All right, we'll get started. Good morning, everybody. My name is Jon Andersen. I'm the consumer research analyst at William Blair that covers Scotts Miracle-Gro. Thanks for joining us for the Scotts presentation this morning. We are very happy to have the company's Chief Financial Officer, Matt Garth, with us, as well as Senior Vice President of Investor Relations, Aimee DeLuca, somewhere in the audience, and Manager of Strategy Investor Relations, Aaliyah Dean. Scotts is an innovator, manufacturer, and marketer of branded lawn and garden, as well as control products. Gardening, we view, as a very attractive target market, one in which, which is experiential, where participants are typically highly engaged and committed to the activity. Scotts products hold leading market shares, and its brands are typically synonymous with the categories in which they compete.
I know we've all heard of them: Ortho, Roundup, Turf Builder, Miracle-Gro, et cetera. Scotts has a wide competitive moat, aided by its scale, which allows for greater investment in brand building, innovation, and marketing, and supports a field sales and merchandising staff that collaborates closely with the largest retailers in the space: home centers, mass, and other garden supply retailers throughout the country. Before handing it over to management, quick housekeeping items. Immediately following the presentation, we're gonna have a breakout session where we'll do the Q&A. That'll be in the Richardson Room on the second floor. I also have to just quickly mention, you can find a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts of interest on the William Blair website. So with that, I'll turn it over to Matt.
Thank you, Jon. Morning. I think John just did a really good summary of what the proposition is here, and we will talk about it. I'm gonna spend kinda 25 minutes talking about Scotts Miracle-Gro, what it is that we do, what our value proposition is, and how we connect with consumers, and will continue to do so throughout the future to create significant value for consumers and shareholders. Let's start with... Not me. Let's start with kind of a broad vision, and, and John, I think, went there. There is a tangible, visceral engagement in lawn and garden. There is a feeling that you get when your yard is better than your neighbor's. There is a feeling that you get when you walk out on your backyard, and you see a green space that is vibrant, growing, and real. This is my vision of beauty.
This is perfectly striped grass, cut at 3 inches, that has been maintained for a few years. This is a Scotts Miracle-Gro lawn. This is a plant that has been planted probably around Mother's Day, is growing voraciously, and is developing very wonderful fruits, vegetables, what have you, utilizing our fertilizers, utilizing Miracle-Gro, utilizing our soils. These are flowers. My wife is a flower lover, and so we grow flowers, and I get to cut flowers in my garden and take them to my wife. It's the most beautiful thing for me. This is what all of this means. Now, whether you're an American Dream person or not, I am. I believe in a wonderful space that you share with your family. That is the backyard. 55% of households engage in developing their backyard, engage in this space.
When John talks about power, when he talks about what it means to be the market leader in lawn and garden, it means more than half of the homes in America are utilizing Scotts Miracle-Gro products. And the reason is because they get to enjoy their space with their family. The connection is real. It has always been for me, it has always been for the company, in its 155-year history. Okay, let's get into it a little bit. What is Scotts Miracle-Gro? So Scotts started in 1868 as a producer of high-quality seed for farmers and built that business in Marysville, Ohio, and was a leader of the lawns market by the turn of the century. At the same time, kind of in the mid-1950s, Horace Hagedorn developed Miracle-Gro along with a partner and became the gardener's best friend.
Over time, the strength of Miracle-Gro continued to outpace that of any other brand in the lawn and garden category. So much so that the profitability, the cash flow, the capability of Miracle-Gro allowed them, a smaller company, private, to merge with Scotts, a larger public company, in 1995. That brought together the best brands in lawns and the best brand in garden. Over the last several years, we've built out a portfolio that strengthens those two leading nationally recognized brands. You can see them up here, a really nice layout. We've moved into live goods with Bonnie. We have plant foods that extend beyond Miracle-Gro into Osmocote. You go through all of the growing media when you walk through your favorite home center, and remember, the major retailers and home centers are our partners.
