Welcome back. Before I introduce the next company, I mentioned this yesterday morning. I just wanted to give everyone a reminder that this evening after the Altria dinner, we'll be hosting the president's party on the top floor of the tower. It's 27th floor. Hit restaurant in the elevator, and hopefully we'll all see you there. With that, for our next session, it's my pleasure to welcome back Church & Dwight to the conference. With us today, our Chairman and CEO, Matt Farrell, and CFO and Head of Business Operations, Rick Dierker. Together, Matt and Rick will take us on a look back through the ups and downs, highs and lows of 2022, and also underscore why they are confident as they look forward to the future.
If history is a guide, they'll run us through about 200 slides in about 35 minutes. We'll take some Q&A. I expect we'll hear about free cash flow, the Evergreen Model, this year's new Give It The Hammer campaign. Also, stay tuned for the Hardball video. It's a really good one. Matt, Rick, thanks for joining us. Thanks also for sponsoring tomorrow morning's break. With that, over to you, Matt.
Great to be back. I see a lot of old friends, investors, analysts. Let's begin. Here's a safe harbor statement. I encourage everybody to take a look at that after class today. I'm gonna start with a look back at 2022. We had $250 million of increases in cost of goods sold in 2022 versus 2021. That put quite a crimp in our gross margin expansion in 2022. We raised prices for the second time in 2022 in a couple of categories, laundry and litter. We had raised prices already in 2021. We priced up 80% of our portfolio. Even with that, we had gross margin contraction of 170 basis points in 2022. Many of our brands had a good year.
Arm & Hammer Litter, Arm & Hammer Liquid Laundry Detergent, Batiste Dry Shampoo all had record high shares in 2022. Three other brands, Zicam, TheraBreath, and Hero, these were acquisitions in 2020, 2021, and 2022, all had double-digit consumption and market share gains. Finally, we made a lot of investments in supply chain resilience. We learned a lot during the great pandemic, and put a lot of money into our supply chain footprint, and we're ready for the next Black Swan event. One other thing I want to note too, we had a few businesses that went backwards this past year. That's Waterpik, Flawless, and our vitamin business. That re-represents 20% of Church & Dwight's portfolio. The 80% of the business grew 4%.
The 20% went completely backwards, resulting in organic growth of 1.4%. As many of you know, our organic growth target is 3%. It also hurt us on the bottom line as well. Our Evergreen target calls for 8% EPS growth, and we actually went backwards this past year with -2% EPS. All that resulted in negative shareholder return. I've been with this company for 16 years, and for the first 15 years, every year, we had positive total shareholder return, oftentimes double-digit. This is an anomaly for Church & Dwight. It's a big disappointment to me. It's a disappointment to our management team, our employees, our shareholders in particular. The point right now is we gotta dust ourselves off and now it's eyes forward to 2023.
Why do we have confidence in the future? As mentioned, we have our Evergreen Model of 3% top line, 8% bottom line. We have a terrific portfolio of brands in the U.S. International has been a juggernaut for us for many years up until 2022. We're gonna restart that engine in 2023. We have a fabulous innovation pipeline for the company. Year after year, our new products account for 1%- 1.5% of our organic growth. We're becoming more and more digitally savvy as a company. I'm gonna tell you later on that 16% of our sales are ordered by consumers online. We think our long-term Evergreen Model is healthy. As far as 2023 goes, we have good fundamentals.
Our reported sales growth is expected to be 6% on top line, organic 3% growth. Our gross margin is expected to expand 100-120 basis points, and our EPS will grow 0%-4%. Why? Because we're gonna be investing more in marketing, and we'll have normalized incentive comp in 2023. Now, who we are. We're a $5.4 billion company, largely U.S. Consequently, we have lots of runway internationally, 70% international, and our original business Specialty Products is 6% of the company. We have 14 well-known power brands, and those 14 brands account for 85% of our revenues and profits. Here's our winning formula, and this hasn't changed for a long time. We have a balanced and diversified portfolio. We have low exposure to private label. I'll show you some numbers in a minute.
We have terrific innovation, we're an inquisitive company. Let's start with the diversified portfolio. We're 40% value and 60% premium. That split has been like that for my entire time with the company. Went back to 2008, you'll still see 40% value, 60% premium. We have a nice balance between household and personal care, almost evenly split, 46% household, 48% personal care. Here's our weighted average private label share exposure. It's 12%, and it's been like that for many, many years. Now, here are the brands that have private label exposure, meaningful private label exposure. If you look at the lines on those graphs, you'll see that they're pretty stable over time. Here's an array of many of the products we're launching in 2023. I'll talk about more of those later on.
