They sort of stole my introduction thunder this morning. What I was going to say is just, you know, a key question for investors has really been the extent to which the company's portfolio would prove resilient, you know, as consumers face increasing macroeconomic pressures. Some have pointed to the financial crisis as a guide to think about how the business will perform and the great strides that the laundry business made during that time, while others have been more focused on many of the additions to portfolios since then and the degree to which that would make the business more discretionary.
I'm gonna turn it over to the team to do a presentation, and we're lucky to have Matt Farrell, who's Chairman, President, and CEO, Rick Dierker, CFO, and Barry Bruno, who is Chief Marketing Officer and President, U.S. Thank you.
Okay. I think Lauren said you were President of the United States.
Yeah, I heard that. It's a promotion. Thank you.
Yeah. Congratulations. Okay. Safe harbor statement. I ask everybody to pay attention to that. As Lauren said, we had a press release this morning, and we announced the acquisition of our 15th power brand. As many of you know, we've built our company through acquisitions. Over the past 20 years, we've added 14 of our 15 power brands through acquisition. Meets all of our criteria, number one and number two in a category, asset light, fast grower, gross margin accretive, and we get to leverage our formidable capabilities to help this brand grow. If you think about the last few years, we bought Zicam in December of 2020. We got TheraBreath in December of 2021. Now here's the third one, Hero in August, September of 2022. That is our story.
Now, let me give you some details with respect to Hero. You can kind of run your eyes down the page. It's number one patch brand in acne care. It's number two brand overall behind Neutrogena, and it's got a lot of runway. Because if you look at some of the stats here, you see the household penetration's only 4%, and the category in general is 23%. The ACV is only 8%, which is astonishing. It's really only on Amazon and Target, a little bit in Ulta more recently. Lots of opportunity to expand distribution going forward. You can see what the share is of the acne patch is 63%. Now it's a leader in acne care. If you run your eyes across the page, you see patches, aftercare, daily care, and body care. 86% of the business is patches.
There's another 8%, which is pimple aftercare, and then another 6%, which is essentially skincare. A little bit more, this business has done a fabulous job building its brand through digital marketing. You see. I won't read these things to you, but certainly on TikTok, Instagram, these guys are pros. Here's some stats with respect to give you some context with respect to room for distribution. Far right, you see Hero, a tiny distribution. Neutrogena in contrast. We wanna drive this brand to around 80%-90% ACV. The household penetration, see 23%. It's five times the category versus where patches are today. Feel great about this acquisition. Now, who we are.
If you look at one, three five, 10, or even 15 years, we've had stellar shareholder return for many years. Not so this year. We've got a double-digit number there, but it's got a bracket around it. We all know some of the troubles that we and CPG has had in 2022. Nevertheless, we do have an evergreen model. We wanna grow our top line organically 3%. Where that comes from is domestic 2%, international 6%, and SPB 5%. If you go to the bottom line there, 8% is what we shoot for year after year. If you said, How's that been going for you? Here's kind of the track record for the past 10 years. You can see we generally beat the 3%.
In fact, our 10-year average is a little over 4%. Then EPS, again, the 8%, you can see we've historically been averaging around 10%+. Last year, we were short. We're at 7% of our 8%. This year, we're calling flat EPS. We have 15 power brands that make up 85% of our revenues and profits. Oops. Here, here's the split geographically. Three-quarters of our company is U.S. 18% international, and 6% is our specialty products business. We'll talk about all three of them before we conclude here. Here's how we're balanced between value and premium products. It's 40% value and 60% premium. That 40% becomes very valuable in an economy like this when we're in a recession.
As far as online goes, you can see we've grown significantly over time. If you went back to 2015, only 1% of our sales were online. We expect it to be 16% in 2022, and we think we're best in class with respect to those statistics. Here's the split between household and personal care. It's pretty even, and you see specialty products in the upper right, 6%. We get lots of questions about this. What is our exposure to private label? It's actually pretty low. You see the weighted average share is around 12%. There's five categories of our 18 categories that have private label exposure. If you look at the graph behind those products, you can see they're pretty stable.
