Good afternoon. Next up, it is my pleasure to welcome Clorox back to the CAGNY stage. Please join me in thanking the company for their generous sponsorship of the break this morning. I had the pleasure of doing this introduction last year, and last year I started my introduction by saying, "It's been an eventful few years for Clorox." Very hard not to start the same way this morning. As we stand today, the company is nearing the end of a five-year period where it's executed on its digital transformation and streamlined its operating model, resulting in a more agile organization prepared to deliver on both its top and bottom-line commitments. Execution has been strong. They've navigated category normalization post-COVID, record inflation, and even a malicious cyber attack threatening their operations. In each instance, they've quite literally wiped those headwinds away. You'll get it.
Demonstrating a capability to navigate through multiple challenges, they're transforming into a stronger company, one that's well-positioned to continue growing earnings and generating long-term shareholder value. One might say they're cleaning up. Too much? Fine. Here with us today, we have Chair and CEO Linda Rendle, EVP and CFO Kevin Jacobsen, and Treasurer and incoming CFO Luke Bellet. One quick note: CAGMI would like to extend a thank you and congratulations to Kevin, who recently announced his intent to retire on April 1st and has long been a supporter of this conference. And we would also like to extend a congratulations to Luke as he steps into the CFO role. Please join me in congratulating them both. With that, I'll pass it to Linda.
Thank you, Andrew. Hello, everyone. Thanks for your interest in Clorox and for joining us today. Before we get started, this presentation contains forward-looking statements. I know you all take that as seriously as we do. The focus of our discussion today is about how we continue to have confidence in delivering long-term shareholder value. We have an advantaged portfolio of superior leading brands, and we continue to invest in them. We've made strong progress, as Andrew highlighted, rebuilding earnings and accelerating top-line growth, and we remain confident in our ability to do that more consistently over time. The majority of the time today, I'm going to spend giving an update on our strategy and our complementary transformation.
We're seeing early, strong progress against our transformation value creation levers, and we're just beginning to scale many of these capabilities in the company, which is driving our confidence on our financial performance, even in a time when the consumer is more stressed. Before we do that, let's start with a brief overview of who we are and how we view our competitive advantage. We have a portfolio of leading brands in the health and wellness and household essential spaces. We compete in over 100 markets around the world, but the vast majority of our sales are in the U.S. Our North Star is maximizing economic profit, and we do that with a choiceful and disciplined playbook focused on leading brands that consumers love in categories where we can leverage megatrends and our capabilities to grow.
We continue to embed sustainability in each of our businesses because we believe that's a way that we maximize value creation and minimize risk, and we do all of this with a focus on operational excellence. Importantly, our brands, the vast majority of our brands, are number one and number two share in their category. And importantly, over the Ignite Strategy period, we have significantly increased the percentage of our portfolio that consumers deem superior. You can see we went from 54% at the beginning of our strategy period up to 64%. I'm going to talk about how we do that as an ecosystem later today. So let's get into the strategy, and I think it's important we start with the trends. The trends on the top dark blue bar were the ones that we identified in 2019 that we thought were going to be most impactful to our business.
You can see health and wellness, multicultural millennials, personalization, and responsibility. Responsibility is largely the same, so I'm not going to talk in more detail about that trend today, but I am going to cover the rest of the trends and how they have evolved and how they create opportunities for us in our categories to grow categories, grow household penetration, occasions, and share, and let's start with health and wellness. We're now calling this new wave wellness. The explosion of data and technology is now allowing consumers to demand more personalization in how they take care of their well-being. People can optimize different parts that are important to them. Perhaps you're working on sleep. I am regularly working on sleep and getting more of it. I'm not doing very well.
But I have a lot of tools to be able to do that, or maybe you're working on your dietary preferences or other lifestyle changes. Consumers are now enabled with data and technology to do this. Second, there's been a mental health crisis around the world, and we're still in the middle of it. During the pandemic in the U.S., 30% of consumers shared that they had anxiety during that time, and anxiety is up across every single demographic group, with teens being the most impacted. One in four people around the globe report still being lonely, and people are realizing that in order to deal with this, they have to take action themselves.
And the good news is there are a lot of technologies and other things that are helping them do that: build community, make lifestyle changes, get the care they need, whether they have to show up in an office or now they can do a lot of that virtually. And then certainly, medical advances are impacting the way consumers are thinking and shopping. GLP-1 is a great example of that, and a host of potential changes this makes for consumers as they go on their wellness journey. So what does this mean for Clorox? We have a number of brands that sit in the health and wellness space, but maybe I'll give you an illustrative example in our cleaning business. You might think about cleaning as a very physical way to take care of your well-being.