We have a long history of growth through acquisitions. In the far left part of this slide, you'll see in 2004, the company completed the Carter-Wallace acquisition. That was the first big acquisition by the company. Then we ended the year with $1.5 billion in sales. We're $5.4 billion today. Virtually every year, we've made an acquisition along the way. In the year 2000, the only major brand we had was ARM & HAMMER. 13 of those 14 brands have been acquired since the year 2000, and they're all number one or number two in their categories. We have very clear acquisition criteria. As I said, number one or number two in their categories, high growth, high margin. You'll notice that we have a different color there for fast-moving consumables.
We bought a business a few years ago called Flawless that went sideways and then declined for us. We learned a lesson. It was a device. You won't be seeing us buying devices in the future. We're asset light, prefer to buy businesses that are manufactured by co-mans. Also, we get lots of synergies from our manufacturing, logistic, and purchasing infrastructure. Finally, these brands need to have a long-term competitive advantage. We like to say 14 brands today, 20 tomorrow. That's our formula: balanced and diversified portfolio, low private label exposure, strong innovation, and we're an acquisitive company. Next, gonna bring up Rick to take us through the financials.
All right. Thank you, Matt. We're gonna go through the 2022 outlook, our actual 2023 outlook, capital allocation. Steve, we're gonna start with the Evergreen Model. This is what we do. Organically, we wanna grow 3% every year. Gross margin wanna expand 25 basis points every year. Marketing is typically flat on a percent of sales, but higher on dollars. SG&A, we leverage as the top line grows, typically at twice the rate of SG&A dollars. Operating margin is about 50 basis points of expansion, and that leads to 8% EPS growth. In 2022, how'd we do? Our outlook was around 3% for reported sales growth. We came in about 3.5%. Organically, we said about 1%, we came in 1.5%. Gross margin, we contracted.
You heard from Matt, $250 million of inflation in 2022. Adjusted EPS, we were at the high end of our range at $2.97, and reported we were down 49% because we had a non-cash impairment charge for Flawless. From a cash from operations perspective, we beat our outlook, $885 million as inventory and working capital improved through the end of 2022. 2023. This is a chance to simplify what our outlook is. Matt alluded to a few of these, but our range is 0%-4% EPS growth. The midpoint is 2%. If you take a step back for a second, our core adjusted EPS growth is about 10%.
We're investing in brands and people, so our incremental marketing spend is moving to 10.5% now that our fill levels are back to normal. We're also getting back to par from an incentive comp perspective, so that's about $30 million or a 3% drag. We have higher interest for our Hero acquisition, higher taxes, and just floating rate debt. All in all, we're about 2% midpoint, but making those specific investments purposeful. Here's the detail of the outlook. 5%-7% reported sales growth, 2%-4% domestic organic sales growth, with domestic being 2%-3%, international 3%-5%, and SPD 5%-6%. Gross margin for the first time in a long time expands 100 basis points-120 basis points.
Marketing, I just talked about that, up to 10.5%, so investing behind our brand. SG&A is higher as we have higher incentive comp. Operating margin is flattish, and other expense is a drag of $110 million, which is $35 million higher on interest expense year-over-year. EPS is 0%- 4%, and then cash grows about 5% to $925 million. Let's look at our track record. Over the last 10 years, we usually show this just organically, but we decided to show reported as well. We have a track record of 6% over the last 10 years average net sales growth. Our outlook is 5%- 7% in 2023. 2%- 4% is the outlook in 2023. Evergreen Model is 3%.
Our average has been 4% over the last 10 years. Here's an important part of the volume of the revenue story. Typically, if we think of our Evergreen Model of 3% organic net sales growth, it's been over a long period of time, 3% volume and largely flat on price. That story returns in the second half of 2023. You can see the progress we're making in Q3 of 2022 because of all the pricing that we've taken, as the industry's dealt with all the commodity inflation, we had negative volumes. That improved in Q4. It improved, we expect it to improve again in Q1 and Q2, and inflect positively in the back half of 2023. Strong focus on gross margin this year, 100 basis points- 120 basis points.
That's 110 basis points to midpoint, so that means we're expecting around 43% in 2023. Our high water mark was 2019 at 45.5%. A lot of confidence that we're gonna have that expansion. Inflation moderates, productivity programs, all that work and effort isn't being masked anymore with inflation. Margin accretive acquisitions are a tailwind, as our case fill improves, it means our logistics costs improve and our fines go down. In 2023, our marketing spend we expect to be 10.5%, and really, that's the $30 million that we talked about before. We really wanted to inflect positively on marketing spend as our fill rates have recovered. SG&A is higher.
We've talked through that a bit. Hero, our recent acquisition, which we're really enthusiastic about, has standalone SG&A. We have $30 million more for normalized incentive comp. Don't worry, our long-term Evergreen leverage targets are still in place. We have a great track record of EPS growth, you know, high single-digit, low double-digit for many years. Matt talked about the step backwards in 2022. I've talked about the investments we're making in 2023. A lot of confidence in the Evergreen model as we move forward. We have a first half, second half story for EPS. First half, we have choppiness from those discretionary businesses that Matt talked about, Waterpik and Flawless. International supply challenges as we've added new capacity comes online by April, May this year, and higher marketing dollars year-over-year.
