Matthew T. Farrell
President and Chief Executive Officer at Church & Dwight
Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. I'll begin with a review of the Q3 results. Then I'll turn the mic over to Rick Dierker, our CFO and Head of Business Operations. And when Rick is done, we'll open the call up for some Q&A.
All right. Q3 was another solid quarter for Church & Dwight. Reported sales growth was 3.8%, which beat our outlook of 2.5%, and that was thanks to strong results from our domestic, international and specialty products businesses. Organic sales grew 4.3%, which exceeded our 3% Q3 outlook with volume accounting for a very healthy 3.1% of our growth. Adjusted gross margin expanded 60 basis points, at the same time, we increased marketing spending and we gained market share in the majority of our categories. Adjusted EPS was $0.79, which was $0.12 higher than our $0.67 outlook, a nice beat. The quality results were driven by higher-than-expected sales growth and gross margin expansion. Our online class of trade continues to perform well with online sales as a percentage of global sales approximately 21%.
Next, I'm going to comment on each of the three businesses, and the first up will be the U.S. business with 3.3% organic sales growth. Volume growth was 2.6%, and this is the fifth consecutive quarter of volume growth in our U.S. business with five of our seven power brands gaining market share in the quarter. Now let's look at a few important categories in the U.S. Innovation, of course, is a big contributor to our success this year and every year. As I comment on the categories, I'll highlight the success of the new product launches. Let's start off with laundry detergent. ARM & HAMMER liquid laundry detergent consumption grew 2%, which outpaced a flat category with ARM & HAMMER share in the quarter reaching 14.7%. The Unit Dose category declined 1.1%. However, ARM & HAMMER Unit Dose saw a consumption growth of 16.5%, and we grew share 70 bps to 4.8% unit dose.
Regarding new products, this year, we launched two new products into the detergent category, ARM & HAMMER Deep Clean and ARM & HAMMER POWER SHEETS. Deep Clean is our most premium laundry detergent, where we entered the mid-tier of liquid laundry. Deep Clean accounted for a little over 40% of ARM & HAMMER's liquid detergent consumption growth in the quarter, and it's highly incremental to our franchise.
The second new product is POWER SHEETS. This is a new form of laundry detergent. And you may remember in August of 2023, ARM & HAMMER was the first major brand to offer this new unit dose form in the U.S. Our fresh linen scented sheet is now the number two sheet on Amazon. And since launching this product into bricks and mortar this year, we have seen high consumer interest in the form. ARM & HAMMER is the number one sheet brand at Kroger. It's also the number two brand in [Indecipherable]. We feel great about the future prospects for this new form.
Now I'm going to switch over to litter. The category was flat in Q3. That's category consumption, as expected, ARM & HAMMER litter consumption declined 1.5%, and this reflects the absence of a competitor out-of-stock situation, which benefited our prior year market share. The good news is we've held on to about half of our prior year share gains. Our new lightweight ARM & HAMMER clumping litter, which is our new product this year, is outperforming our expectations as our share of the lightweight category continues to grow. This is important because lightweight accounts for 17% of the Clumping Litter category. Hardball became the number two major brand with segment in Q3.
Now I'm going to switch over to personal care. The gummy vitamins business continues to be a drag on the company's organic growth. The gummy vitamin category declined 0.3%, well, we can call that flat in Q3, which is an improvement from the category declines in the past few quarters. The bad news is our consumption was down even greater. We were down 10%. The improvement of this business is taking far longer than we expected, and as you saw in the release, has reduced our expectations about the long-term growth and profit of the business. This resulted in a $357 million write-down of the book value of the assets. We continue to move forward with our stabilization actions, which include new packaging, upgraded formulas to improve the consumer experience and higher marketing investments which gives us some degree of optimism for the business is the innovation that we have coming in 2025.
Next up is BATISTE, which continues to see strong growth, with consumption up 6% in Q3, growing share to 46%. BATISTE continues to be the global leader in dry shampoo. This year, we launched BATISTE Sweat Activated and BATISTE Touch Activated. These innovations continue to bring new users to the category, which is very important. And already these two new products account for 2% of the dry shampoo category, and Sweat Activated is the number one new product in dry shampoo.
Over in mouthwash, THERABREATH continues to perform extremely well. The mouthwash category was up 5% in Q3, but here's a few stats, alcohol-based mouthwash was down 1%, while non-alcohol category grew 11%. THERABREATH is the number one alcohol-free mouth wash with 35 share and is the number three brand in total mouth wash with an 18 share. Getting over to new products. This year, we entered the antiseptic segment of the category with the launch of THERABREATH Deep Clean Oral Rinse. It's important to note that the antiseptic subcategory represents about 30% of the $2 billion mouthwash category, and our launch into antiseptics has accounted for 100 basis points of our 400 basis point year-over-year growth in market share. So a great indicator of the future for the antiseptic launch.
HERO is the number one brand in acne care with a 22 share and continues to drive the majority of the growth in the category. The patch category grew 42%, while HERO grew patch market share by 1.7 basis points to 57 shares. So HERO continues to launch innovative solutions and patches and we're very bullish about the future of that brand. I'm going to provide you with a couple of remarks on promotional levels in our household categories.
In the liquid laundry detergent, we've seen stable sold on promotion in the low 30s over the last few quarters. Over in Unit Dose, pretty much the same story, percentage sold on promotion is also stable, averaging in the low 30s over the last few quarters. Litter is a different story. In litter, conditions are different and promotional levels have increased. And here's the trend line. So if you look at Q1, [Indecipherable] was 15.5%. Q2 was a little over 18%. In Q3, it was 19.5%, but it's going to be even higher in Q4. The increase in litter promotions is primarily driven by one major competitor were sold on deal seems [Phonetic] 40%. All right. Turning now to international and Specialty Products. Our international business delivered organic growth of 8.1% in Q3. That's right on our algorithm of 8%. This was driven by strong growth in every one of our subsidiaries as well as our Global Markets Group.
Finally, Specialty Products. Organic sales increased 7.5%, that's three quarters now of solid organic growth for this business. We're confident that this division will achieve 5% organic sales growth this year and will hit our evergreen growth target. So we feel great about our progress in Specialty Products. This commentary on the consumer. In July, we noted a deceleration in consumption in our categories. This continued in Q3 as we expected. After seeing 4.5% growth in our categories for the first five months of the year, June, July and August were closer to 2.5%. Now in September, we saw consumption in our categories strengthened to about 3%. And then in October, category consumption was up 5%. But let's all remind ourselves that the hurricane and the port strike, no doubt influenced those results. So we remain cautious in Q4 regarding the U.S. consumer and category growth rates.
I want to wrap up my comments by reiterating that the company is performing well with all three divisions delivering strong growth. I want to thank all the Church & Dwighters out there for doing such a great job each and every day. It's a great team. And now I'm going to turn it over to Rick to provide more color on the quarter and full year outlook.