All right. So appreciate everybody's time today. We're real happy to be here. I'm Nate Baxter, President and Chief Operating Officer, and I've got Mark Scheiwer, Interim CFO, with us. Between the two of us, we're going to take you a little bit through the history of the company and then talk a little bit about some of the strategies of growth, both on gross margin and top line.
Do you want him to do any opening remarks?
Oh, I did the intro for you.
That's okay. Good afternoon. Welcome, thanks for joining us, for our next presentation, which is Scotts Miracle-Gro.
Yeah. Thank you.
We have President and COO Nate Baxter, who you all know well, and Interim CFO Mark Scheiwer. Welcome to you both. Obviously, Scotts, as you're probably aware, is the unquestioned leader in the U.S. Consumer lawn and garden industry. The brands include, obviously, Scotts and Miracle-Gro, but also Ortho and Roundup, among others. The company also has a Hawthorne Gardening segment, which is a key supplier to cannabis growers in North America and Europe. Though it's had to confront a sharp downturn in demand over the past several years amid industry oversupply. We do have a few slides, which management will go over, and then I'll jump back up here for some Q&A. And so with that, let me hand things over to Nate.
All right. Thank you. For real this time. All right, so Mark and I are going to tag team, and we won't dwell on any of these. But you know, I think we're a 150-year-old company. It's one of the reasons that I came to join this company. You look at the brands we carry; they're just world-class. You look at the potential for growth in the lawn and garden segment. There's still a huge opportunity for organic growth, and I'm sure we'll get into that in Q&A. You know, we've had a tough few years, but I think, hopefully, we're starting to build a track record to show that we're very serious about managing costs and streamlining the business. And I think our margin recovery last year points to that, and Mark will comment on sort of our journey for this year. But at the end of the day, you know, we're very focused on being an investor-friendly company and making sure we're doing the right thing. I don't know if you have any more.
Yeah. The only thing else I would say is we have a long track record of delivering strong gross margins, strong cash flow, free cash flow, and from a capital allocation standpoint, longer term, you know, we're getting back into shareholder-friendly down the road once our leverage gets down. So, we're on our way down. We've made outstanding progress. We generated $1 billion of free cash flow over 2023, our fiscal 2023 and 2024, and we plan to continue to generate free cash flow. We've got about $250 million planned for this fiscal year. I would say, longer term, we view ourselves as a much higher free cash flow generating machine, and we should be able to provide that good shareholder-friendly activity, both quarterly dividend and then, eventually, I think, longer term, share repurchase activity.
Yep. So just a little bit of history for those of you who don't know us. We actually still are headquartered and operate out of Marysville, Ohio. It's where we were founded, back at the turn of the century. We still operate out of that store. It's actually our company store in downtown Marysville. So if you're ever there, let us know. We'll bring you over. But I think the point here is that we've got a deep legacy, not only in the lawn side of the business, which was founded by O.M. Scott in 1868, but also on the gardening side of the business, through the merger with Miracle-Gro, back in the mid-1990s. You know, we feel we've got the best brands. We're the leading investor in terms of R&D, and innovation and marketing and field sales and supply chain.
We'll talk a little bit about that, but we talk about those as our superpowers, and it's a legacy that we have the privilege of trying to continue. If you look at our brands, hopefully, these are well recognized. You'll notice a new brand in the upper right, O.M. Scott & Sons. We're actually bringing back a legacy brand. It's tied and targeted towards sort of that next generation of consumer. This will be lawn care, so lawn food, as well as, lawn seed, both traditional grass seed as well as alternative seeds that are eco-friendly and drought-resistant. One of the things I'm most proud of is we're going to be, debuting this in a new fully curb-recyclable paper bag.
So, you know, as we talk about innovation and look at what we're trying to do for the future, we're trying to, you know, lean into improving our existing products, but we're also trying to make our products more environmentally friendly and safer for folks to use, as well as easier. The only other callout I'll make here is Bonnie Plants. We're a 50% owner with Alabama Farmers Cooperative. We love that business. You know, we look at it as the tip of the spear. You know, it's hard not to go to a Depot or a Lowe's or another big retailer and see all those live goods outside and sort of get that itch to go into the gardening center. Mark, take these.
Sure. All right. So we have these outstanding brands that we just showed you. We lean on them heavily. We invest in them a nd we kind of, you know, we've gone through so much what I'll call fluctuation in our sales activity recently because of the pandemic. You know, we saw 20 years of sales growth during the pandemic, 2020, fiscal 2020 and 2021. And then we obviously then had a deceleration in that as folks began to travel and go back to work. But if you just take a step back and look at our overall on a broad basis, seven-year CAGR, we've grown this business 5% on a top-line perspective for the lawn and garden. And the reason we have the lawn and garden business up here, it is the dominant engine of Scotts Miracle-Gro.
