Capital Markets Day Transcript - CHD 2026-01-30

Richard Dierker, CEO

Okay, I think we're ready to get started. So thank you for coming out today, especially in a cold, blistery New York City day. I really appreciate it. I'm going to walk you through a quick 170 slides, and the management team is going to come up and talk as well. But we're just ecstatic to be here, and we finished the year with momentum. In 2026, the future looks bright. So just as a reminder, we have a safe harbor statement. We're going to make forward-looking statements today. So please check this out on our website. So who's going to be presenting? I'm going to start and end the presentation. Lee is going to come up and talk about our financials and our outlook. And then Chuck will talk about our brands and the categories. Andrea is here, founder of Touchland. She's going to talk about that business and how excited we are about it. Carlos is innovation. Sherby is all things digital. And then Mike Reed will talk about international and SPD. I'll also go through some of the growth initiatives today as well. I just walked through the agenda. I already told you, welcome. So let's look back at 2025. We grew faster than all of our categories across all three divisions. That is quite the accomplishment in a tough and rugged 2025. Four of our eight power brands grew share. Four of seven if you exclude vitamins. Hero and TheraBreath are growing double digits. Strong innovation and marketing spend supports these brands and growth. And then we acquired Touchland this year. Tariff response and mitigation. These three bullets are really important to me. I would say our tariff mitigation and response wasn't just industry leading. I would say it's just leading. I was super impressed with how the company reacted to that. Portfolio changes were executed. We divested spin brush and vitamins. We shut down flawless and shower heads. There is a lot of momentum because of the portfolio changes we were able to make in 2025. So we also have a strong balance sheet, one and a half times levered. you know this, right? Our long-term investors know this. We have been able to acquire businesses. We have the ability to identify, acquire, integrate, and grow brands. And the future is bright for that as well. Hey, Jill, can you just let them know they switched the prompter up here? It doesn't have anything on it anymore. It's fine. This is one of the most important things to understand about the business portfolio. In 2025, our brands grew about 1% consumption. If you strip out all the businesses and portfolio changes we made, it would have grown 3.5%. What a great resilient portfolio to have the wind at our back for 2026 and beyond. Lee will talk about the evergreen model in detail. I will tell you the evergreen model is alive and well. You saw how we had those brackets in our outlook today for 2026. There's a lot that goes into this, but this is the output. We have to make sure we have innovation and brands consumers love. We have to make sure we have productivity programs, the right advertising. All those things are the inputs. And we have a strong track record of TSR. If you look back at three, five, ten year, we're always near the top. 2025, we went backwards, and we're off to a great start in 2026. What's our winning formula? We have a balanced and diversified portfolio. We have low private label exposure. This is going to be my new favorite slide. You're going to see the updated one in a few minutes. We have online success and strong, consistent, category-leading innovation. You know, half of our growth typically comes from innovation. And, again, we're an inquisitive company. We know how to identify, acquire, integrate, and grow brands. Church & Dwight is about a $6.2 billion company, 77% domestic, 18% international, and 5% SPD. Seven brands make up 75% of our sales and profits. And we have a balanced and diversified portfolio. About half of our portfolio is personal care. The other half is household. 64% premium, 36% value. Low private label exposure. So for many years, we've been showing this slide that weighted average exposure to private label across all of our brands, across all of our categories, is around 12%. And it's been very consistent, 12%, year after year after year. And why is that? We don't have private label exposure, for example, and laundry. But look what the portfolio reshaping did to that stat. We're down to 5%, right? Vitamins was an extremely large private label business. So we went from 12 to 5 because of portfolio reshaping. Online success, all things digital. We went from laggard to leader, 2% to 24%. Serbia and her team are doing a fantastic job. Strong and consistent category leading innovation. About, again, half of our growth is typically tied to new products. We measure this maniacally, incremental net sales growth, not gross sales, stand-alone, but incremental net sales growth. And this drives our brands. It creates value for the consumer. Acquisitive company. Number one or number two, share brand is one of the first things that we always want to make sure when we buy a brand or a business. Number two, high growth and high margin, fast-moving consumable. Fast-moving consumable. That's what we're focused on. Asset light, leverage our manufacturing skill set, and then deliver a sustainable competitive advantage. And we're as excited today about acquisitions, both in the U.S. and probably also internationally, right? I think that's the nuance. It's always been the U.S. It's an and. Now we're talking about international as well. And why is that? Like, this company's been transformed through acquisition. And I'll show you in a few minutes. We have a slide. $6 billion, $2 billion is really the Arm & Hammer brand. $4 billion is from the brands we've built and bought over many years. And that tranche started back in 2004. We go from $1.5 billion to almost $3 billion. And then you go from $3 billion to $5 billion. And now we're about $5.5 going to what? We're that's gonna continue to grow through acquisition. Okay, so here's the new news. We haven't talked about this before. I think the reality in the world that we live in is categories have decelerated. Our categories have grown for a decade or longer at 3%. And if you look back at 2024, it was closer to 4%. And then in 2025, the first half grew two, the second half grew 1.3, and the full year grew 1.8. That was not just us. That was everybody. Many categories were doing the same thing. Bad things happen, and you have to be able to react to it.

Michael Read

Consumer sentiment is weak, right?

Richard Dierker, CEO

Five-year lows on consumer confidence. So we have to be able to control our own future. And so what are we doing about it? We're focused on these three aspects of growth internally to help drive results in the future so that if categories slow, we can still hit our evergreen model. If categories don't slow, we can do even better. So grow Arm & Hammer from $2 billion to $3 billion. There's three or four pillars behind that. Number one is continue to do what we've been doing, grow the core. Arm & Hammer laundry, Arm & Hammer litter. Good, better, best. We can round out our portfolio for good, better, best across the Arm & Hammer sub-brands. In-house licensing. We're going to consider that more of an incubator. And I'll talk through that in a few minutes. And then new categories. So we're going to launch a couple new categories this year. But over the next few years, you're going to see a handful of other categories. And those are going to be fewer, bigger, better. We're not going to go everywhere to every one. That's not the strategy. It's to make sure that we're in the right categories where Arm & Hammer can play and win. Drive oral care expansion through TheraBreath, really behind TheraBreath, from $1 billion to $1.5 billion. And then scale our international business. We've been doing a great job doing that for many years, and now it's a little bit doubled down on M&A. We have the scale. We have the infrastructure to do it. So that would go from $1 billion to $2 billion over time. Here's the slide that we've shown before. This is the makeup of the $6.2 billion over time. $4 billion is really from acquisitions. But I'm going to talk about it in the inverse for a second. It means that we've gone, for arm and hammer, from $1 billion to $2 billion over the last 25 years. Our aspiration is to go from $2 billion to $3 billion a heck of a lot faster than that. And again, this is the core. Grow the core. Look at the stair step up over time for liquid laundry and for clumping cat litter. We have a great brand. It's the innovation behind laundry, the marketing behind laundry. We're hitting the consumer right where they are. And year after year, we continue to gain share. What are some reasons to believe in the Arm & Hammer strategy? Well, number one, we've proven over time that we can go into other categories. And, you know, it's not 1846 anymore, but Baking said it was founded back in 1846 with Church and Dwight. Laundry was 1970. Toothpaste was 1980s. Deodorant and cat litter were the 1990s. We know we can do this. We've been in large categories before. Our equity is fantastic. You know, our brand stacks up with other brands like Nike or McDonald's in terms of awareness. And then the last one, which I believe is a competitive advantage, is the Arm & Hammer brand has a halo effect on advertising. If we advertise cat litter, baking soda and laundry benefit. If we advertise laundry, Arm & Hammer toothpaste benefits. That's a unique position and capability that we have. Arm & Hammer is known for cleaning, deodorization, cooking, laundry. the list goes on. It's a premium in some categories, it's a value in others. It's personal care in some categories, it's household in others. There's very few brands, I can't name one, that has the ability to do that. It's also uniquely extendable. It's in more aisles of the grocery store than almost any other brand through either our own brands or licensees. There's over 100 uses of baking soda. It's used everywhere. It's in the laundry room, of course. It's in the kitchen. It's in the bathroom. It's everywhere. So there we go. So grow the core. We talked about good, better, best. Again, there's sub-segments within the Arm & Hammer portfolio that can get rounded out. We've proven time and time again that we're good at Arm & Hammer doing good, better, best. I'm going to show you those two examples. I'm not going to go through them today, but there are new categories that are ripe for Arm & Hammer. And then number four is the in-house licensed brand concept, to be an incubator, to be able to say, here are some categories that we may want to go into. How do we explore that? How do we get a business up to 10 or 20 or $30 million? And then when it makes sense to actually buy that back and be able to scale it like we normally do. So here are the two examples that I would tell you are just textbook for good, better, best. First one is litter. Orange box is good. Black box is better. And then hardball is best. And hardball is known for the best, you know, we're trying to make that the best lightweight litter. We think that might be the best litter, period, full stop. We also have laundry. Good, which is the Arm & Hammer bottle. Better, which is Arm & Hammer plus Oxy. And then the best, which is deep clean. We have almost a billion dollars of licensing retail sales out there with partners. There are many categories in which Arm & Hammer has already proven it can play in. And once we decide that we think that we can be a better owner at some point in time with the right partner, then we believe we can scale it and take it to the next chapter of growth like we did for Hero and TheraBreath. Okay, next pillar of growth is really oral care. Now as we grow, we want to make sure we're focused on the right large categories. And mouthwash and toothpaste are huge categories on the far right, $2.4 billion and $4.8 billion. We would much rather have a share point in toothpaste than even dry shampoo, as an example. And so we're laser focused on mouthwash and toothpaste. And what's uniquely different about us is TheraBreath gives us a great entry point for oral care now, right? Arm and hammer is always to a select subset of the market because of the taste profile and for baking soda. But TheraBreath can reach and penetrate a lot more households. Speaking of penetration, TheraBreath is 12% household penetration. Mouthwash is 65%. Chuck's going to go through more details, but we have a lot of room to still run. We have aspirations to be the number one mouthwash. Number two is toothpaste. Huge category, almost $4 billion. We have been playing in toothpaste for quite some time, and collectively we're a small player, if you add up all of our brands. We think TheraBreath has a unique right to win. We think there's a loyal following for TheraBreath. It hits on best-in-class performance. It's better for you. It has superior flavor. So all those things come together to make this a great chance for TheraBreath to become a meaningful brand in toothpaste. Last but not least is international growth. And Mike will walk you through the reasons to believe as well. But we have a long track record of organic growth. This has been a fantastic story for Church and Dwight and for International. And there's a lot of room to run. We're underpenetrated, our company versus most other multinationals. And we've done a fantastic job taking businesses even faster than our history would say and applying those distribution gains. So Hero, TheraBreath, Touchland, they've all expanded rapidly. and a large part of that is because of international. And so today, I'm just saying we're doubling down on M&A within their international business. Doesn't mean we're doubling down less in the U.S. It's just an and, not an or. But we want to acquire brands because we already have a great footprint or we want to shortcut like we did with Graphico in Japan. We added our OxiClean distributor and now we can start to add some of the brands that we have into that infrastructure. All right, with that, I will ask Lee to come up and talk about the financials.