We have some people who've been suffering with cold and flu here in the first and second row. I hope you all have been using disinfecting wipes to remove the germs so that people around you aren't getting sick. And if not, we'll get you some at the break. But also, what cleaning can do is provide mental and emotional well-being. When you have a messy home, messy desk, actually your cortisol increases and your stress increases. So by using cleaning as a way to reduce the clutter in your life, you can reduce stress and improve well-being. The actual benefit of cleaning also enhances the feel-good chemicals in your body. Anybody on TikTok on the CleanTok channel right now?
If not, if you're like, "Oh, I'm getting a nod," we might be a little older than the generation that is primarily consuming this, but CleanTok has 79 billion views, more than BeautyTok, and people are watching other people clean because it makes them feel good. I know it's wonderful. It's like a cleaning leader's dream. Home life is also changing pretty dramatically, and this is as a result of demographics and how people are actually using their home environment. Demographics: 65% was the high where households had children a number of years ago. Those current households that have children percentage, only 18% of U.S. households have children. The fastest growing household size is one person, and it's over a quarter of households today.
The makeup of households is dramatically different, and that means the sizing of housing has changed, and we have to be ready with our brands to support people in different ways with those households. In addition, people are thinking about home differently. Only a quarter of the people in the U.S. report working outside of the home full-time if they have a job outside of the home. That means home has become a place of work and living their life with their family and friends. Because of that, they want great experiences in the drudgery of everyday chores, and they're willing to pay for them. I'll take you through some examples about this later. Then, as we have more single-person households and even for larger families, a lot of people are having to embrace smaller spaces than they would like, and they're not perfect.
So what they're doing is making those little changes throughout their ecosystem in order to have a better experience at home. If you want something fun to do not now, but during the break, because I know you're so interested in what I'm saying, Google fridge-scaping. It is a remarkable trend where people are like you would tablescape if you know what that is. They are making their fridge look like pieces of art, and it's a good example of how people are trying to take control of their environment. So for our portfolio, this creates enormous opportunities to talk to people in a relevant way. We'll talk about how we're doing that in personalization and create great brand and product experiences for them regardless of their situation, their household, or the type of house that they live in.
And then finally, from a trends perspective, we talked about personalization being a trend, but really this is another level of digitally transformed engagement. Social used to be a way just to connect with family and friends. Now it influences and frankly changes what we watch, who we associate with, what we want to buy, what we buy, how we buy. It's woven into the ecosystem of people's lives. And with that, we see a collapsing purchase funnel. So the traditional way that we would market, where you're drawing interest in a product, we get them to buy it, we get them to continue to buy it and drive loyalty, is collapsing in some cases to a single point where people are doing all of that at once in seconds.
I'll give you an example of how we're leveraging that and what we did in our Burt's Bees holiday program later. And then finally, AI assistance. This is exciting and a little bit scary. People are using this to manage all parts of their lives. Today, you can have an AI assistant decide what you're going to have for a dinner party this weekend. They can create the shopping list and make sure it arrives. So we might be entering an era where machine-to-machine marketing becomes even more important. For Clorox, we've been hard at work over the last five years building a personalization capability to deal with this, and we feel well poised to address a number of changes, even AI assistants. Being number one and two share brands in our category help us when a machine is deciding on a product for a human's basket.
And then finally, although not a trend and hopefully something that will get better as we move through this period of time, the consumer is absolutely under stress, and we've been talking about this for a while. They certainly had another roller coaster year, and they're viewing more uncertainty ahead as we all are. That is manifesting in value-seeking behaviors. People are buying larger sizes, smaller sizes. They're shopping in channels where they think they can get a better price value. They're delaying purchases. And in our categories, they're stuffing the trash bag and they're using the very last spray in that spray bottle. But really important and fundamental to how we create growth and we get these categories growing faster again is they are willing to pay for better experiences. Absolutely willing to pay, and I'm going to take you through examples of that.
I think the easiest example to understand in our industry is that people continue to move online, and they're paying a premium for that, but they are willing to pay for a better experience with convenience. I think important to note too on our categories. Our categories are very resilient, and we typically see an impact of about a point or two in times when the consumer is under stress. That's what we're seeing today. We feel very confident that these categories over time will go back to the growth rates that we've experienced, and one of the indicators is we're not seeing people move to private label. This slide looks at the percentage of private label in our categories. It's about 17%, some ups and downs with COVID.
