Okay, everybody. Welcome back. For the next session, I am thrilled to welcome back Church & Dwight to the conference. With us today are President and Chief Executive Officer, Rick Dierker, Chief Financial Officer, Lee McChesney, and Executive Vice President of International, Mike Read. Together, Rick, Lee, and Mike are going to run us through a presentation for about 30 minutes, and then we'll have the balance of time, about 10 minutes of Q&A. With that, I will hand it over to Rick.
All right. Thank you, Steve. Thrilled to be here. We spent about a week with our investors over in Europe and had a great business review yesterday. Before I begin, here's our safe harbor statement. I encourage you to read that on our website, as we will likely make forward-looking statements. Who we are. We always start these presentations with our performance. Our TSR, our total shareholder return, has been leading in the industry for a long time. Took a bit of a step back, as the whole industry did in 2025. In 2026, we're off to a great start. A lot of that's because of how we run the company, and the evergreen model is really important for us. That's kind of our anchor.
We want to grow year after year after year, the top line and bottom line. We're especially proud that in 2026, even despite this crazy macro world that we live in, our outlook kind of brackets the evergreen model. Organic growth is just core to the company. It's not just one year that we've done it, but over 10 years, we've averaged over and around 4% organic growth. When people ask me what makes us different, why have we had such strong outperformance? If you look at this chart, we've had net sales go from the bottom left to the upper right for a long time, over 20 years. Same thing with earnings, same thing with cash flow. The upper right-hand corner is, again, our consistent growth organically. It's really two things.
One is we have a capability to grow brands through our innovation, through our marketing and advertising, through our trade and promotion, and then we also have the ability to identify, acquire, integrate, and grow brands. When we can do both of those well, then our performance is kind of unique in the industry. Again, as a backdrop, about a $6.2 billion company, 77% domestic, 18% international, and 5% for our SPD business. We have seven power brands, and these seven power brands make up 75% of our sales and profits. We have a winning formula that we like to describe as these five things, a balanced and diversified portfolio, low exposure to private label, online success, strong, consistent category leading innovation, and then, of course, our acquisition for an acquisitive company. A balanced portfolio, we're about 50/50 household and personal care.
We're also about maybe two-thirds, one-third value and premium. We typically do well in any economic environment, and we're doing well right now, even as the macro has a lot of volatility in it. Private label exposure. For a long time, our exposure weighted average to all of our categories was around 11%, and that was relatively low in the industry. After we sold our vitamin business, that dropped down to 5%, so that bodes well for the future. Online success. We were a laggard. About 2% of our sales back in 2016 were online. Now it's about a quarter of our sales. That's interesting, but it also just shows our capability. We're agile, we're lean, we're able to move with speed when we want to.
We have a great innovation capability, and I call it a capability now, not just a new product portfolio. Strong, consistent, category leading. About half of our growth is typically through innovation. Then, of course, good returns become great returns because we know how to acquire brands. We want number one, number two brands. We want high growth, high margin, consumable brands, not really durables. Asset light. We leverage our manufacturing base, and we want a sustainable competitive advantage. We'll talk a little bit more about our most recent acquisition in a couple minutes. We have a long history of growth through acquisitions. This is a $1.5 billion company going to $6.2 billion. Again, ability and a competitive advantage, in my mind, of identifying, acquiring, integrating, and growing brands. It's easy to say, it's hard to do.
The reason we're really good at it is because we've done it again and again and again. Speaking of acquisitions, here's our latest update. We actually acquired a brand, Miss Mouth, which is a fantastic premium stain fighter brand. It's just right in the middle of an online, kind of digitally native brand that's now starting to go into bricks and mortar in the U.S. High brand love and just, again, an exciting one. Here's a video I wanted to share. 22 million views. This went viral.
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The tempo, and then you have kind of a recovery. We have the right to play before that with cleansers as well. We'll be launching that later this year. Touchland is our second most recent acquisition, and it's the number one premium hand sanitizer. Household penetration, again, extremely low compared to the category. Retail opportunities exist. New category expansion exists. We're just now really starting to get behind marketing in a bigger way to go drive brand awareness. The international rollout takes a little bit longer because of regulatory for each and every country. Over the next 12 months or so, you're going to see it appear in many, many more countries, which we're really excited about. Okay. That is really our acquisition update. There's also, I announced in January some growth initiatives that we put into place as a company.