Second half, we have volume growth that I just talked about. We have productivity outpacing inflation, and we have improved global supply. Moving on to cash flow. The last 10 years, we've averaged 119% free cash flow conversion. In 2022, we ended at 97%. Why is that? Well, we have higher CapEx. We're investing in capacity, and I'll get into it in a minute, but for laundry, litter, vitamins, and we're gonna have a stair-step back down in the future. Cash conversion cycle. We've gone from 52 days cash conversion cycle to about 19 days. We've made some great improvements along the way. We have more room to run there. We had a step-up in 2022 because of those discretionary businesses, and they had elevated inventories.
As you heard me say on the very first page, a lot of that working capital cash flow beat was because inventories were starting to come back in line. We have a strong balance sheet. 1.7 times levered is our expectation by the end of 2023, which means we could do up to a $3.2 billion deal and still maintain our credit rating at investment grade. Capital allocation. Number one, far and away, is our TSR accretive M&A. In that slide shown from 14 power brands going to 20, that is the Number one direction for capital for the company. Number two is CapEx for organic growth, really capacity, and G2G, our productivity program. Number three, new product development. Number four, debt reduction. Number five, return cash to shareholders, and I'll talk about the dividend in a minute.
This is all about capacity, ensuring a steady supply for our categories. Laundry, litter, baking soda, vitamins, sustainability efforts as we embrace science-based targets, all those things require capital. Here's the outlook for capital. You can look, we're not a capital-intensive company. We've been around 2% of sales for a very long time. We had a step-up back in 2009 when we added a plant. We also had one in 2011. In 2022 and 2023, we're adding capacity for those businesses. We expect it to stair-step back down over the next two years. Finally, our dividend increase. Our outlook for EPS was 0%-4%, we raised our dividend 4%, the high end of the range. That's 122 years of consecutive dividends. With that, I'll turn it back to Matt.
Okay, I'm gonna take it the rest of the way. I'm gonna start with the U.S. business. As I said earlier, the outlook for our U.S. business is really bright. We're leaders in growing categories. We thrive in tough environments, and our acquisitions have room to run. Let's look at all three of those. We're in 17 categories. Green means that the category is growing. You look at the bottom of the slide, you see that in 2018 grew 4%, 2019, 4.5%. With COVID, you see 2020 and 2021, almost 10% both years. Floated back down to 6% in 2022. So far in 2023, we're seeing a similar number, around 6%. As far as growing share goes, we have 14 brands.
Our goal is to maintain or expand share in two-thirds of those brands. That would be nine out of 14. We only got seven out of 14 in 2022. We definitely got hurt in three categories because of our supply chain issues. Those would be pregnancy test kits, Nair, and vitamins. You can see on this slide, we had really abysmal fill rates in early in 2022, 80%. Typically, they're 98% fill rates. We got to 90% by the end of the year, we're gonna climb the rest of the way in 2023. We do think that as a result, we'll be hitting at least nine out of 14 brands, maintain or gain share in 2023. Now, thriving in difficult economies. You saw earlier that we have a balanced portfolio.
We have low exposure to private label. Let's look at a few categories where that comes to life. First, fabric care. Check out these numbers. Liquid laundry detergent, left-hand side of the slide. Here's the quarterly growth rates for liquid laundry category. You see it was up around 7% Q1, Q2. With $5 gasoline, inflation, et cetera, the category pulled back in Q3 and Q4. Not so for ARM & HAMMER Liquid Laundry Detergent. Just look at those numbers. Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4, 15% year-over-year growth rate for liquid laundry detergent. What's happening is you have a trade down, a trade down from premium laundry detergent to value detergent. We've seen this movie before back in the Great Recession, back in 2008.
As a result, you see that ARM & HAMMER Liquid Laundry Detergent is achieving all-time highs in market share, almost 15% in Q4. Let's look at litter, another big category for us. The litter category had huge consumption growth in 2022 as well. You can see double- digit in every quarter, largely driven by price. If you look at share over the last few years, you see ARM & HAMMER is really the only brand that's grown share since 2019. If you say, what's driving that? It's the Orange Box. We have a Black Box, which is our premium cat litter, and we have the Orange Box, which is a 30% discount. Here's what's going on with Orange Box.
You can see the spike there in the second half of 2022, reaching 11.6% share. Once again, the value portfolio is coming through for us. Number three, I said we have our recent acquisitions have room to run. The most recent ones being TheraBreath and Hero, and I wanna go through some stats with you in a moment. First up is gonna be TheraBreath. Here's what we're talking about, the mouthwash category, which is about a $1.8 billion category. It's split between alcohol and non-alcohol, about 50/50 for each.
