Good morning and good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome to the Ahold Delhaize Investor Day. While I very much had hoped to have this event face to face, I'm very glad that you are with us virtually, and I'm very much looking forward to our time together. I'm not alone today because together with my colleagues of the management board, I'm here with many of our talented leaders across the company. Together, we have a lot of exciting things to share today. I would say, let's get started. We are Ahold Delhaize. We are a company with 19 great local brands that serve more than 54 million customers every week along the East Coast of the U.S., in the Benelux region, in Central and Southeastern Europe, and in Indonesia.
We have built a strong portfolio of leading local brands, each with a number 1 or 2 position in their local market. Across the company, our brands and businesses employ more than 440,000 talented and committed people dedicated to fulfilling our purpose, helping millions of customers in thousands of communities to eat well, save time, and live better. Our purpose guides our company. It's at the heart of all the promises we make and gives overarching direction to our Leading Together strategic priorities. Eat well. We help people choose a healthy and balanced diet, creating access to high quality, fresh, and delicious products. Save time. We make things quicker, smoother, and easier to support people in their busy lives. Live better.
Whether this means healthy eating, affordable, fresh, or making sustainable choices, we are committed to making this happen for our customers, associates, and of course, communities. We've been in the business of serving customers for more than 150 years and have a long track record of always delivering for our key stakeholders. This has been the case in both good times and in bad, and with the latter underlined by the hardship that our local communities have faced during the COVID pandemic. It has been a privilege to be at the center of our communities, ensuring access to food at the most crucial of times. The business of food retail is tough, it's competitive, and I can tell you it's hard work. It's a complex value chain to orchestrate, but fundamental to everybody's lives, and we are passionate about it.
I've been in this industry for nearly 25 years, and the one thing I know for sure is this success in this business comes down to shared values. Our values are courage, integrity, teamwork, care, and humor. They shape the winning Ahold Delhaize culture we have become known and respected for, something we are very proud of. It's why we go the extra mile every day at all our local brands to serve local customers and communities by keeping the shelves full, keeping stores and home delivery safe, working with local food banks to make sure people have access to food and supplies. Words cannot express the level of gratitude and thanks I have for the employees, the teams, and the leadership of our brands for their amazing daily efforts. It's from our purpose and our values that we drive our vision and growth drivers.
Altogether, this comprises our Leading Together strategy. It has served us well over the past few years, and it will for sure serve us well into the future. Let's look at our scorecard. Since 2018, we have achieved a lot, even overachieving in many areas, but we still have some homework left. On balance, though, it's clear that Leading Together is the right strategy for our company and the right strategy for our future. First of all, it starts with an important rule in retail. You win when you drive relative market share combined with brand strength. Each brand is a strong number 1 or 2 in its local markets. Just look at the market shares gain in our top local brands over the past few years.
Food Lion's performance is very impressive, and Meg Ham and her team are winning in the last 36 consecutive quarters of growth. While Stop & Shop improvement is vindication of its transformation, albeit at a slightly lower pace than we would like. It goes without saying our Albert Heijn market leading position in the Netherlands is the benchmark of the industry. Margaret will do a deep dive into this great local brand in detail later in the program. Why have we been able to achieve these great market share developments? It's all about being relevant for local customers, enabling them to shop when and how they want on their terms. Convenience is the name of the game and has replaced price as a priority number one on the customer journey.
When the surge in local demand occurred in the pandemic, we were ready with the additional capacity to meet that demand. Every month, millions of customers use one of our brand websites and apps to do their shopping. Our brands have more than doubled their online capacity, and we've expanded click and collect and pickup points to more than 1,400 in the U.S. In fact, in the U.S., online sales growth has been three times the target we set in 2018. bol.com and the recently acquired FreshDirect in New York City have both grown their customer and partner base, with bol.com alone having 140 million monthly visits. We've more than doubled net consumer sales since 2018, and we did so a year ahead of target. Of course, this was also a result of exceptional circumstances in the last 18 months.
We firmly believe this shift in the customer journey is here to stay. The working from home trend or hybrid working will continue. Slightly more than half of customers surveyed in both the U.S. and Europe said they expect to work from home in the near future. Online purchasing will accelerate. 60% said they expect to shop more online. An emphasis on health and well-being will persist. Two-thirds of those surveyed said they are trying to eat healthier. Furthermore, 35% of customers are more conscious about the sustainability of their food purchases. Finally, value remains paramount. Two out of three customers said they will try new brands if they offer a better value.
This presents for us an opportunity to shift customers towards our own brands and allows us an opportunity to help redefine value beyond price and to include health and sustainability, experience, et cetera. All of these trends play right into our wheelhouse and provide an ideal backdrop for growth. As Kevin and Wouter and their regional teams go through their presentations today, you will hear a lot more details about how we will create even more momentum across our portfolio on the road to 2025. You will hear how we are thinking about technology, automation, and data to accelerate our omni-channel transformation. Vibrant modern stores, reimagining loyalty, automated fulfillment centers, and last mile delivery. They will show how we will make these ingredients work together to bring the most optimal, tailored, inspiring, and relevant customer journey to life locally for all our customers.
I truly believe we have cracked the code and have a repeatable formula for growth in the U.S. and in Europe. We have a strong operating model with our leading local brands, supported by service brands who operate at scale and that leverage their best capabilities globally. Between now and 2025, we have four big priorities we are doubling down on for the next four years. Serve our customers through deeper digital relationships, accelerate our omni-channel transformation, and continue to be the best local operator, lead the transformation into a healthy and sustainable food system, and create the one-stop shop for smarter customer journeys. These priorities tie straight to our vision to create the leading local food shopping experience. Leading at the very least means being the number one grocery brand in all the markets we serve. Customers want to shop with brands they trust.
Leadership helps convey that trust by leading through safety, leading through community support, and leading on health and sustainability. Local. Local also conveys trust because customers want to buy from somebody who understands them and who knows their tastes and preferences. That's why our brands stay rooted in their local communities, connected to and giving customers what they want. Food. Food, and fresh food in particular, is at the center of what our brands offer. It's the number one reason our shoppers visit our brands. It's also an area where we have high expertise and the ability to differentiate. Last, shopping experience. Customers expect a completely easy, seamless, and omni-channel experience from ordering on their phone to moving through the store while they get value at every step and every click.
We can uniquely do this by combining the best of our brands and the local expertise with the scale benefits from our global footprint. Let's unpack these four priorities for the next four years a little bit more. Creating the local food shopping experience is a differentiated and winning vision for us, and it starts with deepening the customer relationship. This is all about understanding critical aspects of their lives, the moments that matter to them and their daily needs to help them eat well, save time, and live better. The way we do that is with our omni-channel customer value proposition, CVP in short. Here we have seven areas. The first is fresh and healthy.
This means healthier foods and lifestyles, providing easy navigation, clear nutrition information, and clear standards on labeling for our increasingly more health and conscious customer. It also means strengthening fresh and healthy assortments and communications so that we are the first choice for the customer. To show we are serious, we're increasing our target of healthy own brand sales to exceed 55% by 2025. We'll do this by enabling fresh and healthy choices, driving programs like implementing nutritional labeling, and guiding platforms for all our brands. For example, our U.S. brands are using Guiding Stars to measure nutrition in their products. We're aiming for a majority of own brands to achieve at least one star in the Guiding Stars program by the middle of 2025. The second key component of our CVP is local and trusted.
We want the customer to recognize our local brands as the trusted local leader. We'll do this by delivering a truly local and sustainable food shopping experience. Each of our brands is an icon within its community, with many of them servicing customers for many decades. Our brands epitomize local through their partnerships with local charities, food banks, and sports teams. That is why we place great importance in giving our individual brands the independence to meet their customer needs. A growing centerpiece here is locally sourced assortments to support their local communities and offer their customers unique products from just nearby. For example, our new brand, FreshDirect, works directly with local farmers and fishermen to get the freshest local produce and provide uniquely local assortments for customers, all with a shorter supply chain.
Our brands are also embedding themselves in the community, continuing to end hunger in the towns and cities they serve. No one should have to wonder where their next meal will come from or have to make the choice between paying bills or buying food, which is why we are making this global issue our number one charitable priority. Lastly, we will drive local sustainability, reducing food waste by 50% globally. The third component is personalization. Our brands will deliver a personalized shopping experience for their customer, highly tailored, highly customered, and highly connected to their individual and unique daily lives. This will manifest itself in many ways. For example, pre-filled lists based on personal preferences and dietary requirements, reminders, personalized offers, subscriptions, rewards, the list goes on.
Our brands will help customers build their baskets in real time, providing great value, recommendations, broad assortment, and convenience of delivery. We also bring community, gamification, novelty, and augmented experience into the mix. While these are all great benefits in isolation, it's combining them that gives the most precious benefit for the customer, the gift of time. Every minute they save is a minute gained to focus on the things that really matter most to them, whether it be personal or professional. This is one of the greatest lessons we have learned as we have grown bol.com to the leading online marketplace in the Benelux. bol.com is a powerful asset in our portfolio, and when I look at the numbers and the KPIs of bol.com's business, this is all the evidence and inspiration I need to see where we can truly go over time.
In light of our announcement this morning, we are going to spend a lot more time on bol.com later in our program. Margaret will take you through why we are so excited about the next phase of growth we are about to embark on. Now, let's move on to the operational priority, to accelerate each brand's omni-channel transformation and continue to be the best operator. There is no standing still in this industry in this time. I mentioned earlier, we have a repeatable formula for growth. We can see that simply through the skilled service brand model. Here we are efficiently organizing ourselves to drive scale and speed in transformation, while also balancing this with the unique demands of customers across our local markets in Europe and in the U.S.
Given the tight operating margins, innovation, transformation, and change, these are the tools that keep our brands sharp and ahead of the pack in their daily work. This is where the brands and support functions really rise and make a difference. They are the competitive advantage and the glue behind bringing the omni-channel CVP to life. As many of you know us by now, our brands have always approached operating excellence with a healthy dose of curiosity and common sense. The result is that they have built a robust supply chain, installed great commercial practices, deployed sophisticated data capture and analytics, and assembled great teams of experienced talent amongst the best in the business to take us into the future. To realize that future, we have defined seven areas that we will continue, and in many cases, accelerate our investments. There are three of these areas that are critically important.
Digital and in-store experience, supply chain operations and merchandising, and of course, data and analytics. First, digital and in-store experience. We are creating skilled E-commerce platforms in Europe and the U.S. to take advantage of our scale while still delivering a truly local experience for customers. By harmonizing the technologies behind the digital platforms, our brands can rapidly deploy new capabilities, keeping them ahead of the game in the important battle for new features and functionalities. Our brands are also digitally enhancing their stores. For example, over 80% of stores in Europe have electronic shelf labeling, and in the U.S., over 70% of the stores have self-checkout. While seen as a customer benefit, this will add further value in improving efficiency in store operations.
Additionally, our brands are leveraging their store experience of running urban store formats in Europe and offering that also to our U.S. brands, leveraging those learnings to win in the Philadelphia market with The Giant Company. Nick has a really nice update later on how the vision is coming to life. Secondly, supply chain operations and merchandising. To help further lower product costs, increase product availability, and increase freshness, we will complete our migration to full self-distribution at AD U.S.A. Chris will show you all the great work and tell you about the benefits that the teams have delivered and what's next on the agenda up to 2023. In Europe, our brands have increased their joint sourcing initiatives in the Benelux and Central and Southeastern Europe across the national brands, own brands, and goods not for resale.
They actively use both buying cooperatives in Europe, AMS and Coopernic, to secure better cost. Our brands have also improved and will continue to improve shrink with smart merchandising and inventory management. We are introducing additional technology to help further manage it, such as new capabilities in forecasting and replenishment, as well as, for example, dynamic markdowns. This is all to help them sell through more product before it expires. All of these capability enhancements across the omni-channel transformation are a priority and underpinned by the third key area, unlocking the power of data. The race to be first to on-demand real-time intelligence is the race no one can afford to lose, and we are certainly in the running. Because of its importance, we have planned a separate session with JJ and Selma to show you how we look at things in a holistic way.
Given our big transformation ambitions in technology and automation, in data and in new business models, we are committing to higher investments in tech and capabilities, and therefore are raising our CapEx spend from 3%-3.5% of sales on an annual basis. Be assured, we will continue to be the best operator in the industry, underlined by our world-class operating margins. As part of our planning towards 2025, we are committing to more ambitious Save for Our Customer targets, EUR 4 billion by 2025. We will also use our knowledge and experience to make E-commerce on a fully allocated basis profitable by 2025. Natalie will walk you through both of these areas later in the program. The next priority is one that helps us fulfill our purpose of eat well, save time, live better.
This is our priority around health and sustainability. Elevating health and sustainability holds a special place for me. I believe it transcends and touches all aspects of our business and our industry. I think of this priority as our commitment to be Grounded in Goodness. I want the decisions and choices of Ahold Delhaize and its brands to be Grounded in Goodness and thus make healthy and sustainable choices easy for both people and the planet. Let me elaborate a little bit. For people, I believe elevating health and sustainability benefits all the people we touch. It benefits customers, it benefits associates, and it benefits the local communities. For the planet, we see three big tracks to move on.
First, in our own business, we are committing to drive the decarbonization of our own operations, both in order to help the world to achieve the 1.5-degree target as specified by the IPCC, as well as to become a net zero climate positive business. We'll work with our supplier partners to help them achieve this goal as well. Second, we are committed to radically reduce waste and moving to a circular economy with respect to products and packaging. Finally, we will support farmers and suppliers as they decarbonize their operations and the overall supply chain and transition towards an inclusive and regenerative food system that supports biodiversity. We already are starting from a good position, and we have a great track record in many aspects of this space. This is also recognized independently.
We have now a AA MSCI ESG rating, upgraded from the A a few months before. We have a top 10% Sustainalytics rating in the food industry. Just this weekend, we once again achieved the number one position in Europe and in the U.S. in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, maintaining a track record of leadership we are very proud of. To further align and deepen our commitment to being the industry-leading healthy and sustainable retailer, we will embed healthy and sustainable further into our short-term and long-term incentive plans and other business metrics as we will report on them, just as we do on our financial metrics.
I'm also very excited that we announced on last Friday that we are committing to reach net zero carbon emissions across our own operations by 2040, and to becoming a net zero business across our entire supply chain products and services by 2050. We definitely won't give up on looking for opportunities and path to getting that job done faster. This is such an important topic. We will be dedicating more air time to this going forward in our communication, starting today, where I'm delighted to have Daniella Vega with us to walk you through our plans, how we will achieve our ambitions here. Lastly, let's spend some time on the portfolio priority.
Over the last years, we have spent a lot of time doing the dirty work and heavy lifting of elevating the operating infrastructure, reducing complexity, replacing legacy systems, and allowing the organization to scale. This hard work has brought us now to the tipping point where we can start to imagine a lot of cool and interesting things we can do by collaborating more deliberately at the interface with the customer. Today's consumers are busier than they ever have been. As I said earlier, time is a precious commodity. In this digital age, consumers are endlessly bombarded from all angles social media, emails, apps, and for example, spam. For brands and retailers, cutting through this dense overload of information, options, and complexity is probably the biggest challenge ahead when we emerge in a new post-pandemic normal.
Retailers with the courage to really cut through the weeds and simplify the customer journey to the essentials that really matter will be the winners, and we will be one of them. I'm excited to announce today two examples of how we are thinking about this. As we look throughout our portfolio, we know urban centers are critical points of influence for customers. They drive cultural influence for the surrounding area, they drive commerce, and they are the focal points for busy customers' life. With our proven model from Europe, we have the unique opportunity to win in these urban markets. The plan we have just executed to win in Philadelphia, I already mentioned before, is a first export of that to the U.S.
Those learnings will now be taken to drive a clear win in New York strategy, creating an ecosystem encompassing Stop & Shop and FreshDirect and their partners to offer a unique proposition. This will be about delivering fresh and healthy food wherever, however, and whenever New York customers wish to shop. Kevin and Gordon will tell you more about both of these omni-channel and marketing strategies. Secondly, we have a truly unique opportunity to win even more in the Benelux. We have the leading number one and two food retail brands, and the leading number one online marketplace in the region. This is one of a kind opportunity. The timing is also right. Combined, we have 2,900 stores and 1,000 pickup points. We support all type of shopping journeys from single item to full shopping baskets.
Combined, we have more than 35 million products we offer. Here, we will significantly enhance the customer's experience across the brands of bol.com, Delhaize, and Albert Heijn. Here, three things are really important. More convenience, more value, and more relevance. This is a true opportunity, and Wouter will spend some time on this big idea later. This portfolio priority also extends to how and where we will accelerate testing, learning, experimenting, and scaling new customer propositions. We will carefully choose the right brand for the right opportunity to be a pioneer for our company and bring more speed and more innovation to the market at a faster pace. For example, we will scale Albert Heijn's premium subscription model and compact E-commerce models to select markets in Europe.
This compact E-commerce model will start with Albert in the Czech Republic. Not only is this compact model environmentally sustainable, but we are able to share the efficiencies with customers by lowering our delivery fees. We're also leveraging our portfolio of brands to test various permutations of quick commerce grocery. We know consumers are increasingly moving to an on-demand model. Our brands are on top of this trend, with several pilots already underway for under two hours, under one hour, under thirty minutes delivery times. Finally, our brands will continue to build out broader portfolio opportunities to accelerate growth in complementary revenue streams. Within this category, our ambition is to deliver EUR 1 billion in complementary revenue streams by 2025, and you will hear more about this from JJ and Selma, our Chief Digital Officers within our company.
These are our four priorities for the next four years, and we are entering into an exciting and new growth cycle. As you have heard today, we have had a consistent track record of driving profitable growth with a clear vision and strategy. Across the portfolio, you can see how we are focused on creating uniquely local omni-channel customer experiences for every brand we have, continuing to strengthen and grow our brands and their market leading positions, and also enhancing the long-term durability of our strategy through scale and omni-channel transformation. We have a strong competitive advantage rooted in our 19 great local brands. We have an efficient formula for growth with our service brands. We have stable and predictable cash flows. We believe our position matches our vision to be the consolidator of choice in the industry.
We have a track record of successful acquisitions over the last three years. Natalie will bring home our program later today with details about what this all means for our financial ambitions. To give you a sneak peek, we believe our strategy and priorities will allow us to deliver sales growth of more than EUR 10 billion, double our net consumer online sales, deliver fully allocated E-commerce profitability by 2025, EUR 1 billion of complementary revenue streams, EUR 6 billion of cumulative free cash flow, and high single-digit underlying EPS growth versus 2022. These are big ambitions, but we have the talent, experience, and diversity to drive our purpose, our values, our vision, and our priorities. I started off by speaking about our people, and it is critical that I finish with them as well. Our people are at the heart of our strategy.
They live by the values of courage, integrity, teamwork, care, and humor. We are committed to them with our 100-100-100 diversity and inclusion ambitions. A topic which is indeed very close to my heart, too. Let me thank them once again for what they have done and what they will do together with us in the future. These are exciting times ahead of us. There is a lot of uncertainty across our markets. However, we believe our strategy and four priorities will help realize the vision of creating the leading local food shopping experience. We will continue to drive profitable growth, and we will realize this with our brands' relentless focus on the customer, creating local and trusted brands and driving the omni-channel transformation. That was it for my side, and see you later at the Q&A.
We have a great program ahead of us and to start us off, over to Kevin and the team to talk about Ahold Delhaize USA.
Thank you, Frans, for the introduction. You know, it's great to be with you today. I really look forward to sharing with you an update on the great work the U.S. brands are doing for our customers as the largest grocery retailer on the East Coast. First, let's take a look at our U.S. presence. Our ADUSA brands operate more than 2,000 stores. We had sales of over $51.8 billion last year, and our companies employ more than 230,000 associates. We've now reached 90% consumer coverage for E-commerce with click and collect and delivery. Our ADUSA brands have over 30 million active loyalty card members.
Our U.S. segment reported 105% growth in online sales, and our companies are now rated number one food retailer in the U.S. in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, which we're very proud of. Now, back in 2018, we talked about the transformational journey we set out on following the merger. We shared with you our plans to grow market share and to have strong local brands in the markets we serve to grow our digital capabilities and create the value unlocks to fund our transformation while achieving our financial goals. Our ADUSA companies have achieved a great deal and are well-positioned as we look forward to continue our transformation in support of the four-part promise that Frans outlined earlier.
As we get started, though, I wanted to acknowledge that we couldn't achieve the results that I've shared without strong teams and our associates at ADUSA. They've done a phenomenal job in delivering business results that have exceeded expectations despite a really tough year filled with challenges, not only in our industry, but in the communities that we serve. People, culture, and passion differentiate our U.S. businesses from our competitors, and they are strong contributors to our brand's longevity. In some cases, our brands have been serving customers for over 100 years. Our people bring our brands to life locally for us. Today and in the future, having these strong brands with deep roots in their local communities is more important than ever. The close relationship our brands hold is why our customers value our brands and trust the brands to nourish their families.
Our brand identities are built on how we show up in the communities we serve, not only when things are going well, but also when times are tough. Our local brands are among the first to have stores open after hurricanes, among the largest donors at local food banks, significant funders of cancer research centers, and much more. We show we care in big and small ways every day, and it really makes a difference. Now, our customers' lives are truly in motion, and over the past several years, each of the brands of ADUSA have been on a journey to create a seamless omni-channel experience for our customers, positioning our brands to serve our customers' busy lives in motion. We provide many ways for customers to shop and interact with our local brands. Each interaction is part of a personalized experience the customer has entrusted to our brands.
Today, I wanna share with you where we are going next and how we will accelerate our omni-channel evolution through what we call our connected customer strategy, and I will highlight that today. Delivering on our strategy will meet our customers not only where they are, but also where they're going. Before I go into the connected customer strategy, let me describe to you what we mean by a connected customer. Now, in some ways, it's every one of us. Our customers' lives are constantly in motion. They're looking for convenient and personalized solutions to save time in their day so that they can enjoy the moments that matter. Now our strategy is built on providing relevant omni-channel solutions so our customers can enjoy the moments that matter in their lives. Our strategy is resonating.
Over the last two years, we've seen significant digital growth across all segments of our customer base. In fact, we've seen our digitally engaged customers grow by 56% in the last two years. Let's take a quick look at what today's connected customer means.
Today's connected customers lead busy lives, or as we like to look at it, their lives are in constant motion. Juggling work, school, and family and trying to fit shopping into an already hectic day can be a challenge. This is especially true when they're trying to make healthier choices for themselves and their families, all the while trying to make time for the moments that really matter. In our changing world, being the destination for customers' shopping needs is more important than ever, especially when customers have a growing number of options. Customers want to shop brands they trust, and our brands' relationships with their customers are decades deep. So trusted, it makes it feel like you're shopping with a friend. Our uniquely local connections, combined with a personalized shopping experience, is the recipe for winning with connected customers today and in the years ahead.
With store aisles and digital shelves full of relevant products and private brand options, we are doing even more to personalize the total shopping experience and always deliver with a focus on convenience, nutrition, and sustainability that they are looking for. Our brands offer helpful options like online ordering for fast and friendly curbside pickup or delivery in as little as 30 minutes. Our omni-channel transformation is progressing and is underpinned by our proprietary omni-channel technology. Our rich customer data enables us to create a customer experience built on their preferences and it's driving basket growth. An expanded assortment allows our customers to find more private brand, natural, organic, and locally relevant products than ever before. Ship to Me extends the shopping experience even further, helping meet all of life's needs.
Easy-to-follow nutritional guidance from Guiding Stars and readily available products to meet dietary and lifestyle needs make healthier living a breeze. Customers can now also find sustainable products marked by leaves. Our omni-channel capabilities make us the go-to solution for customers. From the moment they walk through the door or open an app, our customers trust us to deliver what they need, when they need it, and give them time back in their days. Fast-forward to the future and our local brands will have changed a lot. They'll each increase relevant, personalized solutions that accommodate the diverse lifestyles of our customers. Digital relationships will run even deeper, and health will come to life in new ways through things like customized meal plans, a health profile center, and healthier product swaps.
Predict My List capabilities will anticipate what customers need, and many of the staples that customers need will show up right on time each month through their local brand's Subscribe and Save service. We'll also offer value adds like online classes and consultations to help with meal planning, recipe inspiration, and even advice from a nutritionist or pharmacist. Hot, ready-to-eat meals are delivered right in time for dinner, and catering options are easily accessible for larger gatherings with friends and family. This connected experience is delivered with individualized offers for savings both online and in store. Deeply a part of our customers' daily lives, the seamless, uniquely local experience our brands provide play a trusted role in helping our customers achieve their goals, reach for their aspirations, and spend time present in the moments that really matter.
As you can see, our customers lead very busy lives, and we're doubling down on the connected customer strategy to build deep, trusted omni-channel relationships with them. While all of our ADUSA brands have incredible work underway, today, we're going to highlight examples from three of our local brands on how they are leveraging the strategy to win in the marketplace. First, I'll give you more detail on the key aspects of our strategy. The key attributes of the connected customer strategy has five parts. The first is vibrant, modern stores with a seamless omni-channel experience for all. Next is right pricing with personalized value, compelling assortments and services, including our private brands, and a uniquely local experience. Let me walk you through these with a little more detail.
Now, providing vibrant, modern stores means that we have the right format for the right channel, whether it's an online store, an urban market, or a full-service store. It's about having a store that's convenient and easy to shop, and one that's enabled by technology to make shopping more engaging, personalized, and faster. Some examples of this would include deli order ahead, in-store mode on our mobile applications, and scan and go checkout, to name a few. A seamless omni-channel experience for all means we're here for our customers, whether they need dinner tonight in 30 minutes, groceries or a prescription the next day, or really through any channel that they wanna shop. With the knowledge that their preferred channel could change based on the circumstances of their busy day, we have to have an omni-channel solution.
Right pricing with personalized value means we have a total store pricing that is competitive and compelling assortments with loyalty programs and health solutions that offer customers personalized content that delivers holistic value for each customer. In addition, our private brands offer compelling prices, robust assortment, including those that meet dietary needs. Now, these products are sustainably sourced. They include clean labels, less plastics, and a great story that surprises and delights customers. Finally, a uniquely local experience that connects our brands to our customers in each local market and community that they serve by activating all of their brand attributes across all of our customer touch points. Through the connected customer strategy, we are positioned for growth. Now for our brands to really win locally, we've also carefully designed the rest of ADUSA and the entire ecosystem to support them.
Our support brands include Peapod Digital Labs, Retail Business Services, and ADUSA Supply Chain, and they enable the capabilities to deliver the connected customer strategy while taking advantage of the combined scale and leverage of the total organization. This combination of local brands and support brands enables us to move with speed and advanced capabilities, scale, and leverage within our ADUSA ecosystem much more effectively. The brands really develop and execute local strategies and commercial plans that connect with customers while the support brands provide the scale, the platforms, capabilities, and services that enable the local brands to drive the omni-channel customer experience to win in their marketplace. The idea of our platforms is important to us as they really are designed to achieve scale, leverage, and capability builds to enable the value unlock necessary for the investments our local brands need in order to compete.
Some areas we're covering with these scaled platforms are in E-commerce, digital, and supply chain. We invest in building single platforms that can be tailored for the brands based on the needs of their customers. At scale, we're introducing key practice areas like commercial services, retail media, indirect sourcing, and a retail innovation center of excellence. Our discipline around a cost savings culture, along with these changes, are key enablers for investing in our future. Let me tell you a little bit more about our support brands. Let's start with Peapod Digital Labs, which focuses on digital, E-commerce, and commercial solutions and capabilities to support the omni-channel experience. Established at the start of 2019, it's hard to believe it's only been that long, Peapod Digital Labs was created to house the core capabilities to accelerate omni-channel in the U.S.
When we created Peapod Digital Labs, we had big ambitions to drive a seamless omni-channel experience for customers that would enable them to shop in any way they chose. Now to do that, we knew we needed to build new capabilities in a way that could be easily scaled and leveraged across our brands. To start advancing our ambition, we quickly expanded, or in some cases, we had to create new capabilities in key areas such as product management, data science, DevOps, engineering, retail media, and digital shelf. Now advancing these capabilities accelerates our omni-channel and digital customer experience really across all touch points, both online and in store, including delivery, pickup, loyalty programs, and so much more. The results are really paying off.
Over the last two years, we've seen over 200% growth in omni-channel customers, and we now have integrated omni-channel loyalty programs at all of our brands. Peapod Digital Labs has also been focused on building new capabilities, and they've created several scalable platforms, including our omni-channel loyalty. Spectrum, which is a proprietary picking and packing system to fulfill E-commerce orders. This platform allows us to improve the associate experience while also driving higher utilization and productivity and decreasing training time by almost half. This is part of really driving to find fully allocated profitability by 2025 in our E-commerce. Now, PRISM is also important to us, and it's our proprietary digital and E-commerce platform that creates a competitive advantage for all of our U.S. brands.
PRISM is a critical component for omni-channel shopping, personalized experience, integrated loyalty, health, and sustainability features, and it really brings that all together. In addition, we're now adding Ship To Me, which is a part of PRISM platform that will serve as our endless aisle marketplace and will enable our brands to offer hundreds of thousands more relevant SKUs. Over time, we'll be able to add new services and continue to grow baskets through this platform. Peapod Digital Labs will now apply the same focus to drive new omni-channel and commercial outcomes in important areas such as private brands, data and analytics, assortment optimization, digital marketing, and sourcing. We're looking forward to what we can create and deliver in those areas.
Now, over the past several years, we've proven the power of scaled platforms and have built capabilities that have allowed us to improve the connected customer's experience and continue to grow our business. Looking forward, we have an aggressive digital and commercial agenda to continue accelerating our connected customer strategy and to really position us for success. What I'd like to do now is lightly touch on our Retail Business Services support brand. I've talked about it before in terms of some of the functions that are in Retail Business Services, and while there are many, what I really wanna highlight today is the focus that we have on IT. In IT, we're modernizing our technology and our infrastructure to enable us to win with customer-facing omni-channel capabilities. We do this by promoting common systems which allow us to be nimbler and to increase our speed to market.
We've made great progress on our IT roadmap to develop scaled and integrated platforms with development underway on systems such as a new finance and accounting system, our supply chain that we'll talk about later, E-commerce that I've already mentioned, frictionless checkout, moving to a perpetual inventory, and our network capabilities for carrying all of our totally integrated commerce load. Now, all of these will enable our organization to modernize and truly enable real-time operating environment. This is so important for us as we think about the marketplace that we're in today and the omni-channel world that we compete in. Another significant transformation underway is within our newest of our support brands, which is ADUSA Supply Chain. In 2019, we launched our supply chain transformation, and we really were focused on bringing back our supply chain as we build out our omni-channel network.
With these changes, we will not only have full control of our supply chain, but an optimized network at scale, which will enable the local brands to better serve their omni-channel customers and create one of the largest supply chain networks on the East Coast. The transformation will continue to create value unlocks that will allow us to continue to invest in automation and digital capabilities and to lower our cost to serve and enable our direct-to-consumer relationships as we build this omni-channel network out. What I'd like to do now is have Chris Lewis, our President of ADUSA Supply Chain, give us a little bit of an overview about what's going on in our supply chain.
Thanks, Kevin. The future is omni-channel. To compete, we must be able to serve customers in store, online, and everywhere in between. Having the right infrastructure in place is critical to achieving our aspirations. We're now at the midpoint of our three-year supply chain transformation journey to an integrated self-distributed network for the future. In late 2019, we embarked on this work, and we continue to deliver all the planned facility transitions on schedule, despite a pandemic and unprecedented conditions in the supply chain. Through the hard work and dedication of teams across supply chain and all Ahold Delhaize USA companies, the network is now 65% self-managed, up from about 40% at the outset of the transformation. We're on schedule to have 85% of the network in-house by the end of 2022.
As we take back the supply chain, we're also building for the future. We're adding new facilities in key geographies to support our brands efficiently and effectively. By the end of 2022, the network will include 25 traditional distribution centers and food processing facilities, 28 E-commerce fulfillment centers, and more than 1,500 click-and-collect locations. As we expand, we're deploying key technology capabilities to optimize the supply chain at scale. We have a fully deployed transportation management system, which is driving efficiency across the network, reducing overall miles on the road and getting product to stores and E-commerce centers faster. We're well on our way to a full deployment of an innovative AI-enabled end-to-end forecasting and replenishment system, which will enable us to more precisely predict demand, enhance freshness, and reduce waste.
This fall, we also began piloting new warehouse management technology, which we believe can be scaled across the total network to further enhance effectiveness and drive out costs. We are confident these solutions are the right technology suite for the future of omni-channel food distribution. As supply chains around the world continue to grapple with labor shortages, we're one step ahead when it comes to addressing workforce challenges by augmenting with automation across the supply chain. First announced in 2020, we're on track to open 2 new fully automated frozen facilities next year to serve the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic markets. Sitting at roughly 275,000 sq ft each, these facilities will each receive and ship 45 million cases of product annually. We're also leveraging robotics to equip our people.
We continue to scale wearable robotic technology that reduces fatigue for distribution center workers and help them avoid injuries. We're piloting virtual reality technology for training to help reduce injuries too. In support of Ahold Delhaize USA's omni-channel customer value proposition, supply chain is also enabling new capabilities through investments in automated E-commerce fulfillment. As you'll hear from Nick Bertram, we're testing automated solutions like the one at The Giant Company's Island Avenue site to unlock productivity and drive profitability in the supply chain. We've also evolved processes and ways of working for optimization. We've doubled down on collaboration across our companies and with suppliers.
The ADvantage Supplier Collaboration Program now includes more than 200 suppliers, exceeding partnership and financial expectations and driving solution-oriented thinking to ensure the best in-stock position for the U.S. brands and their omni-channel customers and launch new efficiency Forward Buy and Investment Buy programs. We continue to grow and evolve with care for the local communities we serve and our environment. Across the supply chain, more than 1,500 FTEs have been added since January of this year, and these are good jobs with competitive pay, enhanced benefits, and a culture of care and appreciation. We're also investing in associates to help them to continue to develop and help us launch new capabilities. Through our LEAD program, Learning, Education, Academia, and Development, we deploy a comprehensive approach, including partnerships with some of the most notable colleges and universities to grow talent.
We have taken a purposeful approach to sustainability through energy efficiency, recycling, and even leveraging technology for waste reduction to ensure our facilities are sustainable for the future. The strategic locations of the two new fully automated frozen facilities will alone eliminate 3 million miles traveled annually. As Kevin mentioned earlier, it's been a challenging 18 months, but our people have exceeded expectations and achieved our goals time and time again. We are trusted to always deliver today and for our omni-channel future.
Well, thank you, Chris. From these examples, you can see how the support brands are providing significant capabilities and value unlock to enable us in the marketplace. It's so important to us that our support brands really enable these capabilities. Now I'd like to discuss a few examples of what our local brands are doing to strengthen our omni-channel customer value proposition as they focus on our U.S. growth and leverage the platforms and capabilities that I just talked about. We're going to hear from three of our brand presidents, and they'll share examples of the work underway to build trust and to resonate with consumers. First, we'll hear from Food Lion. Starting more than a decade ago, Food Lion started to reposition their brand, and Food Lion continues to grow today in a very competitive market by connecting locally to the towns and cities they serve.
Meg Ham, the President of Food Lion, is going to give us an update on their omni-channel progress. Food Lion is a remarkable turnaround story with 36 consecutive quarters of same-store sales growth. Food Lion will share how their brand strategy and culture fuels their omni-channel growth and continues to help them with winning locally across their more than 1,100-store network. Let's hear from Meg.
Thanks, Kevin. Food Lion opened its doors in 1957 with a very simple focus, providing the lowest food prices in North Carolina. With no-frills stores focused on helping people save money and put food on the table, it's still at the core of what we do here every day. Since 2010, Food Lion has been on a journey of transformation to strengthen our position in the marketplace. What started with in-depth consumer, marketplace, and associate research identified the most important areas to strengthen Food Lion's position in our markets. Acting upon what we heard required meaningful business trade-offs and methodical strategic discipline that still exists today. Let's explore some of the key steps of our transformation that are fueling the momentum we have today. We developed our strategy, easy, fresh, and affordable. You can count on Food Lion every day.
It brings the omni-channel experience to life, no matter how our customers choose to shop. We strengthened our core equity of low prices with significant price investments across the store. We continue to make price investments today in service of maintaining our low price position and perception. By pioneering one of the first retail loyalty programs in the early 1990s, our industry-leading MVP program continues to create strong loyalty and equity for our brand as we continue to strengthen its value to customers by allowing them to engage in multiple ways to get personalized value, whether that's online, in-store kiosk, or mailed straight to your door. We have a deep understanding of our customers' behaviors and preferences, enabled by our ability to leverage data and analytics.
In 2018, we introduced our innovative digital Shop & Earn program, which has saved customers millions with personalized offers, which means the more you shop, the more you earn. We began our remodel program to modernize and freshen our stores. By making responsible store-by-store financial investment decisions, we provide updated equipment that not only meets the needs of our growing assortment, but also helps us to achieve our sustainability goals. We're expanding our E-commerce capabilities that allow customers to shop when, where, and how they want, and we're creating the modern, consistent shopping experience across our stores that our customers told us is so important to them. Our remodels have created the platform to evolve the store experience and continue to generate strong return on investment. A key focus over the past decade has been to enhance our overall assortment to remain relevant for our customers' evolving needs.
We leverage internal and marketplace data to provide what our customers are looking for, including more natural, organic, plant-based and private brand items while keeping pace with the evolving trends. We're leveraging partnerships with our local suppliers to provide the unique local items that customers expect from their neighborhood Food Lion. We're focused on improving our produce and home meal solutions offering because that's what customers tell us is most important to them. We work hard to keep our shopping experience up to date, even outside of the remodel program. That's why we've created a continuous process that enables us to keep assortments up to date and implement innovative programs throughout the network. Customers are responding to these enhancements, and their increased share of wallet with Food Lion gives us permission to go even further. Investing in our associates has been a critical component of our transformation journey.
Food Lion's 82,000 associates understand their role in delivering our brand, our strategy, and our culture across our 1,103 stores every day. Each associate is empowered to make decisions that put the customer at the center of all we do. At Food Lion, we are the towns and cities we serve. We are your local neighborhood grocery store. Our actions over the past decade have resulted in deeper trust, equity and loyalty, which generates strong financial momentum. Whether demonstrated by our achievement of 36 consecutive quarters or nine years of positive same-store sales growth, substantial growth in our average weekly sales per store, continued year-over-year market share gains, or the significant increase in sales per square foot, our brand is strong and well-positioned for future success.