Lee McChesney, CFO

All right, good afternoon. For those who haven't met, I'm Lee McChesney. I have the privilege of being a CFO for Church & Dwight. And with that, we probably should dive into some numbers. So we'll do that quickly. So we obviously this morning released our 4Q and 25 results. Came in at 3.9% total sales, a bit higher than our outlook. Certainly, Touchland was a big driver of that performance. Organic was 0.7, a little bit lighter than our Outlook, but that was really driven by the VMS business, the now exited VMS business, and then just the category itself was a little bit lighter. Try to give you also this perspective in the release as well. You take out the VMS business in the fourth quarter. Organic sales are 1.8%. So, you know, some nice momentum as you start thinking about 26. We had another great quarter with gross margin. You know, 90 basis points higher than last year, higher than our outlook. You know, really great work from the team across the globe to bring this to life. First half of the year, gross margin was going backwards 50 basis points. In the back half, it was up 50 basis points. So, some really good momentum there. um so that favorability in sales favorability gross margin rate we put more into marketing and and then you know really helpful for the brand today but also as you think about 26 ultimately that led to an eps of 86 cents higher than our outlook and up 12 percent over the prior year so you know overall really nice a really nice quarter um and obviously if we pivot to the full year, that all flows through. Again, you see the overall total sales of 1.6. And then again, organic for the year was 0.7. But when you adjust out VMS, it was 2% organic growth. So again, that's kind of the entry point as we go into 26. I mentioned obviously the progress of gross margin and we continue to invest in SG&A. The other element is cash flow. We had a great cash flow year. We upped our outlook throughout the year, and we actually exceeded that in final form at $1.2 billion. So, really, just a ton of strength. Again, on the sales side, gross margin, EPS, and cash flow, all higher than when we put out our outlook on Halloween early in 25. So, that's the numbers. But I also wanted to just reflect a little bit on what we did beyond the numbers. And A, because it also is a good starting point when you start thinking about 26. So once again, we continue to have the strength of brands. We grew four of our eight brands. We changed the portfolio. And hopefully you saw in the release some of that insight. But moving away from those four brands, we now have a portfolio that has the ability to grow at a faster rate, has a higher gross margin rate. I mean, those are all going to be, you see those in the outlook for MWR326 in a second We had another year of incredible productivity, record levels of good to great productivity. And then, you know, we faced into tariffs early on. So, you know, Liberation Day in early April, and by the end of April, we told you what our plans were. It's $190 million of tariff exposure that we've now moved down to $25 million and continue to decline from there. You see it in the outlook for 26 here, and we'll get through in a second. And then, you know, the cash flow I talked about, you know, we had great cash flow. But this year, we bought Touchland, we returned $900 million to our shoulders, and we still have the same debt to EBITDA ratio. So we have tons of optionality as we move here into 26. So, you know, I have an observation since March. And I just think this is really our culture coming to life. When, you know, things come at us, we quickly assemble the facts, we come up with actions, and we execute. And, you know, we all did this in 25. Again, all this momentum carries us into 26. And certainly I think you'll see that when we go through the outlook. With that said, let's run to 26. So, you know, you know Church and Dwight. You know our evergreen model. This is the foundation. This is what's running through the organization. When we get together, when we think about the plan, people know what's expected of them. So you're going to see this certainly coming to life as we walk through the outlook. So, again, this morning we put out a release, 3% to 4% organic growth range for the year. You know, reported sales will be down negative 1.5% to 0.5%. That's solely the business exit, so I'll walk you through that more in a second here. Gross margin improvement of about 100 basis points. Continue to invest in marketing at 11%. And ultimately, that's an EPS outlook of 5% to 8% for 26%. And then, again, we expect to have another strong year with cash flow, you know, $1.15 billion. So, I know you're going to ask a lot of questions later, but I'm trying to get some of those out of the way here with some of the tailwinds and then the headwinds as well. So, I think you're going to see on display from really everyone presenting today, you know, a lot of the reasons behind this. Again, the brands are still performing well. You're going to see, you know, a ton on innovation from us. You know, I mentioned the portfolio change. Again, this is helping us on the organic growth. It's helping on gross margin. we get to reallocate our focus as a leadership team to use faster growing value brands and premium brands that we have in our portfolio. I mentioned Touchland. Touchland's two quarters now. Really strong results. You're going to hear more about where Touchland's going in the future today. And then as Rick just mentioned, we have the growth initiative. So again, there's an extension of already what we have going on in the portfolio driving us here. And then I make the comment here that in 2025, if you look at almost every metric, it got better year over year in the second half and the first half. And that's our entry point as we go into the year here. So sure, the categories, we're not expecting them to transform. We're still expecting kind of 2% category growth. You know, there's going to be inflation. But also behind that outlook is we do have these exited businesses. You know, it's $400 million of sales that have come out of the portfolio. We've worked through the stranded costs. That's all covered in the outlook for 26. So let's go from there. Just walk through a couple of extra details here. So again, organic growth, the evergreen model calls for 4%. Our range is three to four. We have a 10-year history at 4.1%. I mentioned the reported sales. I just want to give some color here. So again, $6.2 billion of sales in 2025. Our outlook refers to 6.1 to 6.2. You have the $400 million coming out from the exit of businesses. And then with Touchland and the core businesses growing, we almost fully mitigate that on a reported sale basis. But obviously, underneath that is the organic growth of 3% to 4%. And also note in our outlook just the importance of volume. So our organic growth is driven on volume growth. It's not driven on price. It's driven on winning at the unit level with the brand. That's what we've been doing historically. And that's obviously the foundation also of what we're planning to do here in 26. It's a volume-driven organic growth outlook. So I mentioned gross margin. I don't think we typically show 100 basis points of improvement in gross margin. The evergreen model is 25 to 50 basis points. And so let me walk you through some of the drivers to that. So on this page here, you really see what we try to bring to life every day. So whether it's good to great productivity, supply chain optimization, whether it's bringing NPD to life, that's obviously good for growth. That's typically also good as a mixed element. And then, you know, we buy acquisitions that are higher gross margin levels, and then we expand them. It gives us positive mix. You know, those are usually the elements that drive the 25 to 50 base points we're looking for in evergreen. And then, as I mentioned, And, you know, the portfolio change is also enabling us to go from that 25 to 50 up to 100 here in 26. And, hey, there is inflation. You know, I call it 160 basis points. But all those actions I just talked you through are offsetting that. So, sure, we have, you know, natural gas is up, ethylene, things like that. We're going to have a normal batch of labor inflation. We have some capacity improvements. We're covering that. That's what we do with our good to great productivity and all those other amounts we drive normally in the evergreen model.

Chris, Analyst — UBS

Okay.

Lee McChesney, CFO

We talked about marketing. This has been, you know, 11% is called out in the everybody model. That's what we're looking at again here in 26. And, you know, this has been an important formula. We invest in the brands. And when we have opportunities like we just did in the fourth quarter, we'll even invest more here to support the brands. Just to note, you know, marketing will be, you know, based in this outlook, a few basis points lower than it was in 25 because the vitamin business had a higher marketing rate than the core portfolio did. SG&A, I mentioned earlier, is going to be a bit higher. Really, just a couple of drivers there. Certainly, we have a half a year of Touchland's SG&A and his amortization, so that will be a pressure point in the first half of the year. And then, you know, we don't have the same leverage out of the portfolio because we have the business exits, and then we have a bit of stranded costs. But again, that's all factored into the outlook. We're still continuing to invest in the international business, in e-commerce, and then those growth initiatives we just talked about, you know, that's all still going on within SG&A. So all that, again, brings an outlook of 5% to 8% in EPS. The evergreen model is 8%, so certainly that's within the range here. You know, today, obviously, we're talking to you thinking about that as a midpoint perspective, but you obviously have a 10-year history of what we've done there. We'll certainly focus on bringing that to life. Now, we noted also in the release, is a bit of a first half, second half, so the second half's a little bit higher. But just to give you color there, I mean, the growth perspective for the year is similar. The gross margin improvement's similar to the year. But again, you do have that touch on SG&A and amortization in the first half of the year. And then when we look at our marketing programs, they're more heavily weighted to the first half than the second half. And that's solely the driver and the difference. So I think Rick said last time when he was CFO, this was his favorite chart. I think as CEO, it's still his favorite chart. And, I mean, look at the free cash flow conversion, all right? I mentioned, you know, obviously the cash from operations, but 127% in 25. This just gives us so much optionality as we look to invest in the business here. That obviously shows up in the debt-to-EBIT ratio. Again, we did touch-in, we did the share buybacks, and we basically are at the same level of debt-to-EBIT. So all that firepower we had in the past is still there for us, and that certainly shows up here. It's over $5 billion. I think this is almost the exact same chart as last year, despite all those things we did with the portfolio, how we've added to it, and how we've returned dollars to their shareholders. It just speaks to the cash flow capability of the organization. So what do we use the cash flow for? This chart hasn't changed. We've seen it in the past. Number one, TSR accretive M&A. So, you know, the touchlands, the therabrefs, the heroes, finding the next version of that domestically or internationally and bringing that to life. That's the number one goal. That's certainly what we're out in the marketplace to do. And again, we have all that capability financially and organizationally to add to the portfolio today. Next up is certainly, you know, CapEx for organic growth and productivity. Number three is NPD. Number four is debt reduction, but at this point, we've paid down all our variable debt, so we're just sitting at a fixed debt we have today, and then returning cash to shareholders. And on that note, we also announced today that we have a 4.2% dividend increase from the board in 26, our 125th consecutive year of paying dividend, and our 30th year in a row now of increasing that dividend. Again, another great example of the cash flow coming to life. So what should come through here for 26 and what you're going to hear from the rest of the team today is our confidence in the outlook we put out there. So whether it's the strength of the brands, you're going to hear about in a second from Chuck, the innovation from Carlos, you're going to hear from Andrea on Touchland, you're going to hear from Servian what we're doing in e-commerce and how that continues to be a great story. You're going to hear from Mike on the international business and now even more focus under our growth initiatives there. and then that cash flow gives you so much ability to invest in acquisitions or organically in the business. So with that said, I'll move away from the numbers and I'll let the team walk you through some of the stories behind that. So I'm going to pass you on to Chuck.

