All right, everybody, we're going to get started. Thanks for joining us. I'm John Anderson, the analyst at William Blair that covers consumer staples, including Scotts Miracle-Gro. Today we're pleased to have Scotts Chief Operating Officer Nate Baxter and Chief Financial Officer Mark Scheiwer with us to present. Scotts is by far the leading provider of branded do-it-yourself lawn and garden products in the U.S. Most of you know it participates in a range of categories from lawns to gardens and controls. Over the past couple of years, the company has undergone a bit of transformation, which we believe positions it for sustainable sales growth, significant gross margin expansion, and for a much smoother balance sheet going forward. The company has a wide moat, which consists of its brands, its R&D capabilities, and its unique go-to-market model.
We think this is a pivotal year for the company and its journey to delivering more definitive profit growth. Before handing it over to management, just a few housekeeping items. Immediately following the presentation, we're having a breakout session with the entire team in the Adler Room to join us for that. Last, just to inform you, a complete list of research disclosures for potential conflicts of interest can be found on the William Blair website. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Nate to get started.
All right. Thank you, John. I'm going to kick this off a little bit by just giving you some color on the business, our brands, where we're headed, particularly looking towards the future, some of the transformational changes we've made. Then I'll turn it over to my colleague here, Mark, who will take us into financials. One of the things that, for me, joining this company two years ago was all about joining an iconic American company. I believe that to my core. That's been reaffirmed in the couple of years I've had to work with the team here. We've got great brands, great products. We know people want to get out and garden, and they want to enjoy their green space. I think our challenge is, how do we evolve to become more of a lifestyle brand with consumers?
How do we provide everything the consumer needs to have that beautiful green space, whether it is in the backyard, whether it is on their patio, inside their house? As we dissect our business—and I was just sharing this with John—we have got so much growth opportunity. I will take you through that algorithm because I do not think it requires big swings. I think we have got a lot of organic growth just in the existing categories we play in. That allows us to drive the margin recovery. I think it will really allow us to hit Jim's targets in a couple of years, which is what I think gets back to our base position, where we can start to look at how we want to grow beyond that. I will take you through this very little bit today, and then we can talk about Q&A. I hope everybody knows our brand.
There's a new brand that's on the top right. It's the O.M. Scotts & Sons. It's a legacy brand. It's newly started, and it's an all-natural brand that focuses on natural lawn food and seeds. During Q&A, you can ask John, he's the CM of that business, about what that's doing for us. It's not so much about the dollars at this point. It's about our ability to be agile and launch new brands and create new channels. This is an e-comm play primarily. I think you've got it in a few stores. That's really going to be the theme when we talk about growth. We know the retailers are crucial to our business, and they're very important partners. Just like them, we know we've got to look for growth channels. I'll touch that in a few slides.
I'd sort of like to say we have the GE model here, where we want to be number one or number two with all of our brands. Even being number one, we've done $11 billion in TAM, and we've gained, call it, $3.5 billion of that. Right there, my thesis of there's plenty of organic growth to go achieve within the existing market with existing consumers, I wholeheartedly believe in. I'll touch on a few things. Lawns and particularly part of the reason we brought John, we've got a really good story there where we're not only revamping our product line over the next couple of years, but more importantly, we're really focused on the messaging and the education. We've gotten to a point where our products were sort of once-a-year applications for many lawn consumers.
This next generation of lawn consumers needs to understand that multiple applications a year is what really drives a successful lawn. It also works towards our sustainability goals because the more you feed the lawn, the thicker it is, and the less disease and weeds you have. Therefore, the less pesticides and herbicides you need to put on the product, which, by the way, we are hugely supportive of. We think it is important for us to look forward to a sustainable future. I will talk about that when we get to an R&D slide. I am proud of these brands, and I feel like stewardship of these brands is really what my job is all about. We have invested heavily in our insights organization. We have rebuilt the company. Things are coming out of the last couple of years. We recognize consumers changing.
I think it's safe to say we've relied heavily on the older homeowner. They're still a very important consumer. They're not going away. We know that housing for younger generations is a challenge. We also know that those who own homes and invest in their lawns really feel strongly about it. You can see from these statistics here, consumers see this as an opportunity. That's a trend that's sort of come out of the pandemic and we're sort of leaning into. We are seeing shifts from do-it-for-me to DIY. I think that shift happens every year. We're seeing more consumers engaged and less in learning errors education. I'll talk a little bit in a minute about where we're headed. We're going to have a completely new sort of digital interface with the consumer this fall.