It is, it represents 90% of the business from a revenue standpoint. So it's an outstanding business that's built on the backs of the brands that you saw. This CAGR, it doesn't happen overnight. It includes things like pricing. We have pricing power. We can pass on to our customers and work with them on that. We also have innovation, things like EZ Seed, for example, that was a great innovation several years ago. And last year, we introduced Miracle-Gro Performance Organics, which is the pink bag soil that did outstanding with Martha Stewart. So those are some of the things that we feel, you know, are our superpowers that Nate talked about. We can consistently deliver on what I'll call it 3%- 5% longer-term consumer products growth. So we have that track record.
I know it's been a little bit choppy along the way as we've gone through the pandemic, but as we've come out of it and have begun to stabilize, we've seen outstanding, I think, long-term trajectory. As we look to profit margins, this is the U.S. consumer profit margin on here. What I didn't show you on here, you'll see it on a slide a couple more slides later, is the gross margin, and it's really a recovery story. You know, as we kind of came out of the peaks of the pandemic, we obviously were impacted both from a cost structure and our supply chain, and then as our customers were trying to sell more products and end up having a sales volume decline. So our margins obviously got impacted by it. We started to recover, stabilize last year. At the gross margin level, we improved our gross margins.
This year, we're looking to get to 30% total company gross margin rate. What that tells me, and it's things we can control. If you look at, and I'll go into more detail in a couple slides, but our gross margin recovery, a lot of it has to do with what we can control and what we're executing on as we speak. We had a great Q1 result in that you saw gross margin recovery. What does gross margin do? It'll result in a higher operating margin for our U.S. consumer business. We are reinvesting some of those dollars, so not all that gross margin recovery will go completely down to the operating margin. We are reinvesting in advertising, and Nate will have a slide to show you kind of how we have continued to increase our advertising spend. We believe advertising works.
It's one of the pillars of our investments. It's how we get our sales growth. To me, there's three big things the way we invest. It's advertising. It's promotional activity and consumer activation and just really spend with our customers. On our last earnings call, we mentioned that approximately north of 10% of our net sales. Within that number, we invest with our customers in various consumer activation promotional activities, whether it be in-season promotions like the 5 for 10 or volume rebates and things like that. So we have a lot of good activation. And then the third piece that helps make a lot of this happen is obviously our supply chain network. We're constantly looking to get costs out. We've delivered on those last year a little bit, a good amount. This year, we're planning and we've communicated $75 million of costs out in the U.S. consumer business.
That's outstanding. We think we have room to go. Jim, our CEO, Jim Hagedorn, has challenged us with $150 million over three years, and we have a track record of proving that. That three-year glide is 2025, 2026, and 2027. So we're going to get $75 million this year. Moving on quickly to Hawthorne. Just, you know, last couple calls, we've talked about an exit strategy. What I'll say with Hawthorne is we've done a lot of work in general to right-size this business. Pre-COVID, this business, you know, it was a much different environment. It was experiencing double-digit level growth. The industry was growing, lots of investment in it, in the industry, in the hydroponic space, to the point where it peaked out at upwards of over about $1 billion in sales. It's now, I'll call it in that, you know, last year was $295 million.
This year, it could be in the range of, you know, it's going to be a little less because we exited our distributed brands, but just call it a $250 million to $300 million business. It's now stabilized. It's predominantly a branded hydroponic input supply called picks and shovels business that supplies products for growers across North America. This past quarter, Q1, we delivered $2 million of segment profit, and as part of this year's glide path and our guidance of $570 million-$590 million EBITDA, we are looking to deliver $20 million of EBITDA out of this business. It is stable. I think the long-term trajectory of this business, you're looking at a much lower growth business. From our perspective, it's better served to be in a plant-touching enterprise. So we've begun discussions with strategic partners.
Now that it's stabilized, we feel a lot more confident than, say, a couple of years ago as we've looked to exit strategies around Hawthorne. There's two pieces or two components of Hawthorne. So just to confuse you just a little bit, and I apologize. So there's the Hawthorne Gardening, which, again, I just talked about, has great brands. It's picks and shovels, sells to hydroponic retail shops across the U.S. and Canada. The Collective, the Hawthorne Collective is an investment portfolio we decided to invest in around 2021, fiscal 2021. It's now about $40 million of passive investments on our balance sheet. We will look to exit that or transfer it as well over in a package. I think our, again, we're looking to close on this, hopefully, this fiscal year. As we begin to update you each quarter, you'll hopefully begin to see progress on that front.