Chuck

Thanks, Lee. So as Rick and Lee have talked about, we have great optimism in our future and our ability to grow. And as we look at the U.S. business, we're targeting a strong 3% growth And that's going to put us in a great position to continue to win share in the categories that we compete. And this growth is going to be driven by our seven power brands. And the great thing about these power brands is they compete in categories that have been resilient and traditionally deliver growth. And in fact, when we look at 2025, seven of the eight categories that we compete in delivered A little bit under 2%. And that's despite a suppressed consumer environment. And as we take a look at share, we grew share in about half of the categories that we compete, so four of eight. And the drive going forward, of course, is to accelerate the momentum in categories where we're strong. And in categories where we fell a little bit short, we have powerful plans to return to share growth. So let's take a look at some of these power categories. First, laundry detergent. We had a great year in laundry detergent. We outpace the category by a percent, growing about 20 bps a share. Now why is that? Well, a big reason is the performance of the value sector. So if we look at the value sector, that's what's winning and that's what's growing share of the category. And importantly, this is where Arm & Hammer thrives. We deliver that great performance and that great value at accessible price points. And, in fact, when we look at 2025, we want a record share of 14.5%. That is in an environment where competition is increasing and promotional levels are up. And I'm very proud to say that the Arm & Hammer brand is now number one in wash loads. So what are the implications for moving forward? Well, we're going to embrace what's special about Arm & Hammer, and that really is delivering that great performance at these accessible price points and the way that we're going to do this is by embracing and driving forward on our good better best strategy so in that good tier offering that good basic arm and hammer clean and then as we move up price tiers adding value like things like oxy clean and odor blasters and greater cleaning efficacy with problems with products like deep clean in our best tier now moving along to another arm and hammer power brand cat litter and we had a strong year in cat litter as well we grew 20 basis points of share and we also outpaced the category by about a percent and we have room to grow in cat litter especially in the lightweight segment so if we look at the lightweight segment we're only at eight and a half share but we're a 27 share in traditional weight and that's where a product like our hardball SKU comes into play this is a product that is our best performing it's in that best tier for us And it has a 48% repeat rate, which is 14 points higher than the category average. So we have high confidence that this product can drive growth and continue share momentum. As Rick pointed out, we don't just play in laundry detergent and litter. We play across multiple categories that really cover a number of consumer benefits. And so as we drive forward, we're going to expand on this strength as we move from $2 billion to $3 billion for Arm & Hammer. And as we do that, what we need to do is we need to evolve the relationship that we have with our consumers. And we're evolving our consumer communication. So I'm going to share with you guys the update that we're doing to our Arm & Hammer campaign. And the idea behind this campaign is that we're not just bringing the hammer, Arm & Hammer is bringing the whole darn arm and what that really means to our consumers is no matter what they're facing during their day as long as they're with arm and hammer they've got this with the elbow grease the roll them up the muscle with the strength of dollar saved and jobs done well we show up with the whole darn arm arm and hammer more power to you a little bit of my background i came from Hershey. And I can tell you, you can't do all that with a peanut butter cup. And so it's just this incredible brand, and we have great optimism that we can drive it forward and meet new consumer needs and occasions. And we're very happy with the performance of this campaign. So we saw share gains across the categories that we're playing, and we saw important movement in consumer metrics. So consideration and purchase interest also went up double digits when we showed this campaign. Now, moving on to another brand that has tremendous upside for growth, and that's TheraBreath. And TheraBreath didn't just outpace the category. It actually drove category growth. And TheraBreath is now the number two mouthwash, and we clearly have aspirations to be the number one mouthwash, and we attain a record share of just a little under 22%. And there's room to run in our rinse business. So as Rick mentioned, we're about a fifth of what the category penetration is. So there's tremendous headroom there. Additionally, there's upside in building our on-shelf presence. And so if you look at TheraBrush share, and then you compare it to what we have on-shelf, we want to continue to drive our TDP growth because competitors are having one and a half to almost two times what we have on shelf. So a focus on distribution growth is going to be key as we move forward. And then PACE. We're very excited about our PACE launch. Now, why is that? Well, it's a $4 billion category, and it's the third largest category in which we play. Additionally, we know that consumers will spend more on premium oral care products, even in a suppressed environment. Additionally, we have the great brand momentum that I talked about that double-digit growth. And when we talk to TheraBreath consumers, it's pretty amazing. A little under 90% said they're interested in buying this product. And we have an outstanding proposition. So first, what it really lets us do strategically is expand further into our consumers' oral care routine, which is a big deal. We have eight clinical studies that confirm the efficacy of this product, and it really delivers on the TheraBreath brand. And so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to share the launch advertising that really captures the essence of TheraBreath, which is great tasting products that deliver epic, long-lasting fresh breath.

Annie, Other

Annie switched to new dentist-formulated TheraBreath toothpaste because it's long-lasting for epic freshness.

Annie, Other

Wait, fights bad breath for 12 hours?

Annie, Other

And she powers up her routine with TheraBreath mouthwash.

Speaker 6

I love this for us.

Annie, Other

TheraBreath, epic freshness guaranteed.

Chuck

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a consumer that's more excited to brush their teeth. Moving on to another brand that really has high growth potential, and that's Hero, our acne brand. In 2025, Hero grew at about three times the rate of the category. And Hero is not only the number one patch brand, it's the number one acne brand. And we attained a record share in 2025 at 19%. And much like third breath, Hero has a ton of room to run. So if you look at our penetration, we're about a third of the category. And again, we're the number one in share, so tremendous headroom. And from a shelf perspective, it's the similar dynamic to TheraBreath. When we look at our share and our performance, we see that other competitors have 2x the average weekly TDPs. So we'll continue to focus on realizing that upside for Hero. And what gives us even more confidence in how Hero can grow is we're not just a patch brand, right? What we're going to be about is really owning the acne lifecycle, which opens up a tremendous number of occasions. And so if you take a look at where we play, first in that pre-phase, in preventing acne or when it just starts to develop, we've got our cleansers launch, which is going to be a huge launch for us in the back half of this year. Then as we move on, when you start having that first red bump, we have things like our micropoint that helps address that phase. When we move on to, as we say, the full-on zit, we have Mighty Patch Original, and that really does a great job in getting it cleared up quick. And then there's always the aftermath from having the pimple, and so cleaning up dark spots and things like that. So as you look at it, it really is a tremendous opportunity to meet consumer occasions. Additionally, it opens doors for innovation, right? And so there's different ways that we can meet consumer needs across this span. And Carlos Linares is going to talk a bit about some of the innovation that we have planned for Hero.

Peter, Analyst — Bank of America

Moving on to Batiste.

Chuck

So, Batiste, to be clear, didn't have the year that we wanted in 2025. Declined about two and a half share points. But what I want to emphasize, it's still a leading brand. It's number one in category share, and it's number one in loyalty. And as we added some support to Batiste in the back half, we did see some results and some return of some momentum. And so, dollars flattened out from more steep declines in the front half, and we started to grow share, which is very important. And as we take a look at what we intend to do and to support and accelerate this momentum, there's really three areas that we're focused on in 2026. First, stronger, more consumer-relevant innovation. And so products like powders that fulfill a category need for non-aerosol products, fragrance-free, which we know there's a segment that's very interested in these products, a renovation of our colors line for better performance, and then we'll also be delivering custom items that drive interest among our key retailers. Additionally, we're going to be leveraging our price pack architecture to deliver against new occasions, right? And so we have things like our mini travel size, which moves us into more of an on-the-go occasion. And then there's also a jumbo SKU that will be coming out that meets a more heavy user need. All of this will be encompassed with a brand recharge, right? And so we're going to be looking at really revitalizing the brand. You'll see this in consumer communications, and you'll see it in store and you'll see it on pack. Now, as Rick has talked about, we really have evolved our portfolio and we are seeing that we're playing more and more on this intersection of personal care and beauty. And as we evolve our portfolio, we also have to evolve the way we're structured and the way that we're working. So I'll share an example of this. And so what we've created to accelerate brands like Hero and Batiste and Touchland is we've created what we call the specialty hair and skin pod. And what this does is this creates an environment for focus and acceleration. And so as you think about it, what we do is we've dedicated all of our consumer and customer-facing resources just to these categories. So think marketing, sales, innovation. What that enables us to do is to mine insights faster and to get better insights quicker. That then results in our ability to deliver relevant and on-trend consumer communications with agility. Additionally, we're significantly cutting our innovation timeline to develop new products so we can deliver on emerging trends and be right there where our consumers are at. Additionally, as we've established this pod, it's enabled us to attract talent from the beauty and personal care space who can come in and complement our Church and Dwight talent. And then finally, I want to just talk a minute about growing share. Obviously, that's key. Whether you're winning or losing, that's the ballgame. And we have seen intense competition, and we have seen the rise of value brands. Some of these get into a billion dollars, which is big. So we're maniacally focused on five areas that really give us confidence that we can continue to grow share. The first two are about driving consumer equity and differentiation. And so media plans that focus on driving awareness and engagement and penetration. And then equity campaigns that are involved to not just talk about the efficacy of our brands, which is very important, but also build that emotional connection. As we like to think, our advertising needs to clarify and it needs to inspire. And then, of course, insight-driven innovation. That's just such a lifeblood of our company. And so consumer-relevant information and always being a step ahead is a critical area of focus. Using price-pack architecture, We are committed to delivering the right item at the right price, at the right channel, at the right time, to the right consumer. And so that will play a big role as we move forward. And then finally, an omni-channel mindset, omni in everything that we do. And we'll talk a bit more about this later. But we are going to be with our consumer from discovery all the way to purchase. So when we take the focus on these areas and we look at the incredible brands that we have, when we look at the incredible team and heritage that we have in Church and Dwight, We're really confident in our future and very optimistic. And so with that, I'm going to turn things over to Andrea, who's going to talk about our exciting and newest brand, Touchland.