It will not be perfect out of the gate, but we are going to consolidate all our websites. We are going to have more of a lifestyle skill. More importantly, it is not necessarily about directly selling products, although that is part of the goal, but educating the consumer. We have got a team that is bringing an AI tool that will come into play, even on our existing websites in the form of search. We will have a more interactive website that will be coming where we are using, call it, 150 years of knowledge that we have built through science, white papers, and consumer experience. That is proprietary information that we will contain in our large language model. We will leverage that to be able to provide answers to consumers. In a perfect world, we will be a QR code. We will have an app. You can keep your name to that Scotty.
You can send a picture of a problem or a picture of a graph type. We can help you understand what you need to attack, whether it's an opportunity to grow something or dealing with a problem that you might have. We feel we're uniquely positioned to do that. We're going to do it in a way that harmonizes with what our retailers are doing because everybody's got an AI app. We believe we have a right to launch the source of education, and we think that'll drive consumer engagement, especially as we start to look at these cohorts. This cohort of older Gen Z and younger millennials that have been really prevented from homeownership today are actually bigger than the boomer and Gen X. They are coming. That might be 5 years-10 years from now.
Part of what we have to do is engage that consumer today. If any of you spend any time on Instagram, you see there's an awful lot on there about house plants and growing from your patio or balcony. We're going to start to lean more into that. Our focus this year in gardens is getting our organic product line expanded. I feel like we've done a great job there. We're now going to start leaning into indoor gardening and engaging those consumers as well as we try to bring them along. While it's a long way for us, we believe it's important that we look out sort of past five years. I think that's an important statement because, as you know, a few years ago when I joined, we were very short-term focused. By that, I mean weeks and quarters.
We've now put a vision out for three years for fiscal 2027. That's a stable space getting back to a financial position. Mark will talk about that. We're now starting to talk about what's beyond that. I think that's important. Last comment I'll make is just a couple of quotes here from Ted and Marvin. Our consumer is healthy. They're homeowners. They generally have high incomes. I know there was a lot of nervousness, obviously, the last couple of years with inflation, all of the tariff and consumer sentiment concerns. I wouldn't say we're immune to it. I think people are choosing how to spend their discretionary dollars wisely. We are largely unaffected. I think we've been able to manage through that.
Hopefully, the reaffirmation of guidance that we put out this morning shows that we're facing a market where volatility in the weather—I know we always talk about weather—it is a factor, but it's not the biggest factor. At the end of the day, it's 1% or 2%. You can forget about it. We've gotten more sophisticated about how we manage through it. We can talk about that in Q&A if you want. Consumer sentiment, I think, is something that brings everybody down. We haven't seen an impact in our numbers this year from that. We talk about our superpowers, our brands, our innovation, our supply chain, our sales team. I talked about brands, a little bit about innovation on the next slide, and supply chain.
Sales, I want to comment on this because a big part of our expense is maintaining a field sales force that is by and far larger than any of our competitors. The reason we do this is the relationships that they build at the store manager level allows us to drive a ton of off-shelf activity. I was actually here in the Midwest talking to our sales leaders here. For one retailer, something like $80 million of our revenue this year was driven completely off-shelf, not part of planned grants. I think that's something we probably do not talk enough about. We talk about going into line reviews, which are happening this time of year. We cannot fix on planned grants and pricing. What we do not talk about is geared around sharp elbows trying to make sure we get in gaps.
It is a meaningful number for us when we look at our growth. We continue to invest in brands. Jim talked a lot about that. Do not worry about Tomcat. It is in a really, really good place. We are just excited that we were going to allocate our dollars elsewhere. We have high commitment to investment in those brands. We will continue to do that. Our brand health scores reflect that. Let me take a pause here because I think when we talk about our growth algorithm, I talked about the opportunity for organic growth within the existing TAM. We also have to drive it through innovation. That innovation has to look to where the consumer is going. Safety, sustainability is important. We are probably the only company in this case.