Then I went and looked at a presentation from three CEOs ago at Clorox, and it's exactly the same chart. The reality is this exists to give people a low price when that's what they want, but people are not trading out of private label or trading into private label from brands right now, even under stress. This is really what we're focused on right now, which is making sure we're driving category growth and increasing market share by going after new occasions with consumers, and I'll talk about how we're doing that more, as well as driving household penetration. Our strategy continues to be the right set of choices in order to bring this to life. We're committed to delivering 3%-5% sales growth, EBIT margin expansion, which we get more and more confident in.
And when I talk about our Holistic Margin Management toolbox, you'll see that, and then generating strong cash flow. We do that through four choices. Fuel growth is all about removing any waste we possibly can in our system so that we can invest in our brands and expand margins. Innovate experiences is about creating great experiences for people with our brands, frictionless shopping, and bigger, stickier innovation platforms that we can invest in for years to come. Reimagine work is about being as fast as the world around us, and importantly, as skilled and advanced, and that's what our transformation is about, and I'll talk more about that. Finally, we want to ensure we have a healthy core, and we're doing the work with our portfolio to ensure that we support our financial goals.
I talked briefly about the transformation when we started, and this is really about creating modernized capabilities for us to execute our strategy. As I said, we have to move as fast as the world around us, and in order to do that, we have to be as advanced. All of those trends that I spoke to you about, many of which are supported by consumers engaging in data and technology in new ways, and we have to be right there with them. We have to be able to see end to end to remove the cost to ensure that we can continue to expand margins and invest in our business.
And that's why we invested in a significant and comprehensive digital transformation that we're nearing the end of, and invested in a streamlined operating model, which not only makes us faster and more agile, but also saves us $100 million annually. So let me topline the results from a strategy perspective, and then I'm going to take each strategy choice in turn and talk to you about how this transformation is coming to life. So first, we stabilized and grew gross margin after significant impact from inflation on our margins, and we have strong confidence in our ability to deliver EBIT margin expansion annually consistent with our goals. We accelerated top-line growth, meeting the low end of our raised sales target. We've significantly increased the consumer value in our portfolio, and we've strengthened our innovation pipeline, which I'll talk about later, and significantly enhanced our retailer relationships.
On the Reimagine Work side, we are nearing the end of a comprehensive digital transformation. We have the data foundation in place. We're going to implement the U.S. version of our ERP later this year, which we're very excited about because it unlocks new value streams, and we're just beginning to scale most of these modernized capabilities that we're building, and then on Evolve the portfolio, early in the strategy period, we acquired the majority interest in our Saudi joint venture, and we recently divested our VMS and Argentina businesses, enhancing our growth, margin, and reducing volatility. I know I'm a fast talker. Stick with me. Here we go. We're going to go into each one of the choices. The first one is on fuel growth, and this is the one that gets us super excited for the future because it's all about our ability to invest.
Last year, I spoke about this holistic margin management toolbox, and this was building on a strong foundation that Clorox has had in their DNA for many, many years to remove waste and costs. But we needed a broader set of toolbox enabled by data and technology to recover the margin that we had lost during inflation and to ensure we have the fuel to invest, and this choice is paying off. This year, we'll return gross margins to their pre-pandemic levels, and we're more and more confident in our ability to deliver EBIT and margin expansion annually, and some of these levers are just getting started, so from a net revenue management perspective, we certainly got a lot of value from straight price increases over the last number of years dealing with inflation.
But we didn't have much work in spaces like price pack architecture or design to value, and that is because you need a data and technology foundation to do most of that work and be able to look end to end. And the good news is, as we began to implement these tools, we're seeing tremendous value, particularly from price pack architecture and design to value. And let me give you some examples. Last year, we spoke about this example, which was one of our first executions of price pack architecture. We concentrated Pine-Sol, which Pine-Sol is a dilutable. These things are naturally in the consumer's mind concentrated, but we did it in a way that added consumer value to the product, and we significantly enhanced the growth rate on this business by doing this, as well as enhanced margins, delivered a better environmental profile, and increased retailer shelf productivity.
Win, win, win across the board. I feel terrific about this execution, and it's one that we can build on for years to come on Pine-Sol. So what comes next? We are expanding this capability across the company, and one we're working on right now, just as an example, is Clorox Disinfecting Wipes. We're currently in market testing with a variety of retailers, different configurations and pack to maximize consumer value, increase sales, and margin. We're really excited about what we're learning now, and we'll be able to scale this quickly once we have this done, and we're doing this across our businesses. And this might be my favorite example of net revenue management that we have.
