Hello, and good afternoon. Please take your seats. I want to welcome Church & Dwight, who is back to the conference, who's been a steadfast supporter for CAGNI for many, many years. Joining us today from Church & Dwight, we have Matt Farrell, Chairman and CEO, and Rick Dierker, CFO and Head of Business Operations. After more than 18 years of leadership, Matt will be stepping down on April 1st, passing the baton over to Rick.
Church & Dwight remains committed to delivering consistent shareholder returns year after year with a superior portfolio of household and personal care products and a competency in acquiring, integrating, and growing brands. Church & Dwight just completed another fine year of shareholder returns in 2024 and is optimistic about the path ahead.
Matt and Rick are known for their candor, which we always welcome and appreciate, and I'm sure today will be no different. I'd like to welcome Matt and Rick to the stage.
Okay. Okay, good afternoon, everybody. I'm sure there's a lot of many people here or listening that know the story of Church & Dwight, and it is one of really unparalleled consistency for many, many years. Many of the things we're going to talk about here today, we've talked about before, we're a little bit repetitive, we're very informal when it comes to these presentations, but our goal is to create understanding.
So, let's begin. Safe Harbor statement, I encourage everybody to read that after class today. A quick look back at 2024, we had a great year. Everybody knows we have an Evergreen Model. We have three businesses: U.S., International, and Specialty Products. All three exceeded their organic growth algorithm last year. We had seven brands that are our Power Brands. We've got many more brands than that, but five of those seven gained share in 2024.
We target 11% marketing as percentage of sales and a little bit above that in 2024. The next one is super important, and you may notice we talk a lot about numbers throughout all of our presentations because we're pretty maniacal about it.
A nd to have 50% of your growth, your organic growth, come from new products is really terrific, and it's really the sign of a company that's got strong brands and a strong new product development team, and it's so important to sustaining your brand equity year after year.
Online accounts for over 21% of our global sales. I argue that would be higher than any company presenting here this week. It's something that we're very focused on, and we think by the end of the decade that number will be around 30%.
Internationally, we're really underdeveloped internationally and trying to take brands that we've been acquiring over the last couple of years and blow them out to many, many countries. Hero, which is a brand we bought in 2022, is now in 40 countries. In July, we acquired a distributor of ours in Japan. We really didn't have a presence in Japan.
Of course, it's the third largest economy in the world, over 100 million people, so we acquired this distributor and now we have a subsidiary in Japan. Specialty Products, I'm going to talk a little bit about that. It's our smallest business, but it's our original business dating back to 1864, and now it's going to be a perennial grower.
We generate lots of cash, and I think this is the, when you're evaluating companies and investments, the amount of cash that's generated in relation to the assets required to us is an indication of a good company. And generally over $1 billion in cash from operations, almost $1 billion on the balance sheet at year-end, and we're really under-leveraged given the size of our company.
Here's our scorecard just going from right to left, one year, two years, three years, five years, 10 years. My opening statement was this is a company that you can talk about, you've got a lot of consistency, but can you go back and look at the numbers and support it? All right, who we are. $6 billion in sales. We're largely U.S., so 77% domestic, 18% International, and 5% Specialty Products. Those are the three businesses.
Here are the logos for the seven power brands, and those seven power brands account for 70% of our revenues and profits, and we have an Evergreen model, and we've had an Evergreen model for over 15 years now, and the reason that's important is because it really guides how we plan the next year, the next three years, the next five years, how are we going to sustain this.
A nd if you see the top line, organic sales of 4%, you see the three businesses, what we expect, three, eight, and five, and then bottom line, 8%. A nd we expect to expand operating margin by 50 basis points, and the way we get there is we want to expand gross margins 25-50, and then we try to get some leverage on SG&A as we grow from anywhere from 0-25.
That's how you get your 50 bps . Now, a few other characteristics, attributes of the company that are worthy of note is that we're really balanced. We've got low exposure to private label, real good online, terrific innovation, and we're a serial acquirer. So, here's the balanced portfolio. We're pretty much split evenly between household products and personal care products, and we also have a nice split between value and premium, 36% value, 64% premium.
Now, why is that important? It's because when you get into uncertain economic times, recessions, pullbacks, etc., we seem to be able to power through, and it's because of this split between value and premium. And what categories you're in has a lot to do with your growth rate in your company, your margins, and your success. Our categories happen to have low private label exposure, and it's been pretty stable for many years.
Here's the numbers for e-com. Back in 2016, 2% of our sales were online. 2024, it's over 21%, and it's still growing. And this is the point I've made earlier, half of our organic growth in 2024 came from new products, and that means that's net of cannibalization. It's a really important metric to follow. Now, as far as acquisitions go, we focus on acquiring businesses, brands that are number one or number two in their categories.