You will see a dirt wall, and that dirt wall with lots of great potting soil, garden soils, mulches, a lot of that is Scotts. I'd say the vast majority of that is Scotts Miracle-Gro product. And you can see some of the brands, Earthgro, which you'll see at many major retailers, is also one of our brands. And then on the controls, weed, insect, and rodent side, these are very familiar names, Roundup, and again, we've changed the formulation of Roundup, so that is a new technology, new introduction that we've done that has launched very well. We have Ortho Home Defense, many of you have seen. You will see that brand continuing to grow, and then Tomcat, which is one of the leading rodenticides in the marketplace.
At the same time, that business had been growing at, let's say, a nice clip rate of GDP ±1%, for decades, and it was throwing off around 8%-10% free cash flow of sales. If you'll remember, from the late 1990s through the early 2020s, it was all about growth and changing your growth algorithm to be able to grow faster than anyone else. So what did that mean? Jim and the team pursued a area in cannabis, where . . . What were we trying to achieve? We were trying to create the preeminent cannabis company, and we still are today. There are lots of great lanes and highways that lead down this road, but as you know, it's been very volatile.
We have a leading group of brands that supply the hydroponics business with all of the elements they need to grow high-quality cannabis, and then help distribute that along with great brands into great markets that are growing as states move towards legalization. Most recently, on the cannabis side, we moved to a relationship with BFG, which is one of the nation's largest lawn and garden distributors, and so we are doing that, and we'll get into that a little bit later, to help facilitate a margin improvement story at Scotts Miracle-Gro and Hawthorne.
When we talk about what cannabis means for Scotts Miracle-Gro today, I just want to bifurcate this, because we'll get later in the presentation around our, our priorities for the year and beyond, but just recognize that there is the hydroponic supply side, which is Hawthorne, and then there is also the cannabis retail side, which we've made small investments in, and most recently, we helped announce a deal with RIV, which is one of our investments, where they are combining with Cansortium to create one of the leading MSOs in the nation. And so these investments are all very important to helping drive profitability for our shareholders through the various investments we made, but also a more robust future on the cannabis side. So what does that future look like, and what is the value proposition?
I started with a vision of what the Scotts consumer is, can be, what they are attuned to. If you go down and say, "What is the investment thesis?" We talked about the brands. John talked about them. Iconic, they've been leading the lawn and garden category. We define the lawn and garden category. We are empowered to bring new innovations to expand the lawn and garden market. We are growing at GDP plus. This year, we just put out this morning, we'll grow 5%-7%. Yes, that's down a bit from what we had initially projected of 7%-8%, but still very robust growth for us on a year-over-year basis. We've been on a pathway to recovery margins. If I go pre-pandemic, our margins were kind of 32.5%, 33%. Last year, we just ended at 23.7%.
There's almost 1,000 basis points for us to go get in terms of margin recovery, and we are on that mission. It is a multi-year mission, and this year we're going to get 250 basis points plus of it. We are making investments in innovation, in marketing, to drive the space and to drive our margin profile and pricing profile as we move forward. All of those elements took a step forward this year and really were in support of what is a, again, multi-year strategy to improve our overall profile. And then last but not least, and dear to my heart, dear to your heart, disciplined capital allocation. This is a company, and I said it earlier, that can generate significant free cash flow.
That cash flow, when we get to a net leverage position that we feel comfortable with, can be directed at shareholder returns, and that is the intent, and primarily through share repurchases, but there are also other means that we can look at. So a very long history of doing that, and so getting back on trend with the shareholder-friendly activities is what we're looking to do. You heard John talk about, and it was really... John did a great job repeating what I talk about because we travel a lot together, apparently. What are our strategic moats? What is it that separates Scotts Miracle-Gro from any other player in lawn and garden, and by the way, also other partners of retailers? Innovation that defines the space, that expands the lawn and garden market, that brings new consumers into the space. We grow the pie.
No one else has the capability to do what we're doing. We have four research and development centers around the nation that help us drive those new products. Brands and marketing. This year, we're going to spend nearly $140 million in active media. That is a very good number, back on trend. It is significantly higher than what we've been doing in the past couple of years. If any of you have been watching TV or streaming anything, I am certain that you have seen Scotts Miracle-Gro commercials. That is a power. When we advertise, people pick up our products... Supply chain, we have an unparalleled capability in sourcing, producing, and distributing product. Think about it this way: I'm gonna use a low-margin product as a great example. If you are producing mulch, which mulch is a product that's like taking water to elephants.