The backdrop at the time was our categories have grown 3%, not for one year or two years, but for over a decade. In 2025, categories slowed somewhat. That 3% came closer to 2% or 2.5%. That was the backdrop. Along with that backdrop, we also had, that everyone's aware of, consumer sentiment is low. It's at an all-time low, actually, the last reading. So bad things happen at times. How do we make sure that we can grow despite what's happening with categories? If categories grow normal, that means we're going to be growing faster than category growth. We put in place three separate, distinct initiatives. One was grow the Arm & Hammer brand from $2 billion-$3 billion. The second one was grow our oral care business behind TheraBreath from $1 billion-$1.5 billion.
Then the last one is grow our international business as we scale it through M&A from $1 billion to $2 billion. This is one of my favorite slides. I usually talk about it from an acquisition perspective just to show the company going from the $1 billion- $6 billion. A lot of that green, that green is all acquisitions. We've had $4 billion of acquisitions over the years, from a revenue perspective. What's also true in this slide, though, is you can see the strength of the Arm & Hammer brand, and it's a $2 billion-plus brand, and it's grown consistently over many, many years. Why is that? Well, we've gone up into the right on share for laundry and for litter. What gives us confidence to make our Arm & Hammer bet go from $2 billion- $3 billion?
Well, first and foremost, the U.S. is celebrating 250-year anniversary. Church & Dwight's 180 years. We've been in baking soda for 180 years, 1846. Since then, in the 1970s and 1980s, 1990s, we have jumped into toothpaste and litter and deodorant. These big categories, and we've done well. Brand awareness for Arm & Hammer rivals almost any other brand that you know. It's in the mid to high 90s. Finally, we have this halo effect that happens with Arm & Hammer. If we advertise our laundry, it helps our litter business. If we advertise our litter business, it helps our toothpaste business. Again and again and again, we have this advantage versus everyone else on how we advertise. I think the main point of the entire strategy is we are already a brand that goes across categories.
Many companies have a strategy of taking a brand across categories. You hear it again and again and again. Very few are successful, though. I would say we've already checked the box on that strategy. We are in categories where we're premium. We're in categories where we're value. We're in categories that are household. We're in categories that are personal care, all under the Arm & Hammer umbrella. Whether it's deodorizing or cooking or baking, that's the hard part. We've already done that. Now, the next step is to say what categories should we go into? There's four pillars of growth. The first pillar is really, again, growing the core. Innovation, quality products, efficacious, our great innovation engine, and doing what we've done on laundry and litter and the rest of the portfolio.
Rounding out good, better, best on a few of our sub-segments on Arm & Hammer. Number three is the category work. We are deep into it. I told everyone at CAGNY in January that we'd give an update likely in January of 2027. All the work, energy, and effort that we were spending on our vitamin business or other businesses that we were trying to fix has now gone into all these growth initiatives. That is where I think a lot of value will be created over a long period of time. The fourth pillar is really retail sales of our licensee products, or around $1 billion. Some of those make sense for us to take back and to scale up over time. They're already tested and loved and accepted by consumers.
I hope that we take back a few of those. Conversely, as we do all this category work, I actually hope that we can convince some of our licensee partners to take a couple bets on those new categories. The second initiative is really drive oral care expansion through TheraBreath. Again, the focus here is on two categories or two big categories, mouthwash and toothpaste. Over two and a half billion and $4.8 billion. That's where we're kind of laser-focused. TheraBreath has a unique proposition here. It's not just one thing, but it's many things that make TheraBreath successful. Low household penetration, 12% versus a category of 65%. Again, we're growing by leaps and bounds on distribution and on market share for TheraBreath. That gives us confidence as we go and become a bigger player in toothpaste.