Andrea Lisbon, CEO

Good morning, everyone. My name is Andrea Lisbon, and I'm the founder and CEO of Touchland. I'm here today to talk a little bit more about the brand. I'm sure some of you already have used our products. They are amazing. Here are some stats about the brand. The brand has been distributing for five years hand sanitizer, and we recently launched our second category, which is the body and hair mist. Last week, it was published that our power mist, which I have here, was number two in sales in sephora.com. We recently made it to the 2025 Time 100 most influential companies. The brand has a lot of success in social media, so today we have over 1.2 million followers between TikTok and Instagram. We have been distributing in the U.S. for most of our life, and we recently launched in Canada and Middle East this past year, in 2025. We are being distributed in 4,800 doors, and we currently have a premium distribution outlook with partners like Sephora, Sephora Coles, and Ulta Beauty. And also, we've received over 15-plus awards in the industry. We have today five Allure Best of Beauty, Just as a fun fact, Allure didn't have a Best of Beauty Award for hand sanitizer. They inaugurated for us because of our approach to being in beauty into personal care. Our vision for the brand is to lead the future of on-the-go sensorial essentials and really elevate those staples of modern life. We're building the next global lifestyle brand by blending design, fragrance, and innovation. and our goal is to really deliver this movement of microjoice because we are all living in rush and always living under stress and having the capability to disconnect and find microjoice in the everyday is our purpose and one of the things that excites us is that it's a company and it's a brand and a movement that is embraced across generations. We intentionally decided to start our journey with hand sanitizer and you would ask why And we thought that if we could transform the most commoditized utilitarian category of them all into something that everyone is excited about, we would have the customer permission and the strongest validation to elevate the ordinary into the extraordinary. And this is, again, how we've been able to get to where we are today. And it's our innovation framework. We've been extremely disciplined when it comes to our four core pillars of innovation. and it helps us know where do we innovate and how do we innovate. These principles ensure us that we create best-in-class products every time that bring excitement and delight to the everyday. The first pillar when we think about innovation is it has to be on the go and it really helps us to define our innovation pipeline. The second element is it's not just about design, it's also about form factor. If you know how the category was used before, it used to be a gel that you would have to squeeze. We truly not just transform how it looks, we transform how it applies. We created this micro-spray, micro-joy that really delivers a different application. The third element is that we believe that you can get the best of both worlds, right? We never thought that we could get a hand sanitizer that actually takes care of your skin. We really believe in blending skincare into everything that we do. Our recent category, we launched a body and hair mist. It's usually a fragrance. We decided to bring skincare into fragrance to bring this two-in-one experience. And the fourth element, which we spend a lot of time on, is sensoriality at the core of everything that we do. From how it feels in your hand, the sound, the smell, how it feels in your skin. We deploy many, many months and years to make sure that it's a full-on 360 experience when you try our products. And this is a clear example of how we did it, right? We have been the only brand that has been able to premiumize at a scale hand sanitizer category. As you will see here, these are the four pillars and how we've transformed them. From how it smells, we all know how it smelled before Touchland, to the design and how sleek and modern it is compared to how it was before. The formula, again, being able to create a skincare-forward experience that at the same time is non-sticky, which was very important at the core of sensoriality. And then the application, right? This micro-miss, micro-joy that you can ensure you can apply the right amount every time. This slide is really showing our current portfolio and how we've been able not only to innovate within the category, but inside the category, how we've been able to expand ourselves. So we started with the PowerMass, which is the one that I have here. It's our core line. It's the hydrating line, and then we decided, because we knew that the customers of Touchline had appetite for premium formulas, to launch two formulas that are the advanced formulations. We have the Gentle Mist and the Glow Mist. They are revitalizing and ultra-soothing formulas. We then launched, two years ago, these programs of seasonals. They come back every year. They sell out always. They are very successful. This year we launched this. We had salted caramel, spiced pumpkin tinie and gingerbread, cinnamon gingerbread, which were really, really talked to by every generation. And then we also brought in something that really enables us to have fun, which is collaborations, and we will talk more in detail later, and accessories. In February 2025, we introduced our second category, the body and hair mist, and we really brought the same core pillars of innovation to everything that we do. So we also brought the Power Essence and the accessories, because you may have seen people not only want to have touchline in their packs, they want to have it outside, showing as a charm. So when it comes to collaborations, we really think collaborations bring a playful twist into the everyday. We have been able to partner with legacy brands, best-in-class brands like Sanrio with Hello Kitty, Disney, Mickey, Crocs, a case which launched July this year. and you may have tried to get it in stores. It's always sold out. It has been an amazing experience to take the DNA of these brands and join it with touchline and create products that bring delight and joy to our consumers. And then the last piece is accessories. You may have seen it with the phones. People have cases for the phones and so on. We really wanted to create accessories that really enable people a tool of self-expression. You see a lot of trends in TikTok of matching my touchline to my outfit, matching my touchline to my makeup, this has become really successful for us, and it has become a way to really enable that self-expression through the brand. And then an image speaks more than a thousand words. This is a little bit of some of the faces that have organically talked about the brand in their social media platforms, in interviews for what's in my bag, in book, and so on. And it is incredible to see the span of generations and celebrities and tastemakers that have supported organically the brand. It always makes me very happy that sometimes it pops randomly. The latest one was Celine Dion, which was an incredible surprise. And these are our current distribution partners. They are brand building partners, Sephora, Sephora Colts, Ulta. We started a travel retail recently, Amazon, and TikTok shop. And then here are some TikToks where you can see, for example, here, it's our beautiful end-cub in Sephora. It's colorful, clean, minimalistic, and it really shows all of our products in an incredible It's across different points in the store, so you cannot miss to get out of Sephora without buying Touchland. This is Crocs, and it is a very exciting partnership because it's not just, again, to create a product together, but you can actually find Touchland in some Crocs stores and crocs.com, which really, really enables us to really maximize these partnerships. This was in Times Square. This is me, very excited because we got the Times Square, the top part of the store of Sephora, to display our products for a month. I think that was one of my most iconic moments in Touchland. I couldn't even speak, but that was an incredible day. And then the last piece, this is in Middle East. We did Sephora track activation. It was very fun. I was there dancing with our customers. And it really shows, like, the tagline of the brand is move your mood. It's that capability of a brand of really, really driving that excitement and moving your mood. When it comes to growth drivers for us, the first growth driver is invest in marketing to increase the brand awareness and household penetration. We all have the feeling that we're just getting started, and there's so much to do still when it comes to brand awareness and household penetration. Second is select distribution opportunities in the U.S. The third is international expansion. We're very happy to be partnering with the church and the team to really bring the brand everywhere. We receive, and you will see, a lot of letters from all over the world asking us to bring touch land to their countries. We're very excited about it. And then the last piece, innovation and continue to bring unexpected delight to everyday moments of care. We know that our commitment with our customers is to deliver those microjoys and really fuel that through innovation. And I like to close my slides with my favorite part of my job. Every week we receive dozens of letters from customers from all over the world, from all ages, sharing their experience with Touchland in a digital era where everyone is texting and using their phones to receive self-handwritten letters is a testament of how much the brand is loved and how much it's changed people's lives. So this is my favorite part of what I do. And now I'll pass it over to Carlos.

