Message from Our CEO on Sustainability.
To our employees, customers, shareholders, and communities:
For more than 57 years, Balchem has delivered trusted, innovative, and science-based solutions for the health and nutritional needs of the world. We achieve this while operating our facilities and businesses to meet the expectations of our employees, customers, shareholders, and communities.
In this 2024 Sustainability Report, you will find updates on a wide variety of our existing and new sustainability initiatives. We are proud of the progress we continue to make and hope you will see from this report how sustainability plays an important role in our efforts to make the world a healthier place.
Overall, 2024 was another successful year for Balchem, marked by significant advancements in our growth strategies, business performance, and sustainability initiatives. We delivered record consolidated sales and adjusted EBITDA as well as strong free cash flow, allowing us to increase our dividend once again by double digits and significantly strengthen our balance sheet by paying down $119.6 million of debt. We made excellent progress on our growth strategies, with several important new product launches and nutrient awareness campaigns to drive market penetration. And at the same time, we made significant progress on our 2030 environmental goals, our employee well-being and safety programs, and our other sustainability initiatives.
We remain focused on our 2030 goals of reducing our Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions and water usage by 25%, on an absolute basis, from a 2020 baseline. Building on the success we had in 2023, Balchem is pleased to announce that we exceeded our GHG emissions goal again in 2024 with a 32% absolute reduction from our 2020 baseline. This positions us well to effectively execute our strategic growth plans and our sustainability road map.
We are committed to reducing our environmental impact by working collaboratively with our supply chain partners, stakeholders, and industry peers to drive meaningful reductions in Scope 3 GHG emissions. Through engagement, innovation, and responsible sourcing, we aim to enhance sustainability across our value chain. We will continue to explore opportunities for improved efficiency, low-carbon alternatives, and best practices that contribute to a more sustainable future. In 2024, Balchem successfully reduced water withdrawal by approximately 15% compared with our 2020 baseline, signifying substantial progress toward our water use reduction objective. We continue to implement water-use reduction initiatives at several of our manufacturing sites and are confident that we will achieve our 2030 water use reduction goal.
Balchem is well positioned within the markets we serve. We are making good progress on our broad-based sustainability efforts, and we look forward to another strong year for the company in 2025. We are appreciative of the support we receive from all of our stakeholders as, together, we strive to make the world a healthier place.
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer