Morning, everyone. Welcome to the second day of CAGNY. To start us off today, we have Church & Dwight. Let's first thank Church for sponsoring this morning's tasty breakfast and for their long-standing support of CAGNY. Joining us today from Church & Dwight are Rick Dierker, President and CEO, and Lee McChesney, CFO, who joined Church last year after Rick became CEO. Church & Dwight has continued to drive consistent growth despite more volatile times by leveraging its balanced portfolio, as well as adding recent acquisitions to bring more opportunities for growth. We look forward to hearing today about Church's plans to continue delivering strong shareholder, strong shareholder returns. And if there was an Olympic category for fastest company to get through 160+ slides, Church would get the gold. Thanks, Rick and Lee. Over to you.
Wow, I can't top that introduction. Hey, thrilled to be here. We just went through our Analyst Day about two weeks ago, and so this is going to be a little bit of a repeat of that, but when you have good news, you want to share it more than once. So this is our forward-looking statement, and it's a Harbor tatement. Please take the time to read that on our website, and we'll get started. So a look back at 2025. What a volatile year! I told... I write a note to the employees every month, and I said, at the end of the year, I actually stayed up for New Year's Eve, and I watched the ball drop because we wanted closure to a volatile and just a very volatile year.
We grew faster than our categories in all three businesses. Four of our eight Power Brands grew share. Hero and TheraBreath grew double digits globally. We had strong innovation, and we had strong marketing support, and we acquired Touchland. So a lot of accomplishments happened in 2025. And we also made some really big strategic decisions. You know, the first and foremost, tariff response. And I said this at Analyst Day, I believe that we had an industry-leading, even more company-leading, response to tariffs. $190 million we were faced with, and after portfolio actions, after supply chain moves, after a lot of work by a lot of great people, that got down to $28 million. That's not normal. That's, that is normal for Church & Dwight, but not normal for industry.
The second thing we did was portfolio reshaping. You know, it's easy to have a strategy, it's hard to execute, and so we did both last year on portfolio. We divested Spinbrush, divested our vitamin business, we shut down Flawless, and we shut down our Waterpik shower head business. The company's portfolio has never been stronger. Then we exited the year with just a strong balance sheet, 1.5x . That gives us optionality on deploying our cash flow. And here's the one-liner that I want to leave you with on the portfolio reshaping. If you think back, consumption growth for Church & Dwight was 1% in 2025. Not the categories, us, consumption growth.
If you exclude the businesses that we did the portfolio reshaping on, then we would have been growing 3.5% in a very volatile and pressed world. So that's just a great tailwind as we move forward. The Evergreen Model is alive and well. I'm especially proud that our 2026 outlook brackets on the top line and bottom line are Evergreen Model. You know, that's overcoming stranded costs from divesting $40 million of sales. We will get into that detail. But this is just the output. You know, there's a lot of inputs that go into this model, and it's consumer-leading innovation, it's building brands that consumers love, it's our Productivity program. All those things are the inputs, and this is the output. And we've had a long track record of success on our TSR.
If you look at 10 years, five years, three years, we're typically leading. In 2025, we took a step backwards, like many in the industry did, and in 2026, we're off to a good start. And why is that? Like, what's the core of it? The core of it is we're unique in this industry. We have a great organic model, and we can do M&A. And so if you look at the chart on the left, upper left, net sales over the last 20 years has gone up and to the right. Earnings has gone up and to the right. Cash flow over 20 years has gone up and to the right. And then organic sales has been very consistent on average, around 4%.
So it's not the fact that we can do organic growth, it's not the fact that we can just do M&A. The unique piece about Church & Dwight, the reason we have great returns over a long period of time, is because we can do both of those things. So who are we? We're about a $6.2 billion company, three-quarters of which is in the U.S., 18% international, and 5% in our SPD business. We have seven power brands: TheraBreath, Hero, Touchland, Waterpik, Batiste, OxiClean, and ARM & HAMMER. I'm going to talk specifically about ARM & HAMMER in a bit more detail today. More than 75% of our sales and profits are in those seven brands. That's why we care about those. That's why we talk about those more than others. And we have a winning formula, a balanced and diversified portfolio.