This is Design to Value, and what we're able to do is look across end to end with our data lake now and see all of the places we have cost in the system and how it connects back to consumer value, and in the next few years, we're going to enhance gross margin on Kingsford by several hundred basis points of margin expansion by implementing tools that will not change the consumer experience or make it better, so for example, we're standardizing our formulas across our plants and our network. This allows for a more consistent burn for Kingsford, a consumer win, and reduced costs. We're changing our packaging to increase stackability and reduce warehouse space. We've simplified or will simplify our portfolio by 40%, reducing logistics and operational costs. This is a great example of the type of work we can do now.
Having that data and technology is the foundation, and we are doing this across our businesses right now in combination with the innovation that we're doing so that we get scale on our resources. And of course, what I said is important. We have to maintain or grow our consumer value, and this work supports that. But let me talk about how we actually do this at the company. This is the model that we use, and we talk about delivering clearly superior experiences to consumers. We measure each one of our businesses against this model and these five vectors to say, are we delivering an experience to consumers? And that's helped us get to the place we are today on superiority. We have to have the right brand proposition. We have to connect with them emotionally and rationally.
We need to make sure they can find it on the shelf, whether that be a physical shelf or a digital shelf. The packaging itself has to jump off. They have to know exactly the value that they're getting out of that product. We have to get our claims right, and we have to have shelf visibility. And when they take that package home, they better be delighted by it. It better function the way that they expect it to and give them little moments of delight. If you all do go on CleanTok later today, which I encourage you to do, listen to how many times people listen to a spray from a bottle and what that connotes for them. It's critical that we get things like packaging right. And then product, it's got to work. It's got to remove the dirt. It has to block odors.
If you're talking about cat litter, it has to taste great if you're talking about Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing. Then we combine that with the price. All of these things together dictate if a consumer loves it and gives us a superiority rating from a value perspective. Let me take you through three examples of how this model works and how we think about it across Clorox, Fresh Step, and Glad. Starting with Clorox and our Scentiva platform, we've talked for a number of years about the Scentiva platform, and it's one that we talked about relaunching last year. Scentiva goes after households that have a preference for strong scent. These households are big in the U.S., and they make up a third of the cleaning occasions. This portion of the population is growing.
Scentiva addresses the needs of these consumers who don't want to have trade-offs in their cleaning experience between something that works really well and gives them a delightful experience at home. Because remember, they are at home more now than ever, and they notice what their home smells like. So we relaunched Scentiva, and we put it through this framework, and I'm going to take you through it now. The first starts with the proposition. Nobody can own a Clorox clean like Clorox, and Scentiva brings in a long-lasting fragrance paired with that. The proposition is strong, and people see superior value in that. From a product perspective, our products work well, and these products smell amazing, which was a little easier to do in a wipe and a spray, but now we're launching into tougher jobs, which is what the consumer asked for.
We're launching Scentiva in bleach or have launched it in bleach and toilet this year, which is more a place where people expect harsher smells, but we've been able to deliver them a great experience across all of the places that they're cleaning in their home. Let's see how this comes to life in advertising. Clorox Scentiva cleans like Clorox. Smells like lavender. Feels like... Trusted clean, long-lasting freshness. Clorox Scentiva. And then, of course, we have to make sure that the consumer understands this at shelf. So we are launching new packaging with Scentiva with high-impact graphics really connoting that superior fragrance that they're going to get when they take it home. And all of this is coming together to drive multi-year growth on Scentiva.
This year, we expect 58% growth this year from this platform that's been in market for multiple years, showing that this is something that we have been able to invest and build on, and if we get superiority right, we can continue to grow. Let's move to an example on cat litter and particularly our Fresh Step business. Some of you might know that cat litter was more impacted when we experienced the cyber attack 18 months ago, and that's because when you're a cat parent and you have litter in your house, that can be a little traumatic sometimes to have to switch to another litter. We've made great progress, and this is how we're thinking about our litter business in this superiority framework to continue to make progress.
We start with it’s important that we win in this category because this category is going to continue to grow. And what’s the evidence of that? First of all, all of the growth is coming from younger consumers as cat owners. Millennials and Gen Zs are the people entering, and they’re driving all of the growth through 2030 in cat ownership. Cat ownership is outpacing dog ownership, and multi-cat households are on the rise. Cats are also super cool, and don’t believe if you don’t want to believe me, believe Taylor Swift who took her cat on tour this year. And 96% of people say that their pet is a very important part of their household, and they are willing to spend for better experiences for their pet and for the family that has to have the pet in their home.
