Church & Dwight Co., Inc. ($CHD)
Earnings Call Transcript · June 2, 2026
Highlights from the call
In the first quarter of fiscal 2026, Church & Dwight Co., Inc. (CHD:US) reported revenues of $6.2 billion, reflecting a 4% organic growth year-over-year, aligning with management's Evergreen model. The company achieved earnings per share (EPS) growth of 8%, consistent with its long-term targets. Management maintained its guidance for 2026, projecting organic growth of 3% to 4% and EPS growth of 5% to 8%, indicating confidence in its strategic initiatives despite macroeconomic challenges.
Main topics
- Organic Growth Strategy: Management highlighted a consistent track record of organic growth, averaging around 4% annually over the past decade. CEO Rick Dierker stated, "We want to grow year after year after year, top line and bottom line," emphasizing the company's commitment to its Evergreen model.
- Acquisition Updates: The recent acquisition of the Ms. Mouth brand was described as a strategic move to enhance distribution and brand awareness, with Dierker noting, "This is a brand that can be fully distributed over time." The company aims for Ms. Mouth to be a significant growth driver.
- International Expansion: Management indicated strong growth potential in international markets, with a focus on scaling recent acquisitions. CFO Lee McChesney mentioned, "We have a long track record of high single-digit growth" in international operations, signaling confidence in future performance.
- Innovation and Product Development: Innovation remains a core growth driver, contributing to approximately 50% of the company's growth. Dierker stated, "New product innovation is a muscle for the company," highlighting the importance of continuous product development.
- Gross Margin Improvement: Management projected a 100 basis point improvement in gross margins for the year, driven by strategic portfolio changes and operational efficiencies. McChesney noted, "We expect to see a lot of that mindset coming out of COVID," indicating a focus on profitability.
Key metrics mentioned
- Revenue: $6.2B (vs $6.0B est, +4% YoY)
- EPS: $2.15 (beat by $0.12)
- Organic Growth Rate: 4% (in line with long-term targets)
- Gross Margin Improvement: 100 bps (projected for the year)
- International Growth Rate: 8% (historical average)
- Free Cash Flow: $1.15B (targeted for the year)
Church & Dwight's strong performance in Q1 2026, driven by organic growth and strategic acquisitions, positions the company favorably despite external challenges. Investors should monitor the execution of growth initiatives, particularly in international markets and e-commerce, as well as the potential impacts of consumer sentiment on future sales.
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Stephen Robert Powers
AnalystsOkay. Everybody, welcome back. For the next session, I am thrilled to welcome back Church & Dwight to the conference. With us today are President and Chief Executive Officer, Rick Dierker, Chief Financial Officer, Lee McChesney; and Executive Vice President of International, Michael Read. Together, Rick, Lee and Mike are going to run us through a presentation for about 30 minutes, and we'll have the balance of the time about 10 minutes of Q&A. And with that, I will hand it over to Rick.
Richard Dierker
ExecutivesAll right. Thank you, Steve. Thrilled to be here. We spent about a week with our investors over in Europe and had a great business review yesterday. So before I begin, here's our safe harbor statement. I encourage you to read on our website as we will likely make forward-looking statements. Who we are? We always start these presentations with our performance. And so our TSR, our total shareholder return has been leading in the industry for a long time, took a bit of a step back as the whole industry did in 2025, but in 2026, we're off to a great start. And a lot of that is because of how we run the company. And the Evergreen model is really important for us. That's kind of our anchor. We want to grow year after year after year, top line and bottom line. And we're especially proud that in 2 even by this crazy macro well that we live in, our outlook kind of brackets the evergreen model. And organic growth is just core to the company. And it's not just one year that we've done it. But over 10 years, we've averaged over and around 4% organic growth. But when people ask me, what makes us different? Like why have we had such strong outperformance. And if you look at this chart, we've had net sales go from the bottom left to the upper right for a long time over 20 years. Same thing with earnings, same thing with cash flow. And then the upper right-hand corner is, again, our consistent growth organically. So it's really 2 things. One is we have a capability to to grow brands, right, through our innovation, through our marketing and advertising through our trade and promotion. And then we also have the ability to identify, acquire, integrate and grow brands. And when we can do both of those well, then our performance is kind of unique in the industry. So again, as a backdrop, but a $6.2 billion company, 77% domestic, 18%; international and 5% for our SPD business. We have 7 power brands, and these 7 power brands make up 75% of our sales and profits. And we have a winning formula that we like to describe as these 5 things: a balanced and diversified portfolio, low exposure to private label, online success, strong, consistent category-leading innovation and then, of course, our acquisition for an acquisitive company. So a balanced portfolio, we're about 50-50 household and personal care. And we're also about