We tend to do well in any economic environment. We have low Private Label exposure, and I'm gonna share with you today that's even lower going forward. We have online success, strong, consistent category-leading innovation, and we're an acquisitive company. So we're about 50/50 household personal care. So again, whether or not the economic environment is good or bad, whether or not consumers are pulling back from personal care or higher-end products, we tend to do well. Same concept on premium and value, about 64% premium, 36% value. It's a good eclectic mix. Low Private Label exposure. We put this slide together about eight or nine years ago when we were in Paris for Deutsche Bank, and the theme back then was rise of Private Label, rise of Amazon Basics.
We wanted to show people that on a weighted average basis, we had a really low exposure to private label. It was 12%, and that's one of the lowest, actually, in the entire industry. When we took action on our vitamin business, look what happened. It went from 12% to 5%. That bodes well as we compete against private label. Number three is online success, and in 2016, we were 2% of sales, and now we're about 25% of our sales are e-commerce. And that just shows the strength of Church & Dwight to bring in capability, to bring in people. We have a great team. We have great leadership in that area, and we're driving for share gains year after year online. Innovation matters in a big way.
Matters even more when categories don't grow as fast. New products fuel the company's organic growth every year, and about half of our growth is actually from innovation. And then we're an acquisitive company. We have a skill set, we have a competitive advantage, we know how to identify, acquire, integrate, and grow brands. We do that time and time again. Do we? Are we batting a thousand? No, we're not, but we're certainly Hall of Fame material. Now, we do this really well. We primarily want to acquire one or two share brands, high growth, high margin, fast-moving consumables, and we clarified that a few years ago. Asset light, we want to leverage our internal manufacturing capabilities, and we want to deliver a sustainable competitive advantage.
Over the long term, we've gone from a $1.5 billion company to about a $6 billion company, and a lot of that has been through M&A. Two weeks ago, I announced a few growth initiatives, and so I just wanted to reiterate that today. As a backdrop, category growth for us has been around 3% for a really long time. Like, if you go back 1, 3, 5, 10, even more years, it's been 3%. Very consistent. Part of that's because of our acquisition philosophy. We get to decide what categories we play in. We only had one power brand in the year 2000, but since then, we've acquired businesses.
As we do due diligence, we really spend a lot of time on the competitors, on the competitive set, on the category itself, and so we've got to shape this over time. And so more often than not, our categories have grown 3%. Well, last year, something happened, right? And everyone knows consumer was under pressure, and our categories grew 1.8%. Combine that with the consumer sentiment, right? All-time lows, tariffs, inflation, the agita that consumers were feeling. Well, bad things happen to good people, so what are we going to do about it? And here are the three initiatives I announced two weeks ago. One, we're going to grow the ARM & HAMMER business from $2 billion-$3 billion. Second one, we're going to drive oral care expansion behind TheraBreath from $1 billion-$1.5 billion.
Then the third one is scale our international business, focused on M&A, from $1-$2 billion. So those are the three things that we're doing as tailwinds for the business, so that if categories don't grow as fast as they historically have, we still deliver the Evergreen Model. And if they happen to grow like they have with history, we exceed the Evergreen Model. So here is one of my favorite slides. We use this to really show how M&A has transformed the company. And as I said before, only $1 billion of sales, that was ARM & HAMMER in 2000, and since then, $1-$2 billion for the ARM & HAMMER brand. And that means $4 billion has really come from acquisitions over that period.
The reason I put it here, though, is to show the strength of the ARM & HAMMER brand, to go from $1 billion-$2 billion. And that's been behind laundry and litter. If you look, we've stairstepped up on share for liquid laundry over many, many years, and same thing with litter. So what are the reasons to believe that ARM & HAMMER can go, continue to grow? Well, number one is we've had success launching into new categories before. We were founded in 1846, so we've been in baking soda for quite some time. But laundry, toothpaste, deodorant, litter, all those we entered in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. We do well in some of these big categories, like laundry and litter. We have niche plays in toothpaste and deodorant. Our brand awareness rivals almost any other brand anywhere.