The reality is, although litter is really good, it still has a lot of dissatisfiers, and we can better meet those needs for consumers. One of those needs that they have that we can meet with our particular proposition, Fresh Step, which stands for fresh and clean, is odor control, which is the number one dissatisfier still in the category, even with all the great innovation out there. We're launching Fresh Step Heavy Duty. It has a 30-day odor control claim, which is the longest on the market. It is with a proprietary carbon technology that we have, as well as a bunch of other premium technologies that make this product up. This is the first category innovation in odor control in six years. Let's see how this comes to life for the cat and their parent. Every cat acts like their scent don't stink.
And now with our strongest litter ever, it actually doesn't get 30-day odor control. Step it up to new Fresh Step Heavy Duty. I think it's safe to say that if you're a marketer at Clorox, you want to work on a cat litter business because they make some of the best commercials. We also have to win on the shelf, like I spoke about, so we have to get it right in store. And particularly for litter, it's important that we get it right on the digital shelf because this category over-indexes in e-commerce. We revamped all of our digital assets across the line in e-commerce this year, as well as we launched our new odor control product that will have the new digital assets as well, and we're seeing strong growth in e-commerce as a result, and on the physical shelf, our product has to stand out.
The consumer has to know what the claims are, and we are revamping our packaging this year to do that so that everybody knows what the right fresh stuff is for them. We have made good progress on litter, but we have more work to do. And you can see we'll continue to put this through the framework to improve our superiority, improve our growth, and ensure that we're growing market share. The final example I'll take you through is trash. Trash is a problem we all share. It's the highest household penetration category that we compete in. And because people are spending more time at home, they really notice when their trash stinks, and they're looking for ways to enhance odor control and strength of the bag. Of course, in this category, like all, but particularly in this category, value is top of mind.
This is a place we have found some really interesting places where people are willing to pay for a better experience. I'll take you through some product that does that. Trash, like we said, has many dissatisfiers. One of the key ones is if a bag rips or tears, that is a bad experience for the consumer. Terrible experience if you all have had that happen before. We launched a product improvement this year on our MaxStrength line, which is our most premium bag that strengthens the top of the bag, the place where people get the most rips by two times. We're seeing very significant growth from this claim and innovation with 14% sales growth in our MaxStrength line. Glad ForceFlex MaxStrength bag with a two-times stronger top. For over-the-top strength, it's better than all good. It's all Glad.
We're making a bag stronger, and we're also making it much more fun. A teal trash bag. Who would have thought a teal trash bag would be so appealing to consumers? It is. 60% of consumers say a teal trash bag makes their trash experience more delightful. We partnered with a leading retailer to execute on this based off of the trends. This also has an amazing scent called Bahama Bliss, and we launched this exclusively with this retailer. This item is now in the top five of their Glad items in the category. It's amazing what getting those small things right for the consumer can do and delighting them in an experience. This is on our most premium line of trash bags and is growing very strong, showing consumer willingness to pay for better experiences.
We'll be expanding this Bahama Bliss and teal trash bag throughout the U.S., and we're having very strong retailer support. And then, of course, we have to get it right on shelf, like we've talked about with all of these examples. We've improved our packaging across our Glad lineup. This is an example of what we're doing in our most premium tier, MaxStrength, where we're continuing to better communicate to consumers the superior value that we offer to them. So Glad, we're going to continue to lead with innovation in the superiority model. We have to ensure we're getting execution right on shelf. And all of these things are contributing to the market share we're driving now, and the market share will continue to drive in the future. Okay, so I want to pivot to reimagine work.
I've talked about some of our capabilities and how they're starting to scale, but I want to take you through three specific examples that apply to these businesses and how we're creating superior value to remove costs as well as accelerate growth. The first is consumer personalization. We are at the end of our personalization journey for our Ignite Strategy period and have met our goals, and we're setting a new big goal around enhanced capabilities. Our new innovation tools are working extremely well, and I'll talk about the results we're seeing there. And then we're removing costs in our core operations and have even more opportunity as we implement our U.S. ERP later this year. So starting with personalization, we met our goal a year early to get to know 100 million consumers, and now 60% of our spending is personalized with consumers.
This seems like an easy concept. We deliver the right person, the right message at the right time, but it's actually pretty difficult to do in practice. But it's a choice that we're very excited we made because we're delivering top CPG quintile ROI on our advertising investment. This is really paying off in terms of the return that we're getting and our confidence to invest in our brands and accelerate growth. How does this come to life? We personalize different experiences for consumer. This is another Glad example. We are in our third year of our cherry blossom execution, and we're still seeing tremendous growth because we're talking to the consumer in a very personalized way, recognizing that they're looking for better experiences in a really onerous job.
