Scotts Miracle-Gro Co (SMG) August 4, 2026 Conference Transcript

I'm Brad Shelton, Head of Investor Relations. We're pleased to have many of our investors and analysts joining us today, both in person here in New York City or on our live webcast. We're excited about the progress we've made over the past few years, and we're excited to talk to you today about where we're headed. We have a comprehensive agenda for you today. Our presentation will run approximately two and a half hours, followed by a dedicated Q&A session. You'll hear from a number of our senior leaders today, including our executive team, as well as functional leaders across marketing, sales, R&D, and supply chain. Nate will kick us off with an overview of our SMG 2.0 strategy, followed by deeper dives into our category, our consumer, channel diversification, innovation, and operational efficiency. We'll then take a short break, and Mark will wrap us up with our financial outlook. For our virtual audience, a replay of this webcast and all presentation slides will be published on our website at investor.scotts.com following the conclusion of the event. Before we begin, I want to share our safe harbor disclosure and remind everyone that today's presentation will contain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on our current expectations and involve inherent risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our Form 10-K filed with the SEC for details of the full range of risk factors that could impact our results. Additionally, we will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures today. You can find the required reconciliations to the most directly comparable gap metrics in the appendix of our presentation slides With that it's now my pleasure to turn the floor over to our CEO Nate Baxter Thank you, Brad.

Good morning, everybody Can you hear me is this on yep, okay? I'm gonna kick us off here, and we're gonna take you on a journey today So I hope you're gonna be patient sit with us because as we've promised we're gonna go through a lot of detail of the building blocks of the strategy moving forward we're going to talk about our capital allocation strategy but before we look forward I want to sort of reflect back you know this company was founded in 1868 by O.M. Scott and he was like the original disrupter he invented weedless grass seed and if I think about this business and what we've done over the last nearly 160 years and what we want to do moving forward the key message here is we have to continuously disrupt ourselves you know being in business 158 years it's not a reason to be careful we absolutely must be willing to see around corners and try to figure out what comes next it's a category that as you'll see when some of the team comes up and talks people love people are engaged we see it continuing to grow but we also know consumer preferences are changing and it's important for us to make sure that you understand how we're going to adapt with the time you know before I kick off in detail I just want to give credit to Jim you know he handed me a company with brands that most CEOs only dream about and my job isn't really to reinvent what he built it's to future-proof it it's to take us in a direction that will follow our consumer and enable us to grow our business and I'm going to share a little bit how the vision of SMG 2.0 came to life but first let's look back a little at the history of Scott's so I believe we have a right to win moving forward but you know the old saying of what got you to where we are isn't gonna get us to where we need to go and this question is actually the genesis of SMG 2.0 it's a question I started asking the team internally about two years ago and it's a really important question you know who are we and what do we stand for when I took this job about half the people I knew thought it was amazing first of all I was a little bit nuts for leaving the semiconductor industry but once they got their head wrapped around that I'd say about half the folks that I talked to said wow what a great company does amazing things gardening is such a beautiful pastime but the other half said wow you're going to a chemical company that company poisons the world And I I was really surprised by that. So we started with this question, which is if we look at where the consumer is going, we need to ask ourselves, who are we and what do we stand for? And we need to make sure once we figure that out, our associates are all in on that. So one of the three key points I want you to take away today is we talk about our superpowers and we'll talk about innovation and our brands and our supply chain and our sales force. But there's one superpower that underlines all of that. It's our people. And we need to get our people aligned to where we want to go. We'll never be able to sell this to the consumer if we don't believe it with conviction. And so I hope today, by the time you leave here, you have a very, very strong understanding of the people and the culture. So as we dig into this, we started asking ourselves, you know, how do we evolve from thinking about things from a functional standpoint to thinking about things in more of a lifestyle framing? And you've probably heard me say this many times. I will tell you the first time I started saying this internally, I got a lot of side eyes. You know, Nate, what are you talking about? We're not a lifestyle company. We don't get to decide if we're a lifestyle company. those are all true except the first part I do think we are a lifestyle company we need to look at things differently right you'll hear today we'll talk less about products we'll talk more about the living spaces you know less about the journey more about the destination we're a seasonal business how do we offset that you'll hear us talk and there's some examples that Sadie and team will bring to bear that how we're focused on pushing the shoulders of the season whether it's through the controls business or through the indoor guarding business. The other question we ask ourselves is are we really a health and wellness company? You know, if you read the press, gardening is one of the best activities for not only mental but physical well-being, and we have a right to lean into that. So again, this is how we frame how we want our associates as they think about next generation products, how to reach the next generation and consumer we want them to have this mindset so we started with a purpose and our purpose is we care for the living spaces that take care of us so what's embodied in that as I said mental health physical well-being longevity care for our families our pets and the earth and this point and I'm gonna tell you a story that my team has heard probably a dozen times but this is when it all came into focus for me my sister lives in Chicago she lives in Oak Park, Illinois. It's a suburb. Small yards, you know, big houses on fairly small properties. And we were sitting out back having a glass of wine. And I was trying to talk about her grass and her herb garden. But she was talking about how her kids enjoy playing there. They had a pizza oven. They had a pergola. It became clear to me that it wasn't about any one of those things. It And she treats that just like it's another part of her indoor living space. So for me, that was the pivotal moment of, you know, it's these living spaces that take care of us. And what we enable consumers to do is to take care of those spaces. So again, we told the team, the products are important, and we will talk about them. But let's focus less on the products and more about what they enable. So for us, that was really the baseline of how we set a vision for who we want to be. AND BY THE WAY, A TOTALLY DIFFERENT WAY OF THINKING FOR SCOTS. OLD SCOTS, HIGHLY SILOED, I WOULD SAY NOT A LOT OF CROSS-FUNCTIONAL COOPERATION. EVERYBODY WAS TRYING TO WIN. THE NEW SCOTS IS ALL ABOUT BREAKING THOSE SILOS DOWN, AND I HOPE YOU'LL SEE THAT REFLECTED IN THE TEAM TODAY AS THEY PRESENT. YES, EACH BUSINESS NEEDS TO STAND ON ITS OWN. YES, THEY ALL WANT TO WIN. BUT AT THE SAME TIME, WE KNOW THE SUM OF OUR PARTS IS GREATER THAN THESE PARTS INDIVIDUALLY. We know there are cross-marketing opportunities across business units, so you'll start to see some of that come out. We'll talk about technology platforms that span across product categories. So be patient with us on this journey. We've got a lot of material to share today, and I think you'll be surprised at sort of what you learn. All right, so let's start to get a little bit more into the details. The first thing I'm going to tell you, and you're going to hear from the team today, is we're going to be honest with ourselves and with our investors about our headwinds we do have headwinds we have a brick and mortar retail environment that is changing the last few years there's been net negative footsteps in those stores we have a digital world that was accelerated with covid that quite frankly we were behind on i think less than two percent of our point of sale takeaway was through e-com pre pre-pandemic 2018 era we know there's competition out there we know that CPG companies are attracted to this space by the way I see that as a positive we are the industry leader in terms of spending media talking about lawn and garden so I always welcome others to spend their money in the space but that aside they are fierce competitors and and they have deep pocketbooks, and we need to be aware of that. Private label. Thankfully, private label share has remained flat, like we've told you, but we take that threat very seriously. And more importantly, the rise of service and tech solutions. We know consumers are pressed for time, so we'll talk a little bit about what we're doing in that space. But this is the level set. This is literally straight out of a memo that I wrote for the board that said, hey, what are our challenges, and what do we need to do to overcome these? So as we think about what we need to do, we established pillars, and let me talk, you're going to hear two terms today. You'll hear pillars, which is these, and then you'll hear building blocks, and the building blocks are the tactics, it's the how. The pillars are the why, all right? The intent here is it's going to reflect how we compete and operate, and most importantly, how it shapes the culture within the company so that we're all focused on doing exactly what we need to do and nothing that distracts us. So, you know, we've made progress in the last few years. We're out of the cannabis space, but I think it's important for you to know that we are laser focused on our core lawn and garden. So these pillars are essentially going to set the guardrails and the culture, and then the building blocks are going to be the playbook. What is this going to enable? Focus and accountability. Three things I want you to take away. One, we have a passionate team of dedicated employees, and we have an amazing culture. Two, we have a very clear set of building blocks that we believe. They're not rocket science. These are not things that you've never heard before. But what they are are very focused. And last but not least, you have a commitment from the entire company, and especially the leadership team, for us to be accountable and stay focused on these things. So I hope those are the three things you take away as we go through the journey today. So I talk about the people. I wanted to bring this entire team, and almost everybody is here. I've had investors ask us, are you going to bring your team? Can we talk to some of the folks that are doing the work in various areas? They are here. They will be available. During Q&A, the speakers will come up, and we can pass the mic around, but we'll also have a little bit of a social hour after we get through. And here, I welcome questions. This team is eager, and I hope you walk away with as much enthusiasm as they have for the category. And it's not just about the executive team. You know, we are powered by people. It is hard not to go to one of our facilities and find somebody smiling and laughing. We have a lot of fun doing what we're doing. We think it's a privilege to be able to do it. And we also think we need to show investors a little bit more behind the scenes. And so you'll see some of that today throughout the presenters. There's just a lot of really passionate people. The great thing about this company is we have multi-generation families that are still working here. Husky will talk a little bit about that when he gets to his section. I think that's a great thing. And what are we trying to do? We're trying to feather in some outside talent. So you've heard me talk about we brought Nick Muraitison. He'll talk to you today. We're looking for a chief innovation officer. We're looking for a new CIO. we are being very intentional to bring in like-minded outside perspective so that we can build the hybrid vigor we don't want to crush the culture that's been here but we also recognize we need to adapt so what does this result in discipline and focus this is a slide that mark will go through in detail but I wanted to show it up front if we look back since 2024 when we had our first Investor Day. We have consistently delivered on our financial commitments. We have made significant progress on deleveraging. We have exited the Hawthorne business so we can focus on our core lawn and garden. We've driven tremendous margin expansion. I don't know that I've ever seen this in the 30 years that I've been in business. Sales growth, we'll talk about that. That's a challenge, but we have an algorithm that we believe is going to get us to where we need to be. and partnerships and reinvestment. Now that we're through the pain of our financial challenges, we are now in a position to start investing. You've heard us talk about our stock buyback. We'll be very judicious with that at first, but we also are allocating capital to small tuck in M&A, and the team will talk about that in more detail. So from our point of view, we've done a great job delivering, and I think the thing the investor community wanted to hear from us the most was do what you say you're going to do. And we feel like for the most part we've done that and you have our commitment that we will continue to do that. All right, let's pivot and talk about the building blocks. Again, I don't think any of this is a surprise, but what it does bring is focus. And I do not think we had the focus in the past, given the growth spurt that we went through when it was all hands on deck during the pandemic. And then, of course, we had the Hawthorne business which was growing tremendously and I think those two things together allowed us to become less focused and as a result we weren't holding ourselves accountable and as a result the performance of the business hasn't been as good as it can be so really what we're telling you is we're here today to let you know that we are absolutely focused like a laser and there's four components and the team will go through these the first is the portfolio optimization and innovation we've talked about that on earnings calls we've talked about skew rationalization moving out underperforming skews a decision to walk away from a pretty significant chunk of what we call low margin commodities business you know our growth rate would have been higher than we're projecting this year had we not done that but we were very intentional and i think the margin results show we really believe we have a right to be a branded high-margin product company, and we are going to stay focused on that goal. Innovation. Innovation is key. It's honestly probably the area I worry about the most. Innovation is a challenge in this industry. We've been putting down granular fertilizer with a spreader for 50-plus years. You know, how do you innovate in that space? And so the team's going to walk you through it, but a lot of it involves skating to where the next generation of consumers is going. It involves a focus on organics and naturals. It involves us trying to get out of some of the traditional chemistries we've been in. And it involves us trying to educate consumers because it can be a complicated category. If any of you have ever done a store walk, you'll see somebody standing at a big box retailer looking at a wall of fertilizer. And I would say a third of the time, they walk away with nothing in their hands because they don't know what to do. So that's our job to train those folks. Omni-channel and retail expansion. That's huge, because one thing I'm going to tell you is brick and mortar is not dead. I think our biggest retailers are certainly challenged, and that's no secret. But if you look at the next tier of secondary, I shouldn't even call them secondary retailers, specialty retailers, whether it's the clubs, it's the farm and fleet, it's the hardware. As I said on the earnings call, many of those customers grew high single and low double digit in the last quarter. So there is growth. There are stores being added, but we also recognize they have a unique profile to their consumer. So in the farm and fleet, it tends to be larger lot sizes. We need to figure out how to adapt our product line, whether it's for the farm and fleet, whether it's for the pro business, whether it's for the e-com business. So you'll hear the team touch on these things today. Category growth and market expansion. I think it was Bill Chappell last year who asked me if the priority was frequency or household penetration. And at the time I said both, and I meant it, because for us to deliver the results we've delivered the last couple years, we knew we had to engage our existing consumer in dry frequency, because it's a long play on the household penetration. However, what I will tell you now is household penetration is becoming the top priority. This is what Nick Miraitis has joined us for. And I hope he will convince you that we are in a good position understanding our consumer and where they shop and how they shop and what types of products they like. And you're going to see us make a radical transformation in how we go to market to talk to these consumers. I won't spoil his thunder, but traditionally we've been heavy on what we'll call linear streaming media. You're going to see us pivot to digital. it allows us to be agile allows us to be targeted obviously you know this is not something new other companies have been doing this but we feel like the time is right and I think you'll be impressed with some of the stats that Nick is going to walk you through last but not least tech driven operational excellence you know I would argue you've seen pretty good results from us whether it's the margin expansion whether it's driving our inventory levels down we continue to lean in and invest in technology. Mark will talk about our capex but when I joined the company our capex was 60-70 million a year. We now project we'll be at a sustained 100-130 million a year for the foreseeable future. A big chunk of it in the near term is our upgrade of our ERP system to enable us for the digital future but a lot of that capital goes into our plants and as Husky will tell you we have a lot of runway to drive productivity. Some of these plants have lines that are 50 years old we have over 110 lines out there if we can convert a few to high performance lines each year that'll provide massive massive productivity increases so the team is going to walk you through these are going to give you the detail I'm going to finish on a slide that mark is also going to finish with which is what we're calling our midterm growth algorithm so you know we spent a lot of time as a management team and as a board talking about realistic targets that we want to put out to the investor community and what we're focused on are I believe achievable midterm targets so we define midterm as fiscal 27 to 29 these are a little different than what we've talked about in the past but they're building blocks to getting to a longer-term algorithm I think we can outperform all of these you can see we've explicitly called out mark and I are very aligned our long-term target for leverage is to get below three we think three to three and a half is where we'll comfortably be the next few years we think the net sales growth we'll talk a lot about that you'll be able to make your own decision on whether or not that is achievable long term we need to be higher than that I recognize it same with EPS I think we can outperform this But for the midterm, we're very comfortable with these numbers. And remember, slow and steady wins the race. This allows us to generate the profitability and cash flow to fund the business. And Mark will talk about all that in detail. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to John Sass.