Need to be able to grow, they've got to have gross margins that are at or above the company's gross margins and fast-moving consumables. Need to be asset-light. We like to buy businesses that are made by third parties, made by a co-manufacturer, so not looking to buy businesses that have plants.
And we have a very sophisticated supply chain. S o, we look at businesses we're acquiring and say, "Hey, can we leverage that or leverage our logistics, our manufacturing, and our procurement team to gain synergies?" And then the final one, which is the most important one, frankly, is does it have sustainable competitive advantage?
And so you go left to right here, down the bottom of the page, you can see all the different brands that we acquired over the years. We haven't done any significant deals in the last two years, 2023 and 2024, pretty much rolled a donut, not for lack of trying, but we're very fussy about what we're going to buy. Now I'm going to bring up Rick to cover 2024 financials, 2025 outlook, and the U.S. story.
All right, thanks, Matt. So, this is the last time I'm going to do detailed financials for you guys, all right? 2024 was a great year. We had 4.5% top line growth, 4.5% organic growth, really broad-based. SPD, International, domestic, they all grew well. Gross margin expanded by 110 basis points, and then we spent a little bit more than 11%.
We had a lot of optionality. We spent back tens of millions of dollars to go drive share, and we did that. We exited the year with five of seven power brands growing. EPS was 8.5% above our evergreen model that Matt just walked through, and then cash from operations was $1.1 billion, almost $1.2 billion. So, cash flow matters in a big way, and that gives us a lot of optionality.
For 2025, organic growth, we called three weeks ago, 3%-4% was the range, expanding gross margin, leverage SG&A, operating margin expansion of 60 to 70, and then EPS growth of 7-8%. Generating, if all that goes well, $1.1 billion or more of cash flow lays the groundwork for M&A and capital allocation. For the quarter, we had called 2%, and we've heard in the conference about shipments and consumption. I would say that's true.
I mean, shipments are lagging consumption, consumption's strong, our categories are strong, the brands are strong. If I had to call that number today, it's probably 0%-2% as an example. EPS is down 6%, largely because of a higher tax rate and a higher marketing in the first half than the second half. Here's our track record on net sales growth, 10-year average of 6.5%.
Remember, this is organic and inorganic, so M&A is in here, but long track record of growing very, very fast. Next year, we're calling 2.5%-3.5%, or this year, 2.5%-3.5%. Midpoint for organic is 3.5%, 10-year average is close to 4.5%, so just a good track record of growth. For many, many years, decades, not one or two, but decades, we have a long history of growing our organic growth by volume.
During COVID, of course, like everybody else, we had a price mix to the equation, but this year was largely a volume-driven year, and we expect 2025 to be no different. Gross margin, it's been a long road back. B ut we're happy to say in 2025, we expect to be kind of a parity of 2019. So , we've recovered our pre-COVID margins. We have tailwinds to look for in the future.
Even though we have moderate inflation this year, which is about 3% of COGS versus the 2% that's been normal, we are offsetting that with productivity. We have tailwinds from acquisitions that we've bought that are faster growing than the rest of the company. Marketing spend, around 11%. We've bumped between 10 and 12% over time. 11%, 11.2%, 11.4%, it doesn't really matter to me. It's more about how is our share scorecard doing.
And as I said before, five of seven brands gained share for 2024. S o, we're on the right track. Adjusted SG&A, we want to leverage over time as we grow. We try to grow SG&A at around half the rate we grow sales. But why we make investments to build capabilities, Matt alluded to e-com, certainly one of them. International growth, that's another.
EPS growth, we've been growing low double digit or high single digits for a long time. We expect 2025 to be no different. This was probably my favorite slide as CFO. It's probably going to be one of my top five slides as CEO, but this is all about capital allocation. Why? Because it's about free cash flow generation. We're different than most companies.
Most companies target 90% free cash flow generation. We're averaging 115%. Why is that? Well, part of it's working capital management. We've gone from 52 days down to 28 days. We know how to manage our working capital. When you manage working capital, you generate cash flow, you can de-lever, and we're about 1.5 times EBITDA from a leverage ratio.
The only reason that's not going down more in 2025 is because now all we're left with is fixed debt. It's a good problem to have. So, when you add all that together, we have a lot of cash on the balance sheet. We have only one and a half times levered from a debt perspective.
So, that means we have more optionality than we've ever had. So we're sitting with around $6 billion of firepower between cash and our ability to lever up, and this is where we spend our time.
Number one, far and away, has always been TSR, accretive M&A, from a capital allocation perspective. And that's been true since I got here. Matt and I have been really focused on M&A. It's how you create value. It's going to be certainly true as we look forward. M&A is the number one destination for cash flow.