If you just took the total mouthwash category, look at the share of TheraBreath on the right-hand side, 2.6%, 3.9%, 5.6%, 8.1% share. We actually have a 20% share if you just look at the non-alcohol segment of mouthwash. We're the number two alcohol-free mouthwash today. There's lots of room to run. Just focus on the total points of distribution. All the big brands in the category, Listerine, Crest, ACT, get way more SKUs than TheraBreath, so we're only just getting started there. We're gonna run a quick TikTok spot, just so this would be more memorable for you. No features and benefits, no pricing, no talking. It's the new world, but it sells. That's TikTok. Now Mighty Patch.
All right, check out these numbers. The acne treatment category was a very sleepy category for a long time. Look on the left-hand side of the slide, you see around $600 million 2018, 2019, 2020, until patches arrived as treatment. This is the insight that the Hero people had. You look at those numbers on the far right, you see huge growth year-over-year. The fascinating thing about this is they've only been in Target and Amazon. It's also infinitesimal as far as their bricks-and-mortar distribution, and that's all ahead of us in 2023 and 2024. Lots of room to growth here for this brand. We've got another TikTok spot for you for Hero. Roll it. All right, can you tell that the marketers did that one on TikTok? Little bit different, but still very effective.
All right, in summary, with respect to the U.S., we're leaders in growing categories, we thrive in tough economies, and acquisitions have room to run. Next up is gonna be innovation in our pipeline. We have a fantastic group of people in our new products development group and in R&D. They are able to innovate across all of our categories. Here's the breadth of the new products that we're launching in 2023. I'm gonna talk about a number of them, and then I wanna end on HardBall, which as Steve pointed out, is our new innovation in the litter category. Here's Hero Mighty Patch or Micropoint XL, so this is for early-stage blemishes. It contours around your face, your jawline, cheeks and chin. TheraBreath is moving from adult into kids.
We're gonna have TheraBreath for kids, ages six to 12. Trojan is already the thinnest latex condom in the U.S., now we have the thinnest non-latex condom in the U.S. Now Vitafusion PMS Daily Support. I was expecting thunderous applause for this one. It's this is gonna expand Vitafusion's women's health portfolio. Now Waterpik, we have a cordless slide. This collapses to 50% of its size. Put it in your pocket. It comes in three different colors. Batiste, we all know is a dry shampoo. This is used for overnight use, so that you don't have oil buildup overnight, you wake up to fresher hair. Finally Nair, Prep-N-Smooth face. This preps your skin on your face, exfoliates, makes it easier to put on makeup. Now we come to HardBall.
This is our new litter offering. We've been an innovator in the category for many years. We entered the litter category in 1998, and we've had 12% CAGR since then. Year-over-year, year after year, largely driven by our innovation. You go back to 2010, one of our innovations was Double Duty. I think this was the first packaged good in America that had the words urine and feces on it. I know that's TMI, it addressed both urine odors and feces. In 2014, Clump & Seal came out. That's our premium cat litter, which is a high premium to our yellow box. Finally, Hardball, which is our latest innovation. Why does this matter?
If you look at the litter category today, we have a round number that's 25% share of total clumping litter. Within clumping litter, you have regular weight and you have lightweight. If you pull lightweight out, which is about 16% of the category, we're a peanut. We're 5% share. This is meant to get our fair share of lightweight. HardBall is not clay-based. It's not mined. It's sorghum-based. It's a plant-based litter, so it's sustainable and it's lightweight. And the amazing thing about it is the, the clumps are virtually indestructible. Now, before you run this, I wanna give you a little background. In turn, this is not a commercial. This is a video that we created in-house because we're having some fun with the product.
You can roll it now. Love how serious they are. I think Letterman would have had some fun with this back in the day when he used to throw pumpkins off of balconies and whatnot. Maybe you'll see this on some late-night shows someday. HardBall. Three things. It's surprisingly lightweight, it's virtually indestructible, and it's sustainable. It's not mine, we're gonna be putting a lot of money behind that. Next up is Give It The Hammer. This is a new campaign that we're rolling out. Remember, Church & Dwight is a $5 billion company. $2 billion is branded ARM & HAMMER. We're in lots of categories. We're in laundry, we're in litter, we're in toothpaste, underarm deodorant, baking soda.
If you look at what's going on right now, the recession is looming. Yeah, it's true that unemployment is still pretty low. If you look at what the American household is dealing with today, they're paying $400 more per month for the same goods that were purchased a year ago, so they feel powerless. This is something we pulled off the Internet. I'm gonna read this to you. "When you work hard to get a good job, but it doesn't even feel like it matters. When gas is $5, rent increases by hundreds of dollars. Frozen chicken is $25. It's impossible to buy a home, and inflation is so high that the Dollar Tree is now the $1.25 Tree." They feel powerless. What's happening as a result?