Good morning, everybody. Thank you, Nate. Here we go. My name is John Sass. I'm the senior vice president and general manager of our North America business. Now, I've been at Scott's for 22 years, and I love this company. I have the privilege and honor of every day going to work, working on these businesses and these brands, and I'm the first guy right after 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock, I can't wait to get home, mow my own lawn, spend time in my backyard, probably chase a little bit of that ground ivy and thistle problems I have. But I truly use these products every single day, and so it's a blast for me to be able to stand up here and talk about this business. I would tell you, and you'll see hopefully in the next hour or two, I'm so excited about the opportunities we have. I'm just as excited as I go to work today as I was 22 years ago when I started. So as Nate alluded to and as Brad said up at the beginning, before we jump into all the fantastic activities and initiatives that we have, you're going to hear from Nick and you're going to hear from Paula and Sadie and Josh and David as well about all the initiatives we have. My job is going to be to level set. I want you to make sure you understand what our category is, where we operate, and how we're going to sort of move the ball forward. My hope is that over the course of these couple slides, you're going to see it's a big category and growing. We have leading market share position in the best brands, and there's still a lot of opportunity for growth. All right? So if you take a step back, lawn and garden, the macro lawn and garden category, it's huge. This is everything from backyard gardening in suburbia America to indoor gardening, which has a ton of tailwinds in the category, to even here in the city on a fire escape or windowsill. The category, when you think of it all told in, soil, the plant food, everything, including the plants, including outdoor furniture, decor, everything that goes into it, it's a massive $100 billion category. Well, we obviously don't play in all those segments, but where we do play is sizable. We call that the DIY lawn and garden category. And for moving forward the rest of the presentation, this is really the category in the segments that we talk about. So $12 billion, it's broken up into three categories and then 11 segments that are underneath that. So our controls business or the controls business, this isn't our numbers, this is category dollars. Controls is about half the category, right? It's about $5.5 billion. The segments underneath it, you can see here the weed control products, insect control, rodent controls. It's basically the segment that gets rid of all the problems you have so you can really enjoy that outdoor space. On our business here, it's led by Mike Davitt, who's in the room here today. So if there's any questions about controls, he's the guy to find after. The gardens business is about a third of the category. It's about $4.5 billion. And as you would expect, the gardens business is one of our key pillars of our company. It's everything you need to have thriving plants and gardening areas. So the soils, potting mixes, mulch, plant foods, et cetera. And then lastly, and Gardens is also led by Sadie Oldham, who will be presenting today, but she's also here for questions. And then lastly, what finishes up the segment is the lawns category. That's about $2 billion. Again, this is since 1868. This is what Scott's has been known for, the fertilizer, grass seed, and applicators. So any of the spreaders they use to apply the product. Well, there's some nuances to each of these segments I'll jump into in a slide here in a second. But that's the foundation of our categories. Three categories, 11 segments underneath. Now, $12 billion, that's the number as of 2025. But if you looked over the last previous couple years, it's been growing. And it's a nice increase. Steady growth, and this is well past COVID. You know, during COVID, people spent a lot of time investing in their backyards. Now we are the consumables that year in and year out keep them enjoying that outdoor space So 12 billion dollars today and we project by the time that gets to 2030 this could be upwards near 15 billion dollars, so growing category, and we're excited to be part of that Now when you look at and I mentioned a moment ago these categories in these segments have some nuances and they're all you know have different reasons for For growth trends that we're seeing as consumer preferences, and Nate alluded to this, consumer preferences change, the rise of organics, the shift to online and e-commerce has sort of made some impact in each of these categories in different ways. The controls category I mentioned a little bit ago, the biggest, it's also the fastest growing you could see here. And that's because this category in the segment doesn't have the challenges of brick and mortar where there's only so many facings. Consumers today can go on their phone, type in the problem they have, and with e-commerce, we are seeing a lot of entrants into the space. So it's definitely a fast-growing category. Gardens, this is our steady eddy. This one, if you've gone back even 10 years, you'd see great growth in the gardens category. Trends around growing your own food, and I just mentioned health and wellness, and Nate alluded to it. All of the indoor gardening trends that are coming along has really been a nice tailwind for this category and segment. And then lawns. Lawns, as Nate alluded to, we're going to be honest with some things. This is our most challenging category. You saw it was $2 billion. We've, over the last several years, have seen a lot of consumers changing their preferences and how they enjoy their outdoor space. It wasn't too long ago where the lawn in the backyard was the showpiece that people wanted to sort of, you know, don't walk on in the perfectly mowed lines. Well, that's not the consumers today. People really want to enjoy their outdoor space with kids and pets, and we're seeing how they treat and care for those spaces has evolved as well. When I turn it over to Nick in a little bit here, and then you hear from Sadie and Paula and R&D, you're going to hear some of the ways in which we're going to energize and sort of jumpstart this category again. Now, when you think about where does Scott's Miracle-Gro play, we've said before, we are the leader in Lawn and Garden, and that's absolutely the truth. When you roll those three categories together, Scott's Miracle-Gro portfolio of brands and products comprise about a third of the category, 33%, and that makes us the category leader. I told you those 11 segments, previous slide, we operate in the number one leading position in eight of the 11. In fact, we're the only company in this space that has a leading position in each of the gardens, controls, and lawns category spaces. And we think when I look at that wheel, I see a lot more room for growth. So we're pretty excited. Now, why are we so bullish? It's this slide right here, our brands. We have iconic brands in the space, passed down from generation to generation. Three of these brands, Scott's, Ortho, and Bonnie, are over 100 years old. And Miracle-Gro is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. Incredible brands, iconic, and they have honestly stood the test of time, building consumer trust over the years. The brands across the top are the brands that we own in our portfolio. Obviously, the ones that you know and we'll talk about in more detail. And the ones across the bottom here are brands that we brought into the portfolio through key strategic relationships and partnerships. So whether it's Roundup and Bonnie, which you've heard us talk about a lot over the years, and you'll hear more from later today on our two newest partners in strategic partner relationships with Black Cow and Murphy's, which is an up-and-coming natural mosquito-repelling brand. So all in told, this page right here is a fantastic portfolio, arguably the best in the category and the best in the business. all of these give us our consumers every product they need to be able to have a great backyard project or any lawn and garden activity that they want to undertake and I'll conclude right here with this slide this what you're looking at here is a chart of household penetration this is household penetration of SMG brands so how many households are buying our products today you could see soils is about 40% of the way but nearly every other category we operate in is a roughly about a 10% household penetration which is significant it gives us tremendous opportunity this is why we're so excited about the future we have the opportunity to bring more people into this category and grow our business so that's where I'm going to conclude and I'm going to turn the stage over but I hope that you see that the category is large and it is growing we have the best brands and number one market positions and we still think there's a ton of runway ahead of us now I'm going to turn it over to Nick Marietas, our chief brand officer. Thank you.

Here we go. Good morning, Investor Day. Brought some swag out here. I saw some people moving out there a little bit. How are we feeling? Feeling good? There we go. Let's go. I'm Nick Marietas. I'm our chief brand officer. I joined the company officially in June after having the tremendous privilege of serving on the board of directors for two years. Shout out to some of my board friends who are here supporting us. You all are the best. During my time on the board, I had a front row seat to what Nate and the SMG crew were cooking up with SMG 2.0. I started to develop a bit of a sense of FOMO, fear of missing out, and I decided I'm going to go all in, join the team full time. This is an amazing business with an amazing team, and I couldn't be more excited. So for the next few minutes, I'm going to share an update on the category, the consumer, and share some examples of how our teams are bringing 2.0 to life today. We're going to have some fun? Let me hear it. I feel a little bit. Let's go, team. Here we go. So we're going to zoom out. Let's start with the category at large. Lawn and garden is a high engagement category. It is hot and getting hotter by the second. The consumer is leaning in in a major way. And a key indicator we look at for our category up there on the left is social media engagements. This is the liking, the commenting, the viral content every single day that's happening online. And what we see is pretty amazing. Unlike traditional CPG categories there in the brown in the bottom left, boo, our category engagement rates live up in the stratosphere. This is amazing, of lifestyle categories on par with major categories like food and travel, the biggest things in the world. As Nate's been saying, and I've been hearing it as a board member, he's been saying it for two years, this is a lifestyle category. It is undeniable, and consumers cannot get enough. And it goes beyond engagement. It's not just the passive consumption in social media. Consumers are showing incredible search interest on Google with nearly three times search interest versus general household CPG. And this is exploding as the consumer shifts to more and more LLM-based search. Think GPT and Gemini, which is about 30% of all search now in our category, just after one year where that's really ramped up. So let's dig a little bit deeper into how we see the consumer opportunity in front of us. Start with a legacy consumer. First, we've got to win with this consumer. This is the established core of our business. We love this consumer. They're older homeowners, mostly single family. They lean heavily into DIY. They know us. We know them. And we seek to have our brands be part of their lives for decades to come. Second, the emerging consumer. This is a younger audience, first-time homebuyers and renters, and they over-index Hispanic, which is key to growing new households. I mean, this is key. With over 50% of all first-time homebuyers being Hispanic by 2030, you cannot win category growth without winning with the Hispanic audience, and we'll dig deeper into that today. And unlike the legacy consumer, where they know us and we know them, there's currently a 26-point awareness gap on our core brands. So this represents a generational opportunity to grow households, and we are not going to miss. So why are consumers drawn to our category? They see this as a lifestyle choice, and they're drawn to it for a variety of reasons. You heard Nate talk about it, from mental and physical wellness to taking care and creating spaces for their kids and pets that are safe so they can do all the activities outside that they want to do. This is not some household chore. This is a lifestyle choice, and it's fantastic. We're seeing the consumer shift to e-commerce quickly in this category with a forecasted 16% annual growth rate for the next four years. They are looking for a frictional commerce experience from their feed to the digital cart to their door in a nanosecond. It's phenomenal. I don't know if anybody out here has shopped our category, but it goes fast now. From either Amazon or TikTok shop, in seconds, you're going from the top of the funnel all the way through to purchase, and we've got to meet everyone in that moment. And this isn't just a spring thing. Nate mentioned that about selling year-round. This category is starting to explode year-round, whether it's in the garden space where we see 40% of plant care sales happening outside our core season, or in our controls business, where 70%, 7-0% of consumers participate in the category year-round, we are reimagining how our brands show up to meet this change in demand. So how are we evolving to meet the needs of consumers? I'm going to share some examples of three key areas we're focused on. First, how we're transforming from CPG to more of a lifestyle business. Second, talk to you about our social and AI first brand building capability, emerging superpower for us. And lastly, I'll hit on how we're expanding beyond the core season with an amazing example from our Tomcat brand. Shout out to the Tomcat team doing amazing things. All right, let's start with the transformation from CPG into lifestyle. So when you see things coming from our brands, we've made a dramatic shift from traditional CPG product advertising to claiming more of the high order category benefits Nate and I talked about in the opening. And what we're seeing is pretty special. We have a great example here from our Miracle-Gro brand with their Come Back to Earth campaign they did around mental health awareness, urging consumers to stop the doom scroll. you know, the five hours we're all spending every day doomscrolling, and embrace the bloomscroll. So let's take a look.