For example, if you're looking for a new handbag, we will serve you an ad on the bottom left that introduces you to your new favorite bag. If you're one of those consumers engaged in health and wellness, maybe you're searching for an aromatherapy candle, we can serve you an ad that talks about aromatherapy from your trash bag. This personalization drives real results as people feel like we're meeting them in the space that they're in. And I talked about earlier that purchase funnel collapsing and how we're taking advantage of that. This is an execution we did for Burt's Bees over the holiday. Gifting is a very important part of our business. We worked with influencers and created curated gifts that they then could recommend to their followers. So maybe you're looking for a gift for your kid's teacher or your mom.
The content was immediately shoppable, and then we were able to use the data to see what messages were resonating, what packages were resonating. We were able to change our execution in other parts of our media as well as with our retailers. And we can personalize with retailers to do really cool things in store. So I don't know how many of you are football fans, and if you're a football fan, you're a griller, and maybe you really love your alma mater. There's a lot of people in the U.S. who feel this way. And we were able to create bespoke experiences for people, matching them with their alma mater. So imagine you could show up if you're a University of Georgia fan and you're a Bulldog, you could have an experience where you were grilling authentic Georgia barbecue with some amazing chefs while tailgating with Bulldog players.
Very, very cool. And then we were able to create custom digital content to talk about people's alma maters with Kingsford, and we drove superior merchandising in a Walmart and a Sam's store to meet those needs. This significantly increased the lift that we were getting in these promotions and tailgating in an important time where we're trying to expand the season. And we can also personalize along the entire journey for consumers. In this example on Brita, unfortunately, in October, municipalities were required by law to let people know if they had the potential of lead in their pipes. So imagine if you're a consumer and you receive that notice and you're worried about your family's health and well-being.
We were able to personalize across every aspect of that journey, giving them the information that they need and product solutions like our filter that removes lead, and we saw a significant increase in that product as a result, and then, as you can imagine, the more personalized you get, you have to create a lot of content, a lot of content. And what our investment in digital and data and technology are doing is maybe allowing us to do this at scale without increasing costs and then, frankly, lowering costs in many cases. I'm going to let you watch a short video of how we've built brand models with Gen AI that create content in just minutes, so we're thrilled with the results we're seeing for personalization. This is one of our very early modernized capabilities that we've already scaled.
But we need to do more, and what comes next? We're ready for one-to-one communication, which is something, frankly, we never thought we could do when we went on this personalization journey. We didn't think we would have the scale or the efficiency to be able to do it. So imagine today we talk to moms who have to provide snacks for their kids when they come home from school. It's a group of people we can do, and we're pretty sure who those moms are, and we give them good content. But we're going to move from that to talking to Carla, specifically talking about the points throughout her day and where she is in her day, giving her relevant content for all those apertures. So let me show you what this would look like. With Carla, we know Carla is a mom with a toddler.
She also has two older kids that are teens. She's trying to ensure that they have healthy snacks, and she's also on a health journey herself. We can serve her content from Hidden Valley that addresses those very specific needs just for Carla. Of course, what happens for Steve is very different than what happened for Carla. Steve just moved from Texas to Wisconsin. He's going to college, and he's become a badger. He actually has never tried Hidden Valley Ranch before, but his friend just introduced him to dipping pizza in ranch. We can serve him content that calls him a badger, puts the right jersey in place. We know that he orders pizza on Wednesday night, and we can be there for him in that. We know when finals are, and we're ready there to support him in a late-night snack.
This is the future of our marketing one-to-one, and we set a big goal. In the next five years, we want 50% of our media spending to be one-to-one, a massive leap forward and enabling us to build even better and trusted relationships with our consumers. The next capability I want to touch on is innovation. Last year, I introduced our new digital core, and I showed you an innovation, Clorox Toilet Foam, that we built off of that core that we launched in a mere matter of months. We are just scaling this capability across our company and seeing fabulous results. We've reduced the cycle time and innovation by 65% using this digital core. We're driving significantly higher consumer interest in the ideas that we're putting in front of them through these tools.
And we have now three times more ideas in the pipeline than we did before we launched it. So we're excited about our ability to accelerate innovation and get more value out of it for years to come. And these next two slides are just examples of how we made stronger platforms with that digital core and how we continue to feel confident in our growth trajectory. The final one I want to talk about, which is really just getting started, is leveraging the capability to remove waste from our core operations, particularly supply chain. And this will massively accelerate as we implement our U.S. version of the ERP and get the foundation complete in our digital transformation. But we're already seeing strong results using things like AI and machine learning. We're increasing our supply chain responsiveness. We've improved our customer service levels. We've reduced inventories and lowered costs.