Carlos Linares, CTO

Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm glad to be back with you guys again. Last year, I presented a little bit of how we innovate and talked about the transformation that we've been going on through. Today, I'm going to just recap that a little bit and then spend most of the time on a very exciting 2026 lineup. Two takeaways of how we innovate differently. I would say it's unique and it's sustainable. Those are the two takeaways, two words to take away from this thing. So this is your unique model. It's really five, six different sources of innovation. But what's unique about it is that they're really interdependent. They're connected. The behavior in the company is really about teamwork. They're not competing, which is very different than other places that may have one or two dominant sorts of innovation. And as you can see from the bottom, as we've transformed this, most of our innovation, one and a half of it is coming from some of these new sources that we put in in the last several years. The sustainable part comes in when we put the program together. We were at the one to one and a half percent. And this, again, as Rick mentioned, this increment on net sales. So we had a target of going up to the one and a half to two percent. So the good news is over the last three years, we've been at this yellow bar very, very consistently. 2026 is no exception. We're at the high end to deliver, again, half of the evergreen model in growth. So I'm going to kind of take you through this. And one of the challenges of doing it within a few minutes is selecting which ones we have because we have such a pretty strong pipeline for the year. But let me kind of go through that. The first one we'll start is we'll start with the personal care portfolio. You've heard a little bit, maybe a lot, of the two-phase launch. We're very excited about this launch. It's very important to us. It ties into Rick's strategy around TheraBreath and oral care and how do you drive that. We had a lot of interest from the customer, from the consumer, internally, to go do this really, really quickly. And we actually kind of held it back a little bit. We want to get this right. We want to do this the Church and Dwight way from an innovation perspective. And what does that mean? So one was we wanted to understand, what does this thoroughbred user really want? Chuck mentioned 89% are interested in buying the toothpaste, but we wanted to define what that is. Reality, they want efficacy, they want a natural taste, and they want a great experience. We also then put all of our science together. Some of the, you know, we could do toothpaste. We've been doing toothpaste for a while. But we had some upstream future works, as we call it, technologies that we wanted to deploy in this particular toothpaste. So we did that. Eight clinical studies. We actually have 12 hours of fighting bad breath, which is, I think, pretty unique in the category. I've not seen anybody else make that claim before. So it's really performing. And then the consumer experience, the taste, the flavor, the texture. And you see that 4.7 average, which obviously is pretty good. You'll see that number again later on in the presentation. We're hitting at pretty high marks on some of our consumer experience in our NPD. Then let's talk a little bit about Hero, our other more recent acquisition. We've got two innovative launches in the year. The first half we're doing Mighty Shield with a liquid patch. Chuck talked about the pimples cycle. Obviously, you have a pimple, you want to zap it. But it's also a little bit of protecting the pimple, right? So if you think about it in the morning, there's dirt, there's debris. You want to protect that because the perception is that may make it worse. So this is a liquid product that turns into a patch. You put it on in the morning, you're protecting the pimples from debris, dirt, and even makeup. You can put makeup on top. Again, the perception is maybe makeup may make the pimple even worse. So you protect it, and it goes on on top of it. So at the end of the day, it's become a patch. So you apply it in the morning as a liquid. It becomes a patch, and you peel it off just like a patch. Obviously, the exciting part is it's another occasion in the acne journey that we're offering a product for. The second half, we're introducing the cleanser line that was mentioned previously. It's designed specifically for acne-prone skin, so you've got the efficacy of OTC formulas, but it's gentle enough for skin that may be irritated. We typically don't present second-hand products here. We hold them back because of the confidentiality, but we're really excited about this one. As Chuck mentioned, this gets us into another part of the skincare routine for the acne-prone consumer, so you're adding to the routine and adding to the regimen, which is incremental growth for us. And then not to forget about our other personal care brands that are a little bit older in our portfolio on Trojan. So Trojan, we've had a long history of innovation in Trojan, but this is actually our best condom ever. It's our new world material. We haven't done this type of innovation in 20 years in Trojan. So very excited about what this is. It is a patented non-latex material. Trojan is basically about, and condoms, they're about protection and they're about intimacy. This takes the intimacy to the next level. This is clear, orderless, the ratings are incredible. One of the interesting unique things is even feeling your partner's body heat. So we're feeling really, really good about this innovation. I mentioned the 4.7 stars. You see it again. We're very proud of this one. This is a brand new innovation that I think is going to take Trojan to the next level. So let me kind of jump then to the household part of the portfolio. You've heard a little bit about Arm & Hammer, the good, better, best strategy. This is our portfolio. I'm going to kind of take you through a couple of launches in each of these segments here. On the good side, we're introducing a baking soda fresh detergent, 10 times the baking soda we've had before, our highest level of baking soda in any of our liquid detergent portfolio. On the better portfolio or segment, we're actually having a lot of success in Sheets. We're the number one brand in Sheets. We're actually twice as big as the next competitor now in Sheets. So we've taken that convenient form and now putting it into the better segment with Arm & Hammer plus OxiClean. So you're going to get the same convenient, very consumer desirable form of sheets with premium cleansing, premium freshness, and a premium design. If you look at that sheet, it looks very different, very unique, and I think it's going to take our sheets business even further than it is today. And another better innovation that we're introducing, we're expanding this year, is the Arm & Hammer odor blasters. You're probably aware, your odor is a big unmet need in laundry. And you're also probably very aware that rinses have become a new category in laundry category. So we introduced this last year in select stores. In the stores that we're in, we're actually number two brands. There's three others that are competitors. We're actually number two. So we're taking this nationally in 2026. Our other main laundry brand is OxiClean. And OxiClean has been a leader in additives for a long time. We want to make sure we maintain that leadership and kind of keep our advantage against both competitive entries and private label. So MaxForce is our subline within Max, within OxiClean, is the most powerful, highest performing line that we have on the brands. So we're actually taking that brand and I would say almost revamping it. We've got a better powder, more concentrated, more powerful. We've got a new liquid with a new bottle that differentiates it from the rest of the segment. So it becomes very clear that this is an additive from OxiClean. And as you can see, the product of the MaxForce is spread across all of our forms, powder, liquid, and sprays. So we think both the Arm & Hammer and the OxiClean is going to give us some good momentum into the laundry category in 26. And then last but not least is litter. Chuck talked about Arm & Hammer, the hardball. It's not here, but we feel really, really good about hardball. It's got a lot of momentum, and that's in our best category. but this year we're also introducing innovation into our better which is dual defense so again this is another one of those categories that it's all about order control so this product gives you order control in two different ways one is the arm and hammer order control technology that kind of clumps and seals in the order but now we're introducing uh the microband which is an antimicrobial technology that prevents the order uh growing bacteria from developing orders over time. So you actually have both a dual short-term and a long-term order control performance. So before I hand it over to Servi, I think generally I've gone maybe nine innovations in less than nine minutes here, so I've gone very quickly, but I'll say overall we're very proud of the team, very proud of the innovation. We've got category-leading innovation, we've gone into new segments with this portfolio, and we've upgraded some of the core to give us a competitive advantage. So with that, hand it over to Servi.

Surabhi Pokhriyal

Good afternoon, everyone. Good to see you all again. I'm Surabhi Pokhryal. I do all things digital, e-commerce, media, and a bit of AI now. So, as you are familiar and as Rick and Lee introduced, e-commerce has been a fantastic growth driver for us as a company for several years now. I feel really proud to say that we went from 2% to 24% in under a decade. And for those of you who track a lot of other of our CPG peers, I'm sure that pops out as a head, shoulder, torso about all things e-commerce and digital in the consumer goods sector. I also want to reiterate that we are not in the business of telling the consumer where to buy from. Our job is just to make sure, like Chuck was saying, we clarify the intent of our product and we impress them and inspire them to buy. And that's what we do on the online channel. Sometimes it can be misperceived that e-commerce is just Amazon or pure play channels. We have seen it, and I'm sure you see that as you do retailer earnings. There are retailers like Walmart, Target, Kroger, Sam's Club, name a retailer. Everybody is doubling down on the power of digital, and that's what we call omni-channel. We saw above 14% growth for all of our brands, not just the flagship brand of Arm & Hammer, but also our newer acquisitions like Hero and TheraBreath. International, as Mike will speak shortly, is a huge growth driver and priority for us as a company, especially as we compare to our peers. That's one area we want to double down super intentionally. In international, I always say, right, any market that has a cell phone and internet penetration, that's ripe for e-commerce. And as you see by the flags on this chart, you know, markets like Canada and China have always done well with respect to digital, but newer markets like Mexico, which traditionally have been nascent in terms of digital, have done really, really well for us, and that speaks to our double-digit growth there. Finally, an emerging, right? For those of us who cannot keep our cell phone more than a foot away from our hands, and the next generation also, TikTok's shop is emerging as a major growth driver in terms of impressing the consumers where they spend a lot of their time. You might have heard of the trend, TikTok made me buy it a couple of years back, where people would get inspired in their discovery journey on TikTok and then go and buy in store. Now, the platform is compressing that journey. You can see it, want it, click it, have it right on within the platform. And we are leaning into that in a very meaningful way with several of our brands. Fun fact for you, TikTok shop is actually bigger in the US in terms of GMV ahead of a couple of large beauty retailers already. So that just tells you how the consumer buying behavior is shifting online. This is our growth mindset, right? This is what I call as the how of what we do things at Church and White, especially in terms of digital. We always engage, right? Like I was saying, we want to be there engaging with the consumer at the zero moment of truth, being available, mentally available to the consumer. Then we always optimize in terms of test and learns, right? In the age of AI, we want to dip into how we drive our content and creative and continually test to see what works well. And because we are a lean company, we do not have much headcount. We are very intentional about scaling things really fast and scrapping things that do not work. And finally, that's what I call our secret virtuous cycle of innovation and the gift that keeps giving. These are a couple of examples. We are leaning into AI in a meaningful way. The good news is because there's no dearth of tools to be used there, be it on retailer platforms or from the large media platforms, you can make all things from cute cat videos, which are really thumb-stopping, to making sure our product lifestyle shots show up really, really well. I call this the age of disposable content, right? As you know from your own behavior, you will never have a day where you said, I finished my Instagram today, right? Because the doom scroll just keeps going. What that means is we as brands have to make sure there is disposable, bite-sized, snacky content that engages the consumer in a meaningful way and inspires them to buy us. And the next leg of that is we want to make sure there is productivity by making sure that content can translate and go across markets. And that's what we are leaning into doing now. Build for AI discovery. Some of you who shop on Walmart and Amazon might be familiar with Sparky as the agent or Rufus. All things said, that is one area we are leaning into because we already do a great job on making sure our product detail pages show well, our content there shows well. The consumer loves us, and we see that in terms of the reviews that Carlos was speaking to. All of that makes sure that our products pop up on Sparky and Rufus. So technically, we have to do nothing special than what we are doing, just make sure the product content is clean and our reviews are clean and the products show up where they need to show up. In terms of media buying and AI, we also want to make sure that we are adjacent and speak to our consumers who are our high-value consumers, and the technology helps us by placing those advertisements to the right consumers at the right day part and the right times of the Finally, I'm sure in the analyst world you're familiar with the tax of retail media. I'm proud to say that we do not consider that as a tax because we are steadfast in making sure that the retail media we invest in really works its worth, and we get great ROIs out of that, much ahead of industry-leading benchmarks. As Carlos was speaking, we are super intentional about how we do our innovation. Online and digital in particular has been a great platform for us to launch products, create category creators slash category disruptors, and once we have made it right on online, gather the feedback from the consumer, tweak the product as needed, that's when we call and we go make it big. Based on the products that you see on the screen, we launched laundry sheets online first and gained great momentum in a handful of months. We launched the premium baking soda that became number one in just three months. And very recently, we launched the much-loved TheraBreath toothpaste that's already topping all our category benchmarks expected from any earlier toothpaste launches. in terms of capabilities i already spoke about the social content and this doesn't have audio but you'll get a sense of how the bite-sized snacky content works in the social realm and you'll notice something at the bottom called as the engagement rate right brands typically have different variety of metrics in the marketing world because everything is measurable these days which is fantastic but engagement is what tells you how are the consumers talking back to you. They're not just following you, they're engaging with you, liking you, commenting you, you know, re-sharing your posts. And that's the metric we use. And some of our power brands do really, really well. The typical engagement rates are 2%. We do double-digit engagement rates for some of our larger brands. On the right, you'll see something interesting. We have a lot of experience in making sure we follow consumer search trends. What are they searching on Google and Amazon and other online sites. Recently, we are trying to lean into what is the consumer speaking about us and the category on Reddit, which is a great source for following organic chatter, which is unpaid. Similarly, because these things give us the leading surfacing of emotions and their intent, and that helps us define not just how to talk to them in a marketing world, but also tells us how to innovate and build products that they are searching for. On the right, you'll notice, you know, with the help of AI, we are leaning in to find where are the emerging brands across the world. Given in M&A, we are building tools internally to figure out what could be acquisition targets that are ripe for us globally and not just in the U.S., and sometimes it may not be an It may be a brand doing really well in a category or an adjacent category, and we learn from that to innovate differently. with that i feel really proud to say we are at the cusp of saying we are future proofing our growth you know digital or non-digital i call it the era of we are just in the business of doing commerce the e and e-commerce has become silent and we are super proud to say we are always in the race of going towards where the puck is going to be and where it is where it is not on that canadian reference, I'll pass it on to my international partner, Mike Reed.