For Mental Health Awareness Month, we're turning doomscrolling into bloomscrolling. Watching just a few videos can change your algorithm. So Miracle-Gro has uploaded a collection of clips from the garden. The more you watch, the more gardening you see. And before you know it, your feed will be flourishing. So watch some videos, tag some friends, and help your algorithm come back to Earth.

Put my doom scrollers in here. Show of hands. All right, I see a few over there. After this, and we break, go on to Miracle Grows Instagram, like a few things, and you'll see that feed start to change immediately. It'll feel good, I promise you. It's better than the stuff you're seeing in there today. And the results are really promising on this type of communication for us. with this messaging leading to an 18x increase in brand awareness versus our historical average on Miracle-Gro. We are cultivating this lifestyle every single day, sparking new conversations all across the Internet, whether it's with our CGO, happy 85th birthday yesterday to Martha Stewart, by the way, true icon, chopping it up with Bravo's Craig Conover. If you haven't seen Craig, go watch Southern Charm, talking about life and gardening. to what our amazing lawns team is doing with America's 250th to remind everyone why the American lawn is the best room in the house. So let's take a look.

What game of would you rather? Coffee in the garden or wine in the garden?

Cappuccinos in the morning. Maybe vodka at night. A marthacini. Marthacini. Vodka, a big slice of orange.

A sunrise garden walk or a sunset garden walk.

Sunset walk shows you every defect, every weed, every bug, every hole in the leaf. It's horrible.

Gardening with gloves or bare hands?

Have you seen my nails? What do you think?

I promised swag. Now is the swag moment. Who here is my vodka in the garden crowd? Be honest. Who's bringing it? Need to see it. I need to see the hands. I'm feeling it right here. There we go. Sorry, everybody online. You don't get the swag. We're going to send you something. We got two. We got a three and a four. And newsflash, everybody, everyone gets a hat. We got hats outside, but vodka in the garden. Let's take a look at the Scots 250 spot.

This isn't for show. This is America, where we open our doors, step out into our lawns, and do whatever the hell we want. We build. We burn. We party. A lot. We love. We learn. We cut it razor sharp and keep it green because this isn't some royal palace. It's just soil, sweat, and 250 years of the American yard. So come around back. We'll show you what it's all about.

People are talking. We put this type of work out there with a 200% increase in conversation volume across the lifestyle categories that we track. Talked about it before. In order to win new households, we have to win. with the Hispanic audience. I feel like I'm gonna ditch the half for now as I talk about this. We are all in on becoming more relevant with the Hispanic consumer. And this year we shifted focus to having fully dedicated media and creative support and the results have been outstanding. Team put together a little sizzle reel of the work.

2025, the year we planted an idea to reach every corner of Hispanic homes. and we got to work building it together fueling it with inspiration nurturing it every single day and it grew into a campaign with strong hispanic roots grounded in real insights and stories that truly connect little by little we watch the ideas get stronger healthier more alive because when you do it right, when you care about every detail and when you build it together, ideas grow, results bloom, and all that work starts to make sense. Sometimes so much, it feels like a miracle.

We are seeing great early signals from this work with positive purchase intent across all our major SMG initiatives, and we are going to go big in this space. New households, new households, new households. This has to be true for that strategy to work. Next up, our social and AI first brand building capability. I said this is an emerging superpower for us. I couldn't be more excited to share an update with you today. First up, not only do we continue to increase our advertising spend year over year, as Nate alluded to, we have completely transformed our mix with over 80% digital and social, which is helping close that 26-point gap in awareness with the emerging consumer we talked about earlier. And so far, it's working. Our shift to digital is paying off with double-digit improvement in media ROI over the last three years. Now, let's talk about our creative evolution. Now, in order to make our media dollars work harder, we're completely reimagining our creative model, shifting from a few seasonal campaigns that we push out all at once, to being more always-on, generating over 17,000 pieces of content from hundreds of emerging creators and influencers. This not only drives the cost of the creative variable down, but we've also seen it help increase reach and effectiveness on all our major initiatives. We're leading the way in social commerce. Social commerce is heating up. We were the first major lawn and garden brand to launch on TikTok Shop. You're seeing what the live store for Miracle-Gro looked like. It's pretty dynamic if you follow us on TikTok. When you see this go live, people are glued to their screens, talking about plants, talking about the products, and instantly transacting in that nanosecond I was talking about before. And so they loved us from the jump, and we saw this amazing stack come through, which is so impressive, with 35 times more impressions than the average launch by brands on TikTok shops, which is massive. And this test program this year exceeded our revenue goal by 157%. The coolest thing about this is that the team is using social, TikTok shop, to validate new innovations, gather insights before we launch them nationally with other retailers. We have a great example of this with our creator and affiliate program for our new ortho kill and prevent innovation. I'm going to pin this one right down in that shopping cart at the bottom by my knee. This is what the future of advertising and connecting with consumers looks like in this category, and shout out to the team behind it on Ortho. If you have not checked this innovation out, I think we have a few outside probably, maybe. David, maybe. But this is phenomenal, and it's doing great. Congrats to the team. This is a big slide right here. This is crucial to winning new households. We have some great updates to share. When a consumer raises their hand and shows interest in our categories online, we win disproportionately versus the competition. We have a dominant 70% organic share of voice versus all other lawn and garden brands. So there's a 70% chance when you go on to find something out about lawn and gardens that we surface, not in paid advertising, but organically, which is very hard to do. Second, it talked about this emerging AI search to think GPT and Gemini, where 30% of the search volume has already gone. Our Scots and Miracle-Gro brands are number one ranked brands for AI search in all major lawn and garden categories. This is a tremendous accomplishment. This ramped up basically the last six or seven months for this season, and we will probably see this become orders of magnitude more important as we look forward to next season. And then lastly, as Amazon continues to accelerate, We're seeing nearly a quarter of SMG Amazon consumers are new to our brands, discovering us for the first time there in that channel. And we look great and the team has done an amazing job scaling that business the past couple of years. Last part of my update, how we're expanding beyond the core season. We got any Tomcat fans here? Let me feel it. Who likes Chad here? Anybody? Chad fans. We've got a few Chad fans. Davit, you're a Chad fan? Tomcat is killing it, is a pun very intended right there. 25 and 26 were the biggest Tomcat years in the brand's history. And here's what the team is doing to win. First, this is quickly becoming a year-round business for us. As you can see from the chart, with demand spiking in September and October outside our core season that we're known for. Second, the majority of consumers want to buy online in this category. This is a sign of things to come for the rest of the business. And our team is innovating every day to meet them when they raise their hand and show intent to buy. And lastly, it wouldn't be an investor day without giving the last word to our friend Chad. He's an amazing mascot. He helps us break through. He's super ownable. So, Chad, take it away.

Let me show you how I use Tomcat's deadly powerful press and set mousetrap to get so whoa.

I can already feel it working.

Tomcat, not recommended by mice because they're dead.

Not recommended by mice because they're dead. One of the best lines ever. So in closing, we're having a lot of fun. This category is dynamic, and we are reimagining every aspect of how we connect with consumers to grow households and inspire more love for our iconic brands. I'm going to pass it over to Josh now for a section on channel diversification. Josh, let's do it.