We're really excited. This is very early innings for us in this, and we see tremendous value coming out of the next few years. So what's next? We want to continue to lead in personalization, but we need to ramp up these other capabilities to continue to deliver value. And you can imagine, as you take those examples across the portfolio, the opportunity that exists and drives our confidence in our ability to drive top-line growth and margin expansion. Luke's going to connect us back to our financial algorithm to close the presentation so you can see how these things are in concert. And then our final choice, evolve the portfolio. This is ensuring that we have a stronger core, and we do have a stronger core as consumers tell us that our product portfolio is more superior than it ever has been since we've measured it.
And we also want to use portfolio transformation to ensure reducing volatility and enhancing sales and margin. And we did that, as I highlighted at the beginning, with a majority ownership of our Saudi joint venture and the divestiture of VMS in Argentina. And of course, we have a strong balance sheet that continues to give us the ability to execute M&A as a strategic lever. Before I turn it over to Kevin and Luke, I want to cover sustainability. Don't stand up yet, Kevin, because I'm going to thank you too. So sustainability continues to be an important part of our business. We are embedding sustainability into our businesses, as I mentioned at the beginning, because we think this is the best way to ensure that we're minimizing risks that are real and ensuring that we also maximize value.
And a great example of that is the Pine-Sol execution that I showed you, where we can have a better environmental footprint, we can reduce risk for us, and we can give the consumer a better experience. And as I hand it over to Kevin and Luke, like Andrew said, I want to thank Kevin for his excellent leadership at Clorox for nearly three decades. In his time as CFO, he's been a terrific partner to me and been a champion of our growth and transformation. Kevin, we are definitely going to miss you. I'm going to miss you, and we wish you the very, very best in retirement. Luke, oh, let's give him a round. I'm also thrilled to have Luke taking the job as CFO. Luke and I have had the opportunity to work together for 20 years.
He's a terrific leader, and I know he's going to continue to build on the progress that Kevin made. Thank you.
Thank you. Oh my gosh, that was so nice. Wasn't it? Great way to finish my last leg. Hi, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today. Hey, what I'd like to do now is just provide a brief financial update, and I really want to start with three key messages. The first, Clorox has a very long track record of creating value for our shareholders. Additionally, as part of our Ignite Strategy, our goal is to accelerate the financial performance of this company, and then lastly, I think we're very well positioned to continue to deliver value as we move forward, and Luke's going to talk a little bit more about that in a moment. Let me start with our track record.
As I said, we've got a long track record of creating value. If you look back over the last 20 years, Clorox has averaged about an 8% return per year, a combination of stock price appreciation and our dividend yield, and the way we've been able to do that is focus on maximizing cash flows. Now, under Ignite, we're targeting free cash flow of 11%-13%. You can see by the slide, we've averaged pretty much right in the middle of that range, and we've done that during a record level of cost inflation, and while it's important we maximize cash flow, we're also very focused on being disciplined about how we deploy that cash. What I understand, Linda, Luke, the entire leadership team understands very clearly. How we generate the strongest returns for our investors is to invest to maintain a healthy and profitable core portfolio.
That's exactly what we're doing. Linda just walked through the examples. We're investing in innovation, our digital transformation, our streamlined operating model. We're increasing demand investments. That's accelerating our financial performance as we further build that competitive moat around our portfolio. While we do that, we're going to continue to support the dividend. You folks who follow us more closely know we've been raising the dividend year after year for decades, and you should expect that as we move forward. At the same time, we're going to keep a close eye on debt. Now, we target debt to EBITDA of two to two and a half times. More recently, we've been at the lower end of that range. I expect this year we'll be at or below that range.
What that does is it gives us tremendous financial flexibility to pursue incremental investment options as we find those. Finally, we'll continue to return excess cash to shareholders, both through our dividend and our share buyback program. Folks, what I can tell you, if you focus on delivering strong cash flows and you're disciplined with how you invest that cash, you can generate very nice returns on invested capital. The chart I'm sharing with you shows return on invested capital for our 16 publicly traded peer companies. Clorox consistently operates at the very top third of that group based on our performance. All right, let me turn our attention to our financial goals. As Linda said, our intent under Ignite Strategy is to accelerate our financial performance. If you look at our previous strategy period, we averaged about 2% sales growth per year.
We had essentially flat EBIT margins, and we delivered strong cash flow, although, say, highly influenced by U.S. tax reform back in 2017. If you look at the goals we've set under Ignite, we want to meaningfully accelerate the top line 3%-5%. We want to be able to expand EBIT margins consistently 25-50 basis points per year. And then we want to continue to deliver very strong cash flow. Now, the way we go after that, first and foremost, we're working on accelerating the top line. We're focused on bigger, stickier innovation platforms, as Linda talked about, Scentiva being such a nice example of some of the good work we're doing. We're leveraging new growth runways as we see consumer behaviors changing, and we're taking advantage of those as they benefit our portfolio. We're building net revenue management capabilities.