The awareness, the equity, and then we have this competitive advantage that we like to call the advertising halo. If we advertise our litter business, it helps toothpaste. If we advertise baking soda, it helps laundry and vice versa. ARM & HAMMER is known for cleaning, for deodorizing. It plays in personal care, it plays in household. It's premium in some categories, it's value in others. It's a very ubiquitous brand that could go across all these sets of categories. It's in more aisles of the grocery store than almost any other brand, so well-known. Over 100 uses of baking soda. So consumers are using this all the time and everywhere in their house. So the four pillars of growing the ARM & HAMMER brand over the next few years are really continue to grow the core.
That's behind laundry, litter, innovation, distribution, E-com, all, all those things that we, we do well today. The second one is our good, better, best philosophy. We've done that really well in laundry and litter. We have an offering, ARM & HAMMER. We have ARM & HAMMER plus OxiClean. We have ARM & HAMMER Deep Clean. So good, better, best. We're, we're playing with all the different price points. There are other subcategories within ARM & HAMMER that we can do the same thing. Number three would be new categories. I'm not going to talk about that today. I'll probably talk about that a year from now, but the team's hard at work on, on where and why and how. And then number four is in-house licensed brands. I view that more as an incubator.
We have over or close to $1 billion of ARM & HAMMER sales that go through our licensee partners, and some of those got to a point in which we should take them back and scale, like we do for TheraBreath or Hero. These partners can also help us as we enter new categories and be kind of a testing ground for that. So more to come there as well. The second one is drive oral care expansion through TheraBreath. As we grow, we want to focus our resources on large categories, right? And mouthwash and toothpaste are two good examples of that. Mouthwash is a $2.4 billion category. Toothpaste is a $4.8 billion category. We would much rather have a share point in toothpaste than a share point in dry shampoo. And so laser-focused on the category size.
Mouthwash and TheraBreath is a great example. We have a 12% household penetration with TheraBreath. The category is 65%, so there's just a ton of runway there. And even though we're gaining distribution in TDPs very, very quickly, you know, plus 34%, we're still under-indexed to where we should be. Toothpaste is the next step for TheraBreath, the regimen. You know, Church & Dwight is a relatively small player today in toothpaste. You know, part of that is flavor, and part of that is only a certain amount of population really identifies with ARM & HAMMER baking soda toothpaste, right? I think, when I first got to the company, the trivia question was: "Hey, what's the share of ARM & HAMMER toothpaste in the U.S.?" And the answer was something like two or three.
What is it in the UK?" And it was two or three. There's a certain subset of population that kind of dials into the ARM & HAMMER baking soda, you know, palate. TheraBreath is a little bit different. TheraBreath, we spent a couple of years developing multiple clinical trials, best-in-class performance, better for you, and really, TheraBreath's known for fresh breath. And so at the middle of all that is why we're launching TheraBreath toothpaste. Third, leg of a stool for growth initiatives is international. And as a quick backdrop, our international business has been growing high single digits for a very long time.
We have the capability to take these acquisitions and grow and scale globally, and we've done that with Hero, we've done that with TheraBreath, and we expect to do that with Touchland as well. The focus, it's a little bit different this last year or two, is the focus on M&A. We believe it's the right time to bolt on to our businesses internationally. We have people in Europe now. We have people in Asia. The operating units are responsible and accountable and own kind of the upper funnel for the deals. Okay, let me switch to an update on our categories and brands. The U.S. domestic target's around 3% for Evergreen, and we have seven power brands, same, same for the company, right? Same brands. This is the categories over a long period of time.
This is green, right? That's a great place to be. Our categories over a long period of time are growing. And more often than not, we gain share. It's four of eight brands grew share in 2025. So how'd we do in Fabric Care? Fabric Care, we grew consumption 2.5% faster than the category, and even more importantly, despite all the promotional activity that happens in a household category like laundry, you know, value is growing, right? The consumer is pressed, and so, the price gaps between us and premium variants is extreme. So even when promotional activity happens, the value end of the category is growing.