By continuing to listen to our customers and associates, we will confidently adapt and evolve our brand based on their changing needs. Executing our time-tested and proven blueprint will continue to strengthen our brand in a fiercely competitive marketplace. We are confident that by delivering our brand, our strategy, and our culture, we are well-positioned for continued success into the future.
Thank you, Meg. Food Lion's transformation story continues to be one of the most successful and really inspirational stories in our industry. As you can see from Food Lion, not only have we been successful in repositioning their local brand, we're also truly connecting to customers in the community in a unique way, providing the relevant local solutions for their busy lives in motion so that they can focus on the moments that matter. Now, the Stop & Shop team is also embarking on its own brand repositioning journey, and this is led by Gordon Reid, our President of Stop & Shop. The team continues to do a remarkable job of driving their omni-channel transformation. Gordon's going to share details on Stop & Shop's ambition and expectations across their more than 400 store network, tapping into their more than a 100-year heritage as a local brand. Gordon?
Thank you, Kevin, and hello, everyone. My name is Gordon Reid, and I am the President of Stop & Shop, a position I've held for just over two years. I'd like to take a few minutes today to walk you through the Stop & Shop strategy and our progress over the last few years. Let's start with a high-level overview of the business. Stop & Shop is the market leader with the highest share in our trade area. We operate more than 400 stores and 20 central online fulfillment centers throughout New England, New York, and New Jersey with the help of more than 60,000 dedicated associates. Over the last few years, we've focused on building our omni-channel vision and bringing our customers the food they love for how they live, and I would like to share with you the significant progress we have made.
Stop & Shop's ongoing multiyear remodel program is a key component of our omni-channel strategy. Since we began our repositioning in 2018, we have completed over 120 remodels. One key component of our remodels is to deliver excellence in fresh. This includes expanding our produce space and assortment and making it easier for our customers to decide what's for dinner through the addition of quality meal solutions, such as ready-to-heat entrees, flatbread pizza, wing bars, and sushi, to name but a few. We know that our customers are more strapped for time than ever, so we continue to roll out digital solutions that make their omni-channel journeys as seamless as possible, like our Daily Order Ahead and digital menu boards. We are making our assortments even more relevant by using data-driven analytics to assess and adjust our assortments at the macro and micro space level.
This includes adding more local and multicultural products to address shifting demographics and the emerging needs of the communities we serve. Our enhanced price and promotion strategies have improved our value messaging and made our stores easier to shop. We have added signage that enables shoppers to identify the value in our private label choices, our strong promotional offers, as well as our local, organic, and gluten-free products. Convenience is key, so we let you shop your way in store or online for pickup or delivery. Stop & Shop has leading E-commerce penetration with more than 360 click and collects covering over 90% of the fleet. Our delivery service covers 80% of our footprint, including same-day delivery to 40% of our customers through our own delivery service.
Our migration to the Ahold Delhaize USA PRISM platform, which you heard Kevin talk about earlier, enabled the launch of our new GO Rewards loyalty program in quarter 3 of 2020. The program has approximately 1.3 million members and has driven more than $300 million in incremental sales by offering customers a more personalized experience. The progress Stop & Shop has made has led to substantial gains in financial and customer experience metrics. Our remodeled stores are seeing an incremental sales growth of more than 6%. E-commerce penetration has grown by more than 350 basis points versus the start of 2020. NPS increased by over 4 points versus 2018, with strong performance in key drivers such as store has an appealing look and feel, overall service, and fresh quality.
This progress and positive momentum provide a solid foundation to pursue our significant growth opportunity, New York City. Our holistic New York City strategy focuses on being uniquely local and includes remodeling stores to ensure customers have a great in-store experience, accelerating E-commerce through same-day delivery and pickup, optimizing assortment on a store-by-store basis, and further target marketing to help drive neighborhood specific messaging. Given our strong base of 25 Stop & Shop stores, a central fulfillment facility for delivery, and a network of weigh room facilities, we have a unique opportunity to deploy a truly differentiated grocery value proposition to the customers of New York City and surrounding areas. Stop & Shop has made significant progress, but we have further to go, so we are not slowing down and will continue to build our omni-channel vision.
We will bring our customers the food they love for how they live through an easy, fast, and personalized omni-channel experience. Thank you.
Well, thanks, Gordon. As you can see, we have a significant focus at Stop & Shop as they transform to a truly omni-channel retailer. We're working on a cohesive strategy for winning in the Greater New York City area through a dual brand effort at Stop & Shop and FreshDirect. Bringing together the best of both brands and linking our digital and physical presence together, we're going to aggressively pursue our omni-channel capabilities for the Greater New York City area. The teams really believe that the combined efforts will generate significant opportunity for synergies and customer experiences that will allow us to grow our combined market share in the area. Next, you'll hear from Nick Bertram, who's our President of The Giant Company, and he's going to talk about how we're winning in the urban market of Philadelphia.
We believe that we can draw on these types of experiences of how we win in the Philadelphia urban market and apply it to other urban markets, such as I was just talking about in the Greater New York area. Let's hear from Nick and his team on how they're doing.
Hi, I'm Nicholas Bertram, President of The Giant Company, and I'm joined today by Glennis Harris, our Senior Vice President of Customer Experience. At The Giant Company, we promise to be designed for the way families live now. This promise ensures we design our brand experience in whatever way is needed to be there for today's families. With the world around us constantly changing, being mindful of the word now is how we ensure we stay relevant, ahead of the curve, to be there for the families that depend on us for the future.
A big part of that future is omni-channel. Offering a strong customer value proposition through a personalized experience that extends beyond the physical store and seamlessly integrates into the digital world, allowing customers to shop how, when, and where they want. At The Giant Company, we began expanding and investing in convenient multi-channel and multi-format solutions before the world and customer behavior shifted in 2020. We are proud of our Choice Rewards program, with tools and offerings that create a consistent and personalized experience both in store and online, resulting in increased loyalty and share growth.
Personalization really comes to life in Philadelphia, our first true omni-channel market with immense diversity in customer expectations and opportunity. Today, we'll share some of our strategic initiatives that have driven growth, customer loyalty, and career opportunities in Philadelphia with investments in customer-centric solutions, jobs, community partnerships, philanthropic giving, and volunteerism. A great example is the launch of our small urban format, Giant Heirloom Market, which is focused on fresh products, local partnerships, and digital tools, creating a curated range within unique architecture. This is the first time that our brand was in Center City, Philadelphia, bringing forward a new format for Giant that aligns with our strategy and is based on what customers said they want. We want our brand to become part of the fabric of the city, and you'll see it through local growers and purveyors.
It's not just innovation in our stores, but also on how we serve others beyond our walls and reach. We see local vendors as local families too, not only unlocking our potential to grow, but also their own. Giant Heirloom Market's hyperlocal approach has received positive brand publicity and favorably impacted the city. We have more locations in development, and you'll see our latest innovations when we open Fashion District this winter.
While the offering at the Giant Heirloom Market is uniquely curated for its neighborhood, the learnings are universal and helped us grow in a big way with the opening of our first full-size Giant in Center City, Philadelphia, with our River Walk location. This urban two-level flagship is a shining example of our company's innovative and courageous spirit, our passion for the city and its families, and our love for food. Our growth will continue with more Giant stores in Philadelphia, this year at Cottman Avenue and another on Columbus Boulevard.
Of course, our opportunity to compete fully in Philadelphia would not be possible without the introduction of Giant Direct, which enables convenient online ordering for pickup and delivery, key in enabling the personalization our customers seek and what differentiates us as an omni-channel brand. Prior to the pandemic, we had already been proactively investing in click and collects. At Riverwalk, we have the offering front and center with a Giant Direct pickup station. Now Island Avenue, our first automated E-commerce fulfillment center, opened in November, will round out our citywide presence. This facility enables same-day and rapid delivery, not just to Philadelphia, but it extends our ability to expand into new markets. Through technology, the facility will be 57% more productive than our manual selection facilities, allowing us to be more competitive and get ahead of demand.
Over the last few years, our team has launched two new brands and gained share in the Philadelphia DMA by offering a local assortment and the same great value customers expect from Giant. Our team has fallen in love with Philadelphia and the challenge of staying relevant to families through an omni-channel experience. Because at The Giant Company, we are fully dedicated to connecting families for a better future. We have rallied around this sentiment, not only growing our brand, but expanding how we make a difference every day.
Well, thanks, Nic and Glennis. That was a great update on how we're actually applying many of the attributes of the connected customer strategy to win in Philadelphia. Today what we've tried to show you is how we're differentiating in key areas in winning in local markets in the U.S. as part of our omni-channel transformation and how we're positioned to really serve customers' lives in motion as we deliver this connected customer strategy. We hope that we've demonstrated to you how we are building size and scale to enable a connected customer future, providing the capabilities and the services from our support brands to enable our local brands to win. We've shown you how our local brands serve their customers and unlock value to win in their markets.
We've given examples of how The Giant Company, Food Lion, and Stop & Shop are creating uniquely local, individualized shopping experience for their customers every day. We've shown you how local brands serve their customers and unlock value to win in their markets. We gave examples of how The Giant Company, Food Lion, and Stop & Shop are creating uniquely local, individualized shopping experience for their customers every day. Through these examples, we've also shown you how we are driving growth in new target markets like Philadelphia with new formats. Given that we're in many of the top urban markets on the East Coast, we believe that we can take these learnings and bring them to other brands. While these are just a few of the examples, I could give many more, including at our Giant Food or our Hannaford brands.
You see, each of our brands are actively working to deliver the connected customer strategy. Through local brand experiences, we'll continue to differentiate and grow market share in the East Coast markets because we connect with our customers in the most meaningful way. We've shown you how we are uniquely structured to activate the connected customer strategy by delivering a local experience with strong community connections through our local brands and the significant scale and benefits through our platforms built by our support brands. Each of these brands understand their local markets and the community needs, such as relevant assortment, pricing, and services that are tailored to the neighborhoods in which they operate. All of this is Grounded in Goodness with our leadership position and sustainability, as I mentioned earlier, being recognized in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.
The connected customer strategy is also deeply rooted in our global four-part promise that Frans covered earlier today. It's our promise that unites us all around the same goals and ambitions for our organization. We really believe we have a very exciting future ahead as the brands continue to earn the loyalty and trust of our customers year after year. I want to thank you for listening to our omni-channel story. I'm very pleased I've had the opportunity to meet with you today to share a little bit about our journey. Now I'll turn the program over to Wouter, and he'll talk about our Ahold Delhaize European brands. I want to thank you very much for the time you've given me to hear our story about Ahold Delhaize USA.
Thank you, Kevin, and good morning and good afternoon. I am looking forward to sharing all the initiatives and plans we have for our European and Indonesia business. We have seen a tremendous change in our external environment. However, I am very pleased that our omni-channel transformation has delivered outstanding results since the Investor Day, which we hosted in 2018 in New York. We have a fascinating business with a lot of potential for growth. Before I go into that, I would love to reflect a bit on the last year and a half. I'm also very proud of what we've been able to achieve together. Our local brands have done an amazing job to adapt to the sudden changes in the world around us.
The pandemic put our people and our strategic choices really to the test, and we were able to deal with it, and in the meantime, always deliver a safe shopping environment for our customers, our communities, and of course, also for all our colleagues. I cannot thank all our teams in Europe and Indonesia enough for this outstanding job. It's unfortunately not over. We still need to deal with COVID-19. We just don't know how it ends. Also the volatility, the structural political changes, and the economic uncertainty, which will impact all our behaviors. As a company, but also as a person, I am very mindful about the impact that this will have on our increasing business responsibility.
As Frans and Kevin both mentioned earlier, here in Europe, we also see a shift in consumer behavior, increased home consumption, more digital connectivities, price and value focus, and an increased interest on healthy living and eating. All these things matters, and are really in the heart of our strategy. Before I get into it, let me start with an update on our footprint in Europe, and we'll dive right into the specifics of our strategy for the next few years. Across our region, we have 11 great local brands with more than 5,000 stores. We are, of course, also super proud of all our 170,000 associates, which we count on every day to work relentlessly to serve our customers. Omnichannel, our key strategic driver, has already yielded an industry-leading 12% E-commerce penetration, including bol.com.
Besides growth, we are also focusing on gaining market share in all our key markets. This year has been another great year for our business. Some key KPIs we are proud of include our continuous E-commerce growth, EUR 7 billion net consumer sales, 30% growth by the end of this year. Besides E-commerce, we also stay focused on strengthening our footprint across the board with more than 250 store openings in the EU and 130 store remodels. We also now have more than 10 million addressable cardholders. They represent about 50% of our sales. For 2025, we also have quite some ambitious goals. First of all, online growth to EUR 50 billion and a CAGR of 20%. We will also continue to strengthen our footprint by opening more than 800 stores throughout Europe.
By 2025, we will have more than 20 million addressable cardholders, doubling from where we are in 2021, and they will represent about 70% of our sales. How are we going to do that? What is our magic here? First of all is we are going to raise our game and improve the customer value proposition, or CVP, as we call it, in all our brands. This all starts with our unwavering commitment to improving our fresh and healthy proposition. Some very good examples are all our bakery and deli upgrades, which are critical drivers of frequency for our customers. For example, at Albert, we have improved all more than 330 deli and bakery departments across all our supermarkets and our hypermarkets.
Another nice and good example is the introduction of Nature's Promise, a range, a new range that contains no artificial flavors, colors, or any preservatives. Also important for our customers is our strong local link and our connection in the offering. To meet this desire, we have significantly increased local delicacies in the assortment, and a nice example of that is in Mega Image in Romania, where we've introduced Gusturi Romanesti, products that are made with ingredients according to the tradition of original Romanian recipes. A further cool example is that we have turned Delhaize into Belhaize earlier this year throughout the country to promote more than 1,600 of our Belgian producers and suppliers.
Broadening the range of assortment is also critically important at bol.com, where we have ambitious goals to increase the network, our partner network, by growing to more than 75,000 Plaza partners by 2025, and Margaret will tell you all about it in the bol section. Another important pillar of our CVP is our own brand proposition. Customers keep telling us every day that they love the attention of detail and how we apply and build our own brands, and therefore we keep on expanding it and we keep on improving it. Similarly, we are also focused in our CVP on price investments. We will introduce around 1,500 SKUs of price favorites in all our brands in order to improve our price reality and our price investments. On the personalization front, we've also made some great steps, and we've now implemented loyalty programs everywhere.
Last year, we've done Můj Albert in Czech Republic, My Super Indo, of course, in Indonesia, and Moj Maxi at Delhaize Serbia. Of course, I cannot leave the CVP topic without talking about our stores. To improve the convenience of all our stores, we are investing in electronic shelf labeling and shelf scan. By the end of 2025, 80% of our stores will be almost digital. To support our CVP, we are also building new scalable capabilities for the next 4-5 years to come. Starting with our overall operational excellence, one important program to fund everything is to continue our successful Save for Our Customer program, which basically has four pillars.
The first one is sourcing, our joint sourcing, and we are aiming to especially focus on our own brands to also subsidize the Prijsfavorieten program, and we are aiming for EUR 1 billion of value in joint sourcing by 2025. Next to sourcing, also managing our cost is very important, and we are continually seeking for new automated solutions like chatbots or virtual assistants to really manage and decrease our costs where we can. The third pillar is to optimize our merchandising capabilities by improving the pricing, the promo, and assortment management with one shared tool that we have implemented in all our brands. All these initiatives, and there are many more to mention, will drive more than EUR half a billion year by year by 2025. Besides our important Save for Our Customer program, we're also building scalable omni-channel solutions.
We basically look at three models the full service model, the compact model, and now also testing the fast delivery model. We are testing it currently in Mega Image in Romania and Alfa Beta in Greece. These three models, their back office will be serviced by one management warehouse solution. In the middle of 2023, we're also experimenting on a first mechanized solution for that. As I mentioned earlier, we have also introduced loyalty programs everywhere, and we are improving and further enhancing the loyalty features and sharing also the best practices to all our brands, so that we collectively can move towards those 20 million addressable cardholders with generating the 70% of sales penetration in 2025.
All these innovative, digital, scalable capabilities are not only there to improve our business and serve our customers, but they're also there to help to drive our health and sustainability agenda. I have some nice examples because we are very proud of the results of the SuperPlus program at Delhaize that combines the features of Nutri-Score and, of course, the loyalty program to drive healthy sales by giving more discounts to customers when they choose healthier products. Also, the digital signage, the ESLs will help us to implement dynamic pricing. Dynamic pricing can be very specific and can help us to reduce our food waste. Implementing smart cooling will help us not only to reduce our CO2 footprint, but also lower our energy bill.
New innovative packaging systems at bol.com will not only help bol.com to increase the delivery speed, but can also reduce the amount of cardboard that we use. To conclude, I have shared with you how we are improving our CVP, and will do in the future, but also how we are building scalable and exportable capabilities. We have also a unique situation in the Benelux, and that gives us an opportunity to even stronger collaborate to service our customers better. I will tell you more about that later in the program. Besides all these beautiful plans and initiatives, at the end of the day, it's of course our customers who decide whether they want to shop with us or not.
I do believe that we are in a real good position to win in each of our markets, not only because we have great, good, and exciting plans, but we also have great teams in place everywhere, with talented leaders and with high-performance teams who really know how to put customer focus into action. Therefore, it's really nice to listen to Marit and her story from Albert Heijn. Later on, we'll also listen to Margaret and the story from bol.com. Albert Heijn has always been a front runner in many ways, in the omni-channel transformation, in the digital journey, but also in presenting new ways to offer customer value. Also, I think, important thing to understand that Albert Heijn has a long history and a great ambition on health and sustainability.
Let's hear from Marit how we are making an impact on the lives of millions of customers every day in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Thank you, Wouter. It's exciting times at Albert Heijn in the Netherlands and in Belgium. We play a vital role in the market of food and drinks. Over the next few minutes, I will share with you the journey we have been on over the last couple of years and highlight some of the key differentiators as to why we are well-positioned for future growth. Albert Heijn has evolved into Europe's clear omni-channel food retail leader. Be it our store network or online touchpoint, we have developed a suite of capabilities that are second to none. We interact and transact with our customers every single day, every week of the year, over 15 million times each week. It is our ambition to be everywhere and anywhere at the touch of a button for our customers.
We have doubled our E-com sales over the last 2 years and made great strides in doing so in a more profitable manner. Our successful Albert Heijn app is the number one app in shopping in the Netherlands, and with over 3 million monthly app users. We are also where our customers are. We have grown our store network to well over 1,000 stores, covering over 90% of Dutch households, and we still see room to grow. For example, in the next 12 months, we will rapidly expand the number of our high-traffic to-go format locations from 100 to 200. Our innovation and growth has resulted in an omni-channel food retail powerhouse in the Netherlands, with over EUR 15 billion in sales.
To put that into context, this is well over 35% of market share. We are growing rapidly online with an impressive 10% E-com sales penetration. Most important, every night, we fill over 6 million plates with our broad and innovative food offering, and that comes with the responsibility. Performance and purpose go hand in hand. We strive every day to achieve our important sustainability commitments, and that starts with the customers we serve. With our long history in food and drinks, over 135 years, we have an important role to play in society. Our goal is to provide healthy and affordable options for all. By combining our healthy offering with personal insights, we are leading the plant-based, organic, and local food transition. For example, we doubled our offering in vegan options and launched the Albert Heijn FoodFirst app.