Number two is CapEx. Number three is NPD. Number four is debt reduction, and number five is return cash to shareholders. From a dividend perspective, we haven't been paying a dividend for a few decades. We've been doing it for over a century. So just, again, since 1846, the company's been around. We've been paying a dividend for well over 100 years.
So, that's the financial side of the equation. Let me just talk a minute about looking ahead. We have a lot of confidence in the future. Matt talked about the Evergreen Model. I'm going to, in a few minutes, talk about our household penetration on our brands and what opportunities we have. Matt will talk about our international growth.
It's not because Matt was the CEO or Rick is going to be the CEO. It's about this: this is the right time for international growth.
We are under-indexed on where we should be. Consistent innovation. Matt's going to talk about how that's just not what we're innovating, but how we innovate. We've built a muscle so that innovation is year after year after year. Digitally savvy. We've built a competency in e-com, as an example, gone from 2% to 21% of sales. We know what to do, and to bring that capability in, we're really top quartile. Focused on domestic and International M&A.
I shared this slide for the first time three weeks ago, and this tells the story of the Arm & Hammer brand. Back in 2000, that's the only brand we had, and it was around $1 billion. We've grown about mid-single digits for the last 24 years, and here we are now. Arm & Hammer is a $2 billion brand, and what does that mean?
It means we've acquired $4 billion of the company over that time frame. So, we really have an ability to identify, acquire, integrate, grow these acquisitions. It's a unique ability. The reason we can do it so is because we do it so often. The organization knows how to do this, and we expect this to continue.
Okay, moving to the U.S. story. So, remember the E vergreen Model that Matt alluded to, 4% for the company, 3% for the U.S. And we have a long track record of success in the U.S. as well. We're leaders in growing categories. It matters what categories you're in, right?
As part of our M&A process, we're really doing a deep dive on the category. And we're looking at private label, we're looking at competitors. And so, we've self-selected into what categories we play into over time.
We thrive in difficult environments. Matt showed you the premium versus value equation, the personal care and household. And then our acquisitions have a lot of room to run. And you're going to see consumption on some of these brands like TheraBreath and Hero are just off the charts.
We have seven power brands that fuel our growth: Arm & Hammer, Batiste, TheraBreath, Vitafusion, Hero, Waterpik, and OxiClean. So, we're in eight categories, seven brands, eight categories. Arm & Hammer is in litter and laundry.
Our weighted average growth in 2024 was 2.7%. Those are good categories. Look at the scorecard over time. These are the most impactful categories that we're in, and then largely green. And then we say how we're doing. How do we gain share over time? Our brand growth rate's higher than our category growth, and about 2/3 of the time we're gaining share.
Okay, let's flip through the businesses really quick. Fabric Care, we're growing faster than the category. We've gained share over a long period of time, from five share back in 2006 to almost a 15% share in 2024. Why is that? In 2024, we're gaining share. In 2025, we expect to gain share because of our good, better, best model. We launched our best premium mid-tier detergent.
So, we have the Orange Bottle, which is based on Arm & Hammer. We have Arm & Hammer plus OxiClean, which is better, and then Deep Clean, which is our most powerful formula. Cat litter. Cat litter, we're right at the company average, I mean, the category average from a consumption perspective.
And share has been up and to the right and probably balanced for the last two years or so. And the reason, and we actually think this is fantastic, right?
There was a huge cyber event for Clorox. We had a lot of share gains during that period of time. We're extremely happy that we've held on to 50% of that share over the time frame without really deep promoting. Here's the next opportunity for us. It's about lightweight.
Our HardBall variant is lightweight perfected, and our share in lightweight in the category in 2023 was around 4%. In 2024, it's 7.5%. If we can get our fair share of clumping litter, then that's a $100 million tailwind.
Moving to Hero, this is a great story. Consumption growth is just fantastic. It's driving the category. It's not just the number one patch brand. It's the number one acne brand, going from a 1% share just four years ago to almost a 22% share today, but more importantly, there's still room to run for Hero.
Our TDP growth, there's still 2.2 times as much distribution opportunity versus the leader, and more importantly, it's household penetration. We're around a 9% household penetration. The category is 25%. TheraBreath is a similar story. TheraBreath, we're driving huge consumption. It's growing the category. For a long time, we talked about non-alcohol and alcohol mouthwash. We're the number one non-alcohol mouthwash.
We're the number two mouthwash now in the U.S., down from a 4% share to an 18% share in just four years, and same story. We have a lot of room to run on distribution as we spread out on shelf, and household penetration story here is even more compelling than Hero. We're about 10% of households have TheraBreath, and 65% of households have mouthwash. So, we think that's fantastic, and it's not just a U.S. story.
Matt will come up and talk about International in a few minutes, but Hero and TheraBreath are doing great outside the U.S. And here's the trend over time for TheraBreath, again, over three years, going from 7% to the quarterly share number or monthly share number of almost 19%. Batiste. Batiste is growing faster than the category, high single digits. And it's the number one dry shampoo. Again, up to the left, 36.7%, going to 46.5%. And that's an all-time share high.
Vitafusion. We've talked a lot about Vitafusion and vitamins. Context is the category doubled during COVID, $1.5 billion, going to $3 billion. And then for the last three years or so, it's been flat. We're very transparent, probably more so than most. And the gummy category was negative, and it's inflected positive, and we are down double digits. So, what are we doing about it?
We announced this a few weeks ago. We broke glass, and we fast-forwarded innovation in a big way. This isn't small-I innovation. This is big-I innovation. We revamped or are in the process of revamping the entire line, making sure that consumers know we have the best tasting gummy, and that's being proved out.
Number two, we're launching our most powerful formula ever, Power Plus Vitamins. And then third, we're launching a sugar-free lineup as well. And with that, I'll turn it back over to Matt to talk about innovation.
Okay. A lot of people get up and talk about innovation at these conferences, so, it'll be a good idea to talk about how do we do it. So, we'll start with that graphic. We're not entering the toy category, and this will not be in your goody bags after our class today. Anyway, classic NPD. So, how do we do it historically?
Well, you know the marketers would come up with a pain point for our consumers and develop a product to address that. So, you go back a few years, 2018. We started to do something, and we formalized it because a lot of people will talk about doing this. What Future Works for us is we have, let's say, 400 scientists, and we say, "We know you guys are tinkering".
You know we're thinking about, you're thinking about stuff going to and from work. Some of these people have 3D printers at home, and they're always working on their ideas. So, we said, "We want to formalize that process. We want to know what you're thinking about." And we got kind of a panel to say, "Hey, we're going to fund your idea if it's a good one." Open Innovation. So, what's the Open Innovation?
Open innovation is we have a brand, and you might have an idea and a manufacturing plant and R&D, but you don't have a brand. Can we work together and come up with a product that we can launch? Next one is White Space. White Space is just simply, can you identify just a space that there is no product, there's an unmet need? And then finally, the last one is third-party partners.
So, where does this go? I said 50% of our growth, our organic growth in 2024, came from new products, and it's from this activity right here, and 50% of our pipeline comes from these new sources, meaning the third parties, Future Works, White Space, and Open Innovation. A nd then there's a bullet up that we connect diverse competencies. S o, let me give you a real-life example.
S o, let's say you're trying to solve an odor problem, well, we happen to be in detergent, we're in cat litter, we're in our underarm deodorant. T he condom guys are trying to overcome the scent of latex. S o, we got all these scientists, but we're not siloed. S o, we're trying to solve an odor problem, we can get that whole crowd together. I t doesn't matter where they sit. A nd we have five locations around the world where we have R&D people.
That's one of the reasons why we can punch above our weight, is we don't have silos. We bring this crowd together when we want to solve a problem. Another example would be, you know we launched in dry shampoo Batiste. It was sweat-activated and touch-activated. So, if you sweat, you get a burst of fragrance. Or if you brush your hair, you get a burst of fragrance.
Well, that technology existed in another category. And so working with the people in that category within Church & Dwight, third-party partners, we said, "Hey, well, let's bring this into dry shampoo." And we're the only dry shampoo that's got a variant like that, and it's attracting new users to the category. So, I think it's helpful to hear a couple of stories about how is this small company?
We regard ourselves as a small company, $6 billion in sales, able to compete so well in so many categories against so many big companies, and this is one of the reasons why. We got really a terrific R&D team and new product development team, and it's sustainable. Some numbers here. Prior to 2023, so 2022 and prior, we were between 1.5%. Last year, I guess in 2023, we were 1.8% or 2% this year.
S o, we feel really good about our ability to sustain it. A nd now I want to talk about some of the things we're doing in the coming year. S o, last year, you've got Deep Clean. Rick talked about good, better, best. S o, we launched, now we have good, better, best. S o, it's Arm & Hammer Yellow Bottle, Arm & Hammer with OxiClean, and then Deep Clean.
We launched Power Sheets in 2023 on Amazon, August 2023. During 2024, we put all our bucks behind Deep Clean. We did launch Power Sheets nationally, but that's going to be a much bigger deal for us in 2025, and then HardBall, this is our lightweight litter. As Rick pointed out, there's so much opportunity there, so all three of these are done extremely well. So, we're going to build upon those in 2025.
S o, we're launching a Deep Clean Free and Clear. This is a slice of the liquid laundry detergent category that really hasn't played much in the past. S o, got a great product coming out there. We're going to have a fragrance-free Power Sheet. S o, we're going to start expanding the offering that we have for Power Sheets, and we really think this is the future.