That's been true for a very long time, and ARM & HAMMER Laundry has been gaining share for an extended period of time. Two weeks ago, we also announced a new fact. Now, ARM & HAMMER is now number one in wash loads. So this is volume, this is units, this bodes well for household penetration. But ARM & HAMMER has more wash loads than the Tide original brand. And part of that's because of the good, better, best strategy. We have a good with the ARM & HAMMER orange bottle, we have the better with ARM & HAMMER plus Oxi, and we have ARM & HAMMER Deep Clean in the best tier. And cat litter is a similar story. We're growing faster than the category. We're taking share.
Really, the innovation behind lightweight HardBall is fantastic. So we had a 4 share in lightweight litter. It was an 8 share in 2025, and 27% is what our fair share of litter should be. Now, that's what we have in the clumping litter segment. This innovation has a really high repeat rate. We think there's a lot of opportunity on litter. TheraBreath. TheraBreath is off the charts. It is a strong double-digit grower. When we bought that business, we used to talk about it as an alcohol-free mouthwash. We were the number 3 player. You know, we are the number 2 mouthwash now, and we're growing by leaps and bounds. We hit all-time share in 2025, around 22%, and this was the commentary on toothpaste.
Toothpaste, again, is a $4 billion category. Many consumers say 70% that they would spend on a premium, oral care experience. And I think my favorite fact on the page is 89% of TheraBreath buyers of mouthwash are interested in buying the toothpaste. And we'll play the video.
Annie switched to new dentist-formulated TheraBreath toothpaste because it's long-lasting for epic freshness. Wait, fights bad breath for 12 hours? She powers up her routine with TheraBreath mouthwash. I love this breath! TheraBreath, epic freshness guaranteed.
Yeah, so that's a great regimen. Hero. Hero is a double-digit grower as well, taking over the acne space. Remember when we bought this business, you know, acne, acne had been, like, a $500 million category for decades, and then, innovation transformed the category, and the patch business has made that, like, a $1.2 billion category now. So we're growing faster than the acne category, hitting all-time shares on, on acne for Hero. And the household penetration story is a similar one. 9% of households for household penetration for Hero, 29%. And this is a little bit unique, though. Look at the actual category. Household penetration's increasing now. That hardly ever happens for the category, but that's what Hero is doing to that category. PDP growth, same thing. A lot of great growth.
We believe we have more room to run there as well. And the unique part about Hero is it's not just a patch business. We believe it's an acne business, and so we'll see us play more in the acne life cycle. Start with cleansers, but go through the entire journey for the consumer. Okay, moving to new product innovation. We had Carlos Linares, our Head of R&D, present last two weeks ago, and really walk through, we don't just have one kind of vector for innovation and ideation, we have five. And many of those he brought to the company, and I'd say about half of all of our ideas are actually coming from those new vectors. And for a long time, we were growing around 1%-1.5% incremental net sales. Our bar is so high.
You know, most companies will talk about maybe growth sales, they'll talk about not cannibalization. Internally and externally, we always talk net sales, incremental, after cannibalization. Okay, so there's two or three layers into the funnel when we talk about our new products. So about half of our growth now comes from innovation. Here's a flurry of our products. So from a personal care perspective, it's the TheraBreath toothpaste. Hero, it's the invisible liquid patch, it's the Hero cleansers, and then for the first time in over a decade, we're launching a new condom called GOAT, Greatest Of All Trojan. And it's a fantastic condom, great reviews, and it happens to be non-latex as well. And then on the household side, ARM & HAMMER with 10X baking soda.
We have rinses, we have Power Sheets, we improved OxiClean, more powerful, and then launching a new cat litter, Dual Defense with Microban. Okay, international and SPD. Our international organic sales, Evergreen target's 8%. And if you aren't familiar with international business, about a $1.1 billion business, about one third of that is our Global Markets Group that goes through distributors all over the world, 400+ distributors, over 100 countries. And then the rest of the business is in seven core subs. And again, our track record for growth internationally has been stellar. High single-digit growth for a long time. And the unique part about our international business is we're 20 years behind many of the other multinationals, so 18% of our sales is international. Most other companies, it's around 59%.