Everyone wants it, and they need a lot of it, but it's heavy, it's wet. You don't wanna ship that across the country. We have 40-plus growing media stations around the nation that allow us to be close to markets, that allow us to be close to our retailers, that if anyone else were to try to build it, it would be significantly value challenging. Because of the positions we've had for a long time, because of the network that we have in place, and because of the efficiencies that we've gained, this is a power for us. And last but not least, and you heard John talk about it as well, we have 2,000-plus seasonal associates who are on the floor every day at our retail partners.
What they are doing at our retail partners is making sure that our shelves are stocked, and when I say our shelves, we are managing the retail space in lawn and garden. We are making sure that our product is clean, it's pulled forward, the stacks are high and available for consumers. That is a significant power, by the way, that other brands want to lean in with us. They want us to do that for them. So major power across all of these defensible positions, and they belie the moat that we talk about when we say that we have very strong competitive positions. The innovation that we've done this year has been, in my view, step change. Organics, as you all know, is a preference point for the modern consumer.
They want clean products that they feel have no legacy items in them that may not be pure. So we launched a new organic line this year. You can see we've surrounded that with Martha Stewart. These commercials are, and I think later in the presentation, I'll show you one, they are deliberately tongue-in-cheek. They are deliberately trying to engage with the consumer in a way to say, "This is cool," and believe it or not, for some of us who have known Martha Stewart for 50 years, she's still super cool, and so they are connecting, and her ads and what she's doing is helping us. The Healthy product, you see it up there, the second one in. Now, again, I started with, "I am a lawn enthusiast." That's my vision of beauty is that lawn that you saw.
In the midsummer season, you will start to see brown spots in your lawn, and most people think, "I'm not watering my lawn enough." That's not the case. It's usually disease that's creeping in, and it's every lawn in every part of the country. And so ensuring that you have a product that manages that simply for the consumer is what we did this year. And so this is a great fertilization product that also has our DiseaseEx in it, so in one application, the consumer's getting two benefits. It's creating value for the consumer, and it's ensuring that they come in with another fertilization, a second or third fertilization in the season. The Max line is a new introduction that we did at Costco.
It is a specific launch for Costco, and it has been performing extremely well, and what it did is it took a large bag of Turf Builder II and instead turned it to a whole season program from spring to fall. So you have consumers engaging across the season now in Costco with a value price point. The new Roundup formulation's also performing extremely well, and again, let's go to that associated marketing down there with Martha, with Kristofer Hivju from Game of Thrones, you know, Scott for Scotts. It's very powerful, and it performs extremely well in helping to educate the consumer as to the benefits of using our products. Now, I don't know how these videos are gonna work, but like I said, we are investing significantly in the season. Are they gonna work?
They're gonna work.
All right. So we are investing significantly in the season, and we are investing significantly in getting our brands back out there. Go ahead and run it. Or not. So the first one, you would imagine that Martha is up there, and Martha's talking to her lead gardener, a guy named Ryan, at her garden, and they are talking about what... Oh, okay. Go ahead.
All dirt is the same. You need dirt with the right kind of nutrients. Look at this new organic soil from Miracle-Gro.
Everybody should have it. It worked great for us.
This is as good as gold in any garden. If people only knew that it really is about the dirt.
You're a dirt nerd.
Huge dirt nerd. I'm proud of it.
And then immediately we get tons of shirts that are, like, dirt nerd shirts. We get dirt nerd hats, right? Everyone's into being a dirt nerd. And then this one, if you can, start it from the beginning, 'cause it's... There you go.
I thought water would help with these dry spots.
That's lawn disease, but Scotts Healthy Plus will cure it.
Lawn disease?
Been going around.
Like, other people have it, and it's not-
Pick up a bag of Scotts Turf Builder Healthy Plus Lawn Food today.
Feed your lawn. Feed it.
All right, tongue in cheek. There, there's one that's also on national broadcast. That is a gentleman who's talking to Scott, and it comes off like he has an STD, and it's just—it's beautifully done, and people really enjoy it, and we get great feedback, but it's also highly educational. That's a 15-second spot where you learn exactly what the problem is, and Scott helps you provide the solution with the healthy fertilization opportunity. Really good marketing that is driving consumers into the category. We talked a bit about our strong retailer partnerships. You can see a spattering of our relationships in the middle, but we have expanding and deepening relationships across omnichannel in through Amazon, and these are extremely important to us for the future and also for us today.
Because as these home retailers move into other areas, so they're deepening into omnichannel, we're leaning in with them. And this will be very powerful in how you move products that sometimes weigh 40 pounds and how you do it efficiently. And then we talked a little bit about our merchandisers and our counselors in store. I mean, how great is it if you go... I'm a Home Depot customer, it doesn't mean that I don't love the rest of our retailers. I do. It's just that I have a Home Depot near me, and I'm there almost every day. We have... I'm doing a renovation. Sorry. So you have a Milwaukee agent who's in the store every day educating consumers. You have a Behr paint agent who's in the store every day educating consumers.
In season, you have a Scotts Miracle-Gro agent in the store every day educating consumers. It's extremely powerful, and it is a huge benefit to the retailer. Then when I'm there, I try and do my best to sell as much product as possible, so another salesman on the floor. As we talked about from a supply chain perspective, we have growing media plants around the nation. We have the liquids and turbos plants. These are our fertilizers, these are our controls, distribution centers, unmatched, and our capability to get product to our retail partners. Our on-time in full order fulfillment is 95%. For those of you who track that, that is a very good number. Coming out of an operations background, I like that. That's good. Paying to get to 99% might not be worth it, so feel great about that.
Picture of the team in the middle, and then you can see we do a lot of trucking annually. That's 360 million truckloads. Let's, let's be clear, you need a highly organized, highly efficient logistics capability to be able to do that. And having the network in place to be able to connect all of that is the value contribution we have, and we can drive for our customers. Let's get into the financials just a little bit, so that we're all up to date. Now, look, we came into the year, and we had a viewpoint that on a year-over-year basis, our consumers were going to be acting the same as they did in 2023. No change in consumer behavior. But we were driving significant positions with our retail partners.
We were getting additional listings, we were doing new promotional activity, and we have new products that we were bringing to the shelf. If you look at this chart, it lays it out really nicely as to what has been happening. On a controls basis, we've seen the type of performance that we were expecting, plus 13%. On a gardens basis, we see the type of performance that we were expecting, plus 19%. What's behind? It is lawns. Now, we just talked about all this great fertilization and green grass. Fertilizers have been performing well. They're pretty much equal to what they were last year. It's been the seed category, and we're not the first to say this. You've heard the home retailers talk about this. You've also heard some of our competitors talk about the seed season this year is different.
That is a consumer behavior that is different than what we had expected, and that is about half of the difference in our guidance trajectory that we've announced today versus where we were previously. If we dig into it a little bit here, this is on a year-to-date basis. You can see POS units for the year up 11%. That's if you backed into our math, and John can probably share with you, when we gave our guidance originally, we said that POS was gonna need to be in the low double digits, so kinda between 10% and 15%. POS dollars flat, that's a little bit weaker. That's a mix element that we have than what we thought.
And then retailer inventories, this says 19%, which you could say, "Wow, that's up a lot." This was a load in for where retailers wanted to be because of all the promotional activity that is carrying through this summer. So like I said, taking water to elephants on mulch, people continuing to build out their gardens and doing mid-season fertilizations, along with controls that have been growing very well. That was the retailer built. You will see that number come down at the end of the year so that we can end the year with lower retailer inventories than we did last year. This bottom part, again, explains a little bit as to where the variations were from what we had said previously. New listings performed extremely well. Incremental media, it drove the gains that we expected.
The added promotions, we have more work to do here. The season's not done, and so we're going after those added promotions, but to date, we've had significant incremental performance on promotional activity. There just needs to be more. And then less price elasticity. We did come into the year saying that we were gonna reduce price by 2%. We did do that. Typically, we would have seen a volume lift of about 2%. We were more conservative. We said that it was gonna be about 1%, 1.5%. That volume lift didn't take place, and again, it's really the seeds when you get into the mix element on that elasticity. Okay, one other thing to talk about here, because you're hearing a lot of weather-derived conversation as it relates to lawn and garden.