It's probably got a slow build right now, but plastic is public enemy number one. And businesses that can find ways to eliminate plastic in their products are going to win. So next one, Plant Power. So, this is a lightweight litter that's made from wheat and corn, but it still has all these really cool properties of HardBall that it sets up as hard as a rock.
And here we're going after the consumer of cat litter that wants natural product. Rick talked about vitamins. So, we're going running really hard right now, renovating the entire portfolio. Example here, we got heat-resistant formula. So, it's not going to be melting depending on heat. Softer chew, adding more vitamins to the actual gummy. And then we have this Power Plus line as well.
We're the only gummy that's going to have 100% of the daily value or more of 10 essential ingredients, launching in 2025, and then sugar-free. We didn't have much of a portfolio for sugar-free. That may seem odd to you, but it won't be odd anymore. By the end of 2025, 60% of all our variants will be available in sugar-free. So, all that's going on right now.
We were unsuccessful in 2024 in slowing the decline of this business. In the end, it does come back to innovation. That's what we're betting on going forward. Here's a fun one. Eliminate the worry of acne on your chest, back, and butt. This is a double XL pimple patch. It's really cool because it's notched so that it kind of curves to your body and doesn't kind of fall off. It's really cool. Try it.
All right, last one is Batiste. So, Batiste White Dry Shampoo. One of the barriers for people entering the dry shampoo category is just some white residue, particularly if you have dark hair. So, this has no white residue. So, we think we're going to bring more consumers to the category because it's all about building household penetration. Remember I said before we had Batiste Sweat and Touch brought people to the category.
This is going to bring more people to the category too. All right, and we couldn't talk about everything we have coming. We got a number of things coming in other categories, but they'll be revealed throughout the year. Don't want to tip our hand yet. All right, I'm going to talk about International. This is a big opportunity for Church & Dwight. Here's the evergreen model again, 4% at 3%, 8%, and 5%.
So, International growing 8% annually. Here's how we split out the $1.1 billion for the seven subsidiaries. So, you can see the percentages there. And then you have the Global Markets Group. What the Gobal Markets Group is, it's the group that pushes our products out to 100 countries around the world through distributors.
And the way we got the German subsidiary and the Japanese subsidiary is over the last few years, we acquired our distributor in Germany and in Japan.
And now we're able to push our other products through there. You say, "Hey, how have you been doing with that 8% algorithm?" You can see around 8% just about for the last 10 years. Coming out of COVID, we had kind of a rugged time, but we're back to around 8%, 9% in 2023 and 2024. So, here's the opportunity.
If you took your top 10 CPG companies, what you'd find is that they generally have 60% of their sales outside the United States. We have 18%. So, maybe we were slow to the party. And a lot of these CPG companies took their brands internationally many years ago. But we're finding our brands do travel well. You might say, "Well, how is that possible? You're entering categories and others are already there." The answer is you're new news.
And retailers in other countries, they're always looking for new news. So, we're a new brand that's going to show up. All right, so now if you go kind of left to right here, we got lots of great U.S. brands that have the capability of being International. Waterpik is already a pretty big International brand. Arm & Hammer, mostly North America.
Vitamins is the demand for that everywhere, but I would argue that with the advent of GLP-1 and the need for vitamins for people that are going on that drug. N ot just today, but as that grows in the future, it's probably a good thing for anybody who's making vitamins. Second thing, International, those brands Batiste, Stérimar, and Femfresh, those are brands that were born internationally.
A lot of people might not remember that Batiste is a business we acquired in 2011, and it was popular in France and Germany and brought it to the U.S. and essentially created the dry shampoo category in the U.S. Those three brands have a lot of runway ahead of them, and I'll talk about a couple of them in a minute, and then Hero and TheraBreath. These are just recent acquisitions.
When we bought TheraBreath, I remember being at CAGNY and saying, "Hey, we didn't buy this business to be a $150 million business. We bought it to be a $500 million business." And it's got a lot of opportunity ahead of us, and it's been growing even faster than we expected. Hero, another one. So, we acquired that business in 2022.
I mentioned earlier on, we're already in 40 countries around the world. All right, so let me talk a little bit more. So, Hero bought that business in 2022. 12 countries in 2023, 40 in 2024, and 50 plus in 2025. Stérimar, the story behind Stérimar. Stérimar is a nasal hygiene product. Nasal hygiene products aren't that popular in the United States, but they're popular internationally.
This product was invented in France by a swimmer who every time he came out of the ocean, he said, "Wow, my sinuses are cleared." And what was born was Stérimar. And this business has been around for 50 years. It's sold in 90 countries, and it's a perennial grower for Church & Dwight and the International business.
Batiste, it's the number one dry shampoo on the planet. And these are two variants that you see up here. I mentioned fresh Batiste Sweat and Touch. They're called different things outside the U.S., but they have the same characteristics.