We got distribution on toothpaste that we didn't deserve, but we got it because of such a great brand reputation around mouthwash. We're a small player today, Church & Dwight is on toothpaste, but we believe we have an opportunity. We're a small player largely because Arm & Hammer is a niche of a niche in terms of the taste profile with baking soda. TheraBreath doesn't have that same constraint. This is a best-in-class performing toothpaste. It's better for you and has a superior product and fresh breath. Finally, on the growth initiatives, the third one is international growth. We've talked about this before, but international has a long track record of success. Mike and his team are doing a phenomenal job. High single-digit organic growth on average.
Kind of the new news these past few years is the ability to scale and how quickly we've been able to scale some of these recent acquisitions. Hero and TheraBreath are tens of millions of dollars already internationally. Then we believe Touchland has a great shot of international expansion. We're going to start focusing, and we have been, on international M&A. Even this week, we had countless meetings on international M&A. We're not choosing one over the other. We're saying and. Even as of Friday, we just did a U.S. acquisition. We believe there's definite upside over the long term to acquire some great brands in the rest of the world. Okay, speaking of categories and brands, in the U.S., our evergreen model is around 3%. We have those seven power brands that are driving the entire engine of the company.
This is a really important slide. This is our categories over the last five years. This is kind of underappreciated. I would say because of our M&A capability, we've got to choose in which categories we compete in. We didn't inherit this. We chose this. Because we've been able to look at and do due diligence on categories and competitors and private label exposure and so on and so forth, the backdrop is set up for success for us. Many of our categories are growing categories. That's kind of the takeaway here. On average, even in 2025, they grew around 2.5%. Not only do we want growing categories, but we want to be able to enable share gains over time. If you look back at history over the last five years, we've gained share about two-thirds of the time for these power brands.
That matters in a big way, and that matters that when we want to grow in excess of categories, that's how we do it. What's the check-in? The check-in for 2026 is we've had strong volume growth, right? In Q1, we had about 5% volume growth. The second half of last year, we had, I think, 2% volume growth. Along with volume growth, along with innovation, along with higher velocities, along with great acquisitions that are performing well, come shelf space. We gained phenomenal shelf space this last kind of reset. This is almost double our closest competitor or the average competitor in the industry. Speaking of innovation, new product innovation is a muscle for the company.
When Carlos Linares came in, our head of R&D, he saw that we only innovated one way, and we now have four or five different vectors on how we innovate. We typically used to grow at 1% and 1.5% growth for incremental net sales. That's a high bar. I say it all the time, incremental net sales, after cannibalization. We've transformed to go 1.5- 2. About half of our growth these days is coming from innovation. Here is some of our personal care innovation. TheraBreath toothpaste, the invisible patch for Hero. We have cleansers for Hero, and then we have Trojan G.O.A.T., which is the greatest of all Trojan condoms. We have household innovation. We have good, better, best innovation for laundry. This year, it was on the good tier, 10X baking soda.
What better time than today, where consumers are struggling with gas prices, to be able to have a good offering in the value tier? We also have rinses. We have a better sheet, good, better, best there as well. We have our most powerful OxiClean soda launching. Then we have Dual Defense cat litter. All these are great innovations which are helping to drive our shelf space expansion. Now I'm going to turn it over to Mike.
Thank you. Good afternoon. First of all, Steve, thanks for hosting us again this year. DB always has a great conference. Thanks for hosting us. I'm going to spend a couple of minutes on international SPD. We're about 18% of the business. Our evergreen's at 8% organic growth per year. We set up the business in two different ways. We have our subsidiary markets, Canada, U.K., France, Mexico, Germany, Australia, and most recently, Japan. We acquired our distributor back in 2024. That makes up about two-thirds of our business where we go direct through a subsidiary model. The remainder of our business, we operate in well over 100 countries with almost 400 distributor partners around the globe. We support that with five regional offices that are growing now, their cross-functional capability, Shanghai, Singapore, Mumbai, Panama and London.
As Rick showed, we've had a long track record of high single-digit growth. We are poised to continue to do that. I think most importantly is, relative to a lot of our peers, we're still very young in our journey. We're only 18% of our sales. We've been at it for a shorter period of time. We have a lot of runway ahead, and I think most importantly is our brands have the opportunity and have proven to be able to really travel. We support dozens of brands across the globe, but ultimately, these are the nine brands that carry the majority of the weight and will be the biggest growth drivers. It's a combination of leveraging large U.S. power brands like Arm & Hammer and Waterpik and OxiClean.