All right. Good morning, everyone. I am very excited to be here. I'm Josh Meals, Chief Growth Officer for Scott's Miracle Grow. And I'm excited to be here because I get to tell you guys how we're going to take all these great insights, ideas, and innovation and implement them into our channel strategy to drive growth here going forward. But before I get into that, just a quick couple notes about myself. I, like John, have been with Scott's Miracle-Gro for 22 years. It's been an amazing journey. I started in sales at kind of the opening level in the stores, working product, merchandise. And still what I love to do when I'm a little stressed at work is go back into the stores because we have an amazing team out there that drives local partnerships and really makes a difference in the business. But in those 22 years, my family's grown up with it as well. You know, as we're out with our four kids, unlike John, who's getting in the lawn, I guess right after work. I've got to run to travel sports practices as maybe some of you out there do and I'm mowing in the dark but you know we get it done overall. So as I dig into this and we talk about how we're going to grow I think a little history about where we've been is important. So around the time I started 22 years ago Kmart was actually one of our largest customers at the time so I've seen the business evolve. I've seen over a billion dollars of growth driven in this business And I've seen how we've gotten there and it's really gotten to the point We've got deeply rooted partnerships strategic partnerships in three channels of trade overall home centers Hardware and mass retailers and that's because of the superpowers that we have overall and I want to highlight a few of those I talked a little bit about the field sales team already in our sales team in total We've got key offices across the country that call on our largest customers that have deeply rooted strategic partnerships at all levels within those corporate entities that we deal with. But also the field level, we've got strategic partnerships on a local level. So we're able to localize those plans. If you think about our business, it's not a one-size-fits-all across the country. We have regional products, regional timing. You never know when spring's going to hit. You know what's coming, but you don't know if it's the second week of April, the last week of March. You never know when it's going to hit. So that flexibility to be able to have the right products at the right time on the floor where consumers is critical. And only Scott's Miracle-Gro can partner with our largest retailers to make that happen in real time. So it's a big competitive advantage to have our field sales team in stores every day. Partner that with the supply chain that David Huskinson is going to come talk to you about that's able to be flexible, nimble in real time to fulfill demand, varying demand. You never know how hard it's going to spike in a certain market. Are we going to have a sunny weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina, a rainy weekend in Orlando, of Florida, what's going to happen, our ability to adapt and react is a huge competitive advantage for our business overall. And David will walk into that more. Our brands. So John, walk you through number one brands across the board. These brands have been core not just to us, but our key retail partners as well in these channels. They leverage these brands to drive experience, to drive relevance, to drive traffic. And that comes into the retail activation overall that they utilize here. You know, driving our brands in big events to drive traffic into stores is a huge competitive advantage for them and us overall. And I want to mention too, in these channels, if you rewind to pre-COVID 2019, almost 90% of our sales was done in these three channels of trade, almost exclusively in brick and mortar. So we've evolved a lot since then, and I'll walk you through a little bit about why I'm excited because it truly is an and statement these channels as Nate mentioned earlier in his presentation brick and mortar is not dead not by a long shot especially when it comes to the experience and the project of lawn and garden so we're going to continue to cultivate these partnerships and we're going to grow in new channels of trade and we're already well on this journey a few that I'll highlight and dive into a little bit more as I go through here, e-commerce, farm and fleet, grocery, club, growing channels that we'll talk about, creating a new channel with Pro and Do It For Me in a totally new way and we'll talk a little bit more about that as well. And then leveraging new partnerships, Black Cow and Murphy's provides a whole new opportunity to talk to our customers about a new portfolio to leverage scale that we already have within our supply chain and ability to ship direct to overall and adding these brands when you combine it to our service our superpowers we've gotten a lot of traction already as we're heading into 27 behind these brands for those reasons so let me dive in first to e-commerce and I'm going to start a little bit at the top here at the end of this year will be around 13% of our total sales will be done through e-com and that's across all retail we're partnering with our core retailers new e-commerce only retailers like Amazon that we're partnering with to drive sales. So a huge opportunity. If you remember from Nick's part of the presentation, almost 25 percent of the category is done through e-commerce. So we under index in this part of it. But just in this past year, we've grown 300 basis points. We've grown nearly 30 percent. So we're outpacing the category now and we're on track to take massive share in this space to grow the category through this. And it's a major initiative not just for us, but our retail partners as well as we move forward. We're going to develop this as our next superpower, our digital space. How are we doing that? That's through dedicated teams. So it is a total team effort, Nick, John, entire team, through innovation that Paula, Sadie will walk you through here later. But we have dedicated teams. We're bringing in talent specific to e-commerce that is going to help us drive this. We're driving assortment in this space. So e-commerce friendly packaging that can be shipped direct to consumers through our retail partners Leveraging those retail partnerships. So as they turn their massive footprints their stores into nodes to ship out in stocks The ability to partner with them to drive e-commerce is huge and we're partnering with them there We're also partnering with our retailer to drive online only promotions So the big events I talked about a slide ago or a couple slides ago to drive big foot traffic into the stores will still play an important part in our business, but so will these e-com-only deals. And we're looking at how to optimize those. Those may not be massive weekend events. Those may be early in the week. Are you planning your project for the weekend? Get ready for it. How do we get people prepped for those big jobs and leverage that with our retail partners? And then it plays a role in innovation as well. So historically, we'd wait for the spring season. We'd go through our line reviews with retailers the year before. We'd sell in these big innovations. and hopefully it would make its way to the shelf in the spring and consumers would see it. Now we can launch innovation in real time, and we've started down this path. Last summer, we launched the OrthoMosquito Kill & Prevent product through TikTok. Nick highlighted a little bit of that. We got that into consumers' hands early. Then the sell is easy as we get into retail channels. We're launching a Tick Be Gone product right now that Mike Davin and his team are launching online as we speak and getting small retail tests as a result of that. So we can bring innovation in real time as it's ready. We don't have to wait for the spring. So we've got huge goals here. We're going to continue to drive this at a plus 20% rate. Our goal in the near future is to have our total e-com penetration percent of sales above 20%, and we're well on our way to be able to do that, and we think there's a lot of incrementality in this space. Second, we have expanding retail partners. I mentioned those channels of Farm and Fleet, Club, Grocery, and I want to walk through each a little bit here. Since 2019, I think it's worth noting in these channels of trade, we've more than doubled our sales. And that's not on accident. We've been down this path for a little while, and there's still a lot more room to grow because, again, these are channels that are opening stores. They have positive foot traffic. We understand how these retailers operate. So we are coming out with specific assortment for these retail channels. An example, we launched a Scott's Max line exclusively with Costco that's turned into a multi-million dollar line. It grew our overall lawn fertilizer business by over 20% within Costco. So we're continuing to grow these type of lines that are specific overall. So Club continues to be one that also over-indexes organic. So there's organic lines that we continue to launch and continue to drive differentiation that can meet the value for the member that they expect, but also fits within our overall channel strategy to continue to drive sustained growth within that channel of trade. Then Farm and Fleet, a very similar story overall. The rule consumer, larger lots, looking for value in some cases overall. We're actually launching a new rule line that'll be live in 27th of spring that we've already got confirmed listings on at key retail partners in the Farm and Fleet channel. that's going to be new to the line across lawn fertilizer, outdoor bug, the projects that those consumers are looking for for their families, pets, and farms overall to take care of that property at the right price, the right value, and the right offering at the right time. So that's a big initiative overall. And then grocery, last but certainly not least, an area of huge growth opportunity in a couple ways. So number one, having the right product offering overall. We launched a new Ortho Kitchens line this year that has been in Walmart D13, a space that we have not been in previously. It's having huge success, and we're continuing to expand on that line. Overall, we see that as a big growth opportunity, getting to the more convenience, the everyday purchase of the grocery shopper. But it also plays into the Hispanic consumer. So Hispanic retail, big in the grocery space. We have gotten new distribution into those channels over the past year as well and continuing to expand our partnerships into the Hispanic retail and consumer as well. So we see a lot of growth in this area as we move forward. This is really expanding our roots, those superpowers that I've talked about, and bringing it to these retail channels as well and how we grow going forward. And last but certainly not least, a new space, creating a new channel overall for us. And what I want to make very clear when I talk pro, this is a totally new approach to the pro. This is important to say what it's not as much as what it is. This is not true green. This is not going in and servicing the lawns overall. This is not going after big sort of pro. What we are going after is that small to medium pro. That pro that is servicing households out there. We launched this in two test markets this spring and had very targeted relationships. We had a dedicated team. We developed a pro council within it. We gained feedback. We were selling essentially the products that we have off our shelf today with those pros locally. But the whole point of this year was to gain the learnings, to gain the insights of how we attack this opportunity with these small to medium-sized pros that are out there servicing lawn fertilizer, grass seed. and they're the ones mowing and blowing the properties overall and what I'd say is a very successful first year of those learnings so we've got a new pro assortment based off those learnings coming to market next year the teams are hustling on that front that it's going to get the needs of this pro but don't just take it from me all right overall let's take it from a couple pros here Jordan and Georgia with a little testimonial they'll play a couple of quick videos about the value they see in the Scotts brands that they can take and sell to their consumers.

Hi, Hepburn. I'm on Dr. Property Treatments here at Indian Lake, Ohio. I really like the pro line of grass seeds. I've had success at a couple locations with the new line that came out. But going forward, I'm looking forward to the partnership with Scotts. Hopefully we can get some decals on some trailers, show some people that we're out here trying to make it look good.

Hi, my name is Georgia. I'm the owner of Greenzine Lawn Service. We've been around since the 80s, but I've been the owner since 2016. I have been using some of these Scots products on my lawns. I've been happy with the results. Everything is nice and green. Everything's thick and lush. I'm super excited about some of the new products that they're going to be bringing out for us to try on the ProLine. And looking forward to working with the Scots company for years to come.

So, you see, Georgia is a real person, I promise you. You know, she has been a great partner. Georgia and Jordan alone represent over 1,500 households that they service. Just those two alone, as you guys know, very fragmented market. But partnering with these small and medium-sized pros, as I mentioned, they see as a big advantage to be able to sell to households that they're using Scott's products because of the brand equity that our brands bring at the right value for them and the right price for the households. It's a trade-up opportunity for them. To just not go with the normal pro products that they sell every day at dirt cheap prices This is an opportunity to trade up for their households and create a new experience in a selling advantage for themselves So as we partner with the Georgia's Jordans of the world as we move forward We're going to continue to expand these market tests because this is a market It was a bullet point on the last slide this market is 2x the DIY market John Noted we play in kind of a 12 billion dollar market of that DIY this do it for me is closer to 24 billion dollar market overall So we see big opportunities within it We're going to continue to learn expand expand those markets over the next few years and we're taking a very pragmatic approach But we see this as a hundred million dollar plus opportunity as we move forward So I'll wrap up here I think the biggest way I could say it is you know We're going to be everywhere the consumer wants to care for those living spaces as Nate laid out in a meaningful way so those advantages and I would challenge any of you to walk into a home center in the killer spring season and you're going to trip over Scott's Miracle-Gro products when you walk in and you're going to trip over them when you walk out and that's the goal as we expand Omniwise and we expand into these new channels is you're going to see our brands in a prominent way as retailers leverage them to grow the lawn and garden space with our brands overall and then create this new channel within Pro with households demanding Scott's Miracle-Gro products in every way when they're taking care of their households, whether they're doing it themselves or they've got a pro taking care of it for them. That's what we want with our brands, and we're going to expand those roots into new channels overall. So I couldn't be more excited about the next evolution of our growth to fulfill the growth algorithm that we're going to drive here over the next few years. But with that, I'm going to hand it off to a very key partners here in Sadie and Paul that are going to drive the innovation that's going to help enable this.

Good morning, everyone. I am Dr. Paula Powell, and I have had the privilege of being a product developer at Scott's Miracle-Gro for over 20 years. But as you can tell, we have a lot of tenure. I'm going to be joined on the stage in a little bit by Sadie Oldham, who is our Vice President and General Manager of the Gardens team. We are fortunate enough to get to talk to you today about our innovation engine. I don't have a lot of charts and a lot of numbers that I'm going to spew at you, but I have a passion for creating products for this company that I have worked so long for, and I have a bunch of people that help me do that. So let's dive in. We have one of the largest R&Ds in lawn and garden. We were founded by a serial innovator. In 1868, O.M. Scott saw a consumer need to deliver weed-free grass seed, and that's exactly what he did. We continue that legacy in 1946 when we built the Turf Builder Long Program, and in 1974 we established the grounds that we operate on today for research and development. We have over 800 patents to our name worldwide and over 70 patent applications pending. But what makes us a lawn and garden powerhouse isn't just a bunch of statistics, it is our people. They have a broad technical expertise from horticulture to entomology to chemistry and engineering. We have been relentless in our pursuit of understanding people digging in the dirt. We have over 110 associates in R&D, over 20 PhDs, and over 40 people with master's degrees. But they have pets, and they have kids, and they have problems just like you. And I think that's one of the things that makes us in R&D really, really special, is because we have created testing environments that mimic real-world conditions. We are concerned about the consumer, and thankfully, we have been well-funded in that regard. We are anchored by three internal biology stations across North America. We have state-of-the-art chemistry laboratories in Marysville. We have a packaging and applicator division that is second to none. And we're backed by world-class quality regulatory and compliance teams that really help us deliver our products to market. More than that, if we can't do it ourselves, we have an enormous network of research universities, some of which are highlighted here. Indeed, the vision of Horace Agedorn to find a need and fill it resonates with every Scatz Miracle-Gro employee. But we know what got us here won't get us there. As you heard from John, Nick, and Josh, the modern consumer is changing. But not only the consumer, environmental regulations are changing. External pressures on climate are changing. Our resources are getting constrained. So when I think about how we need to transform innovation at Scott's Miracle-Gro to be agile for SMG 2.0, I focus on a three-pronged mandate. The first is to enhance our portfolio resilience. We have a great legacy consumer, but we have to ensure that we are future-proofing our business against these climate changes and the regulations. We need to drive cost-effectiveness in our formulation, and we are committed to our core conviction of being the low-cost manufacturer of our products. We need to give our supply chain freedom to operate. We are being diligent and disciplined as an organization in how we look at our portfolio management. In fact, we have challenged ourselves to actively execute a 30% reduction in our SKU count in both the physical retail aisle and the digital space. We will be navigating that over the next three years, and I'm happy to say we are about a third of the way through. So that brings me to our second mandate, which is cultivating for future growth. The market is evolving. We have our legacy consumer, but you heard Nate talk about our emerging consumer. And we know that we have to bridge the gap between that legacy consumer and that emerging consumer. So we are developing next generation products in our existing categories. We're expanding into new consumer segments. And we're leveraging emerging technologies and technology in general in our product development. By expanding to new channels and developing alternative products, we hope to meet the consumer where they are living, where they are shopping. But we have to continue to pioneer new possibilities. Creating disruptive innovation is fundamental to our growth in SMG 2.0. we are obsessing over the consumer experience we need to understand their pain points before they even know that they have them we don't want to react to the market we want to continue to grow in these categories we've built and build new ones so through increased targeted r&d funding we're focused on the sweet spot this highly lucrative intersection of new technology new insights, and new markets. But how do we do that? We know that innovation has to be rooted in consumer preference. We have to deliver results to improve the consumer experience, and we have to improve the value proposition and stewardship through responsible design. Serving as the leader of our world-class R&D organization, I find it incredibly rewarding that we are considered one of the superpowers, but I have to acknowledge that there is more we can do. When I think about the technologies and the platforms that we have created, Nate alluded to it a little bit, we have two platforms within technology and research and development that we are focusing on. The first is making safe and effective products. We are heavily investing in effective, targeted, bio-based, and organic ingredients to create new products. We are also focusing on the fundamentals of health and resilience for plants and soils. We understand that an eco-conscious consumer wants the product to be safe, to use around their family, to use around their pets, but they will not compromise on safety. Through targeted product development, thanks to Mike Davitt and his team, this past year we have launched Mosquito Kill and Prevent. We have launched Ortho Tick Be Gone. We are launching, have launched Ortho Ant Baits. As far as plant and soil health and building resilience from the ground up, we know that beauty is in the behind the beholder, right? But the underlying soil vitality, the nutrition of the plants that you eat, excuse me, are important to your healthy lifestyle and being a lifestyle brand. You can see in our Miracle-Gro organics expansion that we are focusing on peat alternatives. We are focusing on different organic ingredients. And we are really focusing on chemistries for slow-release organic nutrition. That's the backbone of our organics line. but even as a chemist I have to admit that it's not just what's in the bottle that's important but the bottle and the package itself so our second pillar is about removing complexity clutter and mess from the lawn garden home care space e-commerce is not the future e-commerce is right now Josh talked about it Nick talked about it John talked about it we're obsessing over the unboxing experience a couple weeks ago in Marysville we hosted our board of directors and we talked about how we are focusing on bringing products to your door ecommerce ready products and packaging are something that we are really truly going to focus on not only because the unboxing experience and how you interact with our products is very important but also because formats form factors and shipping less water is important so we're focusing on formats as well. Recyclable and renewable materials is part of our staging gate process as we evaluate new products. Give you my one big stat, today you're going to receive a bottle of Miracle-Gro indoor eight ounce plant food. We achieved a 1.5 gram reduction in the plastic in that bottle which annually leads to almost 16,000 pounds of plastic waste reduction every year. That's huge for us, and that's at the forefront of what we want to continue to do. As we strive to pioneer new product formats, advanced precision dispensing is also very, very important. It's not just making it fundamentally easier, but we want to make it intuitive for you, too. So by scaling our pillars, we believe we can create robust margin expansion, premiumize our formulas, and build resilient customer loyalty. To talk a little bit more about how we're going to do that or how we bring it to life, I'm going to switch the stage with Sadie.