Again, given the stabilization of this business, we feel a lot better prospect-wise as we look out into the future. Ideally, then, we don't plan to get cash for this. Most likely, it would be in an investment form that we would look to monetize or provide optionality in the future. That's Hawthorne, and I'll be happy to answer questions on the topic in the Q&A. Real quickly on the gross margin story and EBITDA, we've come a long way. You can see from the pandemic highs, even pre-pandemic. In fiscal 2017, if you look at fiscal 2017, we were at 36.8% gross margin rate total company. At that point, we were mostly a lawn and garden company. Okay? Hawthorne was real small. You know, that's kind of where we're heading now, right?
As I just described to you, we are going back to being predominantly a lawn and garden company. So gross margin profile, we know what we need to do to get back to that mid-30% gross margin rate. A lot of it just comes from just things we can execute on our behalf, which is costs out. It includes our portfolio of innovation and giving us leverage on pricing with our customers as well. So there's a whole step to that process. Again, we feel comfortable about where we're heading on the 30% for this fiscal year, 2025, and then the ladder up to the mid-30s. Again, it's going to come with additional costs out.
So Jim has challenged us to get another 75 on top of the 75 we did this year, and we definitely have line of sight to that, and that'll happen over a two-year period. So that's a big piece of it. The other piece will be pricing. People, if you just take a step back and say 1% pricing, that would be kind of what we traditionally go for from a consumer products company is that 1% pricing. It doesn't get penetrated. You can take it targeted. We offer things in both fertilizer, grass seed, soils, mulch, controls products. We have a big breadth of product portfolio that we can leverage and utilize with our customer base around pricing. And another piece that Nate talked about a little bit is innovation, and that's a big driver of that.
The other is going to be ultimately then getting back to what I'll call and what I showed you on the front end, which is sales growth. You know, what we're viewing is like around 2%-3% type sales growth. So I think we set a target of growing our sales overall about 3%. To me, that represents about 2% on volume growth, 1% pricing. So that's how we get back up to that kind of the target range of mid-30s, which I think would be an outstanding goal, and then EBITDA is to follow our guidance range. We're expecting about another, you know, another big jump in our EBITDA up to $570 million-$590 million, and we see a path to well north of that as Jim has challenged us to get to $700 million. All right.
So just to shift gears a little bit from the financials, because I think this is really important to sort of add some color to how we're going to get here, you know, it's the culture of the company. These core convictions are, I think, close to 20 years old. And in a conversation with Jim, we dusted these off. And with maybe one small exception, I don't think any of these would change. They're all pretty relevant. And I think that's an important piece because, you know, as I've come into the company, we took $400 million out in Project Springboard, reinvested $100 million. That was really just cost cutting. We didn't really change the work. We didn't change the workload on people. In fact, it went up as we reduced headcount. So now we're moving into a phase of the company where we really talk about transformation.
I think this is where, you know, my background in tech, to me, this is not really that difficult. You know, we sell dirt, fert, and Roundup, as we say. But my belief is this is a tech company, and we just, our associates don't necessarily fully understand that yet. I'll give you some examples. So in supply chain, we're streamlining, we're driving automation into our factories. We are looking at new planning tools. We're obviously heavily invested in AI and other technology, and we can address some of that in the Q&A. But we've already put this into effect. We've already cut our consumer services group by half, for example, because we developed both with external partners and internally an AI tool that just sort of accelerates the ability to understand what a consumer is asking.
So I think, you know, these core convictions are important. The one I'll probably highlight the most because I think it's the biggest force multiplier is advertising works. Jim likes to talk about it a lot. I think you guys know that. It's nuanced. You know, it's in order for us to grow the business, we have to engage new consumers. And that involves, we love the advertising when you look at the top of funnel stuff, whether it's with Martha or Scott, but it's much more than that. And Jim referenced it on our last earnings call. It's about our digital assets. It's about our user interface. It's about taking a category that's fairly complex. If any of you have stood in front of a wall of fertilizer at one of our big retailers to try to understand what you're supposed to use on your yard.