All right, OxiClean. So, we bought this distributor in Japan, and this distributor had driven OxiClean to be the number one powdered pre-wash additive in Japan. And of course, the number one is Kao. But the market is 20% powder, and it's 80% liquid.
It's been a perennial grower in powder, but now just launched in 2024, right as we were purchasing them, a liquid. So, a lot of enthusiasm around that. Okay, sheets. You know we're number two in selling laundry detergent wash loads in the United States. But liquid laundry is heavy, right? It doesn't travel. So, we could never really be a player in detergent outside the United States until the arrival of Power Sheets.
So, now we have a product that is in a cardboard box, travels well. We launched in 12 countries in 2024. It's already the number one sheet in Mexico. Don't want to take too big a bow for that because it's not that big a category just yet, but it kind of shows you that there has potential. We'll be in 25 markets by the end of 2025.
All right, so just kind of wrap up International before I get to Ppecialty products. We acquired Graphico. That was the name of the distributor in July. We now are working to push three or four more brands through that subsidiary into the Japanese market. We're doing all the hard work, you know, the back-office stuff, global ERP system, investing in regulatory infrastructure.
We're expanding our offices in Panama and Singapore, simply because of the growth. There's going to be more talent. And I talked about Hero and TheraBreath. And then finally, we've added former bankers in London and in Singapore so we can get into deal flow outside the United States. We start taking advantage of the fact that we're just underscaled. All right, Specialty Products. This is part of the presentation.
A lot of people start looking at your phones, but I would encourage you to pay attention, and I'll tell you why. This business has been around for a long, long time, and we finally have cracked the code here that this is going to be a grower, and you're going to be hearing about it. I'll tell you why.
So, this one is when we say, "Hey, it's going to grow 5% a year, year after year," and it hasn't been doing that, but it had the ability to do it, and finally, we're seeing it start to happen. So, $300 million business, 60/40 between animal nutrition and specialty chemicals. I'll explain what that is in a second. S o, three businesses. First is animal nutrition. S o, how in the world did Church & Dwight get into animal nutrition?
If you go back 50 years, we're finding that we're selling baking soda, and a third party is selling baking soda to dairy farms. Why? Because apparently it was helping with the digestion of dairy cows. We said, "That's a great idea. We should be doing that."
We started them selling to dairy farmers, and then over the years, we started adding nutritional supplements, then we bought businesses that had prebiotics and probiotics, and now we have this whole portfolio of products that we can sell to producers of cattle, swine, poultry, and to dairy farms.
Performance products. This is a business that's essentially bulk sodium bicarbonate. Sodium bicarbonate has 101 different uses. In this case, we sell bulk sodium bicarbonate to big bakers. It's great for industrial filtration. It's even an essential part of kidney dialysis. Fun fact, and then the last one is B2B.
There are a number of CPG companies that have well-developed professional businesses where they're selling their products in obviously big 50-pound totes or super sacks to, say, hospitals, hotels, restaurants, etc. We've never gone down that path. And we just started looking at that in the last couple of years. And now it's on the map.
So, now we're going to put resources behind it, and we're going to start growing that. All right, so it has been a cyclical business. This is why people kind of tune out. We talk about Specialty Products, but we've done some things now that are going to assure us that we can grow organically year after year after year.
So, what have we done? Well, the first thing we did is we divested a business called MEGALAC.
The name's not important, but it is the brand that was really whipping us around over time. So, that was sold at the beginning of 2024. We also got out of food safety. So, business we didn't have scale. We said we got to exit that. So, now we're focused on within the animal nutrition business is prebiotics and probiotics, and that's Certillus and Celmanax.
And then these products are great, not just in the U.S., but there's a need for them around the world. So, a lot of focus on International and adding people internationally.
And finally, and this is kind of a surprise that the light bulb went off here, but we didn't have a lot of marketers. We didn't have any marketers in this business. So, we're treating it almost like a chemical company. But that's changed. I'm going to tell you a couple of stories now.
We have 80,000 strains of probiotics. What we do is we go on a producer's farm and we swab. We kind of figure out what kind of bacteria they have in that farm and then say, "What is the best strain of probiotic that's going to address that?" It's something that just isn't done. Now, where did HatchWell come from? We had a probiotic we solved a problem for one producer.
One producer said, "Hey, I'm having trouble with hatching eggs." This is a producer that's raising chickens by the millions, obviously. We came up with a probiotic that solved the problem. It had a name about this long. I don't know if it was Latin or Greek, but nobody knew what the hell it was.
So, we had to get the marketers involved and say, "We're going to call that HatchWell." So, what do you think's happening now? It's a thing. Now, listen to the next one, the MoveWell.