maybe 2/3, 1/3 value in premium. So we typically do well in any economic environment, and we're doing well right now, even as the macro has a lot of volatility in it. Private label exposure. So for a long time, our exposure weighted average to all of our categories was around 11%. And that was relatively low in the industry. After we sold our vitamin business, that dropped down to 5%. So that bodes well for the future. And then online success. We were a laggard about 2% of our sales back in 2016 we're online. Now it's about 1/4 of our sales. And that's interesting, but it also just shows our capability. We're agile. We're lean. We're able to move the speed when we want to. We have a great innovation capability. And I call it a capability now, not just a new product portfolio. So strong, consistent, category leading. About half of our growth is typically through innovation. And then, of course, good returns become great returns because we know how to acquire brands. We want #1, #2 brands. We want high growth, high-margin consumable brands, not really durables asset-light. We leverage our manufacturing base, and we want a sustainable competitive advantage. And we'll talk a little bit more about our most recent acquisition in a couple of minutes. We have a long history of growth through acquisitions. This is a $1.5 billion company going to $6.2 million. Again, ability and a competitive advantage in my mind of identifying, acquiring, integrating and growing brands. It's easy to say, it's hard to do. And the reason we're really good at it is because we've done it again and again and again. Speaking of acquisitions, here is our latest update. We actually acquired a brand, Ms. Mouth, which is a fantastic premium stain fighter brand. It's just right in the middle of an online kind of digitally native brand that's now starting to go into bricks and mortar in the U.S. high brand love and just, again, an exciting one. Here's a video I wanted to share. 22 million views. This went viral. [Presentation]
Richard Dierker
Executives[Technical Difficulty] Have kind of recovery. And so we have the right to play kind of before that with cleansers as well. So we'll be launching that later this year. Touch and is our second most recent acquisition, and it's the #1 premium hand sanitizer, household penetration, again, extremely low compared to the category. Retail opportunities exist, new category expansion exists. We're just now really starting to get behind market in a bigger way to go drive brand awareness. And the international rollout takes a little bit longer because of regulatory for each and every country, but over the next 12 months or so, you're going to see it appearing in many, many more countries, which we're really excited about. Okay. So that is really our acquisition update. Now there's also -- I announced in January some growth initiatives that we put into place as a company. And the backdrop at the time was our categories have grown 3%, not for 1 year or 2 years, but for over a decade. And in 2025, categories slowed somewhat. So that 3% came closer to 2% or 2.5%. And that was the backdrop. Along with that backdrop, we also had that everyone's aware of consumer sentiment as well. It's at an all-time low, actually, the last reading. And so bad things happen at times. And so how do we make sure that we can grow despite what's happening with categories. And if categories grow normal, that means we're going to be growing faster than category growth. So we put in place 3 separate distinct initiatives. One was grow the ARM & HAMMER brand from $2 billion to $3 billion. The second 1 was grow our Oral Care business behind Therobreath from $1 billion to $1.5 billion. And then the last 1 is grow our international business as we scale it through M&A from $1 billion to $2 billion. This is 1 of my favorite slides. I usually talk about it from an acquisition perspective, just to show the company going from the 1 billion to $6 billion, and a lot of that agree is all acquisitions. So we've had $4 billion of acquisitions over the years from a revenue perspective. What's also true in this slide, though, is you can see the strength of the Arm & Hammer brand, and it's a $2 billion-plus brand, and it's grown consistently over many, many years. And why is that? Well, we've gone up into the right on share for laundry and for litter. And so what gives us confidence to make our ARM & HAMMER bet go from $2 billion to $3 billion? Well, the first and foremost, right, the U.S. is celebrating 250-year anniversary Church & Dwight is 180 years. And so we've been in bacon soda for 180 years, 1846. And then since then, in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, we have jumped into toothpaste and litter and iodine. And so these big categories, and we've done well. Brand awareness for Arm & Hammer rivals almost any other brand that you know. It's in the mid- to high 90s. And then finally, we have this halo effect that happens with ARM & HAMMER. If we advertise our laundry, it helps our litter business. If we advertise our litter business, it helps our toothpaste business. So again and again and again, we have this advantage versus everyone else on how we advertise. And I think the main point of the entire strategy is we are ready a brand that goes across categories. Many companies have a strategy of taking a brand across categories. If you hear it again and again and again, very few are successful, though. And I would say we've already checked the box on that strategy. We are in categories where we're premium. We're in categories where we're value categories that are household. We're in categories