So part of this investment we're making in media is not really just top of funnel media, but it's also developing AI tools that leverage our database to help consumers take a picture on their phone, ask us a question, be able to get an answer, and help direct them to the product. It's actually something we've already rolled out to our field service engineers. So I think, you know, for me, these are all really, really important, but I think the advertising works is probably one of the most important pieces. I talked about our superpowers. This is them, you know, and Jim has said this multiple times. We are taking costs out of the business and we are reinvesting it in these superpowers. And I'll be honest, I had to clarify with my team.
That didn't mean that if you were in one of these superpowers, you were immune from transformation and trying to take costs out. But what we really mean is all the dollars we save, we're going to reinvest, whether it's in our brands in the form of marketing, whether it's innovation, whether it's in our supply chain and our field sales team. You know, for those of you that follow us, you know, we have a tremendous field sales team. You could either look at it as a big expense. We look at it as a big asset. You know, there is nobody out in the field that has a field sales force with a number of people we do in season that are out there hustling, jockeying, making sure our product is off shelf, making sure that it's merchandised appropriately. We have deep personal relationships with our retailers.
It is most definitely a superpower for us. We're just about to get into the point of the season where this really starts to show. Advertising, you know, this is one, you know, my number is north of 200. If you look at our A to S ratio, it's probably around 3% right now. If you get, say, north of 200, that puts us close to the 5% range. It's still well under index to our CPG partners. It's important to us because it's important not only as we look to engage a new generation of consumer. Like I said, it's not just the fun advertising that you see streaming or on TV. It's all about building the digital assets, building the subscription and loyalty programs, engaging in social where we can. I feel like we're on the right path.
We've had some churn over the last year with some of our digital agencies and our creative agencies, but we're starting to settle in and we've started to build a really small but mighty team in-house that's able to work with our agency partners. The speed at which we have to innovate and deliver, especially when you look at the timeliness of events, for us, this is something we really need to have control of. So like I said, this year, we'll probably be closer to the $150 million mark, and our target in the long term is to get north of $200 million or 5% or 6% of sales. R&D is another big one. I would argue there is nobody else in our category that invests this much in R&D. It's north of $35 million. We have 200+ associates. Deep expertise.
Just before I came in here, I got a pass down on work we're doing with some partners looking at CRISPR. You know, CRISPR is a technology that is being used in Big Ag, whether you're looking at, you know, gene editing of live goods, which is a real opportunity, but also gene editing of bacteria that can be more effective at helping you with natural controls or as a force multiplier for a synthetic chemical. So, you know, I would say the big change that I've seen in the last couple of years is we've filled our innovation pipeline back up. And innovation takes many forms. You know, CRISPR and biologicals, that's a 10-year-out thing. But in the near term, there's form, fit, and function. There's packaging. There's ease of use. There's safety.
And I would say when I came to the company a couple of years ago, innovation really took the form of cost out because that's what we needed. We've completely revamped and reworked our innovation sort of circle, as we call it, to make sure we're focused on short, medium, and long term. And it really is important to driving the margin accretion that Mark talked to. If you look at supply chain, we've got 45 growing media plants. I think 38 of those are ours, and the others are co-packers. We don't ship a bag of dirt more than about 125 miles or a bag of mulch. That's a real advantage relative to our competitors. We've gotten a lot of questions about private label today, and I would argue, first of all, I like private label. We participate in it. It helps fill volume in some of our plants.
But at the end of the day, I don't see it as an existential threat. It's all part of a good, better, best strategy. And I would argue in categories like growing media, which is mulch and soil, we supply a dominant share of that, and it's because we're the lowest cost manufacturer. And, you know, we don't spend a lot of money on diesel moving bags of dirt around. That's not very efficient. So that's a big part of our strategy. Same with fert liquid durables. We have a few plants around the country. We manufacture all of our fertilizer products for lawns in our Marysville Plant, maybe with a few exceptions with co-packers. All of that is distributed right out of our sort of our warehouse or our distribution center that we call the CORD, which is just a mile down the road.
All of our retailers pick up their loads from there. We don't have to ship it anywhere. That is a really nice advantage of the scale we have. As part of the supply chain transformation, I think distribution centers, we had 18 at peak. We've got nine today. There's an asterisk because some of them are third party. We'll have that down to five by the end of the calendar year. And then again, you know, our ability to deliver on time, order fulfillment, we've enhanced that over the last year. We've leaned heavily into our data analytics team. We've built a very small but mighty team that are experts in machine learning and analytics, and we're using that to help us predict where we need product in the network at what given time. In the past, it was we stuffed our distribution channels, our distribution network full of inventory.