When you're raising chickens, they grow really fast and they get really big. And what happens is they have difficulty moving around. They can't get to the trough for feed or for water. And so what happens is we got a probiotic that addresses joint health in a chicken called the MoveWell.
The whole point here is that this business has got a tremendous amount of potential, and we think we're finally going to let the genie out of the bottle. Here's International. 2024, you see 28% of our sales were International. And then finally, just to kind of wrap things up here, we're going to focus on prebiotics and probiotics.
We're going to invest in brand marketing. We're innovating across all three of those businesses. That professional business is one we'll be talking about in the future and adding resources to International. And a lot of you know this is my last trip around the dance floor at CAGNY.
And we were down at New York Stock Exchange a few weeks ago. We made a little pick. So, we're kind of passing the Arm & Hammer hammer to Rick Dierker, who's going to come up and wrap it up.
Well, when you call home tonight and tell your family, tell them the story about MoveWell and HatchWell. Okay? That'll be appreciated. That's right. How we run the company. So, as Matt walks off the field, one of the things that's a thread through all of this, you hear strategies from every single company.
What's unique about Church & Dwight is our culture. Our culture is one of execution. Okay? A lot of people want it, but not everybody has it. I would say more so than the capabilities that we've built on e-comm or pricing or the brands that we've acquired, the thing that Matt did really well for this company was to preserve and iterate on our culture. Culture matters in a big way.
That's the theme through all these five operating principles. Right? We talk about leveraging our brands. Matt talked about the Evergreen Model. I'm going to talk through how we're a friend of the environment. Our employees know that this matters, but consumers do too. We have a long heritage of being a friend of the environment. Back in the 1800s, we put bird cards in our baking soda box.
We were the only sponsor of Earth Day in the 1970s. We plant trees with the Arbor Day Foundation in the Mississippi River Valley, and then in 2023. W e signed up for Science Based Targets, but we did it in a Church & Dwight way, which is the intersection of cost-savings projects and carbon-reducing projects, and here's a picture of the bird cards.
Matt, in the New York Stock Exchange presentation, put an eBay link, so if you want to go find that, you can go that direction too. B ut this is over 100 years of preserving the environment, and it's not us just saying it. It's third parties, and they agree.
The third thing we do is we leverage people. We should not be at the top of the chart on revenue per employee. That's really the bigger companies should do that, but it's an underappreciated metric.
Why is it important? It's because it helps our speed, agility, our urgency to cut through layers, to make decisions faster. It's important. Internally, sometimes everybody would raise their hand and say they need more people. We communicate again and again, "We'll spend millions of dollars on automation, but not so much on incremental people because it matters in a big way."
We have a simple compensation structure from the leadership team all the way down to the plant floor. Net revenue, gross margin, cash from operations, EPS, and forward-looking strategic initiatives. Gross margin really matters. It's easy to say, but hard to do.
Very few companies have this in their incentive program because it's difficult. We believe it's really the firepower behind the P&L and the ability to reinvest to drive the top line, the ability to reinvest in innovation and capability building.
So again, I think it's underappreciated, but it's really important. And how do we drive gross margin? We do it through four vectors. One is our productivity program. We call it Good to Great. And we have probably about six or seven years ago, it used to be an end job to people.
But we carved out dedicated folks and dedicated R&D folks. And all they do every day is work on productivity. And I would say it's a muscle that we've built over time now.
Supply chain optimization. This is network optimization, whether it's plant locations, 3PL locations, acquisition synergies. Again, we have the ability to identify and integrate, acquire, and grow brands. And when we do that, we take it into our backbone. We usually have cost synergies. We also have synergies to grow that business through our distribution network. And then new products.
We want to launch creative new products. The fourth one is asset-light. We leverage assets. And we're not a capital-intensive company. This is one of the reasons our free cash flow conversion is so much better than most. And part of that's our operating model. We have third-party manufacturers on the cost side. We have distributors on the sales side internationally at times. 2% of sales is a good number for us.
And if you do all four of those well, you have good returns. But when you layer on M&A, you have great returns. And that's been the history of Church & Dwight. And that's what we expect the future to be as well. So, you can see a $1.5 billion company back in 2004. Remember my earlier chart back in 2000? Arm & Hammer was the only brand we had, $1 billion. Now we're $6.1 billion.
So, we have a lot of confidence in the future. We have the Evergreen Model. It's alive and well. We're expanding household penetration. We have a lot of opportunities still. International growth rate, we're under-indexed from where we should be. So, we have a long runway there.
You heard about innovation today, maybe a little bit different than you had in the past. Not just what we're innovating, but the how we innovate. Again, it's a muscle, just like the productivity program. We've moved it from 1 to 1.5 incremental net sales to 1.5 to 2% incremental net sales. The bar we use is different than most. Incremental net sales.