Michael Read

Good afternoon. I have the privilege of representing our international and specialty products employees all over the globe. Let me just start with international. So international is about a billion and one size business. We kind of operate in two different ways. Two-thirds of our business is through our subsidiary. We have seven subsidiaries now, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Mexico, and Australia. And middle of the way through 2024, we acquired our longstanding partner, Graphico, in Japan to form our seventh subsidiary. The other third of our business is done through value distributor partners all across the globe. We have five regional offices to support that. Shanghai, Singapore, Panama, London, and Mumbai. And we operate through almost 400 distributor partners and have commercial operations in about 100-plus countries. We've had a long track record of growth in organic. This year, no exception, 5.5% organic growth. If you look over the last three years, we're averaging 8% CAGR, which is right on our evergreen model. So really proud of the team's efforts and a long track record of growth with lots of opportunity ahead of us. Our brands travel extremely well. We support dozens of brands across the globe. But similar to our U.S. domestic business, we're laser focused on a core set of brands. And this is kind of how we think about our business center core priorities. One is we have kind of U.S. scale brands, Arm & Hammer, Waterpik, OxiClean, where we leverage assets and NPD pipelines to commercialize across the globe. We will modify as it makes sense, but generally we're borrowing off U.S. scale brands and taking them globally. That's complemented with a fairly internationally-based portfolio that's largely personal care and OTC, headlined by Batiste, Staramar, FemFresh, and others. And then thirdly, and probably most importantly, kind of more in recent times, is we've really started to accelerate our acquisitions. So we've had a long history of taking brands internationally. I think Hero, Therabreath, and now Touchland give us such a great opportunity to scale and enter markets with real purpose. And I'll give you a couple of headlines on that in a second. As I say, our brands travel extremely well. I'm proud to say six of our seven track power brands have grown share in 2025. It's a really strong result. We don't track market share across all our brands. So in addition to that, our Arm & Hammer business has grown almost 6%, and FemFresh also grew positively in 2025. So really strong results across the portfolio and market share growth across the board. Just to double-click on some of our acquisitions, we launched here a couple years ago. We're now in more than 75 countries. We'll be on our way to over 100 by the end of 2026. We have the number one share position in acne patches across all our track subsidiaries and very similar to the U.S., we're number one in acting in a couple of those with still lots of room to grow. Similarly on Therabreath, we're now in over 50 countries. It's the fastest growing mouthwash in retail in Canada, Mexico, U.K., and Australia. We have a number one online position in several countries that we launched in. So we're really proud of these two acquisitions. And the next in line is Touchland. So you heard from Andrea, really strong results obviously in the US. We've launched in Canada and the Middle East. There's a ton of pent-up demand for this brand all around the world. So we're really excited about how we take the learnings from here on TheraBreath and apply it to the Touchland playbook. So this will be our third big one in a short period of time that we're pretty excited about. One of the things that we're really focused on as we continue to mature as a global business is just to get much, much deeper into to our local consumer insights and region-led innovation where appropriate. We try to borrow assets and leverage them across the world, but where appropriate, we do make nuances and changes. Here's a couple of examples. Just recently launched a harmonized wine of Batiste into China and Japan. Again, using some of the properties and core equities of Batiste, but softer fragrances, smaller sizes, less intense spray, less white residue, things that are fit for purpose for the consumer and to compete more effectively in that market. Another example is we've had a longstanding business of powders and OxyClean. Our Japanese market where we're in the number one position in powders, the largest segment's liquid. So we've done some regional innovation and launched a strong liquid lineup that we launched last year, and it's performing extremely well. So again, where it makes sense, we will kind of make local adaptations and innovation. Just to keep going on the Japan theme, We bought that business in Q3 of 2024. Talked a little bit about our number one position in powders and OxyClean and moving it into liquid. That was the primary brand that we had in Japan. I think most notably is now that gives us a platform to introduce the rest of our portfolio. So we've already launched Batiste and the Breath Co. Hero is soon to come and others to follow. So we've got a strong team there. We're starting to make more progress on the OxyClean brand and also widen the portfolio. And as Rick said, just to close on international, is while we've had a really strong track record of taking U.S. brands and mobilizing them across the globe, we're also looking at international M&A to add to that. So that's either scaling up in current subs and or entering into new geographies of interest. So with that, I'll switch to the specialty products. Specialty products is about a $300 million business. The lion's share is our animal nutrition, which is a longstanding part of the business. About a third is in our, what we call specialty chemicals, and the remainder in our commercial and professional products. From an animal nutrition point of view, we've been traditionally prebiotics, probiotics, nutritional supplements for the dairy cow segment. We've expanded into poultry and also into swine. I think when we've talked about kind of the business growth, we focus on a few areas. Number one is taking what has been largely a U.S.-centric proposition to growing it globally. We're now at 30% sales internationally. We've built a team and been really focused on driving innovation in the space. We've had some really strong innovations, particularly in the poultry sector, that's now starting to drive some major growth there. And we're investing in tools to make sure that we're interfacing with our customers and just selling better and improving our service. This is one example of a CRM that we've applied here and then also the other parts of the division. The other two sectors is what we call performance products. So we're taking solutions into the bakery, water treatment, kidney dialysis, a whole section of different opportunities there. And then the last and the smallest segment is taking our consumer brands into things like hospitality, food service, and Janssen. So those three segments together make up about $300 million worth of growth. 2025, we had another positive year growth, 2.6% organic growth off the back of 7.1%. We've had eight consecutive quarters of positive growth. But most importantly, I think we're really set up well for growth to the future. We've got a strong team and a really core portfolio that's working well in the marketplace. And with that, I will pass over to Rick Turker for closing comments.

Richard Dierker, CEO

Thanks, Mike. All right. So we'll wrap up with how we operate, and then we'll go through Q&A. We have five operating principles. Leverage brands, front of the environment, leverage people, leverage assets, and leverage acquisitions. So leveraged brands, you heard Mike just talk about it. You heard Chuck talk about it. You heard Carlos talk about innovation. You heard Serby talk about how we do digital. So all those things come together, and we do a great job with our brands. Friend of the environment, we have a long track record of being a friend of the environment from the 1800s all the way through present day. And it's not just us saying it. It's many other third-party agencies recognizing that effort. Leveraging people. Highest sales per employee in the industry. And I think this is missed so many times by so many people when people evaluate the company. This isn't about the stat. It's not about trying to make that number go up. It's all about having the agility, speed of decision making, being able to be nimble in a complex world. And so because of that, we believe that's one of our competitive advantages versus the industry. We have a simple compensation structure as well, five metrics for 20%. Everybody is tied into that, but gross margin is 20% of everyone's bonus. It's easy to say, but hard to do, but we believe it adds growth and margin expansion are two very important metrics. They lead to cash flow generation, just like Lee presented, right? That's how you get free cash flow conversion. That's how you get optionality to go buy businesses and do that virtuous cycle in the model again and again and again. Leverage assets. We're not a capital-intensive company. Again, that ties back to free cash flow conversion. That's due to our footprint, right? We have third-party manufacturing in many ways. We have distributors that are our partners internationally. And then we leverage acquisitions. We make good shareholder returns, great shareholder returns, because time after time, we can have a great core business and then add on acquisitions. So to close, we have confidence in our future. You heard it from the management team. There's a lot of things going right. There are more tailwinds and headwinds, even in an environment like we're sitting in today. We have portfolio changes. We have growth initiatives that support a healthy evergreen model. We expand household penetration, especially for businesses that we've recently bought. We have a great high and sustainable growth rate for international. We have great innovation, consistent and really industry-leading, digitally savvy, and then we focus on domestic and international M&A. And with that, I'll invite the ELT, our executive leadership team, to come up and we'll answer a few questions. And Jill has the microphones. Why don't we go with Nick, Nick Modi.

Nick Modi, Analyst — RBC Capital Markets

Testing, testing. Can you hear me? Okay, great. I really don't need this thing. So just two questions, Rick. Like on the arm and hammer kind of from $2 billion to $3 billion, how much of that is international? And if it's not, why not, given the value positioning and the credibility, the credentials that the brand has? And then just the second question was, you had this initiative of smaller teams kind of working on a subset of brands, I think, that you were going to focus on. I didn't hear about that today, so I was just curious, you know, what's going on with that, if you could just give us an update.

Richard Dierker, CEO

Yeah, so two questions, and then I'll let Mike kind of add on to the Arm & Hammer. So the bulk of the Arm & Hammer growth is domestic, but Arm & Hammer is a great brand, alive and well globally. I think it's a longer curve as you grow a brand globally, because, you know, you go to Europe, and baking soda in Arm & Hammer isn't really recognized as much. We tried to plant the seed in China to some degree for fruit washing and other cleaning and cleansing and freshness attributes. But I'd say the bulk of it is in the U.S., although there is great, it's a sizable business internationally, and we expect growth there as well. Nothing but the initiatives we do in the U.S. is going to help with international.

Michael Read

Yeah, just to add, it's actually our single largest brand for international, so it's just broken up into a few different pieces. But we have a strong litter business in China. as an example, we're baking soda that's growing quite rapidly across the globe. And we do think that while laundry probably doesn't play as much of a role globally, most of the other segments will. So we're pretty excited about what Arm & Hammer can do, and it's absolutely part of the growth story.

Richard Dierker, CEO

Yeah. Litter in particular, this might surprise you, but the litter business internationally is larger than you would think, and definitely in China as well, right? And so we're looking at how do we make that business even a faster growth business. The second question he had is really on a group that we call Tag Internally. It's not ready for... We've created it. It's called the Accelerator Group. It reports up through Serby. And there's a couple brands that we believe have every right and obligation to be hundreds of millions of dollars. And we're going to just manage those differently, Let it be a little bit of an incubator in itself, and we'll probably report back once we see progress. In my mind, they're going to come into the incubator. We're going to, you know, some will do better, some will accelerate, some won't, and then they'll graduate back into the company and be managed more as a traditional brand. But this is our chance to really, you know, take a flyer on a few key brands. Servi, do you want to add anything to that?

Surabhi Pokhriyal

No, I think you got it. quick one for me on vitamins. Javier, we sold the vitamin business. I'm just kidding. Go ahead. I know. But a lot of it has been done in terms of what it means to growth. I wanted to see whether you can speak of what it meant for the cost side. It was up against Nestle in the drugstores, all the efforts that you made to stabilize. So what does it mean to leave that behind and refocus those resources against all the innovation that you have?

Richard Dierker, CEO

Yeah, I think it's one of the single biggest, we're going to look back in a few years, and I think one of the biggest strategic pivot points in our company history is when we acknowledged that we couldn't turn the vitamin business around. and the amount of mind share that management had on vitamins, which, you know, I talked about private label exposure. I mean, think about that. I mean, going from 12% to 5%, that is a private label heavy industry, and brands are having a very tough time in that industry. You know, competitive advantages that we thought were sustainable were not. So there's nothing but tailwinds from a growth perspective for the company now, margin. We were over-investing in marketing. But more than anything, it was the amount of time, effort, and energy that we had to divert to doing all the right things. We were. We did all the right marketing. We did all the right consumer research, all the innovation. But every minute we spent on vitamins was a minute we weren't spending on Arm & Hammer growing from $2 billion to $3 billion for the rest of our business to grow. So I think that's going to serve us very well when we look back.

Brian, Analyst — Cowen & Company (in for Josh Jennings)

Thanks for taking my question. So two questions on Touchland. So first, on the international expansion so far in Canada and Middle East, how is that going? And then as you think of Touchland, how do you think about the phasing of international expansion? And do you think you can get into 100-plus countries similar to here over time?

Richard Dierker, CEO

Yeah, I'll make a couple comments. And then either Brian or Andrea, and then Mike can make a comment. it. We're really happy with the Touchland business. We talked about just a double-digit grower, but more than anything, you saw from Andrea today, it's not just a hand sanitizer business. Over the long term, it's a brand, and she's built a great brand. International has done well. I would say it's hitting or beating all of our expectations. We believe there's a path forward. Mike and our regulatory team with Carlos is working hard on getting to 20, 30, 40 countries just so that we have the optionality to go when it makes sense. The unique piece with Touchland is we're going to be more picky on what partners we go with, right? We're being very purposeful on what channels we participate in in the U.S. We'll be very purposeful outside the U.S. as well. Brian or Andrea, anything you want to add?

Andrea Lisbon, CEO

No, that was pretty good. Yeah, we're trying to launch as fast as we can. It's alcohol-based, so there's some regulatory challenges to get it out in some markets in the world. But we're full steam ahead. We're going to have a handful of markets here this year. We started with Sephora in Canada and in the Middle East. That was part of the reason why we ended up in those two markets. And, you know, when you ask the question about being 100, over a longer period of time, potentially, but like Rick said, we're going to be purposeful with which retailers and who we partner with in each of these countries.

Operator

Peter.

Peter, Analyst — Bank of America

Thanks. Just a couple of questions on the guidance. So maybe first, the 3% to 4% organic sales growth. Can you maybe outline what you're expecting in terms of U.S., international SPD? And then in the couple of weeks here, you're going to start to lap this inventory de-stocking component. That was a big drag on sales last year. I think it was 300 basis points in the first quarter. Can you maybe just help us understand what's embedded in the guidance as you lap that this year? Thanks.

Richard Dierker, CEO

Lee, you want to take that?

Lee McChesney, CFO

Just within the outlook of 3-4%, you have the U.S. business is 3% growth for the year, international is 8%, and then SPD is 5%. As you talked about in the first quarter, we definitely had inventory de-stocking last year. But, you know, as I said a little bit earlier, you know, our outlooks for all those businesses are relatively consistent throughout the year for growth. We've just got to get through that last piece of that comp. Yep.

Operator

Bonnie.

Bonnie, Analyst

Thank you. I have a question on promotions. They've really been elevated in a lot of the HPC categories, and we're seeing a fair amount of, you know, negativity on price mix. So, you know, we're seeing a fair amount of, love to hear sort of your thoughts on the environment right now and, you know, essentially what is factored into your guides? You know, where do you expect this promotional environment to land this year? And if you do expect it to remain elevated, how should we think about that in the context of your price mix?

Richard Dierker, CEO

Yeah, no, good question. I think, you know, what you're saying is when consumers are pressed and categories start to decline on volume, then competitors price promote to gain share. But the value of the brand matters in a big way. Like in Q4, Arm & Hammer Laundry was the only one who grew a share. And we're not outspending the category at all. The value segment is the only segment that's gaining share. So the macro is helping the Arm & Hammer brand more so than most, I would say. That's true in cat litter, too. Cat litter competition is spending an awful lot on promotion. We're not. We're well below the industry average, and we're gaining share. So brands matter. You just can't promote yourself your way to growth. And so all the advertising that we're doing, the innovation, remember, it's a combination of value that you're giving the consumer. So we've been very, very happy with that. I do think that promotional levels will drift back to normalcy. We're probably the categories under long-term historical levels for promotion. But we're well-positioned. We're doing well. Mark, any other comments you'd like to make?

Speaker 22

Yeah, I totally agree. I think one of the things we do is to build a great promotional plan with retailers, but we do watch it every week, right? And we continue to monitor how we're doing. To Rick's plan on laundry, we feel really good. And we'll continue to do that. And if the category heats up, we'll make the right moves.

Operator

Okay, Anna.

Anna, Analyst — Piper Sandler

Thanks so much. I wanted to ask on your longer-term gross margin potential. You've historically said that your mix of business is around 40% value, 60% premium. And then, you know, with the last two acquisitions and the growth from premium kind of ticking up here, We are seeing value now around 36%. So I wanted to ask if that's a driver of longer-term gross margin expansion behind, I guess, the premium side of the business. And if that should tick up slightly over time or revert back to that 40%, 60% split between value and premium.

Richard Dierker, CEO

Yeah, it's a great observation and question. I would say our acquisitions recently have been higher margin personal care businesses, and that bodes well for that. Give us a year or two before we think about changing the evergreen model. We just got out of tariff control, and we have another year of 3% inflation. But I would say the problem with long-term gross margin guides is the world changes rapidly. But a lot of confidence in our gross margin expansion. And I think to put up 100 basis points in this year amidst everything that we're going through is phenomenal. I think having flat gross margins in 2025 when we were faced initially with $190 million of tariffs is jaw-dropping. Lee, anything you want to add?

Lee McChesney, CFO

I think, as Rick's point, things evolve. You know, that outlook obviously contemplates what we know now, but we don't know what's going to come this year just like what happened in 2025.

Chris, Analyst — UBS

Chris so just on touch land one of the things I hear about a lot is the risk of over distributing the brand you know going to channels like like mass where you lose the cache of of the brand I think there was some activity at Costco in calendar Q4 where there was a debate about whether you're kind of blowing out distribution and yet I hear there's a ton of you know growth runway can you just talk about maybe um i don't know if careful is the right word but how do you think about you know keeping that uh brand exclusivity and but also having the ability to deliver you know really strong growth rates if that makes sense like staying in the channels that you need to be in but still delivering strong growth and if i just could going to the back half of this year lee i think you said the growth rates should be fairly similar through the year but you know touch land is going to enter the base into the back half and presumably it's still growing quite quickly. Is that a phasing thing? Is there some conservatism in that? But any context on maybe how Touchland could be entering into the next 12 to 18 months?

Richard Dierker, CEO

Yeah, I think we were pretty public a quarter or two ago even when we announced Touchland that we were going to be very careful and selective on what channels we go to because exactly the point you're making, there's a cashier to the brand and we have great partners. Before and Ulta have They've been great partners, and Andrea has developed and nurtured that relationship. So we've said there is no plan in the near term to go into Mass, as an example. Club, we believe, is a different channel. It's a more premium channel. It's too early to tell now what we're going to do. I don't want to front run that. But I would say it's a little bit more unique than the traditional Mass channel. Andrea or Brian, anything you want to add?

Andrea Lisbon, CEO

We did do a quick test, a holiday test in Costco. It went very well. That was purposeful to do it as a test to see how it did there. And so we're evaluating channels all the time. We're evaluating the existing channels. The important thing here that is a little different is that Touchland was not a Sephora-born brand, as a lot are. It was born in Ulta and Target and Amazon, and Sephora pulled us in, okay? So it's not just, so we have more degrees of flexibility in terms of some of those channels, but they're a great partner. They're doing everything that we've asked of them, and we monitor it, you know, each quarter, six months, year. And the day the support doesn't meet our expectations, we want Touchland to be in everyone's hands in the world.

Richard Dierker, CEO

Yeah, I think the other nuance is when we did that club test, you know, Remember, at stores at Ulta or Sephora, they're selling 100-plus units per store per week. It's very, very high-velocity units. And we didn't see that drop off at all, even when we were doing the club test. So that was encouraging. There was another question on back-half growth, Lee.

Lee McChesney, CFO

I mean, again, the range is 3% to 4%, so there's obviously some degree to freedom. You're right, you know, touch-and-does turn into a positive organic in the back-half. You know, the offset that you also have, the Therabrefs and the heroes growing at the rates they were growing this year. Obviously, they're going to keep growing, but, you know, I just think there's a balance to that outlook right now.

Operator

Okay. Rob?

Rob, Analyst — BMO

Thanks. Lee, I hate to keep asking about the guidance for organic growth, but did I get it right that the exit rate for the business excluding vitamins is 1.8? And therefore, does that assume that the business has to get better, like, right away? most companies you take the exit rate and that's the growth for next year but this is a little bit different and then I had a follow up on Arm & Hammer I did the 25 year CAGR math and I think the math is like 2.8% growth rate for Arm & Hammer but you think you can do better than that going forward is it going to do better than that this year or is this year kind of like a similar pace of growth for Arm & Hammer

Richard Dierker, CEO

yeah so I'll take the second one first First, my belief is Arm & Hammer growth will be accelerating in 2026,

Richard Dierker, CEO

27, 28, and 29. Like, I think the plans are being, are in place for 2026. Plans are being laid for 27, 28, 29. And so I do think Arm & Hammer accelerates from where it's at today. Your other comment on, your first question was really on growth, right? And I think you've got to be careful taking just Q4 and rolling it forward, because you've got to remember how high 2024 Q4 growth was. But I think the overarching comment would be we believe categories are going to grow 2%. We believe that x the portfolio changes, we would have been growing 3.5% in 2025. We tend to take share over time. And so when you kind of add those two, three things together, the absence of headwinds, not just vitamins, not just flawless, as we wound down those businesses, but we did get delisted from Costco last year for OxyClean. That was a big headwind. We didn't make a big stink about it, but we overcame all that. And so when you layer all that in, that's why we have a lot of confidence in 3% to 4% next year. Andrea, then Steve.