You can see some of the stats on this slide, but people are shopping different stores, they're shopping different brands, and they plan to add those new brands into their permanent lineup. We believe that ARM & HAMMER is really made for this moment. This is a hardworking brand, and it's well suited for working class consumers. I'm gonna roll the spot.
Price pinch? Give it to Hammer. Workload overload? Give it to Hammer. Stuck in a funk? Give it to Hammer. Hard times? No times? When times get tough, the tough give it to Hammer. ARM & HAMMER, more power to you.
Okay, you're gonna be seeing a lot of this, national TV, video, influencers, e-retail, et cetera. We put a lot of money behind this. We think this is a great moment for the brand. I wanna just talk about digital just for a couple of minutes. You know, if we went back to 2015, only 1% of our sales were online. You know, today it's 16%. That asterisk you see up there says that we're excluding, the last mile, so things like, Instacart, click and collect. We included that, it would probably be closer to 18%. We think that in the future, that's gonna grow to 20%, 25%, 30% over the next, five to 10 years. We gotta get ready for that.
We need to have a digital-first mindset, and it's three things. How you approach commerce, how what kind of an expert you are in digital marketing, finally, what kind of talent you have in-house. As far as the mindset across all channels, 80% of consumers shop omni-channel. They're not committed to one aspect of the channel. We gotta be good in store and online. As far as marketing goes, 70% of our media today is digital, there's lots of outlets: video, social, influencers, retail, media, et cetera. We have to have the right content for the right vehicles. The most important thing is people. We have a fabulous e-commerce team in-house. We recruited a terrific leader, Chief Digital Growth Officer in 2022.
We're focusing on upskilling our people. We have a digital IQ certification program. It's open not just to sales and marketing people, to people in any function in the company. We've made a lot of changes to our partners over the past 18 months, so now we're working with best-of-breed partners, lots of new ideas, very contemporary, and we're focused on analytics. We have a center of excellence for analytics. We've made some recent acquisitions of digitally native brands, notably Hero and TheraBreath. There's lots of learnings from those brands that we can transfer over to our iconic brands like ARM & HAMMER, OxiClean, Trojan. Finally, the commercial team, sales and marketing, is one face to the customer supported by a center of excellence for digital. Now I wanna move on to international. As Rick pointed out earlier, we have a 3% goal.
That's our organic growth target. 2% U.S., 6% international, and 5% Specialty Products. Here's how international looks. It's a $900 million business. On the right-hand side, you're gonna see the subsidiaries, so Canada, Europe, Australia, and Mexico. That makes up two-thirds of the business. The other third is made up for our Global Markets Group that takes our brands to 80 countries around the world. Our Evergreen target for international is 6%. I mentioned earlier, it has been a juggernaut. If you go from 2015 to 2020, you had significant growth year after year. Pull back a little bit in 2021 during the pandemic, and in 2022 we went backwards for a few reasons. One, supply chain problems, Russia, as well as China lockdowns.
A 2.8% growth we felt was pretty good in 2022 considering what we're up against. The subsidiaries on the far left grew 4%. The Global Markets Group has five regions. Four regions grew, many of them double-digit, China went completely backwards for us in 2022. The reason we have so much confidence that we can grow international, and that's a big part of the future of the company, is that we have our U.S. power brands that we can take global. These are terrific brands. We have brands in the middle of the slide that are native to the international business. Batiste, you know, came to the U.S. from Europe. These brands are the cornerstones of the international business and lots of room to run through our Global Markets Group.
Finally, most more recent acquisitions, TheraBreath, Hero, and also Waterpik, have lots of opportunity to grow internationally, and our distributors are just dying to get these brands. If you contrast Church & Dwight with other CPG companies, International is 18% of our sales. Most of our competitors are about 60%. They took their brands worldwide decades ago. We're only getting started right now. Lots of opportunity for Church & Dwight, and we're making lots of investments. In 2022, we stood up an ERP system in China so that we can now go direct in China. We're also adding to our, not only our tools, but people who are experts in digital commerce in our subsidiaries.
We've linked all our subsidiaries together with respect to pricing and Revenue Growth Management, they can compare notes in different markets. We're finding local manufacturers to make our products in Asia. That's gonna cut down on all the transportation and logistics issues. We're also adding a lot of people this year to our international infrastructure for Global Markets Group, most notably in Singapore. Finally, we opened an office in Mumbai in 2022. Just to wrap up international, lots of runway for us for years and years to come for our existing brands. We can leverage our newly acquired brands, Hero, TheraBreath, as well as Waterpik. The Global Markets Group is focused on emerging markets, and we're making lots of investments here, so this is part of our future. Next up is Specialty Products.