We're not talking about how many millions of dollars is innovation. We're talking about net of cannibalization. And then digitally savvy. This is where we've added capabilities to the company. We brought people in who have backgrounds with e-comm, Amazon.
And we've done really, really well. We're going to continue to do that. And then focus on domestic and International M&A. The nuance here is International M&A as well. For a long time, most of our acquisitions have been focused on the U.S., and then they slowly go out globally. We're going to look for the right deal in Europe and in Asia. And with that, we'll take questions. Bill.
Yeah. Yeah. Bill Chappell with Truist Securities. Just a question kind of on Power Sheets and laundry in general and with Evo coming out from Procter & Gamble. How incremental is this?
And I say that of, "I understand plastic is the number one enemy." But we remember 15 years ago when the first round of compaction came and you had an uproar from the people who didn't have their 100-ounce bottles on the shelves and said, "Do you go ahead and re-add 100-ounce bottles?"
And even with pods, it's only gone but so far in terms of household penetration. So , do you see this as revolutionary over the next two, three years, or is this just incremental for the overall category? And mainly domestically when I'm talking.
Yeah. Let me take a swing at that one. Yeah. It's going to be a slow roll. Procter entering the area with Evo is a good thing. And if you've been studying, if you looked about it online, it's super premium priced. And we've always been a value versus Procter.
They always do a great job establishing categories. Look what they did with scent boosters, for example. Look at laundry detergent. Now it's a billion-dollar category. Same may be true for rinse. It's another one that they're doing a good job with. Yeah, I think it's going to be a slow roll.
I think younger people are more attuned to that. The plastic is public enemy number one. You got to be there. I don't think it's revolutionary initially, but I think it can coexist with pods. I think that liquid laundry over time will recede. It's going to take a while.
Javier.
Two questions.
One, given that you have so much innovation and it looks really distinctive this time around, if you can comment on what's happening after the resets now in February and April, how does it look like, points of distribution, if you can comment on that.
And then on the vitamin side, it looks great, the innovation. If you can expand on the channel piece because the drugstores are kind of wobbly and vitamins are overexposed to that. So, if you can talk about what you're going to do on the channel side to offset the drugstore decline.
Yeah. So, I'll take the second one first. Just on vitamins, you have great innovation. That's one part of the strategy. We're also looking really hard about making sure we're prioritizing the right retailers. We're prioritizing the right subsegments within vitamins, and we're prioritizing the right SKUs.
And so, at times, we might retrench when those decisions made us be all things to all people. That's not the right answer, in our opinion. So, we're also doing a great refresh of our advertising and creative. Go tell the consumer about the new innovation that we have, the reason for being, what's different, why you want to take a Vitafusion gummy. But yeah, along with that comes choices on where we play and how we play. And then your first question was on..?
Distribution?
Oh, shelf resets. Yeah. Well, I would say in general, a lot of our categories are well-developed categories. And it's rare that you get net incremental distribution. We've had some positive signs because of innovation on some net positive distribution wins. So, not for now, but probably that's a better question in about three months after it's out there.
Yeah. Kevin Grundy.
Probably the last question, and we'll take the rest in the breakout room. We just hit time.
Great. Thanks. Kevin Grundy, BNP Paribas. Matt, I want to take the opportunity to, number one, congratulate you. Also, for the benefit of the audience, you've seen a lot. You've been at the company for close to 20 years, very capably led the company. The stock's outperformed.
But as you look ahead now over the next 5-10 years, what do you see as sort of the biggest mega trends in the consumer products industry? And why should shareholders think that Church & Dwight is well-positioned to capitalize on those? And we're going to have you back too, in 10 years on the look back on your answer here.
Yeah. Listen, here's my point of view. Everybody in the room, every CPG company, everybody sees the trends.
It's a question of who's going to act on it and who's adaptable. That's it. That separates who's going to succeed and who doesn't succeed. And if you look at what we've done, the best example is digital and online. Back in 2015, we were fourth quartile, bottom of the barrel. We said, "We got to get after this." And now where are we? 21%.
So, now you got AI. It's going to affect all the functions, all the businesses. It's going to affect the retailers. Who's going to be able to adapt quickly? I'd say I'd bet on Church & Dwight because we've done it before. And that's the thing that companies, you're essentially trying to motivate people.
People that sit in jobs like mine or C-suite jobs, your job is to get the army moving. And that's what you do. It's like, "All right.
This is what we're going to do." So, I would say that is the biggest thing that's coming. And we all know that, right? It's just who's going to act on it, though? Who's going to do the best? And by the way, that will not be a competitive advantage long term. It's going to be table stakes.
But there are people that are going to get there sooner, and they will have an advantage for a while. And the question is, who are those people going to be? And we're going to be one of them. Absolutely convinced of that.
All right. Thank you.