The only one that's got an uptick there is clumping and cat litter, lower right. That's picked up a little bit over the past six to 12 months. Hasn't affected our shares or hasn't affected our growth rates. Here's our acquisition criteria. Mentioned it before. Number one and number two brand, high growth, high margin, asset light, leverage our footprint, and a sustainable competitive advantage. Now here's just a display of, if you go back to 2004 through 2022, virtually every year we've done an acquisition. They're not all power brands.
Some are just tuck-in brands, but this is how this company has been built, and that is our operating model. We generate significant amount of cash flow annually, and our the primary direction for our cash flow is to add TSR accretive acquisitions. There are 14 of 15 power brands we've acquired since 2001. All are number one or number two in their categories. A simple way of describing what we're trying to do as a company is we have 15 brands today, with the most recent acquisition, Hero, 20 tomorrow.
If you went back a few years ago, this slide said 10 brands today, 20 tomorrow. We've been using this slide for many, many years. Innovation, typically, our new products account for 1-1.5% of organic growth on an annual basis. Barry's gonna tell you a little bit about some of our new products when he gets up. Here's our formula. We have a balanced and diversified portfolio, low exposure to private label. We're acquisitive.
That's the number one destination for cash and consistent innovation. One of the things that Lauren brought up in her opening remarks is we do have a couple of brands that are more discretionary. We bought Waterpik in 2017, five years ago, and we bought Flawless in 2019. Both of those brands have been significantly affected by the recession. They only account for 10% of our total sales, but still, the amount of pullback in those particular categories has overwhelmed the growth in our other categories. Let me bring up Barry to give us some insights with respect to the U.S. environment.
Thanks, Matt. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm gonna take you through a look at some of the key categories in which we compete and, how Church & Dwight's performing in those categories in this environment that we're in. Then I'll dive into a few of our new products and some of the advertising that we're using to drive awareness and drive trial, which I hope you like as much as we do. In terms of categories, let's start in fabric care with the bull's-eye on liquid laundry detergent. You can see on the left-hand side category performance over the last six months, and you can see on the right-hand side, Church & Dwight consumption.
So the category is definitely moderating, especially over the last three months, where you can see it slowing to the low single digits. On that environment, Church & Dwight's performing really exceptionally well. You can see growth rates far in excess of category growth rates, which obviously means we're growing share. The breaking news here is we achieved an all-time share high in the fabric care category in liquid laundry detergent in August of 14.5%. That's part of a long-term share growth trend. We were down in the 11.5%, back in 2017, and there's been steady growth between now and then, wherein again, we've just achieved 14.5%.
A fair amount of that growth is driven recently by consumer trade down. You can see here there's a migration from premium laundry detergent to value, and that's accelerating in the recessionary environment that we're in. You can see the line chart here that premium's taken a three-point step back while value's increased.
As a reminder, Arm & Hammer plays squarely in the middle of that value tier. That's definitely a contributor to the share growth that you saw. Another category that's important to us that we watch closely, cat litter. Probably not a surprise to you during COVID, there was a big spike in pet adoption. Cats were no exception. This year, the growth, which you can see, is strong, driven largely by price versus volume, as Church & Dwight and competitors have taken price. In that environment, again, Arm & Hammer is performing especially well, growing faster than category in either approaching or achieving all-time share highs in the category. Vitamins and minerals and supplements, it's a different story. You can see growth moderating from mid-single digits to flat to, in the month of August, taking a big step back.