Now, it's my job, Jim's job, the team's job to manage weather, because it happens every year. It is not an excuse. But what we said, and remember, we are in a multi-year progression here for the business, is that weather was going to be roughly the same in 2024 as it was in 2023. The fact of the matter is, the Northeast has been an issue. You've heard that from all of the retailers, the Northeast has been an issue. And the POS, and this is excluding mulch, has been good across the nation in all of our regions, except the Northeast, because it's been cooler, it's been wetter, and the season, frankly, didn't really start until May, and it started weak. And so we'll have to see how the Northeast progresses through the rest of the season, but to date, it's been behind.
Okay, on Hawthorne, we've talked about what we were doing. We've made significant changes in this business and a goal to get it to EBITDA profitability or better. As you look at that, major changes that we made this year, we moved out of distributed low-margin products, meaning a lot of sales, no profitability, and focused on our signature products, lower sales, a lot of profitability. When we did that, we forecast that the business was going to be down about 25%-30% in sales year-over-year. Again, moving out of those distributed products. As of right now, we're on track with that plan and that program, and that leads us, again, to say that this business will be break even or profitable on an EBITDA basis by the end of the year.
As we look at the rest of the year, and I got 3 minutes, John, I know. Let me just quickly talk about what is important to us. Every day, Jim and I, and the team, talk about the multi-year progression that we're on. It is getting back those margin points. This year, 250, driving that to free cash flow because that enables debt paydown, and we are going to be paying, paying down about $350 million in debt this year. Then advancing our plan with Hawthorne. Now, like I said earlier, Hawthorne is a phenomenal business, and Chris Hagedorn, who runs Hawthorne, has been instrumental in this new strategy on a future for Hawthorne that includes partners, that includes driving outcomes that benefit SMG shareholders, and we are making good progress there.
Again, the RIV-Cansortium announcement is a key component to what we're doing to help create value for SMG. This is just a quick rundown of the guidance. You, you probably saw it in the press release. Again, I went through the factors here. Sales, a little bit lower than we thought. Mix has been a component in that. We've been selling a lot of growing media, not so much seed, so you, you still have very good top-line performance. Adjusted EBITDA, we did call down a little bit. Again, this is still 20%-25% higher than where we were last year. That is progression. So I, I know that it's lower than our, what I would say, ambitious guidance, but it is still 20%-25% up year-over-year.
We are translating that into the free cash flow that we said we would deliver of $560 million plus. So I feel very good about the trajectory of the business, and I feel good about how it sets us up for 2025. Just to give you a little... Well, I just, I blew the headline on this, and I'm sure the IR team's mad at me now. So this just kind of details what the emphasis of what I just said was. The trajectory of sales will be up year-over-year, which is great. You can see a pandemic peak in there, which I would have not liked to have shown, but it does give you a sense of reality as to where the business has been.
And then getting back closer to that pre-pandemic EBITDA level and then growing from there is the challenge for the team. Adjusted gross margin, I talked about this upfront. Getting that 250 basis points, we're on it. We're going to deliver it. This is necessary just to talk about how we're driving free cash flow. We're getting those inventories down. The treasury team has done a phenomenal job in orchestrating new AR facilities that allow us to pull more cash flow out of the business. And I'm going to flip back to our purpose, Grow More Good. Go back to that vision, having people feel great about their yard and how they and their family are interacting with their yard. One final note: we are having an investor day on July sixteenth. Everyone's invited. It's going to be a big party.
I'm sure sell-side will show up. If you want to spend more time with them, you're welcome, too. That's tongue-in-cheek, of course. And then last but not least, let me just reiterate, we have a phenomenal opportunity. This is a multi-year strategy that we are on. This was the first year, and we feel very good about the trajectory of the business, which is getting back to the margins that we deserve because of the brands that we have and executing across all of the strategic levers that we have in place to be able to do that. John, back to you. Thanks, Matt. We'll go to the breakout.