So we have a lot of runway here, and one of them is, how do you drive our U.S. brands across the globe, like Waterpik, ARM & HAMMER, OxiClean? How do you take international brands like Batiste and Stérimar and Femf resh to more countries, more people? And then third is, how do you leverage TheraBreath, Hero, Touchland, and scale rapidly? Even more impressive, I think, is 6 of 7 of our Power Brands globally, in those countries, gain share. And as one example of scaling, you know, Hero is now in 75 countries in 2025. It's the number one acne patch, not just in the U.S., but in many countries. And this would have taken us maybe three or four years previously, but because we keep buying businesses and scaling them, we did this in about 12-18 months, which is fantastic.
We expect Touchland to be similar. There's a strong pull, strong demand globally for the Touchland business. Now, we're gonna be a little bit more telling on what customers, what channels, and what countries, but we believe this is a big opportunity. As we move from an export-type business to a more international company, we're also focused on local innovation. So for China and for Japan, we're doing unique offerings for Batiste and reformulated versions. For Japan, most of OxiClean, the additive market is actually liquid, so we've launched liquid. And as we continue to grow, we're gonna have local innovation, local manufacturing, likely third party, just as we go on that journey. And then last but not least, as I said before, I think the acquisition piece has been the missing puzzle piece for international.
And we're at the right time, now that we're $1.1 billion-$1.2 billion, to scale that effectively. Specialty products, about a 5% evergreen target. And just for a recap, $300 million of sales. Two-thirds of that is animal nutrition, and one-third of that is specialty chemical. About two years ago, we also took portfolio actions on our SPD business. We, we sold a very volatile, cyclical part of the business, and ever since then, we've had solid growth. And we're laser-focused on global expansion, laser-focused on innovation, and I expect great things out of this business. Okay, how do we operate? Well, we have 5 operating principles. One, we leverage brands. Two, we're a friendly environment. Three, we leverage people. Four, leverage assets. And number 5, leverage acquisitions, and that's where good returns become great returns.
So I talked through leverage brands already. That's how we're doing with the categories. That's how we're gaining share over time. You know, you heard of scale internationally as well. We're a friend of the environment. So we were founded in 1846. In the 1800s, we were sponsoring bird cards. In the 1970s, we were the first corporate sponsor, one of the first corporate sponsors of Earth Day. We've had a long track record of being having an environmental heritage. And it's not just us saying it, we get accolades from external third parties as well. Leverage people. So this... I'll spend a few minutes on this slide. This is, I think, underappreciated. You know, we should not be the leader on this slide.
This should be Procter & Gamble, this should be Kimberly-Clark, this should be Kenvue, but it's us. And why is that? You know, yeah, we do have a distributor model internationally. We do have third-party manufacturing, but many people have third-party manufacturing. We've purposely kept this number down, the number of employees, because it helps agility, it helps with decision-making, it helps with speed, it helps with being able to pivot when things don't go right. You know, when we joined as CFO, a few weeks later is when all the tariffs hit. And it was a Monday staff meeting, and we were talking about what happened and the impact, and we were quantifying how it was $190 million and where do we go from here.
And by that Friday, we had stopped manufacturing in China for two businesses. And I would just say, I would, I would bet that many other companies could not move that quickly. So it's, it's about speed and agility. The other nuance here, I would say, is just like all companies, we're focused on content creation with AI, we're focused on RGM, we're focused on supply chain. But in the back of my head, it's how do I keep the number of employees similar when we're a $9 billion company, when we're a $12 billion company, so that we can keep that edge of decision-making and speed? We have a simple compensation structure. The same bonus metrics that I have, the guys on the line have at the plant, and it's cash, earnings, it's net revenue, and gross margin.