FoodFirst is our Albert Heijn branded lifestyle platform with personal challenges and inspiration to help everyone creating a balanced and healthy lifestyle, not only with a focus on eating, but also with advice and support on sleeping habits, physical training, and reducing stress. For years, we have been working hard for our own brand offering to help people become healthier, reducing tons of sugar, fat, and salt in small steps for customers, but with a great impact as a market leader. Last year, we also actively started to add fibers in over 100 of our products. In the Netherlands, farmers and growers are under increasing pressure. They have to deal with rising demands when it comes to the environment, and they often have no fixed earning capacity. This means that their income fluctuates every year, each season.
Fortunately, we as Albert Heijn have a unique and long-term partnership with more than 1,000 farmers who work exclusively with us and for us. We've built strong relationships with these family-owned businesses, many of them for up to 40 years. In our BetterFor programs, we pay them a premium on top of the price to invest in various sustainability programs. Last but not least, we are working every day to lower our carbon footprint and reduce packaging. For each converted store, carbon is reduced by over 50%. We operate solely on green energy from Dutch windmills, and we are expanding our solar panels on rooftops. Through our light electric vehicles, we are working towards emission-free transport in larger cities by 2025. Our strong and relevant customer value proposition drives the continued growth at Albert Heijn, and at the heart of this is our stores.
Our newest store format puts the spotlight firmly on the ease of shopping, the digitalization of the in-store experience, and above all else, a full focus on our fresh assortment and product innovations. We have already rolled this out in over 350 stores, and the response from customers has been great. The new format stores are growing significantly faster in both sales and customer counts. We have a strong track record of effectively driving price and value perception to our store wide Prijsfavorieten, as well as our widely recognized bonus weekly promotions. On top of that, Albert Heijn is the own brand innovator, especially with our best-in-class fresh offering, closely linked with the long-term fresh partnerships we have maintained for many years. Most importantly, I would like to highlight our 100,000 colleagues.
At Albert Heijn, we operate our stores with industry-leading efficiency as we have struck the balance of using data and technology, while at the same time creating a very positive and great place to work. In recent years, we have won multiple awards for best part-time job in the Netherlands, something we are very proud of, especially knowing that one out of five people in the Netherlands has at some point worked for Albert Heijn, and this is how we create true ambassadors. While Albert Heijn is the clear leading omnichannel retailer of the Netherlands, we are always looking to densify our network and adding new touch points. I'm particularly proud of the acquisition of the 38 DEEN stores earlier this year. This provided us with an excellent opportunity to color many white spots on our map Albert Heijn blue.
We are currently converting those DEEN stores with a rate of 4-5 a week and expect to finalize conversion before the important December period. It has been great to see the enthusiastic customer reactions to the revitalized stores. I can already say we have a sales performance that matches that enthusiasm. There's more. At Albert Heijn, we are also growing our food service and high traffic propositions, including 100 unmanned stores in offices. Our innovative fresh offering provides offices with a modern alternative to traditional catering. When it comes to E-com, I'm really excited at how our E-com proposition is playing a key role in the overall integrated consumer journey, where I see lots of upside potential as more customers become truly omnichannel. Let me give you an example.
Albert Heijn customers that start shopping online with us spend 40% more with us than they did before. Importantly, our insight shows that they do not fully switch channel. Even our most frequent E-commerce customers still do a quarter of their spending in our physical stores. They become more loyal to Albert Heijn overall. That is why it is important to foster our E-com growth for the next years. It creates a strong customer connection and has allowed us to drive our absolute market leadership in both sales and customer recognition. Looking ahead, we have the ambition to double our E-com sales in the coming years again. We will boost E-com operational capacity for further growth, and we will enhance operational efficiency to state-of-the-art mechanization.
We will extend our reach with current and new propositions, covering over 90% of Dutch households, as well as fueling strong growth in Belgium. Our high ambitions, coupled with the right capacity, the best rated app, and an outstanding 360-degree service experience, will allow us to leverage our market leadership going forward. Our innovation and growth doesn't just come from E-commerce. We take pride in the digitalization of the full customer journey throughout our stores. Over the last few years, we have built a strong track record in digitalization and invested heavily in this area. We have fully rolled out scan to all our stores, and currently the percentage of transactions using scan leads the industry at a solid 63%. We've digitalized the self-checkouts, the shelf labels, customer receipts, and put up digital screens for inspiration and to enhance the customer journey.
We are moving towards fully paperless stores. We are also deploying digitalization in ways that help us achieve our sustainability goals. A very nice example of this is our dynamic markdown initiative. Here, in-house developed algorithms work with our electronic shelf labels to provide dynamic markdowns of key fresh assortment in over 100 stores, supporting our efforts to minimize food waste and optimize overall chain-related cost. Another key digital development we are proud of at Albert Heijn is our app. Back in 2019, we developed a modern and new perspective on loyalty, pivoting our Albert Heijn app to become a true loyalty builder. Our app is positioned to be the key interaction point with our customers wherever they are. We digitalized all our saving campaigns, ranging from non-food campaigns to e-tickets to our money-saving programs.
We have developed a highly tailored personal offer for them, combining in-house data science, gamification, and strong offers to drive increased customer spending. We built recipe and inspiration functionality in the app, which enables our customers to get tailor-made recipes directly shoppable as everything is fully embedded in the app. Just last week, we launched our new Albert Heijn Premium paid subscription. This is a new exciting step in our loyalty funnel. This paid subscription unlocks extra discounts, doubles the speed of digital saving, and unlocks the power of our Ahold Delhaize ecosystem, and for example, with discounts on the Gall & Gall loyalty card and bol.com Select. We're even partnering up with partners outside the Ahold Delhaize ecosystem.
I truly believe our app is a key differentiator in the market, and already is the leading app in the Netherlands with 3 million active users and very high app review scores. Our leading position in digitalization, our active app users, the in-house capabilities, and the first-party data is also unlocking new business opportunities. We have built an in-house retail media agency, allowing endemic and non-endemic parties to access our reach and enhance the customer journey. Most recently, we launched sponsored products, being the first grocer in Europe to do so. With new business opportunities, potential growing beyond EUR 100 million per year, we see further opportunities to grow in this space as we work even closer in the future with other Ahold Delhaize and Benelux brands. That's something that Wouter will come back to later on today once you've heard from Margaret on bol.com.
Finishing up, we are on an exciting journey at Albert Heijn. What I would like you to take away from today is that Albert Heijn is the omni-channel Food Tech player in the Netherlands with a strong proven track record in sales and profitability. We've established ourselves as the leading grocery platform for daily needs, combining successful relevant store network with fresh and digitalized stores. We are the leading from the front in food E-com with a strong loyalty program, and our commitment is to do all of this while staying the absolute number one in health and sustainability. Thank you very much for your time today.
Thank you, Wouter and Margaret, for sharing all the great initiatives you are driving. On that note, I'm very pleased to introduce you to Margaret Versteden-van Duijn, CEO of bol.com. Bol.com is at a very exciting phase of its journey. First, let's get into some more detail. We promised you that already earlier to do this at this Investor Day. Then I will come back and share more details about our intention to sub-IPO bol.com, as announced in our press release of today. Take it away, Margaret.
Thanks, Frans. Now, there's going to be exciting and busy times ahead for bol.com with the announcement of the subsidiary IPO this morning. Actually, what I'm even more excited about is where we've come from and where we're going as a business. Let's take a look at that. Bol.com operates in the Netherlands and Belgium, and these are two very exciting E-commerce markets. Not only do we have very high internet penetration and smartphone usage, but we also already have the majority of our consumers buying online, 87% in the Netherlands and about 70% in Belgium. What's really unique in our countries is the fact that actually most of these purchases are being made locally. In fact, in the Netherlands, 90% of all online sales are with local websites.
If you add to that some very attractive geographic density, then you've got a fantastic E-commerce market. If you look at the Netherlands and the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium called Flanders, we have about 500 inhabitants per sq km. That's four times that of France and twice that of Germany. Let's now take a step back in time to when it all started for bol.com. We actually started the business in 1999 as an online bookstore. We've been around so long, we've actually helped to shape the online E-commerce market in the Netherlands. Five years later, we started to expand into other categories. In 2011, we also expanded to the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. In 2012, we were purchased by Ahold Delhaize, and this is when things really took off.
This enabled us to launch our third-party platform business. That enabled the acceleration of further category expansion, as well as expanding to new services for our partners. In 2020, we also completed our geographic expansion into Belgium by launching in Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium. We are the clear number one market leader. Since our purchase by Ahold Delhaize in 2012, we have grown from a EUR 400 million business to this year being a EUR 5.5 billion net consumer sales. This growth has been based on our platform business, which has grown at more than 100% in this period. Today, our sales are 60% platform sales, and we're also profitable. Our EBITDA this year will land at EUR 150 million-EUR 170 million this year.
Not only are we the number one market leader, but that leadership is very, very strong. Why is that? It's because this is our home. We have no other job to do apart from win the hearts and minds of Dutch and Belgian customers and partners, and we do. Our customers love us. If you take a look at our relational NPS versus other platforms, we stand out. In the Netherlands compared to the next highest scoring platform, you see a ratio of 30-to-1. In Belgium, where platforms are potentially a little bit further, even there we have a 2-to-1 ratio. In our case, we really focus on ensuring that our consumers can find absolutely everything they're looking for with our 34 million unique products. They never have to go anywhere else to shop for price. Why is this important?
Why is it important that our customers can find the right products quickly, at the right price, and get it delivered at home with no hassle? It's important because many of our customers are struggling, particularly young families. They are trying to combine careers and home life, and every 5 minutes that we can give back to them, 5 minutes of not having to search for a product, 5 minutes of not having to compare prices, or 50 minutes of not having to go out to the store, they add up to hours, and the hours help to make daily life easier. This matters. It matters because it also helps with gender equality. It helps to ensure that families can run their daily lives even easier, and that everybody can then use their energy and bring their full selves to the table.
They can use those minutes and those hours to spend on the things that they love. Our partners love us too. If you take a look at partner brand preference, then you will see that bol.com again outshines the competition. In the Netherlands, we have a 5.5 times higher brand preference than our nearest competitor platform. In Belgium, that's 3 times as well. All of this leads us to have a very strong market position. In fact, we estimate that our market share is as big as the number two, three, and four players all combined. We continue to grow our market share, growing at 1-2 points per year. This leadership is built on our platform flywheel, which is probably not that different to other platform businesses around the world.
What is really different is how we localize it for our local markets. Let's take a look at how we do that. Let's start with our brand. We have enormous brand awareness, and we are actually a household name in the Netherlands and Belgium. In the Netherlands, we have more than 90% brand awareness, and in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, 85%. In the French-speaking part of Belgium, it's a little lower because we only launched there last year. At around 35%, we have lots and lots of opportunity to grow. Our brand is so strong, it's actually been named the best retail brand in the Netherlands for the last six years running. That comes because we are deeply rooted into our local markets, and we have an enormous likability factor.
We really focus on those local elements that we don't think can be replicated anywhere else. A great example of this is our St. Nicholas campaign. Anywhere else in the world, you might think that you buy toys for your kids on the 25th of December. In the Netherlands and parts of Belgium, actually, we buy our toys for our kids for the 5th of December. Completely different holiday at a completely different time. At bol.com, we've really tailored our approach to this holiday. We've created a dedicated toys book with 200 pages of toys pleasure for adults and for kids. We have games, we have quizzes, we even have a TV show on Nickelodeon connected to the book. Of course, with QR codes, you can easily buy anything you may wish. It really works.
Families who use the book actually buy 2.5 times more with us than families that don't. We have enormous distribution helped by our sister brands in Albert Heijn and Delhaize. All of this leads us to be a very likable brand, and I think it's really important to really get a feeling for what that looks like. Let's take a look actually at our recent St. Nicholas campaign.
Show me a smile. Don't be unhappy. Come remember when. You lost all your laughing. If this world makes you crazy. You take all you can bear. You call me up. Because you know I'll be there. In the seat of-
Just fabulous. If you happen to come from another part of the world and you're thinking at this point in time, "What are those guys talking about?" That's actually okay, because this campaign is really tuned in to local consumer insights and local humor. Last year's St. Nicholas campaign actually won six different advertising awards, and we believe that this one is even better. This fantastic brand is of course built on an outstanding customer proposition. With 43 million products, our Dutch and Belgian consumers can find pretty much everything that they are looking for, and they can always find it at a fair price. On top of that, what they really love about us is how reliable we are and the fact that they can always count on us for service. In fact, we deliver more than 95% of our packages in full and on time.
The average for our market is only 85%, and we're part of that average, so you can imagine how much more reliable bol.com is. We really pride ourselves on our customer service and being really close to our customers. Things don't go wrong very often, but if they do, we want to be able to call, to be able to WhatsApp or email us at any moment in the day. Our customer service is open 24/7, and in fact, if you give us a call, 75% of the time, your call will be picked up within 30 seconds. Now compare that to other global platforms where you'll be lucky to even find a phone number, let alone talk to somebody in your local language. On top of this, we're also the best in the market at fast delivery.
We offer not only next day, but also same day, Sunday, and evening delivery. On top of all of this, we also offer a Select loyalty program. With this subscription, you can get free delivery on all of those great last mile services I just spoke about. There's a point system to help you save, and there's lots of exclusive deals. We continue to expand this program, and it's really working. Over the last two years, we've had a CAGR of 80%. Members buy more. Each Select member buys on average EUR 200 per annum more with bol.com. Once a Select member, always a Select member. Our retention is in the 90s, and it continues to improve. If we then turn to our partners, we are passionate about being there for the local entrepreneur. 47,000 partners who work with us from the Netherlands and Belgium.
The people you're seeing here on the screen, they're actual partners of ours, people who have come into our studio and taken their time to help us with our marketing materials. Our partners come in to help us also with innovation in the discovery process of how we can make better tooling for them. They appreciate the fact that we can bring them 30 million customers in the Netherlands and Belgium. On top of that, we are there for them. We help them to grow their businesses. In fact, we have more than 100 partner service team members who are there to answer their calls day in and day out. The top 2,000 also have an account manager who's really helping them to shape their business. You can see that this is really working.
Over the last two years, our platform business has grown by 60% per annum. Our size and scale gives us the opportunity to actually help our partners be more successful by offering them distinctive services. We offer a full logistics service. Perhaps even more interestingly, we offer also a last mile only service. Why? Because we came to the insight that not all Dutch and Belgian partners actually want to outsource their warehousing, but really want to get rid of the hassle of the last mile. With our last mile only service, our customers can actually order all the way up to midnight. We then pick up the packages from our partners in the morning, and we deliver them in our same-day network. This means for the customer, they're ordering at midnight and receiving it the next day.
Next to our logistics services, we've also developed advertising services to help our partners and brands be highly visible to customers. Last year, we launched our sponsored products for partners, and this has been a great success. In fact, already more than 30% of our top partners are already using our advertising services. No description of the bol.com business model would be complete without talking about our culture and our team. Now although we may be 100% focused on the Netherlands and Belgium, don't be mistaken, behind that is a world-class team. We have 58 nationalities working at bol.com, and almost half of our teammates are working in innovation and tech. For the last three years, we've been named the best tech employer in the Netherlands, and this is important because we need to add another 1,000 tech teammates in the next three years.
bol.com is a really special place to work and to belong. We really believe in an autonomous culture in small purpose-driven teams, and we have enormously high engagement in our teams. In fact, we get an eight out of ten on all of our engagement surveys. We would really say that this is our secret sauce. This is something that really enables us to innovate faster and better for our customers and for our partners. As proud as we are of everything that we've achieved until today, if you asked any of the team at bol.com, they would tell you this is just the beginning. There is ample opportunity in our markets for our continued growth.
If we first take a look at the online market, although we have high penetration, certainly higher than countries such as Germany and France, we still see that there is enormous room for growth if you compare us to more mature markets such as the U.K. or the U.S. In fact, post-COVID, we are still assuming we will grow the market considerably. Now within that market share, there is more than enough room for bol.com. Why? Because what you can see in the Netherlands and Belgium is actually they're still quite fragmented markets, and there's lots of room for consolidation. We believe that as the number one platform, we are in the prime position to help the consolidation of the market and help more of those local players come onto our platform.
As we work in small purpose-driven teams, at any moment in time, there are hundreds of initiatives going on to improve our business model and our flywheel. Really there are three key game changers that will help us accelerate our market leadership. The first game changer is that there is significant room for us to grow in category depth and breadth. If we take a look at our top customers, we can see that they actually buy 6 times more frequently than the average customer, and they also buy in 3 times as many categories. This creates an enormous opportunity for us, and we'd really like to capture that opportunity by continuing to expand our Select program. In fact, we're aiming to have 2.5 times the number of Select members in 2025. The second game changer is to expand our advertising services.
Here too, there is ample opportunity in the market. In fact, the European retail media market is expected to grow by more than 3.5 times between 2020 and 2025. If you then zoom into the Netherlands and Belgium, we are the best positioned to take a lion's share of that opportunity. Why? Because we have the best rich shopping data, and we have the trust of our consumers and our partners. Here too, if you consider the collaboration with the other Benelux brands, there's an even greater opportunity. The third game changer is to scale our logistics services, and this one is the gift that keeps on giving because not only do we help our partners, but we also help our customers.
By doubling our warehouse footprint, we can enable 4 times as many SKUs to be available next day for our consumers. This means that more than 90% of all of our deliveries will be facilitated by bol.com, and that means the fantastic quality and reliability that our customers love us for. On top of all of this, we are committed to having 100% CO₂ neutral last mile delivery. Bringing it all together, our 2025 ambition is to double our net consumer sales and to do this while preserving our profitability and ensuring that we also double our EBITDA. With all of our logistics investments, there will be 3 times as many shipments being facilitated by bol.com. In fact, in order to achieve this, we will 4x the amount of investment to ensure that we can have this continued growth.
We are very excited about our future because for bol.com, this really is just the beginning. Now on to the rest of the program with Frans.
Thank you, Margaret. You said it nicely. This is really just the beginning. The digital market in the Benelux is highly effective. bol.com has a strong heritage and culture, which is some of the most attractive elements of this company for associates, customers, business partners, and once a subsidiary IPO is the case, also for shareholders. As a management board, we always consider the best way forward for strategic value creation. Based on an extensive and thorough review we have been working on for some time, we have decided to capitalize on the strong growth and strength of bol.com and intend to explore a subsidiary IPO. We will provide further information in due course once preparations have been finalized.
A few details of interest are the following. The subsidiary IPO will entail a listing of a limited interest on the Euronext Amsterdam, and it is expected to occur sometime in the second half of 2022, subject to multiple internal and external factors, including market conditions. Ahold Delhaize will retain a long-term, significant controlling interest in bol.com. For bol.com, this creates direct access to capital to fund its accelerated growth strategy with a clear profile as a consumer tech company, while continuing to expand its strategic partnership and collaboration with the other Ahold Delhaize brands in the Benelux. Let's talk more about that now. As we unleash the potential and power of bol.com, we will also step up and invest more in collaboration across the Ahold Delhaize Benelux brands.
We have a one of a kind opportunity to create a truly unique platform, and with that, new and cool customer journeys. Let me hand over to Wouter to share our ideas on how this bigger Benelux picture might look like.