Thank you, Paula. Welcome, everybody. Good morning. I'm excited to be here. As a leader of our gardens business, I'm going to highlight a couple projects that show how we bring our enterprise superpowers into product development and true platforms. So you're going to see some real examples of the things we're doing in market and a little sneak peek at some of the new stuff that's coming for us. Starting with the 2023 launch of our Miracle-Gro Organics brand. For decades, organic gardeners were struggling with trade-offs. They had to sacrifice on efficacy, price, sometimes even retail distribution and assortment to garden the way they like to garden. And even ourselves, Scott's Miracle-Gro, we've launched several lines over the last decade, and we've struggled to scale because at the end of the day, they often involved trade-offs. But that's what changed in 2023. Leveraging our enterprise superpowers, our world-class R&D, our deep sales relationships, our resilient supply chain, and of course, our marketing and media machine, we built something that provided zero trade-off organic gardening for our consumers. So again, same broad efficacy, same performance, same retail distribution, and most specifically, same retail price. It's been a huge success for our brand, but I think what really brought it to life wasn't just having the products on shelf. It was how we marketed. It was how we brought it to market to say, this emerging category actually can be quite mainstream. So of course, we activated our head dirt nerd, Martha Stewart, kind of put her as the headliner of this mission to launch this brand. in a really big and authentic way so that people believed what we know to be true and that when you garden organically, there are zero trade-offs. So since this launch, we've taken a ton of share in the organic category. We've welcomed a new wave of consumers to the Miracle-Gro brand, and we're going to continue to evolve in this space. So you see kind of this visual here behind me. Today, we already have an assortment that touches every medium that you could need for an area of growing. In-ground, raised bed, containers, specialty mixes for indoor. Whatever you need, we got it. Further, we have a plant food that also works for everything you could possibly need. So you think liquids, granules, spikes, planting pods. Again, we got you a solution from Miracle-Gro Organics. Of course, we're going to keep innovating. That brings me to sort of our number two focus area here, where we think about how do we drive frequency? How do we add a little extra value to those consumers that are growing something that is very variety-specific? So we all know, you know, hydrangeas have that need for a little extra acid. So we've got an acid-lover soil skew so that they can turn their hydrangeas blue. We're leaning into fruit and veg, which is one of the most common things that people grow organically. So it's a really nice way to fill the portfolio but also drive that ongoing frequency and to get consumers knowing and loving us all the time. And then, of course, you know, we can't be here and not talk about e-commerce. Where we've really been able to tap our superpower here is our packaging teams, our supply chain. What they've helped us develop are shippable formats that are lightweight, that are PsyOx, so we can ship in the carton to save us a bunch of money on margin, but also to surprise and delay at our customers. So they aren't lugging those giant bags of soil from the big boxes. they're being delivered to their front door seamlessly and profitably for us and for our retail partners. So that's a little bit about the organics, the micro-organics line. This next spotlight actually follows a fairly similar playbook. This is all about our ortho-organics line. So much like the organic gardening category, consumers in this controls category were faced with constant trade-offs, and the biggest one being performance. They want something that is safe for use around their kids and their pets, but it has to work. Otherwise, you know, what's the point? So what Ortho Organics was able to untap with our formulations team and all of the chemists that we have working every day is to build a really unique formulation that doesn't sacrifice performance. This read and grass skew has the fastest speed to kill in market, 15 minutes or less to visible resorts. So this stuff really works, and we can proudly say safe for use around people and pets which is kind of the mandatory of going in this category so again we're seeing this category exploding 2x growth versus the traditional chemistries and we feel really confident that we have a brand that can span through multiple product categories and can be that one fit solution that they can trust as they move forward so again those are just the two spotlights I wanted to leave you all with but I hope what you see is that we track trends but what we try to do is make things better we try to think forward-looking? What the next consumer is going to want? How can we build something that's sustainable for the next generation of gardeners and yardiners and control freaks? So that's all I have for me. I'm going to turn it back to Paula to take us home.

Thank you. So before we yield the stage to our partners, I want to talk about the strategic alliances that we have made because we couldn't be where we are without our partners. First, academic powerhouses. We partner with With universities, you saw on my first slide, but on this slide as well, we partner with universities across the country, like Ohio State, which is in our own backyard, UC Davis, and Rutgers to scale raw science. They have the brightest young minds and we tap into that very frequently. In addition to that, we actually also use them to do our testing and to understand our emerging consumer, because a lot of the scientists doing this work are emerging consumers. The second is our agricultural partners. Their technology pipelines are second to none. Partners like Corteva, Syngenta, PBI, Gordon, and OnView are very important to us and have got us to where we are today, but their investments in tech forward future is very important to where we go tomorrow. We have the ability to take that technology and scale it for the consumer. A really great example. We've talked about it a lot today. Mike David and his team brought Ortho Kill and Prevent to market. That came from a partner within 2Care who was a part of OnView and that revolutionized mosquito protection in our backyard. Finally, complementary brands and aligning ourselves with these complementary brands. This creates an integrating gardening ecosystem. It allows our scientists to learn from their scientists and also to impart some of our product development wisdom on them as well. So we're growing our knowledge as category leaders as they are. The biggest take-home I want you guys to have from our conversation today is that we are maintaining our product portfolio and actively managing it. We are listening to the next generation of consumers. We are focused on value, experience, organics, and soil health. We are partnered with strong strategic alliances, and all of these things together help us secure Scotts as a leader in the lawn and garden space for the future. But I have to admit that it can't just be all about innovation.

We have to actually be able to commercially scale that innovation so to talk about our operational excellence i'm going to invite up david huskison thank you all right good morning appreciate everybody coming today my name is david huskison i get the pleasure of leading one of our superpowers and that is our supply chain and transformation team i want to start off first who all came to investor day in 2024 in marysville any hands got i got a couple all right very good so for those it came, you will remember that we made a commitment. We made a commitment to saving $150 million over a three-year period, and that was FY25 through FY27. I'm pleased to share, and Joe, you said you wanted the numbers, so here are the numbers. I'm pleased to share that so far coming out of this year we will have delivered $135 million of that $150 million. We have line of sight to the remainder next year, and in fact, we're going to over deliver. So I want to talk about a few key themes on where we've driven some of the savings and where we think we still have some opportunity. Number one, network optimization and logistics. You've heard us talk about this a lot. We really right sized our distribution network and we centralized some of our logistics activities. What I would tell you is we believe we still have room to run here as we look at our manufacturing footprint, which I'll talk about in a little bit. Automation and efficiencies in manufacturing. We continue to invest in automation. Things like skew rationalization are also driving efficiencies, and we know that we have room to go. Product cost savings, so looking at the components that go into our products. And then lastly, strategic sourcing. And what I would tell you here is we have this really cool team. They do local sourcing, and they run programs like a barge program Where we move bark vines up and down the Mississippi to get to our, you know, Midwest facilities, ultimately allowing us to reduce cost. The key takeaway for everyone coming out of this slide is moving forward, we're going to deliver 1% of net sales and savings per year. We believe this is our long run steady rate. And what I said again, right, we're going to over deliver the 150 million when you look at where we're going next year. All right, let's shift gears a little bit. We've talked about the numbers, but let's talk about why our supply chain is a strategic competitive advantage in the lawn and garden space. So you'll see by the film kind of running behind me here, we have a very expansive supply chain, something that nobody else can replicate. If you look at this map, what you'll see is we cover the U.S. We have 40 production facilities. Within those 40 facilities, we have 165 production lines. Nobody can match that. We have 90 contract manufacturing partners scattered throughout the U.S. and globally, allowing us to ramp up and ramp down with seasonality. We have six major distribution centers across the U.S., allowing us to reach 91% of our customers within two days or less. We ship 360,000 trucks per year. Again, think about the scale of that. On average, in our growing media network, we ship within 150 miles of where we produce it, ultimately allowing us to reduce transportation costs and our carbon footprint. Now let's shift gears to reason number two, we have a competitive advantage. Nate alluded to this early on. Whoops, I hit the wrong button. It's our people. We do not measure tenure in years. We measure it in generations. We have a team of employees that have gone through the ups, the downs, the seasonality. They're seasoned veterans to our business, and they're passionate about it. We have a core conviction that every associate and every role is critical to our company's success. And they're focused on the right things. I'm pleased to say last year we reduced our safety incident rate by 18%. When you have a seasoned team and you have talented people, obviously process improvement comes with that. I'm pleased to share that over the last few years, we've implemented a robust S&OE and S&OP cycle with our team using data, demand sensing, etc. to ultimately reduce the amount of inventory we carry on average by over 50%, 52% to be exact, since FY22. All right, let's shift into reason number three. We continue to invest in the supply chain where it matters, and we also continue to invest in technology, which I'll touch on momentarily. So what you'll see is 41% of our capital goes towards cost reductions, so moving costs out of the business. An example of this would be in Fort Madison, Iowa. We're putting in a new production filler on line number one. It's going to take us from 80 bottles per minute to 120 bottles per minute once ramped up. So a 50% efficiency gain there that will ultimately allow us to reduce over time on an oversold line where we see volume growing with the controls business and so forth. We also just opened up, we just started producing bags here recently in our new Brighton, Colorado growing media facility. It's our first greenfield facility where we designed it from front to back and really optimized the overall footprint of that. We're really excited about it. 36% of our capital goes towards asset maintenance. So think about, again, I talked about 165 production lines. We've got to maintain those, and we've got to reinvest in those. So think about palletizers, for example, in a steady state where we're replacing palletizers on an annual basis. Not all of them, obviously, but as a cycle. And the last piece is 23% of our capital right now is going towards technology. And I want to dive a little deeper on this because it's not just supply chain, it's total company technology. You know, when Nate joined the organization, he made a statement of, you know, we're not a technology company yet, or we're going to be a technology company, we just don't know it yet. And I believe that to be true. And it's showing in where we're investing and where we're going. So I'm going to talk to you about three key technologies. We have a bunch, but I'm going to talk about three in particular that, frankly, are foundational for where we go with automation and AI. The first one, Nate alluded to this. It's going to be our ERP transformation. I want to highlight transformation because this is not an ERP upgrade. This is a transformation. We are going from a 1999 old heavily customized system to a new modern 2025 S4 HANA that's clean core. Why is that important? Because we're going to get our data clean to enable automation. We're going to get our processes standardized to the to the industry standard enabling more automation more AI usage and so forth This is foundational The second thing so obviously I described our expansive supply chain Well, we got to optimize it So we're investing in can access supply chain planning and what this system does is it allows us to scenario plan and Ensure that we're utilizing our assets fully. I think it's really cool You know you start thinking about different scenarios, right? So let's say Walmart's going to grow 3% on potting mix, for example. We could go in, plug that in, and understand what production constraints we might have if that were to happen in a specific region and so forth. This will allow us to further optimize our inventory, which we already talked about a few slides ago. And then the last one is our unified data platform. And I think this is really, really important. We're using enterprise Databricks. This is meant to be the one source of the truth when it comes to our data overall. You know, I see Fausto sitting in the front row here. He leads our AI organization. And he made this statement once, you know, it used to be garbage in, garbage out with data, right? With AI now, it's garbage in, gospel out. And I think the important understanding here is we have to ensure that we get our data right. And Databricks is going to be a foundational piece of that enabling AI. So I'm going to close out with just a quick synopsis of where we are scaling AI, where we've already been successful. And I think one thing's important to note. You'll probably read a lot of headlines where companies have really gone all in on AI. And maybe they've paid some big price tags to do that and not necessarily seen the ROI. You know, Nate and Fausto have really challenged us to be pragmatic in our approach, to take small strategic bets and understand and learn quickly where the ROI is and where it is not. And I think that's important because we have not seen big expenses or big missteps because of this. We have several examples of where this is working well. I'll just give you a couple. So on the consumer services side, our web page, when we get an inquiry in, 100% of those go through an AI agent. A majority of those are solved and resolved without the interaction of a human at all, allowing us to repurpose and allow that workforce to focus on complex matters. When you think about personalization, so product pages, for example, we've done some tests and we're seeing where we're able to customize a web page on maybe Amazon's page, enabling it to be specific to the consumer, driving revenue overall. Those are just a couple examples. The other thing is bringing it back to people. We have an engaged workforce when it comes to AI. So our team, they host biweekly office hours with the Center of Excellence team on AI. And it's an opportunity for people to come and share how they're using AI. It's an opportunity for people to come learn. And what's been amazing is we have hundreds, hundreds of people show up every other week to come and they're excited to share what they're doing. And that's allowing us to scale the usage and really make people's lives easier and allowing us to train our associates. So I want to end with kind of where are we going to scale AI over the next several years. One, I already talked about it a little bit, but AI for the consumer. This is very important, right? Continuing to drive the customization, especially as digital becomes more and more important, as e-commerce becomes more and more important, right? We're going to be able to scale the customization via AI. Self-service analytics. we want every employee to be able to go and get rich data and information via AI Databricks is a great example right once we get this fully up and going right you're able to type in the question not have to be you know an expert on queries and then get an output back pricing and promo okay so we're investing in trade promotion management system with Salesforce and as you start to look at that utilizing AI to better optimize and plan where we need to use our trade dollars allowing us to really improve on the revenue side demand intelligence we've already started with some of this that has been a big part you know of pulling our inventory down overall however we still have a long way that we can go with integrating this into our SNOP routines we're really excited obviously as a supply chain guy and then lastly is just intelligent automation all right we have a lot of manual processes today that we're going through and we're going to be able to automate over time and this is where the foundational blocks that I mentioned earlier are Getting our core ERP designed in a way that allows and enables the automation of some of those tasks. So hopefully you get a sense of where we're trying to go, what we're going to do to scale. I'll leave you in closing. We're scaling AI. Our supply chain will deliver. 1% net sales. Mark's going to hit that again. And we will continue to invest in our business in the right way. So with that that concludes the first portion of our session today really appreciate your patience There will be some food and snacks outside We're going to take a 15-minute break So please do go enjoy that come back in and then mark is going to bring us home with talking about some of the the forward-looking You know algorithm and financials. Thank you All right.