Since the pandemic, we've sort of worked with average inventory levels that we called $800 million, and we're now down to below $600 million, and we'll stay there and maybe even look at taking that down further. The point I'm trying to make here is we've come a long way with supply chain. We have a lot of opportunity to continue to automate it and take cost out of the business. And that is a big piece of the gross margin bridge that Mark talked to. Our field sales team. I talked about it. I won't belabor it, but I can't underscore just how critical of a strategic factor this is for us, especially this time of year. We're really the only ones in the stores. A lot of our competitors hire third parties to do this merchandising.
I can tell you the level of commitment that our associates have and the relationships, the long-term relationships they've built with retailers. It is very significant for our success in season. All right, went through that quickly, Joe. We're now at Q&A. We're fireside chat. Although actually we didn't go through that quickly. We're like out of time.
So much for five to ten minutes of slides. That's okay. Nice overview. Thank you. We do have maybe a few minutes left. So before I have some questions, obviously, but I'm curious, anybody in the audience have a question? I guess we could start there. Just raise your hand. Go ahead.
What year are you going to get back to those 2017 gross margins?
Yeah. So this year we're getting to 30%. I would say then it would begin to ladder up over the next following two years to that mid-30s type range. So it'd probably be a staggered approach that we would look to get there on that.
Can I just ask a quick follow-up? Did you disclose any sort of consolidated volume growth metric?
Repeat that again.
Any sort of, what does volume growth look like in your business? Like X, the hydroponics.
Yeah. So on our guidance page for U.S. consumer, we lay out our volume growth assumption, which is low single digits. We have some one-time non-repeat items related to our U.S. consumer business. This is kind of what I'll call kind of further overhang from COVID, but we did some inventory sales for bulk fertilizer and grass seed where we exited inventory positions. And that was probably call it almost a point of impact to sales that we did in 2024. And then our AeroGarden business, we really made changes to that product line. And so we won't be producing and selling the products like we have in the past. So that is also a non-repeat. Outside of those, we do expect the core U.S.
consumer lawn and garden business to be low single digits, which we think is a very achievable, attainable goal based on both the incremental advertising we are investing in, promotional spend.
New listings.
New listings, things like that. So we're in great partnership with our customers.
You mentioned private label. I'm not aware of what's going on. Can you just walk through? Is it the big box retailers that have private label or what's happening?
Yeah. You know, so I think a research report came out earlier this week focused on Lowe's, and you know, they lean into private label. Private label, it's an important business for them. It's, again, part of a good, better, best. We're pretty familiar with it because we participate in almost all of it, not consistently, but across all the retailers. We play in all the categories. I think the concern that we are hearing is how real is the migration to private label from branded products, and while it's very clear why retailers would like to steer towards private label, you know, just I think they took a lot of margin during the pandemic, and they're really reluctant to give that up, but I also think as the, especially the brick-and-mortar retailers try to compete online, you know, they've got to be able to fund that.
It's expensive to compete with Amazon and even Walmart.com. So I think for one in particular, they like to, you know, they're leaning into that. Now, my view is I like the business. It's a pretty small part of our revenue. It's less than 5%. I like the volume. It helps me just deal with the unabsorbed overhead. It's also really important for the relationship with the retailers. But at the end of the day, we don't see it as an existential threat. If I look at the five-year CAGRs on it, it's negative growth. I know, you know, Mark has a view that I think is really sharp, which is if you break our, if you break it into our categories, controls, gardens, and lawns, you know, the controls segment, that's chemical heavy. You need a lot of regulatory review and approval.
That's not really an area right for private label. So then it really becomes lawns and gardens. In gardens, the volume is mulch and dirt. Like I said earlier, I believe we have the best cost structure, the ability to deliver and support our retailers. And, you know, lawns is an interesting one. You know, lawns category I could talk for an hour on because I just think there's so much opportunity. We've seen a massive decline over 20 years. We as an industry, not we as Scotts, we've all seen a decline in units as people have stepped away from lawn and garden. One of the most interesting data points we see is when we look at private label fertilizers, people don't trade down. They just sort of take a pause and step away from the category.
So that tells me it's not necessarily price that's driving it or value perception. There's something else there. And that's a big part of when we talk about our investments in supply chain and product and media getting consumers sort of back into, you know, let's say feeding your lawn four times a year. That's a fundamental tenet of this company that we started decades ago, and we've sort of fallen off that messaging. And it's something you'll see this season as we get into our creative. Anybody else?
Maybe that was more than you wanted to know private label.
All righty. I guess we'll end it there.
All right.
Nate, Mark, thank you. Thank you, everybody, and enjoy the rest of the conference.
All right. Thank you.