Thank you, Frans. There is no doubt we have a unique position in the Dutch and Belgian market. Following years of careful development and investment, our five brands have similar strong positioning, all of them trusted local brands, all of them focused on convenience, and all of them offering an unrivaled broad assortment. Together, every day, we fulfill almost all food and non-food needs with our strong omni-channel infrastructure, providing a powerful backbone. Combined, we have almost 3,000 stores and more than 1,000 pickup points. We support all kinds of shopping journeys, from single item shopping to full shopping baskets. Combined, we have more than 35 million products in our assortment. The last couple of years, the brands have already been working together on several initiatives.
A couple of examples, single sign-on to make shopping easier, joint delivery subscriptions for extra value, using the 1000+ pickup points at all our stores at Albert Heijn and Delhaize, and we sell also gift cards like bol.com gift cards at Albert Heijn and Delhaize stores. When we look at the overlap of our current customers, there is clearly a lot of potential when you look at these numbers. In the Netherlands, we have more than 5 million who shop at Albert Heijn and bol.com and 1 million at Delhaize and bol.com. Besides the obvious cross-shopping opportunities, there is also a potential to create more unique and interesting loyalty-building occasions. As always, we see this through the customer lens, of course. For us and for our customers, three things are clearly important when we are collaborating. It's about more convenience, more value, and more relevance.
Let me take you through some of the examples and the opportunities that we see and also working on. A linked account which will make it much easier to connect with all our brands. An easy interconnection between brands while shopping. A very important element of convenience is payment, whether it be shared payment options or a joint checkout, something we work on as well. Fourth, in the future, we would also like to look at delivery and returns. In a more joint and holistic way, this will be, of course, not only convenient for our customers, but also very good from a sustainability point of view.
In addition, we can also further improve the customer relevancy across the shopping journeys that we have right now, introducing new cross-brand promotions and events by building joint subscription and loyalty programs with offers and discounts for our most loyal and frequent customers. These initiatives will also open up all kinds of new digital services and partnership opportunities which we can, of course, explore further within the brands and also without. To bring this to life, we have a nice example of a customer journey of Sam, Charlie, and Alex, just as an illustration. Having a new baby is an important milestone in our lives, where our customers have the natural and almost instantaneous tendency to change their shopping behavior.
With true collaboration, in this case, with Etos, Albert Heijn and Bol, we can make the life of Sam, Charlie, and even Alex much more convenient, increasing more value and towards a positive and a relevant part of them. Our focus for the collaboration is really looking at those moments that matter, those big customer impact and life-changing event, such like moving house or retirement, where we can really make a difference. By focusing on customer journeys and combining all the relevant data surrounding them, this also gives us the opportunity to build a joint media proposition. Given our scale, this potentially means, combined with all the brands, that we are probably the number 4 publishing player in the Netherlands in terms of reach, after the likes of Google, Facebook, and DPG.
This enables us to be a one-stop shop for agencies and big publishers alike, which is a huge opportunity. As a retail media player, we can also offer ad spaces right on the shopping journey of our customers, which is a truly unique feature. Ultimately, our knowledge of customer shopping patterns and our first-party data can help to make advertising much more relevant for the customer, and therefore yields a higher return on advertising investments for our brands and, of course, all the strategic partners that we have. All in all, with our collaboration, we will bring the following benefits. Bring together our great local brands. Our focus, of course, in the Netherlands is the collaboration between Albert Heijn, bol.com, Etos, and Gall & Gall, and in Belgium, we focus on the collaboration between Delhaize and bol.com.
We can drive convenience and value and relevance for all our customers, and that is the opportunity. We can also, of course, create a sustainable and competitive advantage in our very, very important Benelux market. What will you see in 2022? We will make the first steps visible in our collaboration. We will introduce our media proposition to advertisers and our partners. Customers will see the first tailored offerings, and in the later part of the year, we will introduce a joint subscription package. Lastly, we will also try and pilot a return option for our most loyal members. This is, in short, the presentation about how do we improve the collaboration in the Benelux. Thank you very much. Now back to you, Frans.
Thank you, Kevin, Wouter, Marit, and Margaret. You have really shown how you place the customer at the heart of our transformation ambitions. Now over to JJ and Selma, our Chief Digital Officers for the U.S. and Europe, to share how we are unleashing the power of data to serve our customers through deeper digital relationships.
Hello, I'm JJ Fleeman, and it's a pleasure to be here with you today.
I am Selma Postma, and welcome to Unlocking the Power of Data. As you heard earlier today, we have a strong portfolio of great local brands that are actively deploying the omni-channel customer value proposition and significantly enhancing digital capabilities. This omni-channel and digital transformation is driving new opportunities. As we continue to evolve, we are increasingly leveraging the strength of our unique data and our business portfolio by building state-of-the-art new capabilities and activating those to create positive business impact. Specifically, we are focused on three key activation areas. Passionately driving the best omni-channel customer experience every day while boosting the efficiency and effectiveness of our business, and increasingly tapping into new exciting business opportunities. In that way, ultimately driving our sales growth, lowering our costs, and reinvesting into our business in a continuous cycle.
Today, we will be sharing concrete examples on how we are unlocking the power of data to drive those transformative changes and results. Let's first have a look at what makes our data so unique. Given our broad global reach and the close trusted relationship with the customers, we are uniquely positioned to collect valuable first-party data. We have over 7,000 stores in our global network with 19 strong local brands in 10 countries. We have 54 million customers shopping at our brands every week across our stores and our digital channels. Our customers have a high shopping frequency. On average, customers shop with us 2 times a week, and our loyal customers shop even more frequent. This creates ample opportunities for customer interactions.
They shop across the entire store with a large breadth of basket from produce and meal solutions to pet food to household and more, with the added bonus of having a close relationship with our more than 33 million active cardholders engaged in our loyalty programs. Finally, we gather this data across a multitude of customer touchpoints. As our business continues to become more digital and more omni-channel, it creates the opportunity to engage with more customers in more ways, from stores to websites, apps, marketplaces, and loyalty programs. We increase our understanding of our customers and their local needs, which allows us to continuously serve them better, adding value to their unique customer journeys. To do that, we first need to unlock and deploy the power of our data.
As Selma shared, we have very loyal customers and rich data that we are using across our total business. We have built a significant amount of capabilities that leverage data across all areas of the organization, like the three key activation areas listed, best customer experience, business optimization, and additional income streams. As the customer and business continue to evolve, we are looking for opportunities to leverage our data to build new capabilities that in turn drive positive customer and business outcomes. While we already have thousands of scalable capabilities across our business, we've listed a few here that are really driving meaningful change. These capabilities are underpinned by data security, compliance, and governance. It's important to note that we always obtain and use personal data in a lawful and ethical manner with the highest standards of compliance and security.
At the brands of Ahold Delhaize, the customer experience is built around not only the individual, but also where, when, and how they're interacting with our brands. Let's meet one of those customers today and see how capabilities and data enhance their experience.
Let's walk through an example of how those capabilities come together for our customer, Taylor. Taylor is a young professional. They have a budget they need to carefully coordinate, but that doesn't mean they're willing to compromise. They care about making good food choices for themselves and about how those choices affect the planet. Taylor's pre-diabetic condition makes this a little bit more challenging, but our technology, powered by data, makes it easier for them to meet their goals. Taylor appreciates how easy their shopping experience is, starting by magically predicting what they need. They quickly fill their cart with their typical snacks, favorite fruit, and even ingredients for Taco Tuesday. Taylor wants to try something new this week, so they search for organic couscous. They immediately start browsing tasty recipes, all dairy-free, as the app knows that's their preference.
A particularly colorful dish catches their eye, and they can easily add all the ingredients to their cart. Bonus, there are two coupons they can clip and use right away. Inspired by the many recipes available, Taylor clicks through a path of wonderfully organic and dairy-free recipes that seem tailored just for them. In a matter of minutes, Taylor's completed her cart and is ready to check out. They notice an icon on their peanut butter, click it, and realize they can swap it for a healthier version, so they do. Taylor does a quick scan on what they're about to have delivered to check for any ingredients that they may be allergic to and completes checkout. That was easy.
This is one example of a customer's journey, and it's just the beginning. We're constantly using data science, algorithms, and machine learning, among others, to evolve our customer offerings and experiences as we introduce new capabilities and leverage our data in new ways. These capabilities are driving value for our customers, and they've driven significant value for our brands.
As JJ mentioned, our data and our data capabilities help us create a personalized experience for our customers, but also help us optimize for efficiency and effectiveness within our business. We have many examples, but let me take you through a few. A clear example is the scalable and smart tooling we're implementing across our Europe brands to improve our decision-making and therefore effectiveness and efficiency on assortment and pricing promo choices within merchandising. First implementations have been at Albert Heijn, Alpha Beta, and Delhaize, with full rollout in Europe in the coming months. The assortment tool enables the best differentiation within categories related to available store space. The tool, for example, folds in customers' product switching behavior and prediction of new product performance. Our category resets based on the assortment tool deliver on average 1.3% incremental sales versus resets done without.
The pricing tool enables customer-driven, proactive, and holistic margin optimization with a much faster cycle and decision-making, leading to improved gross margins. For example, 0.4% incremental margin in Alpha Beta. These tools are scalable and shared across Europe, which decreases overall go live and run cost significantly. The run cost for Albert Heijn and Delhaize, for instance, have already decreased with about 26%. Another great example of commercial excellence is the U.S., Customer 360. Customer 360 is a centralized suite of reports and attributes that collect all the insights from every touchpoint we have with the customer. It creates a complete end-to-end view of the customer's shopping habits, demographics, brand loyalty, product preferences, channel preferences, and more. Across Ahold Delhaize, we place the customer at the center of all we do.
Therefore, the insights we collect and make presentable through Customer 360 can be leveraged in an endless amount of use cases to make more data driven and intelligent decisions. For example, when we personalized our homepage, we saw a lift of 69% in RPMs and 35% in product click-through rate. This is just one example. We are applying Customer 360 across other key areas like merchandising, assortment price, and promo to make more intelligent decisions that drive customer loyalty and basket growth. In the U.S., we rolled out another proprietary tool called TNT. TNT, short for The Network Tool, is a best-in-class network optimization engine. It leverages predictive analytics and a wide range of data inputs to give network expansion recommendations that allow our brands to maximize reach and capacity of their E-commerce networks while minimizing operating costs and capital required.
TNT also allows us to optimize based on criteria such as sales, penetration, and capital goals, providing the utmost flexibility. You heard earlier from Nick on the importance of the Philadelphia market and on the new Island Avenue automated E-commerce fulfillment center. The TNT tool was used to determine the ideal location, capacity, and coverage of that E-commerce fulfillment center and others in the area. It allowed us to optimize capital investment and reduce operating costs while maximizing white space opportunity. I also love the next two examples of data-driven capabilities for omnichannel productivity that have been recently launched, not only increasing associate productivity, but also decreasing new associate training time and resulting in better customer satisfaction. The first tool we launched last year at Albert Heijn is called Store Genius.
This machine learning-based tool has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that store managers leverage to drive success within stores. On a handheld device, it gives real-time visibility in key store metrics like sales, availability, customer satisfaction, and also proactively pushes alerts using in-house intelligence solutions and AI. It stimulates sales and customer awareness of the store team, empowering them to make the best decisions. Store Genius also learns from feedback by the store manager in a continuous improvement loop. We have, for example, through smart alerts, been able to improve the freshness of our fruit and veg by over 5%. Also, we significantly improved on-shelf availability by driving the amount of stores that do perfect in-store counting to well over 80. We are continuously adding new features and solutions to Store Genius, as it has become the key to unlocking in-store performance improvements.
In the U.S., as you heard Kevin mention earlier, we have deployed a proprietary tool called Spectrum. Spectrum is designed to significantly enhance omnichannel profitability. It lives on a handheld device and helps our in-store and warehouse associates to pick in the most efficient and effective manner while incorporating the needs and wants of our customers, among others, offering our customers better, more personalized substitutions. By the way, a warehouse is a dark store connected to a store. As a result of our Spectrum pilots, we have seen productivity increases of 1%-3% through enhancements like pick and path optimization and improved visualization on the picker's handheld device. We have also seen training time decrease by 50%.
We will be further deploying this tool across our U.S. network, and this will continue to be a key driver in omnichannel productivity as we work towards fully allocated E-commerce profitability.
Starting with media, we can leverage our wide variety of channels to drive new business opportunities for Ahold Delhaize while ensuring our customer's experience remains at the core. Not only are we able to do this through leveraging our physical assets, think digital screens and shelf tags in stores, but also our digital assets, which include our websites and apps. Media monetization potential like this also extends even further to loyalty and off property. The combination of our channels and our vast customer base enables us to offer tailored services to our advertisers while providing our customers with the most relevant ads and information to make their shopping experience even better. In addition to media, we also derive value from our data insights.
By transforming our unique data into smart and actionable insights at a macro level, presented in intuitive user-friendly dashboarding, we are creating an extremely desirable product for our strategic partners. Helping them to understand and serve our customers better, for example, to make better decisions across their broader business, including product development, supply chain, and logistics, is a win-win for the entire value chain. Even beyond media and data insights, we are developing additional new and unique digital and in-store services designed to improve the customer experience by making our stores and websites a destination beyond grocery. Within digital services, for example, we have third-party marketplace and E-commerce subscription programs, adding a breadth of offerings a more holistic shopping experience, while at the same time, yielding commissionable sales and new income streams.
Within retail services, we have numerous retail partnerships and offerings such as gift cards, which of course generate incremental income. These services and partnerships expand the offering for customer, and we believe there are many store within store opportunities in the future. All of this is just the start. Not only are we excited to be accelerating in each brand, but by joining forces across our local brands and across continents, we will do even more together. Given the continued omni-channel growth and the various opportunities we have just outlined, we see a clear runway to generate EUR 1 billion by unlocking the power of data by 2025. In closing, we are using data to power everything we do at Ahold Delhaize.
We have built capabilities to drive a better omni-channel customer experience, drive business optimization, and are unlocking new business opportunities, creating a virtuous cycle that keeps improving our proposition to our customer. As we continue our omni-channel and digital transformation, our data will unlock significant new opportunities in areas like automation, loyalty, personalization, and new services, and increase relevancy for the customer. Data is at the heart of this, always and everywhere to the highest standard of data security, ethics and compliance, and will play a key part in our market share growth, savings and productivity goals, and our new income streams to drive profitability. Thank you for listening to our presentation today.
Thank you very much, JJ and Selma. It's wonderful to see how our 150-year-old company is transforming to be ready for the next 150 years. Of course, this can only be done in a responsible way, and I'm happy to introduce to you Daniella Vega, Senior Vice President, Health & Sustainability, to explain how we will lead the transformation into a healthy and sustainable food system.
Thank you, Frans. I'm proud to be here today to underpin our health and sustainability focus. As Frans mentioned, a cornerstone of our customer value proposition is developing a healthy and sustainable food system. Our approach is built around the idea that the health crisis and the climate crisis are intrinsically linked. With this in mind, I'd like to share with you some of the key highlights of our approach to step up our efforts in this space over the next ten years. Just coming from COP26, I'm also gonna talk you through our net zero ambitions. The 2025 strategy our associates have been diligently executing already gives us an incredible foundation to build on. While indeed there's still a lot to be done, there are many great examples of the strong progress that we're making. Just a flavor of our results to date.
Our own brand healthy food sales have increased almost 8 percentage points since 2016. We've reduced food waste by 17% compared with our 2016 baseline. We've improved plastic product packaging of our own brands, making sure it's made from recyclable, reusable, or compostable materials. We set Science Based Targets to reduce absolute carbon emissions for Scope 1, 2, and 3. Since 2018, we've reduced Scope 1 and 2 by 17%. We've taken an integrated systems approach to building our climate strategy, conducting in-depth research on the impact of climate change, following recommendations from the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, and we've identified the impact from the most important physical, transactional, and reputational risks that we face. Finally, we've conducted our first human rights due diligence process, where we've also identified the most important salient issues and created a clear roadmap for action.
As a result of our approach and our action, we continue to be among the world leaders in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, and we score in the top 10% of companies according to Sustainalytics. We're also pleased to say that we recently were upgraded by MSCI to a double A rating. Our performance on health and sustainability puts us in a leading position within our industry, and we're proud of this. At the same time, we cannot rest on our laurels. Much more needs to be done. The impact from climate change is clear, be it on our planet and the loss of biodiversity through the way in which we produce and consume food to the health of people. Acting responsibly today is imperative to secure tomorrow for the generations to come.
From the introduction of the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation to the expectations from the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, investors like you require more information about the sustainability efforts of the companies you invest in. With the newly introduced EU Taxonomy, more transparency is expected now on how companies use their investments to make sure they meet agreed sustainability goals. There's also an expectation from the next generation of associates. Gen Z expects Ahold Delhaize to have a clear purpose which is strongly linked to sustainability. To attract and keep talented people, we cannot and do not ignore the fact that environmental, social, and governance topics must be fully embedded into Ahold Delhaize's strategy and ambitions.
Through robust engagement with all of our stakeholders, our health and sustainability strategy has been developed to accomplish all of these tasks, and it's actually very simple. We call it Grounded in Goodness. It's our plan to make healthy and sustainable choices easy for everyone. This next step on our health and sustainability journey is built around the idea that the health crisis and the climate crisis are intrinsically linked. What's more, they're the outcome of a food system which is no longer fit for purpose. Think about it like this. 10% of the world population goes to bed hungry, and yet a third of food is wasted. 2 billion people globally are now overweight or obese, and at the same time, 265 million people are on the brink of starvation. The system is broken and the time to transform it is now.
The health crisis and the climate crisis are two sides of the same coin, and our focus on healthier people, healthier planet treats them that way. It's crucial that we see this connection between human health and planetary health, because if we get it right for ourselves, we tend to get it right for the planet. Everything that we do going forward will have this simple, Grounded in Goodness goal of making healthy and sustainable choices easy for everyone. Healthier people, healthier planet. While there are many targets we can set ourselves as a company, some within and some even beyond our control, the one area where we can make a 100% difference is on the customer journey. Be it through our stores, our apps, our advertising, or on our products.
Enabling the customer to make the healthy and sustainable choices that they want to make has the potential to pull our entire food system into a positive direction by prioritizing products that are good for people and planet. The good news is that the consumer intent is already there, providing tailwinds. 63% of American customers want to buy healthier food and either don't know how or can't afford to. This number is even higher in Europe. With that in mind, our mission is clear. Healthier people begins with empowering our customer to make better choices. For example, via the SuperPlus program, where our Delhaize brand in Belgium integrated healthier choices into their loyalty program, as Wouter mentioned earlier. They do this by giving additional discounts for products that receive a healthy score from the nutritional navigation system, Nutri-Score.
Already, more than 2 million customers have signed up for the program. Let's take a look. We will drive transparency about nutritional value through Nutri-Score in Europe and Guiding Stars in the U.S., and we'll expand these programs to cover social and environmental impacts. We've already started this work with the HowGood program in the U.S. HowGood analyzes each product ingredient against environmental and social criteria, including farming practices, treatment of animals, labor conditions, and chemical use to bring to customers in an easy-to-use environmental and social impact rating system. Let's look at the next key ingredient for healthier people, our product. By 2030, we will have revolutionized the products our brands offer. Our brands will have introduced exciting new ways to connect them to customers and will have done it all within planetary boundaries.