You see a 5% algorithm for specialty products, largely driven by the animal productivity business. Here's how this breaks down. It's a $350 million business. 70% is animal nutrition. That's what I'm gonna talk about, and 30% is specialty chemicals. That's essentially bulk sodium bicarbonate, which we've been making for 175 years. Now if you look at the animal business, the reason why that's on trend is because we make prebiotics and probiotics, and the trend is away from antibiotics when it comes to food production. All these brands live under the banner of ARM & HAMMER. Just like the consumer business, the animal productivity business also has opportunity to grow internationally. The specialty products business, once upon a time, was very cyclical.
We were up one year, down two, up one year, down two. Why is that? 'Cause we were beholden to the dairy industry and dairy pricing. That's no longer the case. We've diversified away from dairy. You look at 2020, 2021, 2022, we had positive organic growth, and we're expecting the same in 2023 with 5%-6% growth from SPD. All right, just to wrap that one up, it's a trusted brand, ARM & HAMMER. We're aligned with consumer trends. Lots of room to grow internationally. We've diversified, which makes us less cyclical. Now I'm gonna end with how we run the company. We have lots of brands in Church & Dwight, but they're very manageable because of the way we're structured.
The dark blue ones here, these are the SBUs, the business units within the U.S. We group all the brands naturally under each one of those headings. You see Arm & Hammer appear in three places. That's simply because we have within fabric care, we have liquid laundry detergent. Home care, we have baking soda and litter. Over in personal care, we have toothpaste, for example. Over in international, you see we've listed all of our various brands. This makes it not only easy to manage all the brands that we have, but also to slot in any of the new brands that we acquire. We have five operating principles. We have brands consumers love. We've been a friend of the environment for centuries. We leverage people, assets, and acquisitions.
I'm gonna talk about each one of these. I've already talked about leveraging brands, quite a bit. I wanna talk about being a friend of the environment. You went back to 1888, Church & Dwight was putting pictures of birds in cartons of baking soda, and the carton said, "Save the birds, save the planet." Church & Dwight was founded by people who really had an affinity for the environment. 1907, we were using recycled paperboard in our packages. This company was really focused on the environment well before anybody could spell sustainability. In 1970, we were the only sponsor of the first Earth Day. 20 years later, 1990, still the only corporate sponsor of Earth Day. We were the first to take phosphates out of laundry detergent in the 1970s.
In 2017, we started planting trees in the Mississippi River Valley. We all know from fifth grade science that trees take CO2 out of the atmosphere. We put 350,000 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually, just our little company. This is our way of offsetting that. In 2018, 100% of our electricity was offset by green energy. Finally, in 2021, we committed to science-based targets. Here are our goals. By 2025, we wanna be 100% carbon neutral via the offsets, planting trees I talked about. We're also committed to science-based targets. What that focuses on is reducing the amount of CO2 you put into the atmosphere by changing the equipment in your plants.
We wanna reduce our water usage by 10% annually, and we want to recycle 75% of our waste. We get lots of recognition for the things we're doing, FTSE4Good, EPA Green Power Partnership, and Safer Choice. We've been a Safer Choice partner for seven years. We're all quants in the room. We're focused on numbers and ratings. Here's just one of our ESG scores. We've been making lots of progress: BBB in 2020, A in 2021, AA in 2022, making lots of progress. Now I want to move to leveraging people. Church & Dwight is a terrific company. We got great brands, we got great people, and we have great culture. The way we describe our culture is as follows.
We're a company that's a roll-up-your-sleeves company, call it blue collar. We've got high aptitude people in the company, many of them who have come from larger CPG companies. Blue collar, high aptitude, underdog. A lot of the companies we compete with, virtually all of them, are way bigger than we are. The fourth thing is we get the facts. We're focused on making decisions based on data. We're digitally savvy, we're becoming more digitally savvy every year. We're focused on diversity in the company, we like people who are risk takers, who challenge the status quo. That's us. Here's a really underappreciated statistic. That's revenue per employee. Our revenue per employee is over $1 million, which is, it's fantastic. We have a very simple compensation structure. Sales, gross margin, cash from operation, EPS.
All of our employees are focused on gross margin. Yeah, we didn't really pull it off the last two years, but by having this in your incentive comp, it creates financial literacy. Here's the playbook, and it hasn't changed. This is Good to Great. It's the name of our continuous improvement program. Supply chain optimization is simply modernizing your equipment, investing in automation. When you launch new products, you wanna have new products that have a higher gross margin than the products that you're replacing. Finally, acquisitions, often we're able to generate significant synergies as a result of putting them in our system. The next step is leverage assets. You heard Rick talk about this. I won't repeat it, but we're an asset-light company.