Again, it's a $12 billion category. It's taking almost a 9% step back. For context, that August step back is a tough comp versus a year ago when the Delta variant spike of COVID was going on. Nevertheless, in that environment, we've been struggling. We had some supply challenges earlier in the year, which led to losing consumers. We're working hard to bring them back now, and as supply has returned, we'll be looking to get back to historical levels of trade, of advertising support to bring those lapsed users back into the Church & Dwight family. Another category that's struggling in this environment, power water flossers. If you follow the category, you know price points range from $50 up to $200, and there's been definitely a discretionary category consumer pullback. Either they're pulling back or trading down.
Waterpik plays squarely in the premium area of this category. We've taken a bigger step back than the category overall. I wanna remind everyone, Waterpik's been an amazing grower for us since we acquired it back in 2017. There's been high single-digit or double-digit growth every year. While we'll take a step back in 2022, we're absolutely committed to the category. There's innovation, there are new clinical trials, there's detailing of dentists and hygienists, so it's absolutely a category that we're committed to. When the consumer comes back, as the leading brand, we'll be ready for them. Dry shampoo has been a fascinating category for us. You know, we bought Batiste back in 2012. We've grown the brand almost 10 times in that interim. A lot of that growth, though, came from international markets.
U.S. is a little newer to the party, and you can see the category is still going through really solid growth of 17%-18% as consumers are returning to travel, are socializing again in the wake of a hopefully post-COVID world. Batiste is the leader in that category, growing 30%, 40%, 50% is driving that category growth. A great category for us that we see continuing to grow long into the future. Household penetration is still really low here versus some of our European markets where we've been in market longer. Another category to talk about is mouthwash, right? There's the total category, which has been a slow grower of a flat to 1%.
There's alcohol-free mouthwash, which you can see in the 7%-8% range. We acquired TheraBreath in December of last year, and it's been a great contributor to growth since then. 40%, 50%, even 60% growth since we've acquired the brand. Definitely driving share to all-time highs as we're growing far in excess of category. I think the really nice story about TheraBreath, it's not over yet. You can see our distribution similar to what we showed with you on Hero lagging competitors. We've improved dramatically, but we've got a long way to go against our branded competitors, so we think there's plenty of runway to keep running. Those of you who followed us for a while, you've seen this chart before.
To look at the 17 categories in which we compete, green means the category grew for that year, or in the case of 2022, is growing year- to- date. Red means the category is taking a step backwards. You can see definitely in 2022 there are more challenges. Six of the 17 categories are going backwards. We've got a weighted average growth of about 3.3%, so a more challenging year for sure. If you're looking for some light at the end of the tunnel, you can see our case fill rates are significantly improving. We started the year below 80%, finished Q2 at 89%, Q3 around 93%, and we're on our way to 95%.
While that's not only good news for Church & Dwight, since we're the leaders in many of the categories that I just showed you on the last slide, we'll help bring those categories back to growth as well as we're getting back into into full stock and supply. That's the story on categories and Church & Dwight's performance in them. I'm gonna give you just a quick glimpse into some of the innovation that's driving our growth across a few of those categories. As we started at the beginning with fabric care, I'll show you a look at Arm & Hammer Baby. We've been in fabric care for over 50 years, but we've never had a product targeted towards baby. That is until now. We've got Arm & Hammer Baby Hypoallergenic Laundry Detergent. It's pediatrician and derm tested.
It's got a fresh baby scent with no harsh perfumes. This is contributing to some of that share growth that you saw earlier on, the all-time share high that we just achieved. Whenever you shoot advertising with babies involved, you're never sure exactly what you're gonna get. I'll give you a look at this copy now so you can see how we're building awareness and driving trial. Let's play the first spot, please.
Comfort or cry it out? Mostly cry it out, but there is some comfort.
I concur. Make one decision easy. New Arm & Hammer Baby Detergent. Tough on baby stains, gentle on skin.