If you look at some of the little notes on the right, we lean heavily into organic. We'll probably continue to grow and dominate across all of our categories in natural. We're working with big-ag partners on biologicals. I have a vision that in 10 years or so, we can say we're going to be a synthetic chemical-free company, whether we can really achieve that or not, I don't know. We sure are going to try. We know from some of our partners that there are biological and natural formulations to either supplement synthetic chemicals, meaning you can use less chemicals to be systems effective. The ultimate vision would be to replace those. I feel we're the only one with enough market to be able to invest in that. We continue to look at packaging. We talked about Owen or I talked about Owen Scott.
That product is now in a fully curved recyclable paper bag. We're very cognizant of the amount of plastic we put out in the world and continue to work on not only packaging but small-form innovation. We care a lot about the indoor gardening space. We're, in 2026 and 2027, going to start to really expand there. The last, these are just some successes. The top is our exclusive Picasso or Max line. That came out of the gate last year, really strong. Below that, you see organic line. Huge, huge gains this year. Just year to date, soils for organic line is up 7% in terms of market share gains. Our organic plant food is up 3%. We see a consumer that wants more options in this space. We're going to continue to invest in those. Supply chain, this is what's been making it happen.
This is why we've been able to affirm our guidance and our gross margin recovery. We've leaned very heavily into automation. I think we all know we invested heavily in expanding supply chain during the pandemic. That was a bad move. I think a lot of retailers got caught in that position. What we've done as we've shrunk it is we've modernized it. We're leaning in heavily to automation. We're driving utilization on a purpose of a peak business. We tend to have very high utilization during certain periods and very low utilization in the others. We came out of semiconductor where if you're not utilizing your setbacks at as high a rate as possible across the year, you're not winning. That's where we're going to head with supply chain. In general, we try to get 1% of COGS, call it $20 million a year, out.
We've committed to $75 million this year and $150 million over a total of now through 2027. We are definitely on track. I'll let Mark talk to that. A lot of automation. As a guy that came out of Texas, this is an area that to me is really easy and timely. Making management changes that put in younger leaders who are more tech-savvy. We're starting to see the results of that. I wanted to talk about e-comm because when we talk about our growth algorithm, you have got to go to where the shoppers are. Part of that is the online space. I talk about that broadly. It's our own B2C, which today is not huge, but we will continue to lean into it.
When we go through this derationalization, which is something we are going through right now, we know that we have to start to segregate SKUs that are big movers and margin drivers for retailers. We need to segregate SKUs that are ideal for e-commerce. And by the way, those are both small and large. A big part of our e-commerce platform is now pallet delivery of mulch and growing media and some of these bigger and heavier objects. That is an important part of that story. Then we have got to figure out how to connect the retailers and their e-comm. If you look at where we have come, last year, about 8% of our revenues were driven through some form of e-comm. It is just under 10% this year. If I were to mix it, I would say we end between 9.5%-10%.
To frame that, last year, we shipped about 6 million units direct to the consumer's home on behalf of not only our small B2C business but also our partners. Year to date, this year, we're at 12 million. One of the benefits I inherited of all the investment in the supply chain is a very, very robust network for direct-to-home delivery. Now, it's not all about direct-to-home. It's buy-online, pick-and-show stores. There are many flavors. Quite honestly, I'm agnostic of it. I think we need a B2C business. It'll probably be that long tail of SKUs that are maybe extra SKUs that don't make sense to push into retailers. We're going to address those. With that, I want to turn it over to Mark and let him talk us through the financials. Then we'll get a question from the Q&A. Sure. All right.
Thanks, Nate. Before I jump into the guidance and our reaffirmation, I really just want to give you a flavor of the employees at Scotts, what we believe in. Hopefully, you can get a feel of we love the company. We're consumers at heart. We love the brands. We are a branded consumer company, first and foremost. This industry has been around for many years. It's stable. It's consistent. The thing that I'm excited about that Nate just spoke to is we've got a lot of growth opportunity in the future both through e-comm channels, through frequency, through educating that consumer to use our products more. I started as a homeowner in my mid-20s, got into an Ace Hardware store, learned the four-step program, and being educated really by Scotts Miracle-Gro on what it means to take care of my yard.
We can do more and more of this and drive frequency. Now, I go into all the other retailers, whether it be Home Depot, Lowe's. It is even more exciting now, as Nate talked about the e-comm side, when it comes to our retail partners. You can deliver pallets of soil and mulch now to customers or to consumers at your home. We are doing things now that'll help us with our growth algorithms, our sales growth in the future. It is what gives us our right to win. Over the past several years, and this chart has it up here as a little history of our sales, it shows that we've grown sales. It shows that we've taken the lifting gain. It shows that we've innovated. It shows that we can continue to do that. It is very consistent.