The two spikes that you see there, one was when we built our York plant in 2009. Looking ahead, 2022, 2023, and 2024, significant investment in laundry, litter, and vitamins. We're gonna grow into that in the future, lots of growth ahead. If you do the first four things really well, you get good returns. If you can add on top of that leveraging acquisitions, you get great returns, and that's what we've gotten for many, many years. Here's the track record, $1.5 billion in 2004, $5.4 billion in 2022. Done an acquisition almost every year. We have clear acquisition criteria. Now I'm gonna end with 2023. Last slide. We feel good about 2023. We're looking at 6% top line for reported, 3% organic.
We're expecting 100basis points- 120 basis points of gross margin expansion. We have a terrific new product pipeline. You heard me talk about each and every one of them. We're taking up our advertising investment deliberately in 2023. We're making a lot of investments in capacity, as you saw on that last slide. Finally, we have significant cash flow generation to fund future acquisitions. With that, I'm gonna wrap it up, and it's time for questions from our friends in the audience. Bill Chappell.
Thanks. Good afternoon. Just a question on acquisitions. 10, 15 years ago, I think you had said, and prior to you had said, you know, we wouldn't look at small deals, $10 million-$15 million deals, because it doesn't really move the needle and takes a lot of time. You know, now you're gone from $1.5 billion in sales to $5 billion in sales. Why still look at $100 million in sales deals? Not to say that you can't be successful with them, but, you know, does it take... You have this high revenue per employee. Does it stretch the employee? I mean, stretch the employees? Does it take a lot of time?
Do you really get incremental shareholder value from such these small deals that, again, if they grow 50%, they still barely move the top-line needle? Second, kind of with that, how does your acquisition criteria change with higher interest rates? I mean, obviously, it's one thing when you're borrowing at 1% or less and can get the returns. How does it change in the current environment? Thanks.
Yeah, okay. I think the way we look at acquisitions is what category are we entering. If you take the Trojan category, you know, we talk a lot about Trojan in meetings like this, but condoms is a $400 million category. We bought TheraBreath because it's a $1.8 billion category. The whole point there is you want to get an acquisition, it opens the door to a new category. We're not looking for TheraBreath just to double in size. We're looking for that to quadruple in size, quintuple in size. That's the ambition for that business. It's not just, "Well, you got $100 million, so it's gonna become $200 million over time." No.
That's a business we expect to be a $500 million business in the future, and a business also that can not only be successful in the U.S., but also internationally. The way you look at a deal now is what category are you going to, and is it large enough to make a difference for the company? That's what's changed. Your question with respect to interest rates, you know, the way we look at acquisitions is how much cash earnings is it going to generate for the company. We're less focused on EPS accretion, because EPS is just masked by the amortization of intangibles. Obviously with interest rates high, multiples will come down. Things should be less expensive. You know, good brands always draw a crowd.
These are auctions, and We have, we're very disciplined about how much we're gonna pay for a business, and there are deals we walked away from in the last 12 months because we just thought they were too rich. We do. How we look at it, Bill, hasn't changed. It's. Interest is just part of the story. It's temporary. Interest rates go up and down over time, so you gotta take the long view with respect to the business. Good question. One we ask ourselves internally quite frequently. Kevin.
Thank you. Kevin Grundy, Jefferies. I think sort of the other side of the discussion that you guys put up the slide 14 power brands today going to 20 tomorrow. The question's around sort of portfolio review and potential for divestiture. I think sometimes what's interesting about platform companies, and I think you guys are, you know, exceptional in that regard. That being said, a brand that you acquired 15, 20 years ago may not meet the criteria today. How do you evaluate brands within the portfolio, ensure that they're meeting growth, margin, return hurdles such that they still make sense and could potentially be entertained as a divestiture candidate and be accretive to shareholders? Thank you.
Yeah. Well, if we put a slide up with the annual sales for all the power brands, you'd actually have ARM & HAMMER would be the big block on the left-hand slide, then they would go down from there. Over on the far right, you have lots of smaller brands that once upon a time they were big when we were at, say, at $2 billion or $3 billion in sales, but now we're $5.5 billion, going to $6 billion in sales. It is fair to say that some of those brands could potentially be divestitures in the future. It, you know, it's something that we always have to assess what's the capital intensity of those brands as well.
You know, if you have a brand that's a small brand, it's not capital intensive, let's say it's a steady-eddy business, maybe grows 1% a year, grows with population, but throws off cash earnings. We would say, "Okay, now that's a business we're gonna hang on to." If a business is now challenged, it's a business we're not gonna invest in, that there's other competitors moving in bigger, that would be one that could potentially be divested. Our bigger brands right now would not be in that category. It'd be generally the smaller brands.
Thanks.
Okay, where's the microphone? Yep.
Thanks. Peter Grom, UBS. Rick, you showed the slide around, you know, marketing as a percentage of sales. It's moving up, you know, I guess 50 basis points or so step up versus Is this the right pace for your investment levels moving forward? And I guess what I'm trying to understand is we've heard a lot about, you know, investments stepping up this week from, you know, a number of CPG peers. And I would just be curious, you know, if, you know, commodities are a bit more favorable or demand comes in better. You know, how do you think about, you know, reinvestment versus letting some of that favorability, you know, drop to the bottom line?