Now at Church & Dwight onto something completely different. Talking about the Trojan brand and Trojan BareSkin Raw, our newest launch, our newest innovation. It's America's thinnest latex condom, and it's meeting with great consumer acceptance. Shortly after launch, it became one of the top 10 SKUs on Amazon. We're just building bricks-and-mortar distribution now, and it's been just an outstanding performer. It's turning Trojan share around and driving growth for the first time in a long time on Trojan. The advertising's a little different than the last one, but I'll let it speak for itself. Let's show the next spot.
Experience more. Experience raw. Trojan BareSkin Raw, America's thinnest latex condom.
Always fun in all the categories we compete in here at Church & Dwight. Last but not least, TheraBreath Whitening Oral Rinse. I showed you earlier, TheraBreath's been gaining share by building distribution, but we're also gaining share by launching new products. This is our newest innovation. It helps remove stains, and it prevents future stains as well. To celebrate it and tell you the story, we've brought back the beloved Dr. Katz, who we bought the brand from in December, to help tell you a little bit of the story about TheraBreath and about TheraBreath Whitening Oral Rinse. Let's play that spot.
With TheraBreath Mouthwash, people are finding confidence in every gargle.
Oh, flushy time.
TheraBreath helps keep Tina's breath fresh for 12 hours and helps give Dale 24-hour protection against cavities. A hard worker, just like us. It also helps Jack control plaque that leads to bleeding gums. Is it weird if I think you're beautiful? Helps Brenda prevent stains.
Million-dollar smile? Yes.
When they look in the mirror, they see their best selves. TheraBreath, it's a better mouthwash. I guarantee it.
That's a quick look at some of the categories in which we compete, some of the new products that are driving our performance. Now I'm gonna turn it back over to Matt to talk about international.
Okay. Okay. Thanks, Barry.
Sure.
All right. The international story. Heard me say up front we have 3% target for organic, 2% domestic, 6% international, and 5% for specialty products. Here's international. Again, this is our track record. Took it over the last 10 years. We've actually been averaging over 6%. Didn't hit it last year in COVID in 2021. If you wanna frame the business, it's a $900 million business, and it's grown from $535 million in 2014. Significant amount of growth, largely driven by our Global Markets Group, which is our export business that ships product to 80 countries around the world. Here's the split. See the Global Markets Group. It's about a third of the business.
Canada and Europe make up another half, and then Mexico and Australia. All right. Now the 80%, its GMG is 18% of the company's sales, but it's been growing at a 15% CAGR up until the end of 2021. The focus here has been certainly lots of countries around the world 'cause we ship to 80 countries. Our focus now is Asia and Asia Pacific, where we've made significant investments over the last couple of years. The short story with respect to how you get 6% is we have our U.S. brands which travel well. We have a lot of opportunity to bring them to other markets. We have more recent acquisitions, Waterpik, Flawless, TheraBreath, and also Hero as of today.
The Global Markets Group does drive a lot of the growth in emerging markets. We have a lot of opportunity ahead of us here, and we feel very positive about international. Animal productivity. That's the one we expect to grow 5% a year. The reason for that is just simply the population of the world is growing and the demand for protein. Historically, we're just a dairy business, and more recently, in the last few years, we got into cattle, swine, and poultry. Here's the split. You have a $336 million business. It had nice growth in 2021, 12%. If you look at the pieces there, especially chemicals in the lower right, 30%, that's in bulk sodium bicarbonate. That's the original business of Church & Dwight.
The point here is that in raising production animals is a move away from antibiotics, and we provide prebiotics, probiotics, and nutritional supplements to those producers. Here's the split again, dairy, non-dairy, and performance products. This is really important. If you go back over the last 10-plus years, it's been a very cyclical business. One year up, two years down. One year up, two years down. You can see that across the page. Because we've gotten into cattle, swine, and poultry, we've now balanced that. We have three years in a row where we have organic growth in the SPD business. That bodes well for the future. It's gonna even out the growth. The short story here is all of our products, especially products, are labeled Arm & Hammer.