We complement that with some of our personal care and OTC brands that are largely internationally based, headlined by Batiste, Stérimar and Femfresh. I think as Rick alluded to, probably our biggest muscle in the last few years has been our ability to quickly take U.S. acquisitions and roll them out globally and to scale. Hero and TheraBreath have been just all-star brands for us, and Touchland is next in line. To put an example, Hero, which is not an old acquisition, already as we've launched, we're into over 75 countries. We'll be north of 100 countries by the end of 2026. I think most importantly, we're already in number one patch position in all our key subsidiaries where we're tracking share. It goes to show how quickly we're rolling out, also the speed and performance that we can generate.
Touchland is next in line. A lot of pent-up consumer demand for Touchland. As Rick alluded to, we're already in a couple of countries. There's some registration process, but by this time next year, we'll be in excess of 20 countries, which we're excited about. I think one of the things from international as we continue to mature is we're putting a lot more time and effort into really understanding local consumer insighting, and also regionally led innovation as well as regional manufacturing. Here's just a couple of examples, and there's many more. As we roll out brands like Batiste, when we enter some of our Asian markets where you have different hair types, different habits, different fragrance likes, how do we alter our proposition to make sure it's more relevant for the local consumer?
That's a good example of just how we're innovating and changing our packs to support that. Similarly, OxiClean, one of our biggest brands in Japan, predominantly a powder business historically, but the Japanese market is 80% liquid. We looked at local manufacturing in order to build a locally relevant proposition in liquid and launched that a couple of years ago, and it's off to a great start. Just a couple of examples. Lastly, from an international perspective, we are focused on M&A. We've had a great track record of taking U.S. brands, taking them internationally. That will still be a core part of what we do, and a big lever of our growth. We're also on the hunt for scaling acquisitions and acquiring in the international arena as well. Quickly, just on specialty products, it's a 5% organic evergreen model.
It's about a $300 million business. It's broken up into three different parts. We have an animal business, animal nutrition business, which is about 60% of it. We have a specialty chemical business, which is about a third, and then our consumer professional is taking our consumer brands into the B2B space, which is about 5%. I think most importantly is this has been a bit more of a volatile segment over the last number of years. We've made some strategic choices to exit some businesses. We've got on our front foot around innovation. We're being much more strategic about rolling our animal nutrition out globally. It's now 30% of our business. Now we've had nine consecutive quarters of positive growth, so we've really stabilized this business. It's in a great shape and ready for continued growth ahead. With that, I'll pass it over to Lee. Thank you.
All right. I'll try to finish up our prepared remarks here. Thank you to Rick and to Mike for walking us through here. For financials, the first place we really should start would be our evergreen model. Rick mentioned this before. This is the foundation of really how we run the company here. It's a balanced mindset. We're looking for profitable growth, 4% organic growth, 8% EPS improvement. What I'm going to do now is just walk you through a little bit of our scorecard. Instead of just showing you a scorecard of what happened the last year or two, let's look back over the past decade. Probably not a chart you're going to see much this week from a lot of others. It's a compelling 10 year history, 4.1% organic growth, right in line with the evergreen model.
It's driven by a lot of what you just saw from Rick and Mike, whether it's the innovation, whether it's the strength of the brand, whether it's the growth we brought forward in international. All those are coming together and driving us consistency in organic growth. If you take it one step further, and then look at it from a volume perspective, we're a volume driven organic growth company. This shows you that same momentum here as well, driving unit growth in markets across the globe. Gross margin. Every year, our evergreen model, we're going after 25- 50 basis points of gross margin improvement. You see a lot of that mindset coming out of COVID. You see this improvement we brought forward in gross margin. This year, we actually have an outlook of 100 basis points.