Hello everyone. We're going to go ahead and get started So for those out and out in the crowd feel free to sit down and get settled in Hello, everyone. I'm Mark Shiver. I'm the chief financial officer of the Scott's Miracle Row Company. I'm an avid consumer and lawn and garden enthusiast. For those that know me, I end many of my one-on-one investor meetings with a simple question. If you have any lawn and garden questions, feel free to ask us, and we can either answer them now, or we can find you the right person at the company that will help you. You heard from a lot of great associates before me. They've got a lot of passion and knowledge for the business. So if you're out there in the crowd, don't be afraid to write a question down, and we'll hopefully answer them for you here later today. We care about the consumer, and I know you all are consumers of our products. We're now moving into the final phase of today's presentation, how we're turning the SMG 2.0 strategy into tangible shareholder value. Nate has made it clear that our long-term growth trajectory is through SMG 2.0, And all associates throughout the company are aligning to this in their daily activities. There's a strong sense of collaboration and commitment from the team around NAIT and our SMG 2.0 focus. And I couldn't be more excited. As CFO, you have my commitment to ensure that everything we discuss today, innovation, operational excellence, channel and category expansion, is measured by its ability to drive profitable long-term growth. All right, so let's jump into the presentation. So why invest in Scott's Miracle-Gro? For us, the investment thesis is clear. It's built on three main pillars. First, market leadership. We are the undisputed leader in the North American consumer lawn and garden market. We drive industry standards, we drive customer loyalty, and we drive high consumer engagement of our products. Second, core superpowers. Our distinct competitive advantages are anchored in our powerhouse capabilities that you heard today. World-class brand strength, elite impact marketing, and our elite field sales force that is in the thousands and connects with consumers and customers every day out in the field. Our cutting-edge R&D that brings new products to market every year in the lawn and garden space. And lastly, our optimized and strong supply chain network that is spread throughout the country and delivers thousands of our products every day to consumers and customers with a high level of service. And third, financial growth. We are at an exciting point in our financial journey post-COVID. This includes a return to consistent sales growth, long-term gross margin expansion, financial de-leveraging, and a move to a more disciplined, balanced capital allocation approach. We believe these will drive future value creation for the shareholders in the long run. So let's get to our actions and results that we've taken over the past two years. Our associates should be proud of this. We've accomplished a lot these past couple years, and we've been delivering on those results. First, financial commitments. We've been consistently delivering and in some cases exceeding our external financial commitments in both fiscal 25 and 26. Second, gross margin expansion. Over the past few years, we've grown our gross margins over 790 basis points, and this year we plan to do that as well. This has been done through supply chain cost-out activities, automation, AI, and an emphasis on our branded products. Third, deleveraging progress. Our leverage ratio has come down quite a bit over the past few years, to the point where this fiscal year we are now below four times. Our goal is to get even further below that, and we are on track to deliver that over the years to come. fourth sales growth the past few years we've grown our sales by around two percent and this is in light of a very challenging consumer and housing market it's been driven by innovation that we've brought to the market strong growth in e-commerce that you heard earlier and a naturals and organics focus like our miracle grow organics line that we launched two years ago to resounding success through Martha Stewart as our brand ambassador next lawn and garden focused back in April we completed the divestiture of our Hawthorne business this has allowed us to streamline our operations further and focus solely on the lawn and garden business and lastly partnerships and reinvestment we are executing on new partnerships like black cow and Murphy's to drive top-line growth starting next year in fiscal 27 and beyond in addition we're scaling our advertising R&D and capex spend to drive longer-term growth for the various initiatives we're working on today for us the actions and results have been clear but in our mind we have more work to do so how will SMG 2.0 create this long-term shareholder value for us it starts by tenaciously executing and delivering on our new midterm fiscal 27 to 29 growth algorithm. This starts with first, dependable net sales growth. We're targeting around 2 to 4 percent. You heard earlier today from Nate and others, a lot of excitement, and we believe we can grow that and potentially outperform it. Second, consistent profitability expansion. Utilizing two metrics we will focus on, we will continue to drive gross margin improvement of at least 50 to 100 basis points of improvement annually. And our track record shows we can do that. Second, adjusted earnings per share growth of between 5 and 8 percent. I'll touch upon this in a few minutes, but I think this is an area in the near term where we can outperform as well as we delever the balance sheet and continue to do a disciplined capital allocation approach and grow our gross margin. And third, disciplined capital allocation. Looking at two metrics on the capital allocation front that we're focused on, free cash flow generation of at least $275 million annually. That'll give us the fuel we need to fund our activities. And second, we're targeting leverage between three and three and a half times. now Nate touched on it a little bit in his opening remarks but longer term him and I are very much aligned to drive leverage longer term to below three times we will give you updates as we go and get closer to the fiscal 29 time period and we'll provide you more details all right let's jump into the details now dependable net sales growth our sales growth will come from a balance of the following. First, category and consumer engagement expansion. John Sass and Nick Moraitis provided a great overview of the initiatives and actions we are taking to work on driving further growth in the lawn and garden category through our marketing and brand efforts. Second, innovation. Driven by consumer preferences and demand for different and new solutions to their lawn and garden needs. You heard from Sadie and Paula a great snapshot of what we're doing in the naturals and organic space to bring new products to life to the emerging consumer. Third, channel expansion. Josh Meals provided an overview of new channels we are pushing into and how e-commerce will help drive and define our growth. And lastly, M&A and partnerships. We are walking before we run through our recently announced partnerships like Black Cow and Murphy's. As it relates to Black Cow, it's the number one soil amendment company in the U.S. It has a strong presence east of the Mississippi. And through our expanded partnership, we expect to really grow this business, delivering 1 to 2 percent of sales growth next year alone in our U.S. consumer business. I get excited listening to our operators talk about these great opportunities, And I'll look forward to reporting the progress on a quarterly basis to you all on future earnings calls Next let's move to gross margin expansion. Our history has shown we can improve gross margins We have a strong track record of delivering on supply chain cost out initiatives Over the past few years alone. We've grown our gross margin rate by 790 basis points That's impressive and that's a testament to all the associates that you saw pictures on up here on the screen and across the country that are doing outstanding work in our factories to deliver on those initiatives. Looking ahead, from a midterm perspective, we are targeting 50 to 100 basis points of gross margin improvement annually. Our SMG 2.0 strategy aligns well with our gross margin expansion as it's consumer and branded focused. Now two areas of the gross margin story I want to highlight are around innovation and supply chain automation. Innovation coming to market will aid in our margin expansion, delivering target margins in excess of 40% at the time of launch. You heard a lot of great innovation around the ortho product line that Mike Davitt leads. Many of those products are bringing that gross margin profile to real life as we speak this year. On the supply chain front, we have a long runway to go to continue to invest in our manufacturing and distribution capex to streamline our operations and deliver 1% of net sales cost out annually. You heard earlier from Dave Huskinson. He's working on a lot of exciting things in this area and projects and initiatives, and I look forward to the progress as we go. Longer term, we're targeting a gross margin rate of nearly 40 percent. We don't expect to be there in the next few years, but over the long term, as we bring this innovation to market, including packaging innovation in the e-commerce space and other areas, our goal is to get to that target. And I look forward to giving you an update as we get closer to fiscal 29. So let's look at earnings per share growth. Over the past several years, we've delivered some impressive earnings per share growth, $2.59 per share to be exact over the past, from 23 to 25. Key factors in this growth include reorienting our business post-COVID, including divesting of the Hawthorne business. We've stabilized our sales growth trajectory, and we've executed on supply chain savings projects and other cost-out initiatives that have driven both gross margin expansion and operating margin expansion. In addition, we reinvested in our business to drive growth in higher areas like advertising, research and development, and technology. We're also spending more on CapEx related to high-return projects, and most importantly, we've been reducing our leverage ratio and paying down debt. Through SMG 2.0, we're targeting a mid-term fiscal 27 to 29 goal of 5 to 8 percent of annual earnings per share growth. This is driven by the consistent sales growth that I've just touched upon, the gross margin expansion as well, a disciplined use of SG&A spend. We are targeting around 17 to 18 percent of net sales for the next several years in our SG&A spend. We will continue to challenge our SG&A spend and reallocate as necessary to higher return areas like advertising, R&D, and technology. And we've done that the past several years now to great success. Our Bonnie Plants joint venture will also continue to be a growth story on the equity income line. As a 50% owner of this $300 million plus sales business, Bonnie Plants is the number one herbs and veggie branded company in the U.S. It's going through its own 2.0 story that you've heard today. The live goods category is a growing and exciting category, and you'll hear more from us on this in the future. Lastly, through disciplined capital allocation, we expect to continue to pay down debt and buy back shares to offset annual shareholder comp expense dilution in the coming years. Now, as I said earlier, we've done some great progress here, as you can see. And I would expect, versus these long-term growth algorithms, in the near term, we could potentially outperform it as we drive our gross margin improvement further, we deliver on partnerships like Black Cow, and we execute on that disciplined capital allocation strategy that I've talked about. For us, the path is clear on how we plan to grow our EPS. Now, let's talk about the disciplined capital allocation strategy that I've mentioned so far throughout this presentation. Free cash flow is the lifeblood of our SMG 2.0 strategy. We generate over 275 million of free cash flow annually. This gives us the flexibility to fund consistent growth and return value to shareholders. As we look to capital allocation strategy in the future, two words come to mind for me in describing it. Disciplined and balanced. This disciplined and balanced approach will be comprised of the following. First, reinvestment in the business through increased spending in areas like advertising, R&D, technology, and CapEx. These provide very high return income to the business and weatherproof it and make it more resilient for the long term. second we plan to maintain a high quality quarterly dividend next we plan to begin to offset our annual show or compensation dilution through our recently announced and authorized share repurchase program fourth we continue to strengthen the balance sheet by paying down debt further and targeting our leverage ratio between three and three and a half times and like I said earlier longer term we will target but below three times in the future and then lastly strategic tuck-in M&A acquisitions now let's get to that last point revisiting our M&A strategy it'll be intentional focused and disciplined we plan to walk before we run and through Nate's partnership and alignment we are focused on strategic tuck-in acquisitions that have the following four criteria. They're lawn and garden core or adjacent. They provide us with synergistic highly, they're highly synergistic and have low execution risk. Next, they provide us strong returns and are financially accretive. And lastly, they're neutral to positive on our leverage ratio. We have a couple past examples of this up here in a picture format of our consumer lawn and garden business where we've been real successful in 2014 we acquired Tomcat at the time it was the second or third largest consumer rodent control product out there and over the course of the next several years we turn it into the to the largest effectively doubling sales that's been a great resounding success and you saw a couple ad campaigns really cool ad campaigns from it and I'm excited to see where it goes year-round next you'll see down here a big picture of our soil we have a leading consumer soils business that's over 1 billion in sales with the Miracle-Gro in Scott's soil brands this is a powerhouse in the industry we've built that business both through internal capex but also through external acquisitions of regional players we've leveraged our supply chain capabilities to its utmost advantage to deliver an incredible business to you all today. We also have several partnership companies and opportunities lined up as well, like Black Cow that I mentioned and Murphy's earlier, and we've already started the process of learning how to walk with these businesses. Looking ahead, we're working hard to deliver on our midterm fiscal 27 and 29 growth algorithm, and we believe we can outperform it in certain areas. We believe delivering on these goals sets us up long-term to provide the shareholder with greater value. In summary, we have the right strategy, the right team, and the right financial foundation to deliver consistent results. Our SMG 2.0 growth algorithm couldn't be more clear, and you have my commitment to provide you periodic updates on our performance against these metrics. So with this, this brings us to the conclusion of our presentation today. And I'll now turn it over to Nate Baxter for final remarks Thanks mark and thanks everybody.