Can you hear me?
Oh, yeah. Gotcha.
Thanks for the question, Peter. On Analyst Day, we also said if you do the math, effectively our 10% of sales rate of spend is equivalent to about 11.7% after you take the price increases these last two to three years into effect. That should give us some confidence that that is a good number, right? We're increasing that further. You know, historically, we've been between 11% and 12%. We think that's a good number. What's our report card for that? It's how our shares are doing, right? We publish, not very many people do, but we publish every single year how our shares are doing. Our categories are growing, great, that's one thing. How are our brands doing? How are they taking share? We wanna grow nine of 14.
That's the indicator whether or not we need to step it up or not. That will drive the decision.
Okay. Thank you, Peter. Yeah. Olivia.
Wanted to ask you about gross margin. You mentioned turning positive this year, but what's your view on longer term? Is it to get back to where it had historically been, or are there impediments in place now that make that more challenging?
Thanks, Olivia. You know, again, similar to what I said on the Analyst Day, you know, and what I said a few minutes ago, if you take the midpoint of our range, we're at 43% is our outlook for 2023. Our high watermark was 45%-45.5%. Our productivity program is around 2% of sales typically, right? A few years ago, we probably had a lower bar than that, but these last few years, we're trying to hit 2% of sales. That is being masked by the inflationary pressures we've had, right? $250 million last year, $290 million the year before that. We're saying $125 million in 2023. Normally, that's about $50 million or $60 million of inflation. When things will eventually calm down, right?
Inflation will get probably back to normalized levels eventually. When that happens, we think our productivity programs, they outpace inflation. When that happens, that's gonna be a good driver, good tailwind to gross margin expansion and a stair step back up to historical levels. It's not pricing, it's more about productivity.
You can't expand gross margin just by saving your way to prosperity. You also have to drive your high margin brands and Hero, TheraBreath, for example. That's also gonna be a tailwind in the future years to expand gross margin. Okay. Chris.
Following up on the M&A discussion. You know, what are your thoughts on protecting your flank versus new acquisitions or fast growth? Inevitably, that will bring in other competitors in the space. I think in Hero's category, you have a very large competitor who has announced some innovation in that space as well. Perhaps what have you learned from other small deals that you've done that had become great successes? Batiste comes to mind. You know, it does come up, you know, that, hey, we've, we went through this period of acquisitions, competition clearly waved. Why couldn't that happen again with TheraBreath and with Hero? I'm just curious how you would respond to that.
Well, I would say Batiste we bought in 2011. It was a $20 million business at the time. You know, today globally, it's over $200 million. It's attracted all the usual suspects into the category of beauty brands. Yet the business continues to grow, Grew significantly share in 2022. I mean, obviously you do have to worry about other people entering the category, but we have the most efficacious dry shampoo, and we've been focused on our marketing and supporting that significantly now. I'm not worried about Batiste. TheraBreath is a different story, where we acquired the disruptor. If you look at the mouthwash category with $1.8 billion, we acquired the... You worry about worrying about your flank.
You have Listerine, Crest, and ACT. This is the brand they were probably worried about, which we acquired. I'm not worried about other entrants into the mouthwash category. TheraBreath has been around for almost 20 years, so they've been going at it hammer and tongs for a long time. They only just caught fire a few years ago. Consequently, it's now on the map. It is the most expensive mouthwash. It's almost twice the price of Listerine, and it ages younger. In fact, TheraBreath and Hero are two of the top 10 brands that are most loved by Gen Z. We're the cool company now, Chris. You can put that in your notes.
The point is, yeah, you're right. You're always looking about new entrants into our categories. Oftentimes, they're gonna be digitally native, so we gotta be looking on Amazon and elsewhere to see where they're coming and what's making them successful, what are the attributes of their other brand, and it's just something we can copy.
Yeah. The only thing I would add to that is even for Hero, for example, like, the form is what's driving the category growth. That category for a long time was $500 million for the last five years. Last two years, now it's $700 million. As new entrants come in that form, we think the category expands for all people.
Yeah. Then with respect to Hero, the race right now is to be to win in bricks and mortar. Remember, Hero was just in Target and Amazon, the retailers are not gonna have a half a dozen patch brands on shelf. It's just not a big shelf space. The next 12 to 18 months are critical for us to be established as the brand patches that retailers are gonna cover in bricks and mortar, we're well on our way there. Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, all the Food, Drug, Mass, all interested in taking the product in 2023.
With that, I think we'll take it next door for any more questions. Thanks to Matt.
Thanks, Steve.
Thanks to Rick. Thanks to Trish and Dwight.
All right.
Thank you everybody else.