And then, as Linda mentioned, we continue to evolve our portfolio. We bought majority control of our Saudi joint venture. We've exited Argentina, and more recently, we sold our vitamins, minerals, and supplements business. And that's structurally accelerating the growth rate of this company. And at the same time, we're working to advance margins. Now, for those of you who follow this more closely, you know during the inflationary cycle a few years ago, we lost about 800 basis points of gross margin. And we have been committed to rebuilding that margin. And importantly, we're on track to do that this year and, in fact, go a little bit further. And we're leveraging our very well-established cost savings program. I think we've been able to demonstrate the strength of our portfolio has allowed us to take the necessary pricing to also recover margin.
And then both net revenue management and the portfolio work we're doing is all structurally improving our gross margins. All right, so let me end on our fiscal year 2025 outlook. From a sales perspective, we're targeting 4%-7% organic sales growth. Now, keep in mind, we have a temporary benefit from our ERP implementation. If I set that aside, we're targeting 3%-5% sales growth in line with our long-term goal. We expect to expand gross margins 125- 150 basis points. Now, what that does for us, it gets us back to the 44%, and we go a bit further, another 20- 50 basis points beyond. And then finally, we're on track to have another very strong year for earnings. Again, if I set aside the temporary ERP benefit, we're targeting 9%-12% earnings growth this year.
At the midpoint, this would be our third straight year of double-digit earnings growth. All right, everyone, thank you very much for your time. I'm now very pleased to introduce Luke Bellet to join us.
Thank you, Kevin, and thank you, everyone, for joining us. As we look forward into the future, we remain confident in our ability to deliver a financial algorithm and create long-term value for the shareholders. You heard Linda talk about our strategic choices, which really are designed to create an ecosystem for us to deliver our financial goals. You also heard that in the past few years, we've been on a transformation journey to build a stronger, more resilient company. We streamlined our operating model, and we made significant investment in digital transformation. That really creates the foundation for us to modernize our capabilities. Here's the thing, we're just beginning now to scale broadly those modern capabilities that we've been building. That gives us good confidence in our ability to unlock further top-line growth and margin expansion for years to come.
Our transformation is enhancing our ability to drive top-line growth. On innovation, you heard from Linda about the good progress we've been making in building a stronger program, and we're just now scaling broadly our Digital Core capability, and we're seeing great results, both strengthening our pipeline as well as accelerating our time to market. On personalization, we build a leading-edge capability, and we're still seeing more opportunity for growth as we're now focusing on one-to-one communication, and then we've been building a robust Net Revenue Management capability. I think you heard Linda share some of the example of Pine-Sol and Clorox Disinfecting Wipes, where we saw great progress, and we're really now broadly scaling that capability across all our businesses, so we feel like we have a strong pipeline and a clear runway for us to continue supporting our share and our sales growth for years to come.
Our transformation is also enhancing our ability to expand margin. We had for decades a pretty well-established cost-saving programs, and last year, we've been shifting to a more holistic and integrated margin management approach, adding new capabilities, and Linda talked about some of them, Design to Value, Net Revenue Management. And this is really working for us. In the past two years, we've been delivering record-level cost savings. In addition, we will be implementing a new ERP in the U.S. at the beginning of next fiscal year. And over time, we expect to see additional productivity savings as well as improving end-to-end visibility and consistency. And just recently, we've been deploying a Global Business Services organization. And in the past, it had been difficult for us to take full advantage of that capability given our outdated digital infrastructure.
In just on that initiative, we can see now a roadmap of tens of millions of dollars over the next few years. So again, confident in our pipeline and can see a clear runway for years to come, which gives us good confidence in our ability to keep expanding margin and, over time, lower SG&A levels. So with that, we think the investment case for Clorox remains strong. We have an attractive business model that generates strong cash flows and high return on invested capital. And as Kevin mentioned, we're going to continue to be disciplined on how we deploy that capital. So let me bring this to a close and end where Linda started. Our Ignite Strategy continues to position us well for the future. We have a leading brand with superior value. We are transforming our company and modernizing our capability.
That gives us good confidence in our ability to deliver our financial algorithm and create long-term value for our shareholders. With that, I'd like to thank you for your time today. It looks like we're just about time. For those of you joining us, we'll see you in the breakout room. Thank you.
Luke did my job for me. So join me in thanking Clorox again for their generous sponsorship this morning. And we'll see you guys over at the breakout.