Hopefully We were able to weave a narrative that makes sense is practical And everybody feels comfortable with what I can say is the three things that I wanted you to make sure you remember as you walk away Here one this is all powered by our people in our culture. I can't emphasize that enough You know for us We've got a framework of a strategy, but it's the people behind this company And if you ever join us on one of our tours, whether it's through R&D or going out in the field, you'll see and feel that. And I really believe that's a meaningful benefit. The other is we've defined very, very clear, uncomplicated building blocks and financial targets. I know these targets are not super aggressive. I think that's because we're very intentional with this. You know, we had a long discussion among the management team and the board. Like I said earlier, we feel very good we can deliver. I personally think we can over deliver, but we know we still have credibility that we need to sort of build back with everybody. So right down the middle of the road there. And last but not least, Mark and I are going to hold ourselves and this entire organization accountable to this. I think those are the three simple things. Everything else will fall into place. You can see there's a lot of excitement. There's a lot of opportunity. You look at that household penetration data. You look at the size of the market. You know just to sort of comment on that on the M&A piece there are Hundreds of small brands that are either core or adjacent and one of their biggest challenges is they get to call it the 50 million dollar revenue level to drive expansion requires capital they don't have and If you're doing it through third-party partners, it's prohibitively expensive and becomes a sort of a dead business model We are the vehicle for these brands. And so from my point of view, there's a long line of really interesting opportunities, whether it be in our core, whether it be in live goods. You've heard me talk about that. Mark has really alluded to Bonnie. Bonnie has really done a great job over the last couple of years driving that business. They have a Bonnie 2.0 with a target to get to north of $500 million just in nationwide urban veggie sales. So I think all of these things put together really give us confidence. So I think now we're going to bring the rest of the team out. Let's get into Q&A. Let's hear what you have to say. Give us some challenging questions. You know, we're up for it. What did you see or what did you hear that you didn't like? What did you hear that you like? If you raise your hand, we'll get a mic to you. Yeah, there's going to be a few mics floating around here.

We're going to, what, Peter Grom first? Go ahead, Peter.

Yeah, Peter Grom, UBS. So, Mark, I guess I kind of have to ask. So you outlined the 5% to 8% EPS algorithm, but you mentioned that you have confidence in outperformance in the near term. So can you maybe just unpack what that means and what's really driving that confidence and, I guess, related? Sure. I know we'll get 27 guidance in November, but it's the reason that doesn't apply to next year.

Yeah. So I guess maybe a quick statement. We're not giving 27 guidance at this conference, so I'll just give you that. What gives us confidence is how we've been performing this year. This year was a pretty challenging environment, right, from a weather perspective and commodities. Actually, the past two years have been both that. The team has done an outstanding job delivering on the various initiatives, both cost outs and on the sales front, getting new innovation to market. So that's what gives us confidence going into next year. We have some partnerships out there like Black Cow that I just spoke to that have some nice little tailwind to us going into next year. So we're really excited about that. We continue to pay down debt and do all their disciplined capital allocations. So I think if you look all the way down the P&L, as I kind of touched upon it, things like Bonnie Plants, it's an equity method income line that people kind of forget about. But it adds earnings per share growth each year, and it has for the past couple of years now. So I would say that's what gives us confidence that as we look out into 27, we're not given guidance, but could we outperform the algorithm in that area? I think my answer to you is yes.

Yeah, and maybe I'll just add, Peter, just to take it a little bit to sales. I'm sure somebody will ask that question. I'm actually really happy with how the company performed given two springs in a row. We had Liberation Day with tariffs, and then we had the war in Iran, two things we didn't anticipate. And I think even though from an outside perspective, only achieving low single digit isn't breathtaking, if you look at everything that happened under the hood, remember we're also in the process of evaluating our portfolio. We walked away from $100 million in low margin revenue this current fiscal year and replaced it. And for me to grow, call it low single digit, 1%, something like that by the end of the year, we had to replace all that volume. And I think our margin story tells it. So I think part of the reason we ended up with what maybe are viewed as slightly conservative midterm targets is we just have a lot happening under the hood as we try to flip over and focus on the branded higher margin products as we try to bring new innovation to market. But our confidence in those things driving both top line and margin in the long run is really strong.

Great. Jonathan Matazewski from Jefferies. Thanks for all the color this morning. My question was on just your customer set. there's some disclosure around your legacy customers and your emerging consumers so can you kind of add some more color there break out those two groups how do they contribute to overall sales and maybe just give us some confidence in terms of historical precedence how you've adjusted to a changing consumer because it seems like the strategy is trying to kind of activate this emerging consumer with black cow and natural inorganics and things like that so how much does the two to four percent growth over the midterm rely on kind of activating that emerging consumer good thanks Jonathan why don't we start Josh why don't you talk about the the retailer

and then we'll pivot to Nick and John and talk a little bit about the consumer yeah so I really think you know our core consumer there's still more to get so when we talk about household penetration and expanding the core through that when you talk about black cow you mentioned it So that brings a whole new consumer set in. What's really interesting since we've been working with Black Cow behind the scenes, we see pictures coming in from our field. It's amazing how many carts you see with a couple bags of Miracle-Gro on and a couple bags of Black Cow as people really want to tinker with that specialty side of it. So expanding that consumer portfolio is part of it, but getting that emerging consumer. You talked a lot about Hispanic and our push into that, not only with the media and advertising as part of that, But it's also the retail channels that we're getting into and expanding on the grocery side with a Hispanic consumer So there is an emerging part of it and then I think e-commerce just opens up a whole new consumer set Especially for problem solution as we look at controls There's a lot of share space to gain within that that Mike and team continue to launch solutions for so There's a lot of share space that I would say is emerging consumers But there's also a core piece of this with black cow especially in innovation that we're going to continue to bring to market Yeah, and maybe I'll comment on the first part of your question.

So if I look back five years ago, six years ago, the big three accounted for more than 70% of our revenues. That's now down around 60%. As I mentioned earlier, these, I'll call them specialty retailers for lack of a better term, the Farm and Fleet, the clubs. I mean, you know, you open the Wall Street Journal, you just see how Costco is building a following. They are growing rapidly. So again, brick and mortar isn't dead. The other thing I want to point out that I don't know if any of us connected to the dots, our retailers, even the big ones, are not sitting still. Their e-com business is up double digits as well. They are figuring out how to use their stores as nodes of distribution. I certainly wouldn't count them out. Their growth in e-com is important to us. Yes, we know some of the e-com growth will cannibalize brick and mortar. But we also know, as Nick pointed out, we're adding net new customers like the 25% stat you saw out of Amazon. So I think all of these things together, look, the path isn't 100% clear. I mean, you know, don't get me wrong, but I think we're very confident that we've got enough irons in the fire and we're spending, I think, more importantly, you heard Josh say a few times, we have dedicated teams. You know, so rather than a peanut butter approach, we are building teams around these retailers to understand what they need and what they think their consumers need. And so for us, I think that gives us confidence that we'll be able to navigate this changing landscape. By no means is brick-and-mortar dead. Things are just evolving, and they're evolving rapidly, and we need to be sort of everywhere and make sure that we're understanding what that consumer needs. And that'll change again, I'm sure. This period of pressure on the consumer, I mean, thankfully, we're really resilient. I mean, I can only imagine if we were in a category that wasn't as resilient. And when we see the housing dam break at some point in the future, that'll be a tailwind. We don't look at it as a headwind now, but for sure it's going to be a tailwind. So I think all those things add up, and a little bit goes back, Peter, to your comment. That's why we have confidence in, you know, over time outperforming where we are today.

And, Jonathan, I would just say on a quarterly basis when we give updates progress-wise, I think a couple key areas that I would point to that directionally show the progress we're making is our e-commerce expansion, right? So we report e-commerce POS to you all on a quarterly basis in our calls. So keep tabs on that because you'll see the outstanding growth. I think longer term, you know, you hear us talk about naturals and organics, but at some point we'll start to tell you how much of that is in our portfolio as we quantify and define it a little better and those things.

Thanks. Good morning. Joe Altobello, Raymond James. A question on SG&A. If I go back two years ago, SG&A to sales was about 15.5%. This year it's about, call it 17.5%. And I know a lot of that increases advertising. You talked about earlier the ROI and that advertising investment is pretty good. It hasn't translated into an acceleration in the top line. So I'm curious, how much of that is the skew rationalizations that you guys are doing that's sort of obscuring some of that ROI?

I mean, I can start and then I can let maybe Nick and others and John Sass speak to what they're doing operationally. I would just go this year, if I looked under the hood, as Nate spoke about, I mean, there's some outstanding progress in our branded branded sales growth. We've talked on the last call. We're up mid single digits on our branded sales growth. So I know the advertising at the end of the day is focused on our branded consumer products. It's not focused on some of those high traffic items like a mulch or commodity soils or private label. All those advertising dollars go to work for our products. And where we put that money to work, it's grown mid-single digits this year. So I think that's a success. It also goes to the innovation flywheel, which, to be honest, over the past couple years has been a little bit dry. And so the past year and a half, we've started to launch a lot. Well, you've got to invest in those areas to really build those categories. I just mentioned the Tomcat acquisition as an example. Over the course of a few years, we grew it to the number one consumer rodent business. It's because we invested in advertising, and we put it in our channel. So those are just some examples as to maybe how it's been showing up in our P&L. Maybe not as obvious, because to your point, we've been going through some optimization.

Well, maybe I'll just add, you know, we're going through a very rigorous ZBB, zero-based bin process. So we don't take for granted that whatever the budget was in a previous year, we're just going to add on to it. We are actually asking all the teams to bring everything down to zero and build it back up. So our commitment to Mark is we're going to maintain that 17% to 18%. We're not going to exceed it. We're going to be really, really sharp on how we allocate those dollars. And I actually personally think we can get more out of the dollars we're spending today. And I think Nick has come a long way in his couple months in the seat here of helping us see where we can use those dollars more wisely. So I think we'll do more with less over time, but we're going to be really disappointed.