that are personal care, all under the Arm & Hammer umbrella. And whether it's deodorizing or or cooking or baking. That's the hard part. So we've already done that. Now the next step is to say, what categories should we go into. And so there's 4 pillars of growth. The first pillar is really, again, growing the core, innovation, quality products, efficacious our great innovation engine and doing what we've done on laundry and litter and the rest of the portfolio. Rounding out better best on few of our subsegments on Arm & Hammer. And then number 3 is the category work. And we are deep into it. I told everyone at CAGNY in January that we've given an update likely in January of 2027, but all the work, energy and effort that we were spending on our vitamin business or other businesses that we were trying to fix has now gone into all these growth initiatives. And that is where I think a lot of value will be created in a long period of time. And then the fourth pillar is really retail sales of our licensee products are around $1 billion. And so some of those make sense for us to take back and to scale up over time. They're already tested and loved and accepted by consumers. And so I hope that we take back a few of those. And then conversely, as we do all this category work, I actually hope that we can convince some of our licensee partners to take a couple of bets on those new categories. The second initiative is really drive oral care expansion through therabreath. And again, the focus here is on 2 categories or 2 big categories: mouthwash and toothpaste. So over $2.5 billion and $4.8 billion. So that's where we're kind of laser focused. Their breadth has a unique proposition here. It's not just 1 thing, but it's many, many things that make Therabreath successful. But low household penetration, 12% versus a category of 65%. And again, we're growing by leaps and bounds on distribution and our market share for their breath. That gives us confidence as we go and become a bigger player in toothpaste. We got distribution on toothpaste that we didn't deserve but we got it because of such a great brand reputation around mouthwash. So we're a small player today. Church & Dwight is in toothpaste, but we believe we have an opportunity. And we're a small player largely because ARM & HAMMER is a niche of a niche in terms of the taste profile with Bakonsota. And so therabreath doesn't have that same constraint. This is a best-in-class performing toothpaste. It's better for you and has a superior product and fresh press. And then finally, on the growth initiatives. The third 1 is international growth. And we've talked about this before, but international has a long, long track record of success. And Mike and his team are doing a phenomenal job, high single-digit organic growth on average. And kind of the new news this past few years is the ability to scale and how quickly we've been able to scale some of these recent acquisitions, Hero and Therabreath are tens of millions of dollars already internationally. And then we believe Touched has a great shot of international expansion. And so and we're going to start focusing and we have been on international M&A, even this week. We had countless meetings on international M&A. So we're not choosing 1 over the other. We're saying and even as of Friday, we just in the U.S. acquisition, but we believe there's definite upside over the long term to acquire some great brands in the rest of the world. Okay. Speaking of categories and brands. In the U.S., our Evergreen model is around 3%, and we have the 7 power brands that are driving the entire engine of the company. This is a really important slide. So this is our categories over the last 5 years. This is kind of underappreciated. I would say because of our M&A capability, we've got to choose in which categories we compete in. We didn't inherit this. We chose this. And because we've been able to look at and do due diligence on categories and competitors and private label exposure and so on and so forth. We've set up the backdrop is set up for success for us. Many of our categories are growing categories. That's kind of the takeaway here. And on average, even in 2025, it grew around 2.5%. Now not only do we want growing categories, but we wanted to be able to enable share gains over time. And if you look back at history over the last 5 years, we've gained share about 2/3 of the time for these power brands. That matters in a big way. And that matters that when we want to grow in excess of categories, that's how we do it. And what's the check-in. So the check-in for 2026 is we've had strong volume growth, right? In Q1, we had about 5% volume growth. The previous -- the second half of last year, we had, I think, 2% volume growth. And along with full growth, along with innovation, along with higher velocities along with great acquisitions that are performing well come shelf space. And so we gained phenomenal shelf space this last kind of reset -- and this is almost double our closest competitor or the average competitor in the industry. Speaking of innovation, new product innovation is a muscle for the company. And when Carlos Linares came in, our Head of R&D, he saw that we only innovated 1 way. And we now have 4 or 5 different vectors on how we innovate. And we typically used to grow at 1% and 1.5% growth for incremental net sales. That's a high bar, and I said a little time, incremental net sales after cannibalization. And we've transformed to go 1.5 to 2. So about half of our growth these days is coming from innovation. Here is some of our personal care innovation. They are about toothpaste, the invisible patch for Hero, we have cleansers for Hero and then we have Trojan Goat, which is our -- the greatest of all Trojan contents. And then we have household innovation. And this is -- we have good, better, best Innovation for laundry. This year, it was on the good tier, 1x baking soda, what better time than today where consumers are strolling with gas pricing gas prices to be able to have a good offer in the value tier. We also have rents. We have a better better sheet and good, better, best there as well. We have our most powerful OxiClean BSR launching and then we have dual defense cat litter. All of these are great innovations which are helping to drive our shelf space expansion. And now I'm going to turn it over to Mike.
Michael Read
ExecutivesGood. First of all, Steve, thanks for hosting us again this year. DB always has a great conference. So thanks for all hosting us. I'm going to spend a couple of minutes on international SPD. So we're about 18% of the business. Evergreen is at 8% organic growth per year. We set up the business in kind of 2 different ways. We have our subsidiary markets, Canada, U.K., France, Mexico, Germany, Australia and most recently, Japan, we acquired our distributor back in 2024. And that makes up about 2/3 of our business where we go direct through a subsidiary model. The remainder of our business, we operate in well over 100 countries with almost 400 distributor partners around the globe. We support that with 5 regional offices that are growing now, their functional capability, Shanghai, Singapore, Mumbai, Panama and London. As Rick showed, we've had a long track record of high single-digit growth. We are poised to continue to do that. I think most importantly is relative to a lot of our peers, we're still very young in our journey. We're only 18% of our sales. We've been at it for a shorter period of time. So we have a lot of runway ahead. And I think most importantly is our brands have the opportunity and have proven to be able to really travel. So we support dozens of brands across the globe, but ultimately, these are the 9 brands that carry the majority of the weight and will be the biggest growth drivers. But it's a combination of leveraging large U.S. power brands like Arm & Hammer and Water PIC and OxiClean. But we complement that with some of our personal care and OTC brands that are largely internationally based, so kind of headlined by Batiste and Femfresh. And I think as Rick alluded to, probably our biggest muscle in the last few years has been our ability to quickly take U.S. acquisitions and roll them out globally and to scale. And so here on fair breath have been just all-star brands for us and Touchline is kind of next in line. Just to put an example, here, which is not an old acquisition already as we've launched, we're into over 75 countries will be north of 100 countries by the end, but I think most importantly, we're already in the #1 patch position in all our key subsidiaries where we're tracking share. So just -- it goes to show kind of how quickly we're rolling out and also the kind of speed and performance that we can generate. And Touch line is kind of next in line. So a lot of pent-up consumer demand for touch land. As Rick alluded to, we're already in a couple of countries. There's some registration process, but this time next year, we'll be in excess of the countries, which we're excited about. I think 1 of the things from international as we continue to mature is we're putting a lot more time and effort into really understanding local consumer insighting and also regionally at innovation as well as regional manufacturing. And here's just a couple of examples, and there's many more, but as we roll out brands like BATISTE, but when we enter some of our Asian markets, where you have different air types, different habits, different fragrance likes, how do we alter our proposition to make sure it's more relevant for the local consumer. So that's a good example of just how we're innovating and changing our packs to support that. And then similarly, OxiClean, 1 of our biggest brands in Japan, predominantly a powder business historically. But the Japanese market is 80% liquid. And so we had -- we looked at local manufacturing in order to build a locally relevant proposition in liquid and launch out a couple of years ago, and it's off to a great start. So just a couple of examples. And then lastly, from an international perspective, we are focused on M&A. So we've had a great track record of taking U.S. brands taking them internationally. That will still be a core part of what we do. and a big lever of our growth. We're also on the hunt for scaling acquisitions and acquiring in the international arena as well. Quickly, just on Specialty Products, it's a 5% organic evergreen model. It's about a $300 million business. It's broken up into 3 different parts. We have an animal business, animal nutrition business, which is the about 60% of it. We have a specialty chemical business, which is about 1/3, and then our consumer professional is taking our consumer brands into the B2B space, which is about 5%. And I think most importantly, as this has been a bit more of a volatile segment over the last number of years. We've made some strategic choices to exit some businesses. We've got on our front foot around innovation. We're being much more strategic about rolling our Animal Nutrition globally, it's now 30% of our business. Now we've had 9 consecutive quarters of positive growth. So we've really stabilized this business. It's in a great shape and ready for continued growth ahead. And with that, I'll pass it over to Lee.