That foundation that comes back from May is going to be our normal 25- 50 basis points that comes from our normal gross margin toolkit. We have the strategic portfolio changes, which gives us a mixed benefit as well. Behind that is a whole bunch of actions. These are all the things we bring to life each and every day to drive gross margin improvements. Foundationally, it's good to great productivity. It's RGM activities. It's driving positive mix. Within that May 1st outlook, we also had $25 million-$30 million along with our evergreen model. Specifically for 2026, we gave an update on May 1st. We're still going after 3%-4% organic growth. We have the EPS outlook I just talked about, 5%-8%.
We also talked again about just another strong year in cash flow, another $1.15 billion being targeted. That was our outlook in May. We'll give you an update once we get through the second quarter here at the end of July. Behind that is, you look at this list. You got tailwinds, and you got headwinds. We began the year with the same outlook. We just have far more tailwinds, whether it's the momentum coming out of last year, the strength of the portfolio, the strength of the brands, really a lot of the elements you just talked about. Certainly, we have headwinds we all talked about, but again, we have the driver on the tailwind side really leading the EPS growth we talked about there.
Behind that continuous, we have this free cash flow, which is another compelling part of what really drives the P&L results you just saw there. We're showing you a decade here, 119% free cash flow multiple history. Many companies target actually less than one. Substantial cash flow that gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility to really drive effective capital allocation. It also shows up in our total debt to EBITDA. We're sitting here today at 1.5 after doing Touchland, after doing $900 million of buybacks last year, and continuing to invest in the organic business. Just a lot of opportunity, a lot of flexibility it gives us to drive this business. You sit here today, even with Miss Mouth just done, $5 billion available, we can invest in capital allocation effectively. Where do we focus that? We're very consistent.
Our number one use of cash is TSR accretive acquisitions. It can be Miss Mouth, it can be Touchland, it can be Hero, TheraBreath. That's our number one use. We obviously continue to invest in the business, whether that's NPD, whether that's driving growth, good to great productivity. Next would be debt, but right now we actually have no variable debt based on the debt data I just showed you there, and then returning cash to shareholders. Just another example of just the significance of this cash flow just coming through ultimately to shareholders, look at the dividend track record, 125 years, 30 years consistently of driving increases. With that said, we have a good amount of confidence in our future. Yes, there's headwinds out there, but there's a lot more tails.
We talked about it, whether it's the driving the brand, the momentum we have on the acquisitions that we've done over the last several years, the international growth we just talked you through there. We look forward here from our May outlook and with optimism. With that, we'll turn to questions, Steve.
Okay, great. You were kind enough to preview the conference with an acquisition to give us something new to talk about, so let's start there with Miss Mouth. You mentioned, Rick, number one position on Amazon, recently launched, I think it was Walmart late last year and Target just a month and a half ago, so which sets you up for a lot of growth. Is there more distribution opportunities that are high priority, or is the growth really about consolidating the distribution that's been recently won?
Yeah, no, it's a good question. I think if you take a bigger step back, I had in my comments, but 35% ACV, we believe this brand can be fully distributed over time, and we're really good at doing that. We have the channels, the relationships, and whatnot to make that happen. We also have Mike and his team on international to help expand there, too. Walmart's off to a great start. Target's off to a great start, and I think Target's already a nine share as an example, only being there a few months. It always goes back to the brand and how it delights consumers, and this certainly is doing that. We're going to look back in a few years and say, "Wow. That was an extremely good acquisition that's grown dramatically and right in Church & Dwight's wheelhouse.
Yeah. Are there innovation opportunities either in the pipeline or that you guys have conceptualized, or is it really about pushing distribution on the core product?
The answer is yes to both. I think the first priority is going to be how do you really go drive awareness and household penetration? That is runways of growth. We are going to have most of the organization focused on that deliverable, and then a small subset really focused on the innovation pipeline and where can it go and what makes sense for that brand. As you saw in the video that we threw up there with 22 million views, it is a product that has that magic moment, that wow, and that is what consumers are. They are looking for efficacy. They are looking for a brand that they trust. It can enable, I think, a great innovation pipeline in and around that area.
Yeah, cool. Just to round out the economics on it, you called out in the announcement that essentially neutral for this year, cash earnings accretive for next year. Does that imply sort of EPS neutral, or how do I think about it? Obviously, I'm more focused on cash in the long run, but we know the market and EPS matters. How do we think about that, Lee?