I would tell you that from a long-term perspective, we set out a target of 3% annually per sale. And we believe in that. It comes through innovation. It comes through pricing. Being the national lawn and garden company, consumer product company that we are, we offer a wider range of products. Nate just spoke to all the brands. If you look at them in the categories, lawn, we offer fertilizer. We offer grass seed. We offer plant food and gardens. We offer soils, mulch. In the controlled space, we offer a wider range of insecticides and herbicides, weed-killing products. We offer vermicide products. These are all wide ranges of things that we offer. We also offer mulch into the high-velocity SKU. Why do I say all that? It allows us to take pricing. It allows us to innovate in all of these areas.
It allows us to grow on an annual basis. You'll see here over a seven-year period through last year, we grew our sales by 5%. We reaffirmed our sales guidance for this year to be low single digits. It shows that we have the ability to innovate and to grow our sales. Some of the recent innovation, and Nate didn't speak to it, but I'm excited about Miracle-Gro Organics that was launched last year with the Martha Stewart MRT, the pink bag. We've got some other cool things, as you mentioned, through Owen Scott. Over the years, we've innovated over the past 10 years-1 5 years in some really cool things like Thick'R in the fertilizer space, which is a grass seed and fertilizer product that's an all-in-one solution. We've also, in the fertilizer space, have other all-in-one solutions that provide a multitude of outcomes.
I would say over the years, we've been able to prove that. We have an amazing R&D team. The reason we're able to continue to grow our sales—I just come back to that. I'll kind of reiterate. It'll help us define what we can do on gross margin—is our supply chain team. Our supply chain team helps us deliver product quickly in season to customers. We're a national garden, a national consumer product lawn and garden company. We can get product to consumers and to our customers quickly, reliably, and on time. That's super important. Jumping to gross margin in EBITDA. We've reaffirmed our target. We've had 30% and the range of $570 million-$590 million. I would just tell you that as we set up for the year, we have made a ton of progress.
We kind of almost take it for granted internally on the gross margin side of the house. If you looked at it a couple of years ago, we were in the low to mid-20%. A lot of that was COVID-driven. We had significant peaks and valleys in our sales volumes that caused quite a few fluctuations in our gross margin. Now we are on the road to recovery. If you look at pre-COVID, Scotts has been a mid-30% gross margin company. Now, if you talk to Jim Hagedorn, our CEO, he'll push us to the high 30%. Do I see a path to that? Potentially. We have to keep being diligent. We have to focus on the things we do best. Nate had a slide earlier that talked about cost out. This fiscal year, just to get everyone grounded, this year, we are expecting 30% gross margin.
That's over 370 basis points of improvement versus prior year. About 210 of it is coming from cost savings from a supply chain perspective. We're about $75 million. About one-third of that is commodities-driven. A few-thirds is cost out. And it can come from a range of things: automating a packaging line, renegotiating prices with vendors, changing formulas, all those things. We have a history of consistently doing that. 30% gross margin this year. If you talk through the first half of our fiscal year, what we've reported, we are well on our way to achieving that. In fact, I feel real confident in what we've been doing in that area. So about 210 of those basis points I just talked about are tied to that.
Last year, Q4, we also did an E&O charge tied to our AeroGarden business, which is these kitchen counter light units that grow plants. We took about a $29 million inventory write-off. That will be non-repeating. That's an upside. Call it 80 basis points. The difference really goes to a couple of things. It's additional overperformance in the business. It's also Hawthorne doing a lot of strong work there. We didn't mention it here. I'll cover it at the very end, basically around Hawthorne. They are making a lot of strides on profitability. It's a lot smaller segment, very much like our other segment now. EBITDA. At the beginning of the year, the past couple of years, we've given an EBITDA metric. We have, in the press release, introduced EPS back into the fold again, which is traditionally what we used to do pre-COVID.
EBITDA, $570 million-$590 million, if you look at it historically, pre-COVID, we're back to those levels. We see a strong line of sight to growing that even further for next year. The way we grow that and our gross margin, which is mid-30%, over the next two years, so 2026 and 2027, Jim spoke on the past couple of earnings calls, and I have as well, about obtaining about $150 million of supply chain cost out over three years. $75 million this year, and then another $75 million in the next two years. Again, $75 million over two years. It should be doubly evenly distributed, but it's around, what, $38 million a year? It is something we can consistently do, and we have a history of. The team has already been working on it. We've already been planning for next year.
I've been seeing great progress in that area. I'm excited about next year and the path forward on achieving the second phase of the $75 million of cost out. Other things. Let's see. Anything else on EBITDA? I don't think so. We can move ahead. All right. EPS. We've reintroduced EPS. We've put in here a minimum of $3.50 a share. If you look at it, the past couple of years, we've made outstanding progress. Part of that is tied to the EBITDA improvement I just spoke to, the gross margin I spoke to, which are driving a lot of that EPS growth. The other piece of it is also below the operating line. This is where we've done a lot of hard work in between cash flow, net repayment, and eventually then driving interest expense savings.
That is driving a lot of the improvement below the line. For this year, we do expect cash flows to be about $250 million. If you look at it probably pre-COVID, that number was around, call it on average, about $200 million- $210 million. We have started to take a step change up in cash flow as we look to this year and beyond. Some of the growth initiatives that Nate spoke to, as he was going through the presentation, they do not require massive working capital funds. They require just normal CapEx expenditures that we can fill within our normal run rate, which CapEx, in general, is around, call it 2.5%-3% of net sales on an annual basis at Scotts. Again, a lot of it is focused on our factories and supply chain.
I would say some of the newer investments we're making in CapEx are tied to data and to IT. A lot of those insights that Nate just spoke to, automating things through that. A lot more good work to happen. We feel like we can consistently deliver it. I go back to Scotts. We've been around for many years. We're a consistent, stable company. We can deliver consistent, stable cash flow as we look to this year and beyond. The last couple of years, I'll only highlight, were pandemic-driven. We did get a lot of free cash flow from inventory flow-through. I would just tell you that our inventory levels are very good as we head into the balance of the year.
We would foresee our inventory level to be, call it around $600 million at the end of the year, what we hold on our balance sheet. I think the thing I'm more excited about, as Nate spoke to, is how do we maybe improve cash flow during the fiscal year and not have such a significant ramp-up in our inventory at different times of the year? You can produce inventory at different times. You can get your retail partners to take that over that time period. We're working on that. We're excited about it. All right. Long-term. I've got you starting here to talk about the four, what I'll call, four key goals. That's delivering sustainable net sales growth. Again, I just showed you that history. We've shown that we have the ability to hit 3% annual sales growth.
That comes with some pretty solid high-margin products. We're not just driving low margin, 20% below our countrywide gross margin SKUs. This is high-margin activity. The things that we're doing from a growth, both in the lawn space and frequency, our soils products for high margin, and doing the stuff with Martha Stewart there, they all deliver really strong margin. We have a history of delivering 3% annual growth, as you saw on the chart earlier. It comes through innovation. It comes through new platforms. Again, I'm excited about e-commerce. We're growing double digits in e-commerce. This year, we're growing double digits. It keeps growing. The reason we're able to do that, again, supply chain. We can get you the product in season when you need it the most. That's super important for us. Be the lowest-cost manufacturer.
This is tied to sales at the end of the day, in my mind. We have had a lot of listings. We are the national lawn and garden player. Growing Media, what I did not tell you, and you may have seen in prior slides, but Growing Media has about 40 sites around the country where we produce soils, mulch. That is a strategic and competitive advantage. We are able to get product quickly across the country. Ultimately, that allows us to ultimately get our margins back up to what you have historically seen. I think, and again, for me, as I look out, I think we can achieve above 35%. The way you get there, again, supply chain savings, pricing, because we are an innovative company. We offer a multitude of products across the category. Then we can grow our sales.
All three of those things can provide you the gross margin improvement. I'll just wrap up and talk about briefly balance sheet and capital allocation. If you look at it pre-COVID, traditionally, we give our quarterly dividend. We give a share buyback or share repurchase. Those are some of the consistent things that we'll ultimately get back to once our leverage gets to 3.5 times and below. We can easily do that, we feel like, over the next two years, and then hopefully introduce something like a buyback for you all in about a year or two. With that, I'll pause. We can jump to Q&A. Yes. All right.