That travels really well with people that produce some production animals. It's aligned with consumer trend away from antibiotics. We're in lots of species now, and we have a lot of opportunity to go internationally. Only 15% of this business is international today. Now, how we run the company. If you're a long-term shareholder, you know this story. We number one is leverage brands, two, friend of the environment, three, leverage people, and fourth is leverage our assets. We're asset-light. If you do those four well, you get really good returns. But on top of that, we're really good at targeting, acquiring, and integrating businesses, number five. The good returns become great returns. Just to say a little bit about each one of those.
As far as the leveraging brands go, we got a 15 brands that make up 85% of our revenues and profits, but we have 80 brands worldwide. We've been a friend of the environment for a long, long time. I won't read all of this to you, but if you went back to the late 19th century, we were putting cards of birds in the yellow box saying, Save the birds, save the planet. The company was founded by people who were environmentalists, so they were far beyond their time. More recently, we've committed to science-based targets. Run your eyes across the page here. Here are our targets. We wanna be 100% carbon neutral through offsets by 2025.
Those offsets are we've planted millions of trees in the Mississippi River Valley over the last four or five years 'cause we all remember from fifth grade that trees take CO2 out of the atmosphere. Number two is water, 10% reduction of water annually, and we wanna recycle 75% of our waste. We've been getting a lot of recognition for this. We don't send notes to these people trying to get on their list, but they do find us, so I think it's attributed to the company. All right, number three is leverage people. We think this is really an underappreciated statistic. If you look at the revenue per employee of Church & Dwight, it's over $1 million.
We have $5 billion in sales, and we have 5,000 employees. Next up is how are those people incented? We have a very simple compensation structure, revenue, gross margin, EPS, and cash from operations. What that does is it promotes financial literacy within the company. If 25% of your comp is tied to, say, gross margin, people wanna know, What is gross margin, and how can I get it? Okay, I made that point already. Then how do you expand gross margin? Well, gross margin has been pretty tough to expand the last couple of years because we've been overwhelmed by lots of costs and inflation.
We have a Good to Great program, and this is our continuous improvement program, named after the book that everybody's heard of, but nobody's read. Next one is supply chain optimization, where we try to do a better job running our plants. New products we introduce with a higher gross margin than the products that they're replacing.
Finally, acquisition synergies. Although we do not have cost synergies built into our most recent acquisition being Hero. Number four, leverage assets. We're an asset-light company. Typically, our CapEx is just 2% of our sales. You can see that varies over time, and Rick will say a little bit more about this in a minute. Finally, leverage acquisitions. I've covered this already. If you go back to 2004, $1.5 billion in sales. Today, over $5 billion and many acquisitions along the way. All right, next up is Rick to talk about the financials.
All right. Thank you, Matt. I'll go through the Evergreen model briefly, and talk about the outlook, wrap up with capital allocation, and then maybe a slide or so on Hero and the deal implications on the financials. First off, our Evergreen model. Matt walked through a little bit, 3% top line growth year after year is what we aim for. 2-6-5 is how we get there. Gross margin expansion is 25 basis points. These last couple years have been choppy as we deal with $ hundreds of millions of inflation, and you can't quite price enough to get there. The long-term algorithm is 25 basis points of expansion. Marketing dollars typically higher, and the percent of sale is flat.
It's a virtuous cycle for us, because spend back marketing drives the top line, drives NPV, and that's how we get there. SG&A is leveraged by 25 basis points. Typically, as we grow the top line, if we can grow SG&A at half the rate, then we can get some basis points there. That expands operating margin by about 50 basis points, and that drives EPS growth of 8%. Okay, for our outlook, today we announced this morning that our reported net sales growth is revised to 2%-4%, and adjusted EPS growth remains flat. Now, there's three things that you really have to take to heart on the 2%-4%. That implies, after you factor in the stub period for the Hero acquisition, that our base business is coming down by about $100 million.