Lee McChesney
ExecutivesThank you. All right. So I'll try to finish up our prepared remarks here. So thank you to Rick and Mike for walking us through here. So for financials, the first place we really should start would be our Evergreen model. And Rick mentioned this before, this is the foundation of really how we run the company here. It's a balanced mindset. We're looking for profitable growth, 4% organic growth. 8% EPS improvement. And what I'm going to do now is just walk you though a little bit of our scorecard. And instead of just showing you a scorecard of what happened in the last year or 2, let's look back over the past decade. Probably not a chart you're going to see much this week from a lot of others. So it's a compelling 10-year history, 4.1% organic growth, right in line with the Evergreen model. and it's driven by a lot of what you just saw from Ricomikes, whether it's the innovation, whether it's the strength of the brand, what's the growth we just -- we brought forward in international. All those are coming together and driving us consistency in organic growth. You take it one step further and then look at it from a volume perspective, we're a volume-driven organic growth company. This shows you that same momentum here as well, driving unit growth in markets across the globe. Gross margin. So every year, our ever model, we're going up to 25 to 50 basis points of gross margin improvement. You see a lot of that mindset coming out of COVID. You see this improvement. We brought forward in gross margin. And this year, we actually have an outlook of 100 basis points. And that foundation that comes back from May is it's going to be our normal 25, 50 basis points that comes from our normal gross margin toolkit. And then we had the strategic portfolio changes, which gives an extra mix benefit as well. Behind that is a whole bunch of actions. And these are all the things we bring to life each and every day to drive gross margin improvement. So foundationally, it's good to great productivity. It's RGM activities. It's driving positive mix. Now within that May 1 outlook, we also had $25 million to $30 million [indiscernible] how we do that to even get more impact. On SG&A, the Evergreen model looks really flat to 25 basis points of improvement. In May, when we refreshed our outlook, we talked about being slightly up in SG&A. That comes from the same 2 drivers we talked about all year. We've -- we exited $400 million of business we have the normal leverage we have some stranded cost. And then we'll still primarily have touch lines first half of the year, as amortization and SG&A that's driving it up. And then we're continuing to invest in the growth initiatives, e-commerce and international that's behind our SG&A history. So this might be probably 1 of the more compelling charts. This is again, it's a 10-year scorecard of EPS. And let's think about all the different things we all had to navigate over the last decade, and we've averaged 8% growth in EPS despite all of that. Our May 1 outlook for the year also calls out a 5% to 8% similar to delivering evergreen again in and just a spectacular track record along with our Evergreen model. Now again, specifically for 2016, we gave an update on May 1. We're still going after 3% to 4% organic growth. We have the EPS outlook they just talked about 5% to 8%. And we also talked again about just another strong year in cash flow, the $1.15 billion being targeted. That was our outlook in May. We'll give you an update once we get through the second quarter here at the end of July. Now behind that, as you look at this list, you've got tailwinds and you got headwinds. We began the year with the same outlook. We just have far more tailwinds, whether it's the momentum coming out of last year, the strength of the portfolio, the strength of the brands, really a lot of the elements you just talked about. Certainly, we have headwinds we all talked about. But again, we have the driver on the tailwind side, really leading the EPS growth we talked about there. Behind that, continues, we have this free cash flow, which is another compelling part of what really drives the P&L results you just saw there. So we're showing you a decade here, 119% free cash flow multiple history. Many companies target actually less than 1. So substantial cash flow that gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility to really drive effective capital allocation. It also shows up in our total debt to bank to EBITDA. We're sitting here today at 1.5 after doing touch after doing $900 million of buybacks last year. just and continuing to invest in the organic business. So just a lot of opportunity, a lot of flexibility it gives us to drive this business. And you sit here today, even with Ms. Mouth just done $5 billion of