Yeah. I would just say as we kind of put in the release, obviously, it's day three here, that we said we think it can be a double-digit grower. Well, let us get into a little bit. There's obviously a timeline for distribution gains and things like that, and certainly, it will be accretive in due time.
Okay.
Yeah.
Great. One of the, I think, most consistent questions coming back to your investor day when you talked about those three new growth drivers is around on the Arm & Hammer side and just the balance as you go from $2 billion-$3 billion, the balance between core growth behind good, better, best initiatives, behind moving to new categories, and then the licensing optimization. Do you have any further comments in terms of calibrating the size of those buckets and then maybe, Mike, the role that you see international playing in the escalation of Arm & Hammer?
It's a fair question. I would say the two largest contributors of going from $2 billion-$3 billion would probably be, of course, our continued growth of our largest categories of laundry and litter. That's innovation. That's our playbook. Great. That's going to be a tailwind. That's kind of what got us from $1 billion-$2 billion, the bulk of it over time. The second one will be what categories we choose to enter. We're doing a lot of great research, a lot of great testing, a lot of good discussions with retailers already on what those categories will be in 2027 and 2028. I'm just not ready to talk about that yet. I think it's going to be a good tailwind. It's going to be the second largest, I think, contributor to that.
The third one, probably tied for third, will be the good, better, best for the sub-segments of Arm & Hammer, and what we choose to bring in-house, and can those provide tens of millions of dollars of growth over time? What I'm doing, really, with the management team is we're putting a bunch of kind of drill sites out there that are going to add up to tens of millions of dollars independently that will help kind of be the front runner in case you have a headwind of the economy and category growth or category sluggishness. I think our categories are very resilient. You saw the slide. In case they slow or in case we want to grow faster, we're going to have all these initiatives at our back. That's kind of a little bit more color.
I'm going to give a full report out probably in January.
Okay. Mike, anything you want to add on international?
Yeah, I'd just say, as the U.S. business is going through some of those category assessments, we'll look at those and do any of those apply to international growth. To be determined as we go through that. The one that's sort of line of sight is we're quickly expanding our litter business, particularly in our Asian markets. We've got Arm & Hammer baking soda and litter in markets around the globe. Those would probably be the two levers that we'll pull a little bit harder. Litter has a lot of opportunity that we're excited about.
The second one in international, which you may not be aware of, is part of the reason we bought the Japanese distributor, and we started off in a great spot was because we had 80% brand awareness for OxiClean in Japan, and now we're throwing through TheraBreath and Hero and Batiste and Waterpik through that same sales channel. There's a similar story, not distributor-wise, but consumer-wise, 80% brand awareness of Arm & Hammer in South Korea.
As we look for M&A, as we look for different brands to buy, that just sets us up for success as Arm & Hammer can grow globally.
Yeah. Okay. We're running out on time, but I did want to ask, you may be one of the few companies that a presentation didn't voluntarily mention AI.
This week, by the time it was all over. I'm curious in the context of that slide you put up around Arm & Hammer being kind of a later adopter of e-commerce and digital.
Yeah
What is the company's position on AI? What approach are you taking, and are you following a similar path, or are you more leaning into it?
Yeah. What a great comment. I would say that is exactly what we're doing. The capability that we were able to transform the company from e-com of two to 24, sometimes you have to really come together and figure out what are the four or five areas. You could do a lot of things. A lot of them could be mediocre. What are the four or five things and focus areas in AI that we're doing? We just went through that with our board in our strategy session. I'd say it's alive and well. I think it's going to transform the company. I'm telling our employees again and again and again that my goal would be to be able to double the size of the company and still have the same number of employees. We can move with speed, agility.
We can do more effective advertising, more effective RGM capabilities, more effective R&D and formulation, more effective supply chain. That's what we're laser-focused on. I thought you were going to ask me why are we the only company who has dollar share and volume share growth? Obviously that did not come up.
That's a given.
All right. Thanks.
All right. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.
Thanks, Steve.
Thank you guys for joining us.