Our brands will make healthy and sustainable choices easy by reformulating a healthier and more sustainable average shopping basket, lowering sugar, salt, and fat, and informing and rewarding customers to make better choices. We'll also continue to focus on reformulating our own brand products to be kinder to both people and planet, as Marit explained in her presentation. This isn't about restricting people's choice. Our brands are not talking about forcing customers to become vegetarians or vegans. It's about nudging people towards a planetary diet that will include many of the same elements that they will all be better, more vegetables, better meat, and products that are produced in a healthy and sustainable way. To measure success, we will continue to track the percentage of own brand healthy food sales as part of total own brand food sales.
By 2025, we aim to have well above 55% of our own brand food sales coming from healthy products. That's healthier people, but what about healthier planet? We'll achieve our goal of a healthier planet by focusing on our own operations and our farmers and suppliers. Let me first talk about our farmers and suppliers. We have unbelievable reach and power through our relationships with farmers and suppliers. Our brands work with thousands of farmers and suppliers who create hundreds of thousands of products. Our brands can drive supplier engagement and work with them to protect, restore, and sustain forests and other ecosystems. That's why we're committed to achieving zero deforestation and conversion by 2025.
As you heard from Marit, an excellent example of the power of long-term relationships is the Albert Heijn Better For program, where they partner with more than 1,000 suppliers and farmers to ensure production is better for animals, farmers, and the environment. Albert Heijn works with these farmers exclusively, and these programs include a premium for the farmer and a guarantee of sales. For example, EUR 0.05 a liter more for carbon neutral milk. As a result, carbon emissions in the value chain will decrease, biodiversity will improve, and there's more transparency on how products are produced. Another great example is The Giant Company, a proud partner of Rodale Institute, the leading voice in developing solutions for the regenerative organic movement. Giant supports three key Rodale initiatives that are centered on farm consulting, farmer training, and research.
Through this program, farmers will get support with the transition to organic farming and receive training in regenerative organic agriculture. Secondly, I'd like to explain to you how we'll make our operations better. Let's talk about food waste. In 2020, Ahold Delhaize produced 259 million kilograms of food waste. This is an environmental problem, and it's a business problem, and it's one we intend to solve. Alpha Beta, our brand in Greece, has created the first alliance for the reduction of food waste. Today, it counts over 45 members from other companies, organizations, and the scientific community in Greece, and it's even endorsed by the Ministry of the Environment. Plastic is another enormous environmental problem, very visible too, and extremely high on the agenda of our customers. Our brands work hard to reduce and use recyclable or reusable plastic packaging.
Delhaize Belgium, for example, is reducing plastic by removing unnecessary plastic lids from all own brand yogurt, desserts, sour cream, and plain cheese. That's equal to 23 tons less plastic per year or 7 million less lids. Earlier this month, Albert was the first retailer in the Czech Republic to offer its customers more than 80 dry and drugstore items, like nuts and detergents, by using reusable smart containers or the customer's own refillable containers. As we look forward, we will continue to work on our ambition to reduce food waste by 50% by 2030 compared to our 2016 baseline. We have an ambition to achieve 100% recyclable, reusable, or compostable plastic packaging from our own brand product. All this work must lead to the radical decarbonization of our full value chain as we transition to a net zero business.
It's imperative that we drive the decarbonization of our business partners to a 1.5 degree future by becoming net zero. That's why I'm excited to announce that we're committing to reach net zero carbon emissions across our own operations by 2040 and becoming a net zero business across our entire supply chain, products, and services by 2050. Let me walk you through our plan to achieve this. First, with an overview of how our carbon emissions are distributed through our company. Based on our current target to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 from a 2018 baseline, we can see that two-thirds of our emissions come from our Ahold Delhaize USA brands. 53% of carbon emissions come from energy consumption, 46% is electricity, and 7% is from heating.
36% of carbon emissions come from leakages in our refrigeration systems, and 7% of carbon emissions come from transport. Energy consumption, leakage from refrigerants, and emissions from transport. What can we do to reduce these elements? On the first element, energy consumption, we build and remodel stores in the most energy efficient way by installing LED lighting and retrofitting refrigeration systems by adding doors and seals to save energy. We also look at how we can shift to low carbon heating initiatives by switching to heat pumps and district heating. This is not only good for reducing carbon emissions, but it will also help us to make financial savings as we reduce energy consumption. As a result, we've reduced absolute energy consumption by 8% in the last four years.
For the electricity we still need to consume, we can abate this simply and effectively through PPAs, power purchase agreements. On the second element, refrigerants, this is much more complex to abate and more costly. To minimize costs, we phase replacements with planned store remodels with the approach adjusted and tailored to the refrigerant system installed and coolant currently used. Since 2016, we've reduced the global warming potential of our refrigeration systems by more than 11%, and we will continue to bring this number down. When our brands remodel stores, they'll use refrigeration systems with a lower global warming potential or where possible, use natural refrigerants. The third element is logistics. As much as possible, we'll make use of low energy transportation methods like electric vehicles or fuels with low carbon emissions. Our brands also utilize technology to improve route optimization to reduce last mile costs.
In the U.S., our brands are working on a new last mile enterprise routing solution and automated route planning. In Europe, our brands are working to improve the fill mechanism of their vans to allow for more orders per trip. To wrap up, I'm confident that we can achieve our net zero ambition, and the reason is twofold. First, because we're on track to deliver a 25% reduction against our 2018 baseline for this year. Second, we've already shown that we can do it. For example, Albert Heijn has reduced their emissions from Scope 1 and 2 by more than 90% in the last 10 years. Our Delhaize brand in Belgium has reduced its emissions by 70% in the last 12 years. They've achieved this through efficiency initiatives such as LED lighting, solar panels on stores and distribution centers, and switching to green energy.
To minimize the impact from refrigeration, they're installing natural refrigeration systems and covering their cooling equipment with doors. As a result, 50% of Albert Heijn stores already have natural refrigeration systems in place. A key enabler to amplify our commitment is partnership, following our mantra of Leading Together. To collaborate and advocate for action with other businesses, we've joined the Science Based Targets initiative Business Ambition for 1.5 Degrees, a global coalition of UN agencies, businesses, and industry leaders in partnership with the Race to Zero. This includes our Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. To measure our Scope 3 emissions, we engaged with more than 120 A brand suppliers and asked our own brand suppliers to provide their carbon emissions as well. This way, we can build a more solid baseline and work with them to implement abatement plans for the coming decades.
Last month, I presented this health and sustainability ambition at our annual leadership meeting. We spent around 25% of our time on this topic and discussed the challenges and opportunities and some of the enablers for action across Ahold Delhaize. Our leaders are fully engaged and with our track record, culture for innovation, and desire to make a difference, we're hungry to meet and exceed our ambition wherever possible. Next year, to further support action against our targets, we plan to increase the incentive percentage attributed to healthy and sustainable performance, both for the long term and the short term reward schemes. In summary, I'm sure you'll agree that we have an exciting opportunity to make healthier and sustainable choices easier for our customers, and a clear plan to continue to integrate our Grounded in Goodness approach into our business.
We're focusing our efforts on where we believe we can have the biggest impact to make sure we transform our business and contribute to a healthy and sustainable food system. I invite you to continue the conversation with us to question and value our efforts. We believe putting healthy and sustainable at the heart of our vision and purpose, our customer value proposition, and our strategic drivers, we will create long-term value for all of our stakeholders, for our customers, for our associates, communities, and for you, our investors. We will proactively seek to engage with those who value this approach and want to be part of our journey. Thank you, back to Frans to continue with our program.
Thanks, Daniella. I'm so proud to see how we are making healthy and sustainable choices easy for the benefit of both people and planet. Now, let's go over to Natalie to show you how it all comes together in our numbers and updated financial ambitions.
Thanks very much, Frans. Today you've seen why everyone at Ahold Delhaize is energized and excited by our increasing potential for growth and value creation. We're clearly unique in this industry. On the one hand, you've always been able to count on us for reliable growth and free cash flow. On the other hand, we're getting better and faster every day at innovating our business model, adding great value, convenience, and relevance throughout the customer journey and at every single touchpoint. This strength comes from the success of our last strategic plan, the leadership and executional excellence we've demonstrated through the global pandemic, our strong local market share positions, and the introduction of high-tech, digital, and scalable platforms across our business. I firmly believe we are ready to accelerate on many fronts. At Ahold Delhaize, we take great pride in our reputation for transparent and consistent financial management.
We tell you what we know when we know it. We believe strongly in the value of a promise, and we take great pride in keeping those promises we make. For example, our sales growth has been something that you can count on like clockwork. While we've continued to optimize the assets of our local, trusted, and convenient 7,347 stores across the group, we've also nearly tripled our net consumer online sales, surpassing the EUR 10 billion mark. This is a testament to our relentless focus on modernizing our omni-channel go-to-market proposition. Now, operational excellence and attention to detail have been key here.
These are core parts of our DNA and our culture, and it's exactly this mindset of cost consciousness, continuous improvement, and sharing and scaling best practices that has allowed us to consistently exceed and expand our Save for Our Customer initiatives and deliver industry-leading margins through it all. We also believe strongly in that old Jerry Maguire saying, "Show me the money." This means you've always been able to count on us to deliver strong operating and free cash flows and the best balance sheet in the industry. As the CFO, one of my key responsibilities is to take this competitive advantage and use it to help us seize opportunities to drive long-term financial efficiency by innovating and diversifying our sources of funds.
With active debt and liquidity management, we've been able to spearhead new innovative funding solutions like the successful issuance of the sector's first euro sustainability-linked bond and the sustainability-linked revolving credit facility. We've also extended maturities and have no material debt to be refinanced prior to 2024. Moreover, we've managed to de-risk our long-term financials by reducing our off-balance sheet multi-employer pension plan, and we haven't just invested in our core, but also in high-growth, high-potential assets like bol.com, which is yielding big results today and has even bigger future ahead of it, as Margaret so eloquently described earlier. We've also added new exciting assets like FreshDirect, clearly signaling our intent to secure key strategic elements to strengthen our position as the industry's leading local omni-channel retailer.
Our EPS growth has been remarkably constant, too, supported by share buybacks and growing dividends, which have helped us deliver top-quartile shareholder returns. As we get ready to close 2021, we're proud of our accomplishments over the past three years. We're in great shape financially and operationally, so let's turn to the future. While I'll talk mostly about our 2025 ambitions today, let me start with some high-level comments regarding 2022. We all know there is a lot of uncertainty out there. In addition to getting our first real look at the new normal post-COVID world, we're seeing headwinds on the macro front, especially as they relate to labor and inflation and product availability. As a result, like all other food retailers out there, we're expecting to see tougher comparisons in 2022, ones we'd initially thought would hit our numbers in 2021.
The climate crisis and the immediate step-up in the efforts required to slow down and mitigate the perilous picture painted by the UN climate report and at last week's COP26 will also require near-term action on our part, a headwind we're clearly aware of and are fully ready to play our part in resolving. However, it's important to note that we are also expecting structural tailwinds outlined earlier by Frans to help us in 2022 and beyond. Our customers are buying more fresh and healthy product, more private label brands, and utilizing our growing omni-channel ecosystem as outlined by Kevin and Wouter. As a result, despite many puts and takes, we're confident we will again increase our sales in 2022.
You know this is an area where we don't give explicit guidance, but we firmly believe that being a leading local food retailer means you have to grow both relative market share and brand strength year in and year out, so expect to see that trend continue in 2022. We're also confident that despite continued investments in the future growth of our business, we will again be able to maintain our industry-leading operating margin of at least 4%. You can also expect to see our operating cash flow stay strong, and we will continue our successful share buyback program with a new EUR 1 billion tranche ready to go. This was just a short sneak peek at a more detailed guidance that you'll receive from us at Q4 when our results are out early next year.
Moving beyond 2022, my colleagues have done a great job in illustrating the building blocks that will move the dial for our company going forward. While we execute against these great plans, we're also laser-focused on how they translate into the financials and meaningfully unlock more shareholder value as we run the playbook up to 2025. I already mentioned that we plan to grow our sales again in 2022, and I believe that's just the tip of the iceberg. At Ahold Delhaize, we are in a fundamentally different place with respect to revenue growth as we look at our business moving towards 2025. With our high-quality assets and our finger on the pulse of consumer behavior, we are confident that we have every opportunity to raise the bar for future revenue growth compared to our historical averages. This shift is being driven by two fundamental changes.
First, we're building off a new higher sales base. We are confident that COVID has brought a permanent shift upwards, and that a higher share of working, shopping, and eating from home is here to stay. That's on top of our initiatives to gain share versus competitors. Increasing share of wallet will always remain core to our growth approach in food retail and also in non-food retail with bol.com, a compelling CVP, great value, relevant assortment, and coverage density really matter. The new ingredients in the mix now is delivering a compelling omnichannel journey because that is what customers want and need, and successfully shifting that formula from mastering operational excellence in brick and mortar to leading across multiple food and closely related non-food retail journeys by driving more convenience and more value into those moments that really matter for our customers and their families.
It has a big potential to unlock what I believe could be the biggest growth opportunity our business has seen in decades. When we get those things right, market share gains follow. Frans talked about our track record and continued focus measuring how we stack up on this front. As CFO, I care about this metric because it's the non-financial KPI with the highest correlation by far to sustained retail profitability that I know. As a result, we expect to deliver a visible and sustained uptick versus our historical growth rates as we move forward and translate this into EUR 10 billion of incremental sales between 2023 and 2025, with all of our brands and regions contributing. We expect at least half of this growth is going to come from online sales and project net consumer online sales to double between now and 2025.
We're growing capacity and collaboration across our ADUSA brands, especially through the greater integration of pure player FreshDirect into our business. The biggest driver of growth here will clearly come from the development of the food, non-food platform we are building right here in the Benelux. As Margaret highlighted, you'll see bol.com consumer net sales double as we expand into new categories and better support our merchant partners in growing their businesses. More importantly, as Wouter outlined, we'll strengthen and accelerate our collaboration across all of our Benelux brands to better excite, unlock loyalty, and deliver faster and more conveniently for our customers.
With market leading positions on the ground, online, at the doorstep, and even in the social media space, this is something no single player can match and the space we have committed to making a game changer for how consumers shop and win back time and live better lives going forward. Let me move now on to operating margin, which is something we take great pride in at Ahold Delhaize. We have an industry leading operating margin and are fiercely committed to holding that position as we move forward. We start in a great place, and our margin will also continue to be nourished by four key drivers, and those are sales growth and leverage, driving margin mix, omnichannel profitability, complementary revenue streams, all of which feed into support accelerating our saving for the customer momentum.
We've already said that relative market share and local scale matters when it comes to profitability, so expect to see us strengthen key positions in markets, especially where we have clear structural advantages to support sustained profitability going forward. This is important, and it provides us with both growth and leverage. We're also committed to continuously improving our margin mix, be it more fresh, private label, healthy, and general merchandise offerings. We're committed to increasing our profile and sales in these higher margin categories. Daniella mentioned, food waste is an area we are committed to at Ahold Delhaize. As a food retailer, we're uniquely positioned to have a big impact there. As a finance person, I know that reducing food waste means reducing shrink and improving margins.
It's one of the many things we can do on the healthy and sustainable front that support our CBP and profitability. Expect to see us keep chasing those aggressively as we drive towards our target of reducing food waste by 50% in 2030. I'd now like to make a few comments about improving our profitability and our omnichannel business because we know it's one of the most important contributors to our overall profitability going forward. In the last 2 years, we've taken the time to evaluate our rich data to ensure that we are measuring E-com exactly the same way across our business, understanding its primary levers, and benchmarking what is best practice internally and externally.
While you may hear stories from other retailers about being profitable or close to it today, if you listen closely, you're likely to notice the word profitable is usually modified by words like incremental, marginal, or flow-through. That's step one in how you measure profitability. At Ahold Delhaize, we care about fully allocated long-term sustainable profitability. That means we're looking at what happens when you add marketing costs, incremental labor, headquarters support, and everything else it really costs to make online sales happen. Despite this much stricter definition, we've got lots of positive stories to report already. As you heard Margaret mention earlier, bol.com is highly profitable. In fact, all of our aggregated non-food business is. Our online B2B sales are, and we have several high-density catchment areas where we're already clearly profitable.
While the devil is in the detail, we firmly believe there is a special sauce to delivering profitability online. It all boils down to how we maximize our performance across four key areas. Delivering sales density and ultimately scale, which is just as essential in E-com as it is anywhere else in food retail. Ensuring that local demands and the CVP are leading or at par, at least competitively, and these expectations are changing rapidly and need constant attention. Optimizing operations, fulfillment, and last mile delivery, which are time-intensive, expensive, and we believe strongly that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. It's just like our great local brand philosophy, where a tailored approach to each marketplace, to the specifics of the market, the culture, and the catchment area make all the difference.
Building complementary revenue streams, which can both significantly enhance the customer journey and provide a direct boost for our profitability. We have clear plans to make E-commerce profitable on a fully allocated channel basis by 2025. I would like to emphasize that we are also thinking about omnichannel much more holistically. In addition to a pure channel profitability approach, we're also working hard to better understand the complex cross-channel halo effects and trade-offs it causes for the rest of our business. You've heard the impressive loyalty statistics that Selma and JJ are talking about incorporating into our thinking. When we entice consumers to join our omnichannel ecosystems, they buy more products, and they buy more frequently, and they spend more, and we're much better able to customize the experience and curate their product offering.
This creates a virtuous cycle for everyone, and we are convinced it leads to a more rewarding shopping experience, significant gains in customer lifetime value across our brands. This is a new way of thinking, and we are working hard to embed it in our culture and our performance management in a similar way to what we've done with C for our customers. A key component of that shift will be also based on complementary revenue streams. We see big potential to drive this, not only through our big efforts at bol.com and our enhanced collaboration in the Benelux, but also there's big upside in the U.S. business as well. This will primarily consist of activities in digital and in-store media, retail media services, and data insights.
We believe we can triple our current revenues from these areas to generate over EUR 1 billion in revenue in this key area by 2025. In addition to these big moves on E-commerce and complementary revenue streams, every year, you've seen us doing this consistently for many years now too, at our company, we are focused on reducing cost and improving our cost structure every single day. We've been continuously investing in our operations, the infrastructure, standardizing and harmonizing our platforms, processes, and relevant parts of the portfolio. I believe we definitely have more juice to squeeze in this lemon, regionally and globally. These activities are all about driving savings for our customers, and this is a muscle we're going to continue to flex, and it allows us to be consistent and drive price competitiveness and test and learn and grow in the highly fluid omnichannel space.
We plan to step up our game plan here on this front, generating EUR 4 billion of savings in the next 4 years. This is almost twice what we've delivered since 2018, and when we first introduced this program, this has become a core element of our culture, and we will continue to build upon that. This is by no means an easy lift, particularly in the current environment, and certainly it's going to require a lot of hard work and discipline. These are all things you know we're good at. To get there, investing now is critical, which provides a great segue for me to share our thoughts on how we're planning to use investment and CapEx to underpin that journey. Again, we start here as always with customer lens.
We plan to further strengthen our position as a technological and an AI leader in the food industry. We will clearly over-index to omnichannel and digitech projects, real-time data capabilities, and automation. Our growth agenda at bol.com and sustainability will also require significant funds to realize their full potential. On this journey, we will not leave our stores behind. We will continue to deliver vibrant, new, modern store formats and experience powered by technology and featuring tangible sustainability improvements. As such, we are lifting our medium-term guidance on CapEx from 3% per annum to around 3.5%. We know this is a level above most of our peers, but with more tech-savvy customers and diverse competitors than ever before, leading in digitech, omnichannel, and sustainability are the key differentiators to successful food retailers going forward, and that's where we plan to be.