There's three things that really go into that. The first one is the discretionary items that Matt talked about. Flawless and Waterpik are going backwards a little bit, more so than we thought. You know, 2021, consumer was flush with cash, stimulus money and whatnot, and this isn't just happening with us, this is happening across industries. So that's the discretionary piece. The second part is vitamin. The vitamin business is coming off of all-time highs, right? That business has essentially doubled since we bought it back, a few years ago, and it's gone up by about 50% to 50% just from 2019. So it's retrenching a bit, still high, it's just a more material business for us. Then the third thing is, orders are flattish from retailers, even though consumption is very strong, in some cases double digits.
Those are the three things that are happening, in order to get to the $100 million drop back. Okay, just a slide on Hero. Hero, a few facts. You know, $630 million purchase price, $570 million of cash, and $60 million of restricted stock just to those three founders, which just ensures alignment to the corporation and retains those folks for three years to help run that business. Trailing 12-month EBITDA is $45 million. Trailing 12-month sales is $115 million. About 40% EBITDA margins, $130 million of sales in 2022 is the expectation, so that means about $150 million in 2023. What's very special and near and dear to our hearts is cash earnings.
It's gonna be accretive by about 3% is our expectation, and neutral to EPS as you have to include the transition costs and amortization and interest expense. We expect to close in about a month, so probably in October, early October, and our leverage ratio goes to about two times by the end of 2022, and we expect to be below 20, two times in 2023. Still, plenty of firepower for acquisitions. Okay, speaking of firepower, here's what we do with our free cash flow. Number one, far and away, is TSR accretive M&A. Number two is CapEx, number three is NPD, number four is debt reduction, and number five is return cash to shareholders. We're not a capital-intensive company, and Matt showed you the history, 2% of sales.
In 2022, we have a step up of about 3.5%, close to $200 million, and then we expect another step up in 2023, closer to $300 million. That's really just adding capacity for some of these key businesses like laundry, litter, and vitamins and distribution, as an example. Free cash flow conversion, for many years, we've averaged 120%, and in 2022, we expect to dip down as we spend more on CapEx. But again, as that returns back in line, we expect that to return to averages. Then our cash conversion cycle, and I'd like to nuance as well. For a long time we've gone from 52 days down to 15 days. As we bought some businesses that have longer supply chains, we're still in the teens.
We have a bump up in 2022, largely because of inventory, right? Again, these discretionary items, there's too much inventory in the channel, there's too much inventory that we have, so it takes a couple quarters to work through that. Also, as we've all learned through COVID and supply, it's, you know, just in case, not just in time. We're trying to build a bit more inventory into the infrastructure as well.
We have a strong balance sheet, two times levered, even with this deal by the end of the year, and just plenty of firepower. Here's a slide to show you that we could still do a $3.5 billion worth of deals and maintain our investment-grade rating. Then finally, with dividends, right? We have a long track record, 121 years of consecutive dividends with a 4% increase in 2022. With that, Lauren, we'll turn it over to you. We'll do the breakout. Up to you.
Ms. Lieberman.
Thank you. Thanks so much for that. One of my bigger questions, in particular on the heels of the Hero announcement this morning, is just that as you keep adding brands to the business, you add complexity, right? It's a simple business. You run really lean on costs, overall. I've been wondering the degree to which you think about investments that are needed to support this broader and more complex business over time. You know, whether it's analytics, IT, data, you know, just that it gets harder to keep track of a business that is across more categories. They're really different from each other, and also across more geographies, right, as international becomes a bigger part of the business.
Yeah. The way to think about that is, well, let's take your question about investments. We've made investments over the past 18-24 months. One example would be we've established an analytics group. Many of you know, you're not hiring CPG people to join an analytics group. You're hiring math majors and physics majors. We've had some great success. The reason we started that is because we initially hired third parties. We had a third party help our marketing group, so they helped us predict what kind of lift we would get from spending on advertising. We had a separate group, third party, that we hired to help us analyze what kind of lift we're gonna get from trade promotions.