Nick, do you want to talk a little bit about the efficiency with the microphone? I nailed it.

Yeah, here we go. Yeah, just building on what Nate was saying is I would say from a bottoms-up perspective, when you saw me talk about the mix, there's still so much more efficiency to get out of our media spend. And obviously, we're a seasonal business looking to get more 365. So we've got to be more surgical, right message, right time. And that is an ongoing thing that's going to be an evolution for us. It's not fixed in a day. But I would also say for everybody thinking about SG&A is that I wish advertising and brand building were an immediate payback every 90 days you can measure. And I would say if you look at the broader CPG landscape, chasing the performance metrics of ROI every 90 days has been actually not a great thing for most CPG businesses. And when you see that slide with all the number one brands, that's built over decades. And so we're going to continue to invest that way. Our brands need to stay relevant. They need to stay healthy. So it's a double-edged sword of following the performance, you know, drug a little bit too far, backing off and making sure we're not starving the equity of our brands. And so that's kind of a little bit more color to what Nate and Mark were saying.

Hey, guys. Chris Carey at Wells Fargo. Two to four percent revenue growth historically, I would think, is a bit higher than the average of the categories or what I would typically characterize as the ongoing growth rate of the company. um would you disagree with that characterization and you know um if that's the right historical characterization why the confidence that you can do a bit better going forward and i wonder if you could maybe break down how you would think about what is volume going to be a bigger factor is mixed premiumization going to be a factor you have more confidence in pricing over time as the balance sheet gets better you're going to do more m a within that number but i would just be curious to get a bit more detail.

Well, I'll start and kick it over to Mark. So first of all, the actual, that segment we play in, that 12 billion, it's actually growing faster than we are. It's growing at five to six percent. So we're actually underperforming this year. I mean, two years ago, we overperformed, but this year we're underperforming. And a lot of it's because it's growth in categories that we don't play in. A lot of it's in controls. I don't think we hit on it specifically here, but, you know, the mosquito kiln prevent a year ago, we weren't in that market. Ant Bates, a year ago we weren't in that market. Light Traps, a year ago we weren't in that market. So there's a lot of opportunity for us to grow in adjacency. So, you know, the reality is we're underperforming relative to the market, at least this year. I think the... But just to be clear, a lot of it's categories that we just didn't participate in.

And we're just now getting into. And they're very adjacent. So, I mean, and the distribution channel is the same.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, the other thing is, to your point, I think volumes will be challenged. I think given, I mean, we are committed to our margin growth. We have articulated we're going to take pricing. Without a doubt, that always has an impact on volumes. Now, we tend to think we're really smart and we're precise in how we do it, but we won't get that all right. So I think volume is going to be challenged. But a couple things. I'm encouraged on the net new consumers into the space. The other subtle change that we didn't explicitly talk about is we're not just targeting homeowners. We're really targeting younger people that live in condos and apartments. And I think that is important for two reasons. One is I think there's revenue growth to go get there when you talk about indoor gardening and controls. But two, from Nick's point of view, you're starting to build brand affinity with consumers that aren't yet homeowners. And when we do see that housing turnover, we hope that they remain our consumer. And I think the mix piece is important. So I think this will be driven by mix. It'll be driven somewhat by volume. It'll be spotty. You may see volume decline in some of the big retailers that are struggling with footsteps. But like I said, we're seeing increase on a percentage basis, significant increase in volume in these specialty retailers. And, you know, I think the other thing is we're going to bring innovation to market, whether it's through innovation that we develop on our own or through M&A. I think this M&A piece, this consistent, you know, tuck-in, one-ish type of deal a year is going to be important for that growth algorithm in the near term. And it will also expose us to a bigger portion of the category. Murphy's is a good example. We have a partnership with them right now. We don't do any on-skin, and that's new for us, and we're excited to see what that can bring to the market. So I think all of those things together, yeah, there's headwinds, and, you know, Chris, I think it's a good question, But all those things together give us confidence, especially as we go through that skew rationalization and really get to a point by the end of 27 where we're now in a maintain, where we're doing a better job on product lifecycle, and we've pushed out a lot of those lower-performing skews. I think then we'll start to see growth build on that.

David Shacknow from William Blair. I think you mentioned earlier in the presentation close to a quarter of the lawn and garden category is e-commerce. And I know you touched on it a little bit in one of the other questions, but you said you're under-indexing there. Are there things that your competitors are doing that you think you kind of represent incremental white space or opportunities for you now? And also just on the e-commerce point, are there any margin considerations that we should be taking into account?

All right, let me start, and then we'll have the team pick up what I missed. So I think it's not 25% of the market yet. So I think that if I was not mistaken, the 25% was our net new consumers on Amazon. Right, Nick? We are under index there on the pure play e-com. You know, our market share on Amazon is low double digits as opposed to call it on average across our brands 50% in brick and mortar. THE MARKET SHARE FOR THOSE BRICK-AND-MORTAR RETAILERS WHO ALSO HAVE E-COMMERCE SITES, THEY'RE WITHIN 500 BIPs, YOU KNOW, ACTUALLY IN SOME CASES IT'S A LITTLE HIGHER, SOME OF OUR RETAILERS ACTUALLY SELL MORE OF OUR PRODUCT THROUGH ECOM THAN THEY DO IN BRICK-AND-MORTAR, BUT THAT GAP IS NOT SIGNIFICANT, YOU KNOW, IT'S NOT A 10% GAP, THE REAL OPPORTUNITY IS, AND I THINK YOU'VE HEARD US QUOTE THIS, IT'S PROBABLY CALL IT A ROUGHLY $500 MILLION OPPORTUNITY IF WE CAN GET THE MARKET SHOP TO PARITY WITH OUR BRICK-AND-MORTAR. I think it's so that's the first part. The margin piece, it's real. Now, most of it's not on our shoulders, but it still presents challenges with retailers because they have to figure out their margin play, and that puts pressure on us when it comes to pricing. So it's in our best interest to do the things that Sadie and Paula talked about, figure out how to have fewer touches. So ship and own packaging is a really big initiative. We didn't get too technical. But at the field day we had recently showed a lot of packaging where it's not going to have to get wrapped in a secondary wrapping. It doesn't get bubble wrapped and put in a box. You take two touches away. It just ships in its own box. So I think it's innovation like that that will help us help the retailers. We don't have a huge D2C business. I think we've been pretty open about that. It's an important business for us, especially on our lawns program, because we have a core consumer that is engaged with us through D2C, but it's not a huge business. So while it is certainly margin challenge relative to the rest of the business, I don't think it's ever going to become such a big portfolio that we're going to worry about it. But we do worry about how we help the retailers, and that's where the innovation piece.

The only two things I would just help add to that are when you talk about competition, it's the endless aisle. So like we are the leaders in that space in many of our categories or most, but it's an endless aisle that we're competing against there. So that's where, again, we're putting investment dollars to work in advertising. We're making innovation changes, right? You saw that packaging changes. That will help us with those retailers as well. We don't see it as a detriment to our margin climb because we're doing things like investing in R&D packaging that you saw an example of. We will do channel differentiation and diversification, right? If you took a brick-and-mortar on-shelf SKU and put it online, sure, it may end up being slightly detrimental. But at the end of the day, you're always looking to innovate and get that differentiation. So those would be the two key things I would just say.

And I would just end with sitting still and worrying about e-commerce. We've got to play in it today, and we'll figure out how to optimize.

Because that's a sure bet to lose market share as the consumer sort of evolves where and how they shop. so from our point of view we've got to be all in on e-commerce and we'll work with our retail partners and figure out some of these challenges but they're not they're not our margin challenges it's really the retailer margin challenge which is indirectly ours so thanks Andrew Carter Stiefel wanted to ask about the advertising I didn't hear a number today about an absolute budget I know you've said 200 million you also did some disclosures around recently how much is going to digital I guess I'd be curious to to know what your kind of customer acquisition costs are how they compare to say other categories and also you know your competitors in this field who face a very different cost curve and then kind of a final point with the lean into digital where are you in terms of being able to flex and what I mean by that is say you buy a podcast spot for a Friday if it's going to be rainy all weekend you just wasted a bunch of money in a market where are you at being able to be that like a true variable on off can you ever get there with the ad agencies I'll stop there so Nick why don't you come up so I'll just tell you our 8s is about four and a half right now percent I think it needs to be higher in the long term as we grow revenues one of the challenges we have today is to be truly always on call it 365 days a year we don't have enough

dollars in our sort of media budget to be always on. Now, Nick is going to be able to reallocate dollars. You'll find we're spending less on talent as we move forward because, you know, you move into a creator and influencer economy. It's just way more efficient. I'll let Nick talk about the ROI on some of these.

I would say on the flexibility point, I'm so fired up on where we're going to go. I think, you know, say it conservatively in that 80-20 split, I would say 80% of that media has to be flexible. This is so dynamic. And if you see how we're spending, whether it be in the retailer environment, Amazon marketing cloud, that's why we're shifting those dollars there, is it gives you true freedom and flexibility and not just media spend, but also, if you remember that slide I shared with the 17,000 pieces of content, like that is what you actually have to fuse together to win to pay off on that question of how dynamic can you be. The media piece is pretty much solved. I would say the bigger build next year is that 17,000 could easily go to 100,000. And that's where AI and automation and all the work that Fausto and his team are doing to make it happen need to be ready to go for the spring season. So that's simply put where it's going to go. And so the ad agency ecosystem to that point, I was formerly, I used to run a big ad agency. It's evolving. And I would say what's amazing about this team is we have an amazing center of excellence organization that can create things instantly all day every day as well as automation coming to this space really fast and then we lean on agencies for some of our bigger things throughout the years initiatives but no worries there in terms of you know keeping pace with that change.

One example a great example this past spring Memorial Day weekend I think it was Monday or Tuesday of that week we wanted to double down on the weather patterns that were coming through the Midwest and Northeast, and we had ads created by Thursday. They were into the Memorial Day weekend, so we can move pretty fast. Your first question, you know, customer acquisition, when 85% of your category is still sold through brick and mortar, we don't know the end consumer, right? So it's not like we're a true D2C company that is trying to buy and transact all online completely, but what we do look at is our media mix model that you got to see, right? The ROI of our total investment spend, while we don't know who is the actual purchaser of the bag of soil or the bottle of ortho, we do know that overall we see significant ROI and it's increasing as we change our mix in here. So that's how we look at it over the course of a full year spend. That's what gives us the confidence to keep investing into advertising and more in the future.

Hi, Tom Mahoney, Cleveland Research. When you think about the commodity exits that you guys have done in 26. What if that headwind remains as you continue to do skew rationalization looking into next year? when you think about 2% to 4% growth long-term, can you think about that on a price versus units basis over the long run?

So I would say, I mean, again, not given 27 guidance, we're still working the numbers, we're in active discussions, but Certainly not of the magnitude we had this year, you know, I talked roughly a hundred million. I'd you know Maybe it'll be a third to you know 40% of that. I'm not exactly sure again.

We're still discussing with retailers Accurate Josh, okay What was your second part of your question it was the I can get that growth Yeah, the on the on the sales growth a mix between price and volume is that for next next year? It was the next year or just longer term? Yeah. So I can start and then feel free, Nate. But I would say if you look at our history, I would say generally on that growth algorithm, if we've grown historically around 3%, that's been a mix of price and volume fairly equally. I would say over that time period, that's a historical look. You know, our volume has been grown through innovation and through some of the other things we've talked about today, like the Tomcat acquisition. I think looking ahead, I would say partnerships, innovation, I would say those are going to drive more of the volume growth in the future. Price will be a component of it. Is it going to be the end-all be-all? No, at least in my mind. I don't want to speak for the sales folks, but in my mind, our innovation and other things should drive that activity.

Yeah, well said. So pricing, M&A, volume, and innovation is a big piece of that. You know, it's just coming to market with new innovation that has a de minimis of 40% gross margin is sort of our standard internal talk track. Now, not everything, you know, there will be strategic products we bring to market where we make a decision that we don't have to meet that threshold. But in general, that's the spirit that we've asked our teams to focus on. So over time, as we introduce more, that should be accretive to that top line growth and the margin as well.

Any other questions? Nope looks good.

All right, but we'll be available the whole team be out there So on your way out if you have any other detailed questions feel free to stop us. Thank you for joining us today Thank you everyone