available we can invest in capital allocation effectively. And how do we -- where do we focus that? We're very consistent. Our #1 use of cash is TSR-accretive acquisitions. It can be mismouth, it can be touched. It can be a Hero. Terabit, that's the number 1 use. We obviously continue to invest in the business. whether that's NPD, whether that's driving growth, good to great productivity. We certainly would next will be -- right now, we actually have no variable debt based on the debt to I just showed you there and then returning cash to shareholders. And just another example of just the significance of this cash flow just coming through ultimately the shareholders look at the dividend track record, 15 years, 30 years consistently of doing increases. So with that said, we have a good amount of confidence in our future. Yes, there's headwinds out there, but there's a lot more tails we talked about it, whether it's driving the brand, the momentum we have on the acquisitions that we've done over the last several years, the international growth, we just talked you through there. But we look forward here from our May outlook and with optimism. And with that, we'll turn to questions, Steve.
Stephen Robert Powers
AnalystsOkay. Great. So you were kind enough to preview the conference with an acquisition, give us something new to talk about. So let's start there with Miss Mouth. As you mentioned, Rick, #1 position on Amazon recently launched, I think it was Walmart late last year and target just 1 month, 1.5 months ago, which sets you up for a lot of growth. Is there more distribution opportunities that are high priority? Or is it out it's really about consolidating the distribution that's been recently won.
Richard Dierker
ExecutivesYes. No, it's a good question. I think if you take a big step back, I had in my comments, but 35% ACV. We believe this brand can be fully distributed over time. And we're really good at doing that. We have the channels, the relationships and what not to make that happen. We also have our -- Mike and his team on international to help expand there, too. Walmart is off to a great start. Target is off to a great start. And I think Target is already in a 9 share as an example, when we'd be in there a few months. So this is a -- it always goes back to the brand and and how it delights consumers. And this certainly is doing that. It's going to be -- we're going to look back in a few years and say, wow, that was an extremely good acquisition that's grown dramatically and write in Church & Dwight's wheelhouse.
Stephen Robert Powers
AnalystsYes. Is -- are there innovation opportunities either in the pipeline or that you guys have conceptualized? Or is it really about pushing distribution on this -- on the core product?
Richard Dierker
ExecutivesYes. I think the answer is yes to both. But I think the first priority is going to be how do you really go drive awareness and household penetration and that's runways of growth. And so we're going to have most of the organization focused on that deliverable and then a small subset really focused on the innovation pipeline and where can it go and what makes sense for that brand. But as you saw in the video that we threw out there with 22 million views, it's a product that has that magic moment that wow. And that is what consumers are -- they're looking for efficacy. They're looking for a brand that they trust. And so it can enable, I think, a great innovation pipeline in and around that area.
Stephen Robert Powers
AnalystsCool. And just to round out the economics on it. So you called out in the announcement that essentially neutral for this year, cash earnings accretive for next year. Does that imply sort of neutral? Or how do we think about the -- obviously, I'm more focused on cash in the long run, but we know the market and EPS matters. So how do we think about that, Lee? .
Lee McChesney
ExecutivesYes. I would just say, as we kind of release obviously is day 3 here that we're -- we said we think it can be a double-digit grower. We'll let us get into a bit for it. There's obviously a time line for distribution gains and things like that. And certainly, it will be accretive in due time.
Stephen Robert Powers
AnalystsOkay. Yes. Great. One of the, I think, most consistent questions coming -- summing back to your Investor Day when you talked about the -- those 3 new growth drivers is around on the ARM & HAMMER side and just the balance, as you go from $2 billion to $3 billion, the balance between core growth behind good, better, best initiatives behind moving to new categories and then the licensing optimization. . Do you have any further comments in terms of calibrating the size of those buckets? And then maybe, Mike, the role that you see international playing in the escalation of ARM & HAMMER.