These are key growth drivers. They require significant upfront investments to reach scale. As I mentioned in my opening, everyone at Ahold Delhaize is energized and excited by our increasing potential for growth and value creation. Our plans are built on the premise that has sustained this company and its brands for over 150 years. Build relative market share strength, know your customer inside and out, relentlessly to deliver a high value, high touch customer proposition. While many players in the industry have ridden the wave of the last two years, when times get tougher, which they will, there are not many companies with the financial strength to ensure that they are ready, willing, and able to keep pace with the changes and transformations required to stay competitive.
For me, financial strength and having the courage to take on the growth and investment plan we are laying out here today is firmly rooted in our continued confidence in the strong cash flow generation you have come to know and expect from us. We will continue to deliver on this front going forward. I expect operating working capital as a percentage of sales to improve post 2022 as we implement self-distribution in the U.S. supply chain. We will unlock productivity gains through more connected and end-to-end processes and unlock the power of data across the value chain. While there will be a significant step up in CapEx, particularly at bol.com, through our strong balance sheet, the intended sub-IPO of bol.com, and of course, our ongoing operating strength, we will be able to support the investments while at the same time delivering industry-leading cash return for our shareholders.
Bringing all of this together, our group focus for the next four years is going to be all about four key priorities. Delivering a winning CVP. That sets us apart from our competitors with a distinctly local, trusted, and omni-channel approach. Continuing to deliver operational excellence because we know that's the bread and butter that allows us to be brave and visionary in other areas. Making health and sustainability a key focus, where we help make choices for customers easier and act as a responsible steward across the whole value chain at the same time. Pursuing new business models, either as a consolidator of choice or via creative partnerships to help us explore new areas where we can add value for consumers.
Our financial ambitions for 2025 are increasing our sales at faster than pre-COVID rates to deliver EUR 10 billion of incremental sales between 2023 and 2025. We're going to double our net consumer online sales to over EUR 20 billion. We're going to continuously deliver an industry-leading underlying operating margin. You'll see us grow EPS at high single-digit rates between 2023 and 2025, ensuring that cash generation continues to be a priority in all of our operations. There is plenty to be optimistic about as we introduce this next chapter of our Leading Together strategy. While we are expecting some macro headwinds in the short term, I know that we can navigate them with confidence.
Confidence because we have a track record and great momentum, confidence due to our unique portfolio of leading local brands, strong market positions, and our clear path to drive growth. Confidence in the robustness of our margins with more financial upside in our financial model and increasing eCom profitability. Confidence that we have a strong balance sheet that allows us to put our money where our mouth is and accelerate our efforts at bol.com, omnichannel growth, and in sustainability, because this is where we believe we can generate the most value for customers going forward. Most importantly, confidence that we will continue to deliver outstanding financial returns that you have come to know and expect from our team. Thank you very much for joining us today. We'll now take your questions.
Wow, that was a lot of content. Thank you very much for being with us today in this Investor Day of Ahold Delhaize. I hope you appreciated the passion and the confidence and the pride our leaders talked about our industry and about our company. Now it's time for Q&A, like Natalie already mentioned. With me in the studio are Natalie and Wouter, and in Quincy, Massachusetts, in our studio over there, also, Kevin is joining us. We will be moderated for the Q&A session by JP O'Meara, our Senior Vice President for Investor Relations. JP, let's move over to you and let us know what the first question is which came in.
Thank you very much, Frans. Our first question today is gonna come from Andrew Gwynn from Exane BNP.
Hi there. Yes, thank you very much for the presentations. I just wanted to go for two questions, actually, if I can. Firstly, obviously, the CapEx is being guided up. You're guiding to around about EUR 1.5 billion of free cash flow per year, dividend cost loosely EUR 1 billion per year. Should we anticipate that maybe in time the share buyback program is scaled back, maybe before it's reinstated a little bit later on in the plan? Second question. It's actually sort of two parts. Firstly, I think at the very beginning, you mentioned that convenience is obviously really increased in importance for consumers. Then in time, obviously, the expectation is that health, wellness, the planet is going to increase. Do you think those are both margin opportunities for the group?
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Andrew. Natalie, the question on the share buyback, and the CapEx balance.
Yeah. I think when you talk about the share buyback, you know, we made a big point today to come out and give you right away our guidance for 2022, which is we are planning to do a EUR 1 billion share buyback again. As we look out in the future periods, there's always a you know, a lot of different factors that are moving and may influence that in terms of what's happening on our CapEx front, the macro front. We haven't given any guidance on that yet. What I would say is, to your point in terms of CapEx, we are stepping up that ambition. We do wanna go from 3%-3.5%.
It's really a place where we're gonna focus on omnichannel, on bol, on health and sustainability, and of course, making sure that our stores are getting everything they need.
Drew, on the margin question, we already indicated for 2022 a margin equal or slightly higher than 4%. This is included also in the total gross margin components we see. We have to figure it out what customer behaviors will do. We think that customers are going to keep eating healthier, and normally those products have a better margin mix. We are careful here to see how that stickiness of behavior will be there over time.
Okay. Very clear. Thank you very much.
My pleasure.
Our next question today is going to come from Robert Joyce at Goldman Sachs.
Hi, good afternoon. Thanks very much for taking the questions. I've got three of them. The first one, just a couple or two little clarifications actually. On bol.com, the EUR 5.5 billion in net consumer sales, is that equivalent roughly to sort of EUR 2.7 billion in reported revenues? Am I doing the right math there? Second one, just on Bol as well, wondering if you could give us an idea, in that CapEx budget, how much CapEx annually Bol's gonna roughly be taking over the next sort of four years in that plan. Then the final one, the EUR 1 billion in complementary revenues, it's a big number. It looks big relative to what some peers maybe you've come out with.
Can you just give us a bit more granularity behind how you've come up with that number, and what kind of drop through you'd expect on a revenue number of that size in those channels? Thank you very much.
Natalie, if you take the first question, then I'll try to take number 2 and 3 away, if that's okay with you.
Super.
Yeah.
In terms of the bol sales, we don't disclose specifically the bol direct sales. We have the net consumer online sales. In terms of your math, you're pretty good, which is we basically have said, you heard in Margaret's comments, 60% today is coming from our Plaza partners, and 40% is coming from our first-party sales. The only thing you need to add in there is don't forget that we also have our subscriptions and our commissions on the third-party sales, which also get added into that number.
The question on the CapEx breakdown, Rob, we don't give the CapEx breakdown by brand for the company. The other question was on, JP, help me here.
1 billion.
This was on the new revenue.
Yeah.
new revenue sources with the billion-dollar target, and that sounds like an ambitious target.
You want to take that one, Wouter?
Oh, yeah. I think the EUR 1 billion is coming from the monetization flow. We also see new opportunities in generating advertising money for us, which we will use, by the way, to invest in our proposition in our online or in our CVP. This is a new income stream for us, which is, I think between the U.S. and Europe, about 50-50.
I can add to that. If you look at where is it coming from, we're really talking about this is gonna be stuff that you see in terms of digital marketing, things that we do in store, the data insights, retail services. Those are really gonna be the core things in that area, and we are pretty ambitious about it. You know, we were talking about tripling that number from where we are today, but we believe, you know, we've got a lot of unique assets, whether it's in the U.S. or especially here in Europe with our new, you know, winning in Benelux combination of Bol and our other brands that are gonna allow us to be able to really seize that opportunity.
Thank you. Is the assumption that that will be reinvested? I mean, is that part of the growth driver here, or do you see that in 2025 being quite a substantial part of EBIT?
From my perspective, I'd say I absolutely believe you're gonna see that become a substantial part of how we get to profitable E-commerce over time. It's also something that we believe is core to how you look at, you know, our profitability going forward, whether in a, I'll say, a more holistic omni-channel sense of the word.
Thank you.
Before we go to the next question, JP, in the studio here in the background, there's a little bit, a lot of noise, so if you could check that one as well, and then we go to the third question, JP.
Sure thing, Frans. Our next question is gonna come from William Woods at Sanford Bernstein.
Hi there. Just two questions from me, please, on bol.com. Firstly, you've kind of said that you expect sales to double to 2025 and EBITDA to double to 2025. Is it fair to assume that you're not expecting margins to expand over that time, and therefore, the majority of the online profitability increase is from the grocery business? Secondly, on bol.com, a question around Amazon and the competitive positioning. How are you feeling about the competitive positioning versus Amazon, and why is now the right time to look at an IPO in the context of Amazon just launching its own fulfillment centers in the Netherlands in this year?
Wouter, can you take the Amazon question on the competitive set in the Benelux?
Yeah.
You take the first question, and then I come back to why we think that the timing is right for the
IPO.
for the IPO.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
No, no. I think what Margaret really well said. By the way, there are a couple of components that we are currently competing with Amazon, and not only Amazon, by the way. In the Benelux, we have a couple of other players too. I think our customer NPS is outstanding. I think our current fulfillment capacity next day delivery is outstanding. I think the third one is, of course, the bol brand is very strong and very likable. I think also if you look at the shoppability of bol.com, that's really a strong component. I think what I also try to explain in the collaboration with the brands is something where we see also bol benefiting, and it sets us really apart with the current competitors in the Benelux, like Amazon and others as well.
We feel very strong about further growth, and we've also looked in the past, and Bol has always gained market share, so we are quite confident in the future in that part.
When it comes to what's going on on bol profitability, our view is really clear. We believe that our sales are gonna nearly double, and that's gonna drive a lot of EBITDA growth for us. There is also that piece of being in the bigger within Benelux ecosystem that's gonna also deliver additional profitability. I think the reality is, we're four years away. There's going to be some moving levers left and right. What we wanna do is the most important thing is how do we drive growth? We believe very much that the profitability will follow.
Expect us to be pushing really hard on that, and that may be, you know, there may be trade-offs we need to make to ensure that we're able to maximize the growth in the marketplace.
On the timing of the subsidiary IPO, which is now timed for the second half of next year, we feel that the timing is right. I think Bol has more maturity at the moment. We have a great plan, as you heard from Wouter already, on growing Bol, but also growing the business in the Benelux with all the brands connected to make those customer journeys more attractive and to combine food and non-food, which will be a unique proposition, and we would like to fund that journey as well. The second thing is that we also think it's the right time to get some online currency.
The third time, and you know that from our side, we're always a little bit frustrated about the fact that the value of the great business of Bol was not properly reflected in the valuation of our total company. We hope that we can strike those three things with going public the second half of next year.
Excellent. Thank you.
Pleasure.
Next question is gonna come from Fabienne Caron at Kepler Cheuvreux.
Good afternoon, everyone. Three quick ones from my side as well. The first one to follow on Rob's questions, could you share with us the profitability that we should expect from the EUR 1 billion extra complementary sale? The second question is more general question when I look at your forecast for 2022 in term of top line growth. Does it mean that you do not expect the food retail market to shrink in value terms in the U.S.? Is that what we should read behind these numbers? Finally, when you talk about the E-commerce profitability in 2025, are you thinking only grocery or do you put as well bol.com? Thank you.
Yeah. Kevin, if you can take the question on what you expect for next year on value and volume in the U.S. You take the first one, and maybe Wouter or myself will take the last one. If you still remember all those questions.
Okay.
Maybe a question to you, Kevin. We have a stable growth outlook, a positive growth for 2022, for our company. What do we expect from, let's say, the sentiment in the U.S. on volume and growth?
Yeah. I think that as we look at 2022, we're really anticipating some of the, as Natalie said earlier, gains that we've picked up through the pandemic and the changes in the way that the consumer behavior has really kind of manifestly changed for us, that we'll be able to hold on to those. That's a big part of what we're looking at achieving as we go into 2022. We're also very diligently looking at our omni-channel expansion and our ability to actually find growth in that area as well, and also looking at our assortments and how do we continue to kind of curate the assortments that are really, really relevant to consumers today based on the changes that are happening with our consumers.
We think next year, for example, in the U.S., that over 30 million of the folks that are actually working from home today will continue in that form or fashion, which gives us a lot of eating occasions that will be available to us in the U.S., and we're looking to really try and gain all of those that we can in order to continue to move forward. As we look at the inflation that we're seeing coming through, we're seeing that in commodities, we're also seeing that in labor, and we're looking at how do we manage that and what does that mean relative to sales versus volume. Volume will be pressured as we go into next year, and as we cycle through that, we're going to have to continue to really focus on trying to drive volume as well.
I think of the two, I think the volume will continue to have the most pressure.
Maybe on the first question, which was all about what's happening from those complementary revenue streams and how much should you expect to fall to the bottom line, I think there the answer is, we are gonna spend some money to build up these capabilities because we believe we're in a very unique point in time, which is all about, you know, we've got the transactions, now we wanna look at not only how do we build better services for our customers, but how do we monetize that for ourselves as a group. You can expect the vast majority of that is gonna flow through to the bottom line.
Having said that, I also wanna manage your expectations, which is it's part of our overall margin outlook, because it's also very important for us that we take those benefits and we're able to invest them in the pricing to stay competitive and really making sure we're doing everything we can on the E-com side to help grow that into a even more profitable business.
The total E-commerce profitability, food and non-food, Wouter?
That is of course, food and non-food, including Bol, but maybe also nice to reiterate a bit on what we are doing, because this is one of the four of our big assignments on how do we deal with especially the food grocery profitability part. I think what Natalie said well, it's about density, it's about scale. We are going to use automation, of course, to make sure that we have a high productivity on a couple of our operational parts. You will see that also in the future, that the home shop centers will definitely change in much more of an automated part. I think density in the last mile is very important.
The other thing is, we're working on also together with real scalable, simplified solutions for E-commerce so that we don't kind of think in every market differently, but we really work together in building you know scalable solutions to make our food E-commerce much more profitable than it is right now. Of course, we also need the benefit of the income streams which are new, which will help us as well on that journey.
We said earlier, Fabian, that bol.com was already EBIT profitable. We said that for some time now.
Yeah, in 2019 even.
Yeah, in 2019.
Yeah.
For some time we know that it's profitable. If you talk about E-commerce, fully loaded, fully allocated profitability in 2025, then it's mainly a food game. In food, we see the opportunities Wouter just mentioned on productivity, all the things he mentioned. We also see there that an omni-channel customer also in food is a richer basket both in margin and in size. We see there a higher share of wallet and therefore also a nice opportunity also to build those customers stronger. All those elements together give us good confidence that with the fully loaded and we have all the costs linked to that transaction allocated to that E-commerce sale, we are very transparent there. It gives us the confidence to be profitable in 2025.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Our next question is going to come from Nick Coulter at Citi.
You're on mute, Nick.
Yeah. On air.
Can you hear me now?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
We can hear you loud and clear right now. Yeah.
There's always one. Listen, thank you for today, and great to see you. Three questions if I may. Firstly, what proportion of online sales in the U.S. will have automated fulfillment by 2025, or indeed the Netherlands? I'm just trying to get a handle on how much the needle is going to shift in terms of your fulfillment. Secondly, on retail media and complementary services, I guess a very different angle to Rob, should we expect the EUR 1 billion to be a staging post to a much bigger number over the long term? I guess it's between 1%-2% of your sales.
I guess implicit within that question is to what extent can you drive retail media from outside of your online sales using your store loyalty data? Lastly, apologies if I missed it, but just on CapEx, is it possible to get a few tangible examples of where the incremental CapEx will go, whether that's on automation, whether that's on tech software or capability? Thank you.
If, Kevin, if you can say a few more things about your online business and what you see more in the profile, be it the click and collect and the delivery, but also a little bit more on automation and the things you do already with automation, then let's start with that question first, and then we fill in the second and the third one later on. Kevin, on automation in the U.S. and micro fulfillment and these type of things.
Yeah. We've started in the U.S. as we've built out the omni-channel environment. We've been looking at multiple different environments for testing the micro fulfillment centers and how they can actually play a role in building not only our ability to meet demand and meet that demand in a timely basis, but also for us to drive productivity. We today have actually just opened a new center called Island Avenue. That center is running with a company called AutoStore that we've used with a bot configuration there that we'll be using to really test what kind of productivity we can get out of that and how we can go forward.
As we look at our growth, we do believe that being able to build this in a way that we're staying where our demand is and we're not getting too far out where we're overbuilding our automation is also important to us. We're looking at that balance between those two. We've learned a great deal in a couple of the sites we've already built. We have a Takeoff site that we've built, we have the AutoStore site, and then with the acquisition of FreshDirect, we also picked up a Fabric site. We have a great opportunity for us to continue to learn from that and apply it.
We also have a lot of manual centers that we do today for also driving productivity into our support of our click and collect operations in our central fulfillment that we do today. As I look at 2025, we don't yet have what I would call a fixed number for what we think that relationship between automation and non-automated will be. We do have a belief that as we look at this, it'll be a complement of those two things working together as we build more and more density and more and more kind of capacity that we're going to need to meet the demand. We're looking at how do we use that automation to drive the productivity and the availability for us to be able to meet that last mile across all the channels.
That's how we're thinking about it today, but I don't have an actual number that would say, "Here is what % of our total sales would actually be through automated centers." That's yet to be determined for us.
It's also nice to see you, Nick, and then we talk about an international company. When we talk about Europe and the U.S., we see a lot of those learnings and practices coming over from the U.S. to Europe for MFCs, micro fulfillment centers. The other way around, we see also, we have a number of very big and very successful DC automation projects here in the Benelux, which will also find its way with the learnings to the U.S. You see there that internationally, people work together to learn technology. It's not all set in stone, right? There's quite some experimenting with new technologies, the examples Kevin mentioned.
I think this is the strength of an international company, that you have this cross-fertilization between the regions, not only for automation, but also for a lot of other things. Nick almost gave us a target on
Well,
On complementary revenue streams, right?
Beyond the 1 billion, I think, yes.
Yeah. Well, I think what I'll do is I'll actually answer the last question next, which was on how are we thinking about the CapEx, and what are the big buckets there? Because I think it fits really nicely on the back of this one. I mean, I said it in kind of the prepared remarks, which is, first of all, stores are always gonna be the thing we spend the most money on. That continues to be, you know, our the biggest part of our business, and we wanna make sure it's flourishing. When we look at where is the incremental money being spent, and I think that's the real question, bol.com is the number one in terms of where are we spending new monies, because we really need to accelerate that growth.
In addition to that, you're gonna see us spending it on what are we doing with the, I'll call it the win in Benelux, so that bigger ecosystem of how we really bring that to life. Then you hit right on the other big item, which is everything that we're doing on the omni-channel side, and the biggest piece of that from a cost perspective is gonna be around DC's automation and fulfillment. I think that piece is really important, kind of getting at what your big topic was there.
We spent a bigger proportion on digital and automation and systems.
Yeah.
System support and data, all the things we discussed today, right?
All those things, and health and sustainability too. There was another question you had about monetization.
Yeah, that was beyond EUR 1 billion, if you see more.
Yes
bigger components.
Yes. We definitely see.
Beyond 25.
We definitely see more. I'm not ready to sign up to it.
Natalie, you say yes.
Exactly. I'm not ready to-
Kevin and I are a little bit more kind of let's go after this one first.
Yes. I think it's definitely past 25, but as I mentioned, when you look at what's going on with everything on these alternative revenue streams, I think the most important thing is, you know, it's an opportunity right now to go out and, you know, utilize that strong position we have, you know, where we've got all the transactions, where we're able to translate that into, you know, I'd say a real foundation for the future. But are we stopping at EUR 1 billion in 2025? Definitely not.