Gross margin is easy to say but hard to do. Hardly anybody has gross margin in their incentive metrics. We leverage assets. So, you know, one of the reasons we are so good at free cash flow is because we're light on CapEx, and that's been a very purposeful design over time. You know, part of our footprint is outside, but we're an asset-light company. That's how we describe ourselves. Now, we'll spend CapEx in a fast minute if we think there's a savings, an advantage, it enables, it's a safety issue, environmental issue, any of those things. But, again, we spiked up as we invested in different areas, and now we're back to our 2% run rate.
And then I guess for me, all that's—everything you've heard is kind of our core operating model organically, and then our good shareholder returns become great because of M&A. And again, you know, repetition is another understanding. I would say we are a little bit different. We have the ability to identify, integrate, acquire, acquire, integrate, grow brands. And I think many people think they do, but we actually do. And when you do it again and again and again, it builds a culture, it builds a knowledge base. And so our employees, you know, the 30 or 40 or 50 that are involved in diligence and the integration, know their battle stations, and there's no substitute for experience. So we have confidence in our future. You know, the portfolio changes that I talked about, the growth initiatives, that supports a healthy Evergreen Model.
We're expanding household penetration, especially for some of those fast-growing businesses that we, that we've acquired. We have a sustainable high growth rate for international. We have consistent innovation. Year after year after year, that muscle has been built. Our E-com business is on fire. We've, we've transformed it from being a laggard to a leader. And then, as always, we're laser-focused on M&A. And I'd say it's not just domestic now, though, it's also international. And so when you look up in a few years, we're gonna be-- we're gonna look back and say, "Not only did we continue to do our domestic M&A, but we also did international." So let me turn it over to Lee to walk through the financials and the outlook.
All right. Thanks, Rick. Good morning. So, as Rick said, it was a impactful year in 2025, and it was really heartening to see all the actions we took really come to bear and give us optimism here as we're into 2026. So just as a reminder, you know, in the back half of the year, organic growth accelerated. Our gross margin rate improved year-over-year. That combination enabled us to invest more into marketing. Our operating margin, our EPS expanded, and we drove record cash flow of $1.2 billion. We also did Touchland. We returned $900 million to our shareholders. And I just think it's a perfect example of Church & Dwight culture coming to life, right?
We had the facts come at us, we laid out a plan, and we acted, and that gave us really some good momentum here as we pivot into 2026. So we talk about our Evergreen Model. Rick talks about it, I talk about it. It's the foundation of how we think about, you know. Again, summary of all the inputs that we need to bring to life to deliver. And this is the foundation. This is what was behind the basis for our 2026 outlook, which we released a few weeks ago. So 3%-4% organic growth. Total sales are -1.5% to -0.5%. That's solely the business exits. Gross margin improvement of 100 basis points, continuing to invest in marketing. SG&A will be a little bit up.
I'll walk you through that in a minute here. And then adjust the EPS outlook of 5%-8%. And finally, another year of strong cash flow of $1.15 billion. And then we said for the first quarter, some similar metrics to this, kind of a similar level of growth, gross margin rate improving. We're gonna continue to invest in marketing, and then EPS will be slightly up. Not, not up at the 5%-8% level, because in the first half of the year we have the Touchland's stub period in terms of amortization and SG&A, and then some timing with our marketing through the year. But again, that was our outlook. That's still our outlook today. Now, underneath that, I think this is a nice recap of really a lot of things that Rick just walked you through.
We have a lot of momentum as we come into 2026. There's more tailwinds than there are headwinds. So number one, you know, the strength of the brands. What we have is, you just saw the innovation roadmap. You know, we're positioned well just on the top line there. The portfolio realignment. So yep, sure, it's. We strengthen the portfolio, but it gives us the opportunity to have a high organic growth, higher margin rates, and that, certainly, you know, comes through in our outlook for 2026 and as we look forward here. Touchland is off to a great start. You know, that will become organic in the back half of the year. We just talked about our new growth initiatives, certainly, you know, opportunities for those to start adding benefits.
As I mentioned earlier, really every metric accelerated in the back half of 2025, and that, that's a nice entry point we have coming into 2026. So certainly, you know, the categories are a little bit softer, as Rick talked about. We, you know, there's still sticky levels of inflation, and we do have the business exits. There's $400 million of sales coming out, some stream to costs. But again, all the things on the tailwind side drive this outlook. You know, again, 3%-4% in organic growth and 5%-8% EPS expansion. So this is our scorecard on organic growth. And this, you know, not everyone shows 10-year scorecards. We have 4% average organic growth. A lot has happened in the last 10 years.
I think it's another reinforcement, the categories matter, and then how you execute within those categories. That's, this shows through here, our outlook for 2026 is certainly in line with this as well. I mentioned the reported sales, again, -1.5% to -0.5%. You know, the simple story there, you have the business exits. We obviously have divestitures from that. There's a headwind on the sales line here. The good thing is, between Touchland's and our organic growth, you know, we have the opportunity to mitigate much of this in 2026, and obviously, you saw the earnings growth with that outlook. I think very important also with the organic growth outlook is this is volume. This is our scorecard for the last 10 years on volume growth, driving unit growth. You know, our organic growth is fueled by unit growth, not by price.
Our outlook for 2026 is just in line with that same, same history we've, we've demonstrated as well. Our adjusted gross margin outlook is 100 basis points for the year. It's definitely higher than the Evergreen Model, so let me walk you through that a little bit here. You know, foundationally, we're typically pursuing 25-50 basis points. That's the operations teams, that's the engineering teams driving good to, good to great productivity. We had a record year in 2025. We're set up for a very good year in 2026 as well. Supply chain optimization, NPD, driving positive mix from elements like our higher, higher-margin acquisitions. Those are all coming to light. That typically drives 25-50 basis points.
The portfolio transformation gives us this additional opportunity in 2026, and that's where the path to 100 basis points of improvement comes. And that all fully mitigates what's probably right now, an estimated 160 basis points of inflation pressure, your typical manufacturing pressure points, labor inflation, and then some of the investments they've made in capacity. That, again, that's all factored into this outlook, you know, a really, really nice gross margin outlook for 2026. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, underneath all that, I'm not talking about tariffs. You know, we had a $190 million original tariff outlook. Rick just talked about it. We very quickly acted, and now as a result, you see the outlook in terms of our margin outlook for the year. We're going to continue to invest in marketing.
So, you know, certainly this 11% guidelines have been helpful, but what's most important is how the brands are doing. You just saw the brand scorecard. You know, they're doing well. We invest to drive that brand scorecard. And when we have opportunities, like we did in the back half of last year, we'll also index even higher here. And so, you know, that's the mindset for 2026 here. Now, SG&A is going to be slightly up in the year. As I mentioned earlier, this is really two drivers. You know, we don't have the normal leverage we have from organic growth, because you have a little bit of a pullback from the business exit. So, you know, that gives you a little bit of headwinds there, and there was obviously some standard costs.
And then Touchland, for the first half of the year, has an amortization bill and has its SG&A. That's really the driver here. Underneath this, we're still investing in the international business, e-commerce, and the growth initiatives that we just laid out for the future here. Our EPS outlook is 5%-8%. But again, look at the scorecard for the last 10 years. We've averaged 8% growth in EPS, despite all the things that we've all had to navigate over the last years. Again, it speaks to the categories we start off on the top line, speaks to our ability to drive the margin improvement and invest in the business coming to life each and every year. Now, this may be one of my favorite charts. Free cash flow conversion, 127% in 2025. That's impressive.
The 10-year average is 119%. You know, typically, most companies are averaging something less than 100%, and this, this is, this is literally the difference of Church & Dwight. You know, it goes back to the strength of ARM & HAMMER and everything that that business does, and then really how we, how we run operations here. And this gives us tremendous flexibility. This shows through. Like, look at, look at this again, all of this just happened in 2025. Our debt-to-EBITDA ratio is essentially the same. You know, that strong cash flow came through. We bought Touchland, we returned $900 million to our shareholders, and we're still at the same debt-to-EBITDA level. It gives us tremendous capacity as we look forward here as well. And this shows through over $5 billion of firepower.