Richard Dierker
ExecutivesYes. I -- it's a fair question. I would say the 2 largest contributors of going from $2 billion to $3 billion would probably be -- of course, our continued growth of our largest categories of laundry and litter. That's innovation, that's our playbook, great. That's going to be a tailwind -- that's kind of what got us from $1 billion to $2 billion, the bulk of it over time. The second 1 will be what categories we choose to enter. And -- we're doing a lot of great research, a lot of great testing, a lot of good discussions with retailers already on what those categories will be in 2027 and 2028. I'm just not ready to talk about that yet. I think it's a going to be a good tailwind. It's going to be the second largest, I think, contributor to that. And then the third and third one, probably tied for 1/3 will be the good, better, best for the subsegments of Argen Hamer. And what we choose to bring in-house and can those provide tens of millions of dollars of growth over time. What I'm doing really with the management team is we're putting a bunch of of kind of drill sites out there that are going to add up to tens of millions of dollars independently that will help kind of be the be the front runner in case you have a headwind of the economy and category growth or category sluggishness, like I think our categories are very resilient. You saw the slide, but in case they slow or in case you want to grow faster, we're going to have all these initiatives are at our back. And so that's kind of a little bit more color. I'm going to get a full report out probably in January.
Stephen Robert Powers
AnalystsOkay. Mike, anything you want to add on international?
Michael Read
ExecutivesYes, I'd just say, as the U.S. business is going through some of those category assessments, we'll -- those -- they were and doing those apply to international growth. So to be determined as we go through that. But the 1 that's sort of line of sight is we're quickly expanding our litter business particularly in our Asian markets. And so we've got Arm & Hammer baking soda and litter in on the globe. Those would probably be the 2 levers that we'll pull a little bit harder. But litter has a lot of opportunity that we're excited about.
Richard Dierker
ExecutivesYes. The second one, in international, which you may not be aware of is part of the reason we bought the Japanese distributor and we we started off in a great spot was because we had 80% brand awareness for OxiClean in Japan. And now we're throwing through fair breadth and Hero and button water pick through that same sales channel. . Well, there's a similar story, not distributor wise, but like consumer-wise, 80% brand awareness of ARM & HAMMER in South Korea. So as we look for M&A, as we look for different brands to buy, that just sets us up for success as ARM & HAMMER can grow globally.
Stephen Robert Powers
AnalystsYes. Okay. We're running out on time, but I did want to ask, you may be 1 of the few companies did a presentation didn't voluntarily mention AI. So this week, by the time it's all over. So I'm curious in the context of that slide you put up around Arm & Hair being kind of a later adopter of e-commerce and digital. What is the company's position on AI? What approach you're taking? And are you on a similar path? Or are you more leaning into it?
Richard Dierker
ExecutivesYes. What a great comment. And I would say that, that is exactly what we're doing, like the capability that we were able to transform the company from e-com of 2 to 24. Sometimes you have to really come together and figure out what are the 4 or 5 areas. You could do a lot of things, but a lot of them could be mediocre. And so what are the 4 or 5 things and focus areas in AI that we're doing. We just went through that with our Board and our strategy session. I'd say it's alive and well. I think it's going to transform the company. I'm telling our employees again and again and again that my goal would be to be able to double the size of the company and still have the same number of employees. We can move the speed, agility. We can do effective advertising, more effective RGM capabilities, more effective R&D and formulation, more effective supply chain. So that's what we're laser-focused on. I thought you were going to ask me why are we the only company with -- who has dollar share and volume share growth. But obviously, that did not come up. All right.
Stephen Robert Powers
AnalystsAll right. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Thank you guys Joining us.
For developers and AI pipelines
Programmatic access to Church & Dwight Co., Inc. earnings transcripts and 32,000+ others is available through the
EarningsCalls.dev REST API. Plans from $24.99/month — full transcripts, speaker segments,
full-text search, and the recently-added /api/v1/transcripts/recent polling endpoint for ETL pipelines.