That then migrated into we're gonna have our own talent in-house to work with those two firms outside. As far as the complexity of the business, one of the things I would point to with respect to Church & Dwight is that we're really skilled at managing complexity. Take the international business and the Global Markets Group that Barry ran for many years. It's 400 distributors. Now most people would say, "I don't wanna deal with 400 distributors." We have the ability to manage that kind of complexity. If you look at our supply chain, we have, you know, a few hundred not just suppliers, but also co-manufacturers. 25% of our sales are made by third parties. That's a competency of the company.
You're right, as you add brands, things do get more complicated. We already have the talent and skill to manage complexity. Organization structure is important too. We have a U.S. business, but we have six businesses that we break it down into. We have home care, fabric care, personal care. You get the idea. As we buy a business, we've gotta put it in the right bucket. There may come a day where we don't need six, we need seven, or we need eight just to kinda spread it out. Now Barry might not like that 'cause all these characters report to Barry. You know, it's strategy, structure, and people.
We think we have the right structure, and we think we have the right competencies to manage complexity in lots of areas that I mentioned. Anybody in the audience wanna take a swing? How we doing on time? Oh, we got four minutes.
There's one.
We got one.
Thanks. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about U.S. laundry. You mentioned that you're seeing trade-down, with value outperforming premium. How would you characterize the approach to pricing that has been taken in both the premium and the value, and how that kind of price architecture of the category has evolved year-to-date and how you'd expect to see that continue into the Q4 ?
You know, we wouldn't comment on pricing at all. I would just say that if you take a big step back and look at price gaps pre-COVID and price gaps now, they're essentially about the same over time. We wouldn't wanna get into any of the pricing details.
Thanks. Talk a little bit about the vitamin business. You've mentioned that you had, you know, there were some supply chain dynamics earlier this year. Case fill rates were low, but also acknowledging there's a normalization going on in terms of category demand. When I go into some stores, not all stores, so sample size of what I see at CVS, maybe not a Costco, right? There it's a highly promoted category, so it's not just speaking to your business. You walk in that aisle, it runs the length of the store.
Yeah.
The entire thing is filled with yellow tickets on promotion. That was the case pre-pandemic.
Sure.
It's not, you know, a just now thing. As you think about that and you think about this normalization period, and you're talking about kind of pulling back a bit on that spending and support for the business while you're in this intermediate period, is there an opportunity to clean up the category, right? To become more rational, to clean up the SKU count on the shelves that maybe as a category leader you can support that transition? 'Cause it looks like the category is almost a victim of its own success.
Sure.
In certain respects, so I'd be curious your perspective on that.
Well, when we bought the brand, you can comment, Barry, after I lob this one in. When we bought the business, I think there were six other competitors for gummy vitamins, and now it's dozens. It's really been fragmented over time. It's difficult for us to convince the retailer to reduce their offerings. They do. A lot of these different brands do have followings. The expectation is that over time, the number of offerings will decline and that there will be consolidation. You know, the category's been around for, I guess 10 years or so. 'Cause when we bought the business, only 3% of vitamins were sold in gummy form. Now it's in the 20s.
I think the retailers may be viewing that there's still more interest than there is, we would agree, for that to grow. Consequently, they wanna keep the wide assortment. We do think over time it's gonna in a few years down the road, not in the near term, I think it's gonna plateau and there should be fewer people.
Yeah.
I think Matt got it right, Lauren. I think the gummy form is still growing, right? That's attracted a lot of competitors in the space that was quieter before. I think the strong brands will emerge as winners there. I think as we get back to supply rates that we can actively support, we're getting back to normative levels of trade. You'll see us compete in that as well as advertising. Yeah, it's a heck of a lot more competitive than when we bought the brand, for sure.
We have to wrap there.
Okay. Thanks, everybody.
Thanks, everybody.