So between cash and ability to leverage up, you know, we have a lot of opportunities to invest in our business, drive, and really drive, you know, capital allocation. And where do we want to do that? That's here. So number one use of cash is TSR- accretive M&A. The Touchland was our latest example here, and we're behind that. These are unique assets. We take a lot of discipline to find them. Obviously, the message today is we've done that. We have the financial capacity and the organizational capacity to do more, and we're in the marketplace looking. Next up is CapEx for organic growth and for good to great productivity. Number three is NPD. Number four is debt reduction, though today, you know, we only have fixed rate debt. We have no variable rate debt or variable debt.
And then ultimately, a return of cash to shareholders. So this is, this is our focus for all that firepower. It served us well. We just showed you the ten-year scorecard. This has been the foundation of how we've done that. That's our mindset as we look forward here as well. And again, all those actions we took in 2025 enable us to, to be in a pretty good place here. So as, as the theme here is, we, we feel confidence in 2026. Yes, there's headwinds, but again, we took actions all through 2025 here. We have a great X-ray coming into 2026, and, you know, we're, we're optimistic that we're going to bring this 2026 forecast to life. So with that, we'll conclude our remarks. Thank you.
Uh .
So Rick, you mentioned the three growth areas you're focused on. Those are some big numbers there. We're talking, you know, B's instead of N's, right? Or half a billion, I guess, on the, on the Hero brand side. But just as you think about the level of spend you'll need over the next few years in those areas to get to that level of growth, can you give us a little bit of insight there? And maybe also just short term, what's embedded in 2026 already in terms of revenue contribution from those areas and level of spend. And sort of taking a step back, I think the bigger question is, we've learned in CPG over the last decade that when companies move into new areas or white spaces, there's opportunity, but there's also fierce competition, right?
Areas like toothpaste are very competitive, international acquisitions, inherently more risk. So just holistically, how do you think about managing risk as you go after these growth opportunities from a corporate standpoint?
All right. Darren, that might be a four-part question - but I'm going to do my best. You can correct me if I get off track. Look, I think it's. I really do believe the ARM & HAMMER brand is unique. Like, and I tried to walk through that, and that, you know, a few, maybe a decade ago, we tried to go and make a couple of the brands go into be mega brands and go into other categories. And you're right, it is hard to do. But the ARM & HAMMER brand is a little bit unique. It's already done that. And I think where I also get confidence is my comment on there's already $1 billion of retail sales in other categories for ARM & HAMMER right now...
And so those are going to be some good testing grounds for us. And I don't think today is the day I'm going to go through what categories we're going to look at. But you're right, every category is competitive, but there are certain attributes of the ARM & HAMMER brand that put us further down the field, even from the starting block, and that's what we have confidence in. For toothpaste, like TheraBreath, you know, it's a unique opportunity because of how well TheraBreath mouthwash is doing. You know, if as TheraBreath mouthwash resonates with consumers on bad breath and freshness, we think that equity goes right over to toothpaste pretty darn well. And you asked about support levels.
You know, you're right, there's B, not M, in terms of growth over the next, you know, whatever, a number of years. These are moonshots that we're going to take, and we're going to invest as we go. And so there's some benefits in 2026. It's early days, though, is what I would say. And so kind of pay as you go in 2026. And as we get into these new categories, you're going to see us say, "This is the right level of investment, but this is also the revenue opportunity." I fully expect all these things to actually be tailwinds for revenue and for earnings over the time. Today and yesterday, and two weeks ago, was really just letting people know this is where we're putting our time, energy, and effort.
Sometimes the things that you choose not to do are just as important of what you choose to do. So the fact that we were able to shed some of these brands, like Vitamins and like Spinbrush and others, the full force and time, energy and effort of our people, who really make the place run, are going to be behind these growth initiatives. So I have a lot of confidence we're going to do some really cool things. So I would say stay tuned on some of the output from that, but this is really just the inkling of here's the direction that we're going. We have about one more minute, so we probably should take the rest of the questions in the breakout, if that's okay. All right? Thank you.