Also there, we will also learn there on the way, yeah, and our data strength is phenomenal, like Selma and JJ said. The 1 billion is already a great next milestone. Let's work first on that one.
Yeah.
Next question, JP, and thank you, Nick.
Our next question comes from Fernand de Boer at Degroof Petercam.
Yes, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions, and also thank you for the extensive presentation. I had a few questions left. I think, Natalie, you said something about working capital. Could you say what kind of improvements you therefore see in the coming years? And then on the CapEx, you also said that the investment would be probably front-loaded, but could you say something about the phasing of this CapEx? Is it going to be first in 2022 and 2023, and then later on to drive the cash flow and the profits? And then on the complementary revenues, is that going to be booked in the store sales or in the other income line as not directly then in the comparable sales growth?
Okay, there were a few in there, so I'm gonna have somebody repeat those as we're going through them.
Working capital was the first.
The first one was working capital. On working capital, basically the position there is 22 is a little bit of a trickier, because we've got some, you know, puts and takes and COVID unwind, that kind of thing. As we go forward, I mean, you know basically from a working capital days outstanding, you know, we have negative working capital. As our sales grow, our working capital improves, and that's essentially the underlying assumption behind that one.
The other one was the question on the potentially front-loaded CapEx. We indicated around 3.5%.
Yeah.
Over the years, Fernand, you know that we always were well invested in our business. 3%-3.5% of sales, which is quite high compared to the overall industry, because we would like to make sure that our store fleet is in a good shape. Where we now, let's say, invest quite a bit in bringing Stop & Shop again into a winning situation, and you heard a lot of positive things about Gordon. We did that 8 years ago with Food Lion, we do these kind of things on a regular basis. That 3%-3.5% is not abnormal for us. That's normally how we operate, because we believe that those stores must be in a good shape. To which extent is it front-loaded?
Yeah. I was gonna say, I wouldn't take my comments as meaning it's all front-loaded. What I talked about was what do we have to do to really get those complementary revenue streams up and going. When we look at, you know, overall, especially in terms of the bol piece, the sustainability piece, and what we're doing on the fulfillment, I think you'll see that more evenly spread across the period and actually potentially a little more as we go into 2023 and 2024, just because of the timing of those facilities going online.
The third question, Fernand, what was the third one?
Yeah, I think it was about.
Yeah, I think.
the media revenue, whether that was sales in stores or, I think it's just part of our Save for Our Customer program.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was actually not entirely clear to me.
Yeah.
Thus, this complementary revenues, I also had the impression that was part of the EUR 4 billion savings, and
It is.
It is.
To clear that.
It is.
Yeah.
You'll see it flow through in the margin line, either in the gross margin or in the operating expense, in that, either of those two places, operating income or gross margin.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
Is it clear, Fernand?
Yeah.
All right. Good. Thank you. JP.
Our next question, friends, comes from Andrew Portas at HSBC.
Wow.
I see with us. Thank you.
You win the award for the most colorful background.
Good backdrop. Yeah.
We have a broad choice at HSBC, so I chose this one. Yeah, thanks for the detail today. Really interesting. Just wondering if you can give us a bit of color on the free cash flow, and particularly the shape of it over the next 4 years. It's EUR 1.5 billion over the 4 years, but should we expect it to sort of start lower and build?
Just thinking about the bol.com free cash flow. I know you didn't wanna give the details on CapEx, but is your food retail business the free cash flow there gonna be higher than EUR 1.5 billion on average? Just to give us a bit of color on that side of things. Lastly, just around the step-up in CapEx. I guess, you know, Ahold for the past decade has sort of achieved its sort of growth ambitions within that sort of 3%. You built a you know world-class omni-channel business with that, and yet, now we're sort of seeing a step-up in that.
Is that just a function of the industry becoming more capital intensive, or is there something else that you're seeing that really necessitates that real step change in CapEx?
Are you taking the first two? On the free cash flow, I take the CapEx later.
Perfect.
Yeah. Sounds like a plan.
Yeah.
That sounds like a plan, yeah.
On the free cash flow, you don't get too much more color from me. I mean, we came out with the comment that we're gonna be looking at EUR 6 billion over the next four years. You've divided it, you know, evenly across those years. That's not a bad assumption, but, you know, it obviously will vary a little bit year to year, excuse me. In terms of how does that play into what's bol and what's, you know, our, I'll call it our core grocery business, everybody's gonna play a part in terms of how we improve our free cash flow. You know, we've talked about investing first in bol.com and making sure we give it all the energy to grow as much as we believe is there.
That assumption's fair, I think, but we want everybody to contribute to the improving free cash flow of the business going forward.
On the CapEx profile, or do investments get more expensive, is that the reason for stepping up? That's not the reason. The reason is here that, first of all, we can carry this with our balance sheet and the strength of the company. Secondly, we just see opportunities. We see opportunities omni-channel. We see opportunity with our store network. We see opportunity with densing up in the markets where we are already strong. We think that we can deepen footprints and increase more market shares where we are already leading one and two, as you know, in number of the markets to take more opportunities there. So the brands see big opportunities there. We have to calm down the brands a little bit because they see even more opportunities there.
We increase the CapEx, but that's a positive thing. It's a positive thing of confidence and that we also can there take more share, and not only in the bricks and mortar, but also on the online or the omni-channel part. That's what I think Kevin showed with the strong numbers in the U.S. and online, and Wouter showed in Europe, plus all the plans we have in the Benelux, which we just mentioned and which we just shared.
I think I'd just add the sentence, which is, you know, we are a company that believes, you know, very strongly in keeping that operating cash flow coming, and so you can expect that as we go forward. But we also, we have this super strong balance sheet, so we wanna use it. You know, this is something when you see the opportunities, this is something where in the last year, whether it was FreshDirect or DEEN or Southeastern Grocers opportunities, those were things we were able to jump at because we did have the balance sheet to do it. You know, you can expect to see us do more of those if they make sense.
We are very disciplined how we use and utilize our CapEx. We have strict hurdle rates in our company, and all those investments have to hit the hurdle rates. And those proposals we see in our executive committee to pass and to approve those projects. You can expect from us the same discipline as we had before on the return on capital, on the hurdle rates, and, strategically, which projects should get the money if there is more demand than supply from a CapEx perspective. You can expect from us a strong free cash flow focus, but also a very strong discipline on the CapEx. JP.
Very much.
Our next question comes from Victoria Petrova.
Thank you very much for the event. It's extremely helpful, and obviously, we very much welcome any initiative with monetization of bol.com. Are you thinking about monetizing your online grocery business into the future? Obviously, it's given a completely different multiple in comparison to grocery business. I have one more clarification question. Out of three fulfillment options, Takeoff, Fabric and out-of-store, so far, which one is the most profitable for you?
Okay. I think that question on the formats of online, bricks and mortar, click and collect, this kind of thing, that sounds like a typical question for both Kevin and Wouter, so they can shed their light a little bit on this, what is the most profitable business format when we talk about online. The other question is a simple one to answer. We just announced our intention to float bol.com for a limited share.
We would like to be a significant shareholder going forward of bol.com because we would like to work with bol.com in all the things we just heard in the cool things in the ecosystem to strengthen our total business, and we have no intention to IPO or to float our online grocery business because we see this as an omni-channel format and combination of our brands. We have to talk a little bit more about this like today to also let you understand how strong that business is and how valuable that is the grocery omni-channel business. Maybe Wouter a few things from your side.
Yeah, maybe just to shine a light a bit on how we look at E-commerce on the food space here. What I try to explain is we're looking at three models. It's the fast delivery model, which we are testing basically, which is a very dilutive model. Then we have compact, which is of course a free delivery model. We are testing and learning that in high urbanized areas, and then we have our complete model. That's a model we have already for a long time. You see, of course, the secret sauce that Natalie always talks about is like how do you get close to profitability?
If you just take the ingredients what I just mentioned about scale and density and a high drop points, then if a customer spends more than EUR 150 in those kind of dense areas, highly urbanized areas, then we are seeing really very much light at the end of the tunnel. We look at it from a fragmented point of view, but we do have a journey to go forward. In the home, in the online part for food, we don't have in Europe a lot of automated solutions yet. Kevin is ahead of that curve. We are already testing a couple of solutions that they have in the U.S., and we're going to bring that soon into Europe.
Maybe Kevin, maybe some light on your side because you also have the pickup points, which is of different dynamic I think.
Europe is very much a delivery business for us, both for Bol, but also for the food business. We started with a next day delivery business with Peapod in Chicago, a good 20 years ago. That business drastically changed over time, Kevin. Maybe you can give a little bit of picture, where are you now with your various fulfillment formats?
I think what Wouter said is also true for us, is that, density, volume, scale, those really are important as we think about building out our omni-channel network and how we're actually using different channels for different types of fulfillment, and then ultimately, how we ultimately get profitability out of that. In the U.S., in our marketplace at least, about 50% of our total volume, a little over that, comes from our click and collects. At the end of this year, we'll have about 1,500 of those in place. In a click and collect, what really matters is getting the volume up so that we can cover all the fixed costs and continue to move forward with that. We also have a big central fulfillment operation today.
In central fulfillment, again, it's getting that center and the routes really optimized in order for you to get the volume and the density that you need to have, and then also the transaction size. During the COVID period, those transaction sizes have been fairly large. That's helped us a great deal in getting those centers where they need to be from a flow through point of view. As we look at automation, like when we talk about Takeoff and AutoStore and Fabric, these are different types of configurations, and we're looking at different ways to implement them. We run today, we have about 21-23 manual warehouses that we run or dark stores that we actually pick from.
Again, volume matters a lot there, but when you have volume, you can get a pretty good productivity out of those facilities. Our thinking then is that adding these configurations for automation to this, it will allow us to actually increase the productivity quite a bit. If we look at like at an AutoStore, we're looking at our all-in productivity about double what it would be from a click and collect, slightly higher than that maybe in today. As we look at this going forward, we think there's a great deal of opportunity for us to apply the technologies of these micro fulfillment centers in combination with building that demand density that we need.
As Natalie talked about our CVP, our CVP is just critically important to us because the more that we can connect digital shoppers and build omni-channel relationships, the more opportunity it gives us to drive profitability in any of our kind of omnichannel delivery mechanisms that we're using, and ultimately get that last mile where it needs to be for us to be successful with this. That's how we're looking at it today. Again, we don't have enough time with all of our different technologies that we're testing, but we're looking at a lot of different approaches to this.
We do think, and you saw with Island Avenue, what they're doing in the Philadelphia market, that's one example of a test that we're running to see what do we learn from that, and then how do we apply it as we're building out demand going forward, because we do believe that our demand will continue to grow.
It's also clear that click and collect fulfillment model is more profitable than that very expensive last mile.
Mm.
A lot of customers are very happy with the click and collect because it's same day and quite flexible there. With the stores you know and the assortments you know. I think we found a way there that we can marry both, a better customer connect, but also with a more profitable fulfillment model. We learn on the way and we exchange information between the Europeans and the Americans. Was it an answer to your question?
Thank you.
All right.
Absolutely. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Yeah, yeah. JP.
Our next question comes from Sreedhar at UBS.
Yes. Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for the presentations. Three quick questions then from me, please.
Sure.
Just going back to the free cash flow, I'm afraid, Natalie, the EUR 6 billion or more than EUR 6 billion, any view on how we should see it for 2022? Perhaps more broadly, when do these additional investments actually become accretive to free cash flow? Because clearly through the plan period, they're dilutive to the prior level of free cash flow that we've come to expect from our older days. Second one, you've talked about achieving fully allocated E-commerce profitability by 2025. Very helpfully, you've shared some details on bol.com. But can you talk a little bit about where it is today for food E-commerce and in 2025, how we should be really thinking about it relative to the focus in group margin that you're talking about for 2022, for instance?
The last one is, I think going back to Rob's question on the alternative media, alternative revenue streams, as you say, EUR 1 billion. I fully understand the profit from this may well be used as fuel for additional investment and fuel for growth. Any helpful hints in terms of how we should think about potential profit contribution at a gross level? Some of it may be, it ends up being reused as fuel for growth. Thank you.
I will take the question on the profitability of E-commerce, where is it now?
Perfect. I'll take the first and the last.
Yeah, that's all right.
I can do those two very quickly.
Yeah.
In terms of free cash flow for 2022.
Mm.
Sorry, you've got to wait until February with our Q4 results, then you'll have more. There's obviously some different moving factors, as you can imagine, as we get to the end of the year. On the question in terms of, what's happening on the monetization and how you see that kind of flowing through the P&L, I already mentioned that we expect the vast majority of that will come in our margin line. We're gonna be using a good portion of that to reinvest in, you know, the other activities so that we can make sure we stay competitive and we hold those industry-leading margins going forward. Sorry, not a lot more specificity for you.
No, Natalie, just a quick follow-up, because I think what we've seen is a step down in the free cash flow with the new investment plans. When do you expect that to sort of start to be-
Yeah, sorry about that. You did ask that one as well. I think the call out on that one I would just make is, I'm not sure if your assumption, which is, hey, there's a lower flow through, is a fair assumption. You know, the example that I like to give a lot is if you look at the U.S., where we put a lot of money the last few years into the supply chain, we're just getting ready to, you know, this year it's still $50 million, next year it's cost neutral. 2023, we see it be $100 million of an upside for us. I think as you look at omni-channel, you can think the timelines are a little longer, but I think Bol is a great example of the payoffs are much bigger.
I'd say, you know, stick with us. I think you'll continue to see, you'll be very pleased with the payoffs of those investments.
Mm-hmm.
Cool.
On the other question, Sreedhar, on the profitability of the total E-commerce business by 2025, we already shared with you earlier, since 2019 that bol.com is EBIT profitable. We talk here about a food E-commerce challenge, yeah.
Yes.
Your question is, okay, if you make that profitable in 2025, where are you now? Now, where we are at the moment is that it's at the moment not profitable. It's loss-making.
Sure.
Again, we talk about a fully allocated. We see a couple of competitors in our business who have different calculations, talk about incremental and these kind of things. We talk about a fully allocated, everything what is linked to that. If it's labor in the store, if it's of course, the automation part, if it's the way we deal with our service partners, it's all allocated to those costs. We are very clean and very clear. It's loss-making at the moment. We have a few pockets where we have high densities.
You can imagine that in cities where we have a high density, if it's in Holland or in Belgium or in the U.S., that we see already profitability coming through, but the whole business profitable in 2025, and we do not indicate how much loss-making is it at the moment. I think on Bol, we will be much more explicit as soon as you see the prospectus coming in, hopefully in the run up to our IPO the second half of next year.
I was just gonna add to that, real quickly, which is I think the most important thing, and the reason we feel confident being able to make the comment on 2025 is we are in a great place incrementally. We have seen good improvements in, as we move from 2019 to 2020. Those are a little more historical, but we have a lot of data on what's driving that improvement in profitability today. If you look at, you know, everything on sales volume and leverage that the commercial guys mentioned, but you add also, what are we doing on operations? How are we doing it on the CVP? And what do we look at on those complementary revenue streams? It's very clear to us what we have to do, what are the levers we have to pull.
That's, it's a nice place to be in because now we've got to operationalize it, but that's what we do best as retailers, is when we get into that, you know, retail is detail, and we're pulling those different levers. That's, I think, why we have so much confidence in the 2025 outlook.
Yes, sir. Absolutely last point. When you see 2025 food E-commerce profitability, how different do you think will it be to the group level profitability that we are now seeing, about 4%, I guess. That was my last.
I'll just close that one up with, you know, when we talk about omni-channel profitability, and that really is the direction that we're moving, where you think about customer lifetime value and what are all the halo effects and the trade-offs, then I feel very confident about you're gonna see something very much in line with the rest of our profitability. If you look at channel profitability, it probably still won't be as profitable as in-store profitability, but it is something where we're gonna feel, you know, we've got a very channel-oriented, how do we optimize that channel first? Then most importantly, how do we look at it from a more omni-channel perspective?
Yeah.
Because that's really what matters to us as a company, is how do we make that piece work.
We talked about earlier quarters, we talked about an omni-channel customer, richer in share of wallet, richer in the total margin profile. That is the name of the game. That's what we believe in. I think so far we have not been disappointed the way we are positioning ourselves. I would like to go to the last question, JP. Sridhar, thank you. It's a little bit dangerous because then we might get three again, but, let's give it a try.
Bonus. Yes.
Probably needs to be a power question.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I'm pretty sure, Fran, Xavier can control himself with his last question today. Hand it over to Xavier.
Xavier, you're on mute.
Yeah. That was a wonderful question.
Sorry. Yes, on mute. Yeah, two questions then, not three. The first one, can you elaborate a bit more on the top-line growth you're expecting for your in-store business, just to understand a bit more how it will contribute, you know, going forward to the sales growth on the EUR 10 billion incremental sales you're expecting by 2025. The second question, just on capital allocation going forward, the fact that you're increasing CapEx. Does that mean that potentially you're more focusing on organic growth versus bolt-on acquisition, as you used to mention? Do you still believe that you've got the balance sheet to potentially participate in consolidation despite the CapEx improvement? Linked to that, what is potentially the read-across for share buyback then?
Yeah, I'm happy to take both, in fact, but if you guys would like to fill in, then let me know. The sales number, the EUR 10 billion, is roughly 60% coming from online and 40% coming from our stores. So we are very much focused on that omni channel. We grow with stores, bricks and mortar, and we grow with online, but 60/40 is roughly the distribution. The second thing, what you asked about CapEx, you know that in our definitions of CapEx is talk about organic growth investments. That's the CapEx. If we talk about M&A, it's outside the CapEx envelope. There also we have an unchanged view on this. We see opportunity in the markets, then we will look at those.
We have indeed the financial strength, like you talked about before. We have done a couple of M&A transactions in the last couple of years. We acquired Southeastern Grocers. We acquired DEEN in the Dutch market. We acquired FreshDirect. I think we have our eyes wide open. We have, let's say, a firepower with the balance sheet to act when we see there's a good fit within our strategic framework, within our profitability framework, very well-disciplined. The M&A envelope, Xavier, is outside the CapEx envelope.
Just quick follow-up on that. I was just thinking that the fact that you're increasing the CapEx, does that mean that potentially organic growth is a key focus a bit more than bolt-on if I compare to what you did in the past?
Organic growth has always been the key focus for us because that's the most profitable, as you know. It has always been the key focus to grow on the same square meters or expanding with the 1s and 2s in the markets where we operate. Let's not forget the strong growth we see with the omnichannel and the ecosystem we talked about in the Benelux, which will give us growth levels and promises to customers we have not seen before because of the unique combination of leading food brands, a leading marketplace in the Benelux, and that's, I think, exactly where we're heading for.
Maybe one more sentence on that one, which is, you know, it was the headline of the press release today. We are expecting to step up our expectations on growth organically. That's the reason why we're investing, because we believe there's all that opportunity out there.
Very much.
Okay, those were the last 2.5 questions from Xavier. I would like to thank everybody on the call, both the ones with the questions, but all, everybody who followed us during the day. Thank you very much for your interest in our company. I hope you got a lot of new information about the industry, about our company in itself. I'm very proud that we had a strong team which took you through the day. We are very much looking forward and in confidence towards the future. I hope you are with us. Thanks for your attention today. Thanks for being with us, and see you soon and at the latest the next quarter, of course. Bye-bye. Thank you.
Bye.