Operator

Andrea Teixeira, JP Morgan.

Andrea Teixeira, Analyst — JP Morgan

So I wanted to still stay on the touch land. So the UK, I was curious, usually brands go and fly to the UK, and especially because you have Batiste there, why the UK expansion didn't happen yet, I think, if I'm not mistaken. Canada and the Middle East is where you already have the brand. And then in terms of line extensions, should we see line extensions within Touchland this year or this is something more long-term?

Richard Dierker, CEO

Yeah, we're not going to comment anything on line extensions yet. I would just say that our plans would say that we believe the brand can be bigger than just hand sanitizer. You saw Andrea's slide and it was about convenience. It was about the sensorial experience. It was about convenience. All those things come together, and there are other categories that that could apply to. As to the UK, remember, this is a team of, for a long time, of 12 or 13 people managing a business that now is almost $200 million. So I know for the company, for our company, we would be like, yeah, we're going to go to UK on Thursday, and we're going to go to Portugal on Friday. For them, they were just trying to keep their head above water, and they were doing a great job. And so we're adding a lot of resources on regulatory, right, to lay the groundwork to do the next 20, next 30 countries. Regulatory is usually the answer with this product on where you can go and how fast you can go.

Steve, Analyst — Goldman Sachs

It's two questions for me. The first one, on the arm and hammer aspect, $2 billion to $3 billion, are you just calling that out, you know, to kind of you know quantify it make it a priority or and be more attentional about it or I guess to what extent are you doing something different going forward versus how you've been managing that brand the center of your portfolio for a while and then the second question is on just TheraBreath moving that into into paste you know maybe size of the prize you know as you think about the incremental growth of the overall franchise, how much is oral rinse versus how much is paste, and just how you're thinking about bringing that to market. Are those going to be marketed and promoted separately, together? Are you going to bundle the product? Are they individual initiatives, or are you marketing paste to the rinse consumer, or is it independent, I guess, is the question?

Richard Dierker, CEO

Yeah. So I'm going to, on your first one, it was really about what are we doing different on Arm & Hammer? And I would say that slide that had four pillars. The first pillar is what we're doing today. And what we're doing today is doing a great job on innovation, on marketing, on promotional, on pricing, on sizing, all those things. And that's what's been driving our share on laundry and litter for many, many years. I expect that to continue. That's a core competency of the company. The good, better, best, we've done that really well in laundry and litter. I'm saying to you today that there's a few sub-segments that we haven't been doing that. We haven't had the focus there. We're going to put a little bit more focus there. And so I think that's an incremental opportunity. The third one was incremental categories. That's incremental. Like where does Arm & Hammer have the right to play and win? And we want to make sure we're very picky about that. But you're going to start seeing that over the next couple of years, I would say. I don't want to front run any comments on where we would go or whatnot. And the fourth one was, again, there are certain brands that we license today that when they get to critical mass, we should take them back and we can scale a lot faster. So that's really like an incubator, a test ground. for us. There's also probably categories that we may want to get into, and that's a great test environment to do so. So those are what's new about it. I would say the numbers, you know, $2 to $3 billion, I want to make meaningful progress over the next four years, is what I would tell you. Hey, Chuck, do you want to take the TheraBreath discussion on how we're marketing it together?

Chuck

Yeah. We see tremendous upside. And so it's a balance of there's room to run rents, as I showed before, and penetration and pace. So there will be some individual efforts. But as we look at this, what we're really thinking about this is penetration of the consumer's oral care regimen. So where we can, certainly between online promotions, those type of things, looking to pull it together. And in our early results, what we are seeing is we are having a high conversion rate of rents users going over to the pace. So, it is going across the oral care needs.

Operator

Olivia.

Olivia, Analyst — Baird

Thanks. So, value is obviously still a very big driver. So, can you talk about your confidence in ability to capitalize on that value-seeking consumer while also thinking about the impact on margins? That's number one. And then your full-year organic sales growth targets clearly are ahead of a lot of your peers. but you have the highest exposure to, right now, the lowest growth market. So as you think about the opportunity in front of you to capitalize on international markets, what's the pace to be able to do that to kind of offset, to capitalize on some of that international opportunity while also being mindful of the fact that the U.S. consumer is pretty challenged?

Richard Dierker, CEO

Yeah. I'll take the second one first. So I would just say, you're right, the U.S. market is a slower-growing market these days than many of the international markets. We're doing really well internationally. We're growing, but not all the international markets are fantastic. We're growing above market rates internationally as well. Even though categories for us only grew 1.8% last year, like I said before, XR, our portfolio changes, our brand's consumption was 3.5%. So in a tough environment, our brands and consumers bought those brands, and that's pretty strong growth. So that gives me a lot of confidence. Your first question was, remind me, Olivia, I lost it, margin and value. Well, it's kind of my answer to what I said to Bonnie. Despite the promotional environment, the brand matters, right? And what's unique about Arm & Hammer? We talked about it a little bit, but we have the halo effect for advertising. So even though we're a value detergent, we're advertising everywhere. And most competitors in value and anywhere else can't advertise at the same rate we can. It just doesn't work. So that's number one. Number two is we kind of gloss over it quickly. But, you know, Carlos Ruiz and his supply chain team and Carlos Linares, who supports it with R&D, our productivity numbers are just astronomical and and we have a muscle there you know carlos laneros walked you through our innovation muscle on mpd and it had five different vectors and that's why we we over time can innovate and do two percent of sales or half of our organic growth rate we have that same and maybe we should tell that story next year we have that same story on productivity to be able to have productivity year after year after year guess where most that productivity comes from. High moving throughput on widgets, which is fabric care and home care. It helps everywhere, but it really over-indexes on households. So that helps offset any inflation we have or pressure we have on gross margin typically.

Operator

Yep. Thank you. Filippo Falornia, Citi.

Filippo Falorni, Analyst — Citi

I wanted to ask on the laundry category. Rick, you showed us the chart that shows the value part of laundry, outperforming the premium. Like, it's been going on for a couple of quarters. What is your expectations adding into 2026? And as you think about innovation, you made a bet on the sheet, the laundry sheet as an alternative way of laundry. One of your competitors coming in with a different format. How are you thinking the competitive dynamic will evolve in 26 on that part of the category?

Richard Dierker, CEO

So, yeah, you're right. Procter's coming out with Tide Evo. So that does nothing but bring more awareness to a different form in the laundry category. Fantastic. We are going to be a value to Tidevo in a big way. Our efficacy actually is really good, especially with the better sheet that Carlos just went through. So we're the number one brand right now in that smaller sub-segment, which is probably around $100 million plus if you include kind of off-channel sales. So feel really good, continued about that. It's still a small part of the category, okay? So just a good perspective out there. And then what was your first question? Oh, how long do we think the value piece? Look, I think that's more of a macro. More than anything, that's more a macro environment question. And I think the consumer continues to get pressed. You know, consumer confidence continues to be shaky. And, yep, you know, the club class of trade and the high-end consumers feel good because of the stock market. But the everyday consumer, the share of wallet going to purchases is still high. You might not have the same year-over-year inflation, but that share of wallet is still impactful. And so I believe that they're going to continue to make choices on value, period, the end. And so I would expect that to continue is what I would say.

Speaker 9

Hi.

Speaker 9

So, you know, gross margin performed quite well in 2025 and in the year stronger than you had anticipated and have a strong guide for 2026. But we didn't get the gross margin bridge like we normally get. And so I'm wondering if we can, you know, hear what the drivers were of that, but also maybe how gross margins are performing when you exclude touch land, kind of in that base business. And then second, saw quite a few mentions of an ERP transition. I think a lot of people tend to get nervous around ERP transitions and wondering if there's maybe a sell-in that we need to be contemplating as we work through the model.

Richard Dierker, CEO

Yeah, so I'll let Lee walk you through the gross margin bridge. We wouldn't go through details on margin excluding touchland, but he'll give you some color on that. And then maybe Ray can give you some color on our SAP go live. I would tell you that we are not – I know a competitor had a massive sell-in. We are not contemplating something like that.

Lee McChesney, CFO

Yep. So for 25, just to give you perspective, again, kept margin flat. You know, the commodity pressures and things like that, plus the tariffs are actually, you know, close to 200 basis points of pressure. You know, the productivity, you know, offset a large portion of that. and then you have the benefit of the mix of the acquisitions kind of closing that gap to keeping it flat year over year. You know, as you said, for 26 here, you know, we kind of have the normal, all those elements coming to be in that kind of 25 to 50 basis points, and then it's really the portfolio change that drives the rest up to 100 basis points.

Richard Dierker, CEO

Yep, and then we have gone, you know, Kevin Gokey's here too, our CIO, and Ray's our new CTAO. And we've gone through SAP go-lives. You know, my first job at the company was the director of operations finance, and I was on the project of going live with the SAP reinstall. And we have a great supply chain and finance team and IT team that are just full-time dedicated to that project. We have a lot of confidence in it. But I'll let Ray talk about his thoughts.

Ray, Chief Accounting Officer

So the larger strategy out here is we are digitizing our core so that we can do faster M&A and we can grow organically. Our S4 transformation is on track. We have a great team and we are getting up for go live in our SAP transformation. And you will see our business processes improve as we build this robust platform and it's going to be the engine of growth in the future.

Richard Dierker, CEO

The only other comment I would add on that is a lot of times when you see ERP transitions that really, really struggle is they're going from something, nothing to something. We are doing our upgrade. We've been an SAP shop for a long, long time. Not to say there's not risk, but we have a lot of confidence in it. Okay. Well, again, I just want to thank everyone for coming out on the cold, blistery day in New York City. As you can tell, the management team has a lot of confidence. I have a lot of confidence. The company's portfolio has never have been stronger as we look forward, and we're looking forward to executing well in 2026. So, thank you.