Hi, everyone, and welcome to the SSC. My name's Anita Healy. I'm the Head of Investor Relations here at Coles. We have an action-packed agenda here today, which you can see up on screen. So we'll get started very shortly, but just a few housekeeping matters. So firstly, safety. If you hear a, I'm not very good at this, but beep, beep, beep alert tone, please collect all your small belongings, leave any large ones behind, and get ready to evacuate. If you hear a whoop, whoop, whoop evacuation tone, please follow any of the Coles team members in their red polos or our wardens, and they'll take you to a safety exit and get you to assemble outside. Secondly, bathrooms. Just as you came in today, there's bathrooms just near where the coffee machine was, so head out to the bathrooms there. Thirdly, photographs.
We are asking that no one takes photos today, either here at the SSC or at our CFC this afternoon, but we do have stock photos, so if you would like photos for your records, please contact IR, and we'll send you through photos for the day. Mobile phones. Could everyone turn their mobile phones onto silent, please, and then finally, Q&A. We'll run all of the presentations first today, and then we'll have a Q&A just before lunch with all of the presenters. The Q&A is being run via Slido, so you can see the Slido here on the screen, but you've also got Slido QR codes on your tables, so if you want to enter a question at any point during the presentations, feel free to enter that or during the Q&A.
And we do ask, it is a strategy day, so we'd like you to limit your questions to the topics that we're covering today. It's not a trading update. And I think that's probably it from me. Over to Leah.
Thanks, Anita. And good morning, everyone. Big welcome to everyone in the room, but also to those folks that are joining us online today. So as Anita said, we've got an action-packed set of presentations this morning, and then we'll head out to the CFC this afternoon. And we're very excited to share with you a bit more detail around the strategy. So let's get into it. So 2024 marks 110 years of Coles trading and operating in Australia. And there's a really rich history of innovation, customer focus, and value over that time. G.J. Coles opened his first discount variety store in Collingwood in 1914 with the purpose of lowering the cost of shopping for Australian households. And on the day of opening, a sign hung in the front window that said nothing over GBP 1. And after 10 days of trading, he'd taken GBP 935, four shillings, and one penny.
In comparison to that, many of our big stores today take around AUD 2 million per week. If we move forward through to the 1960s, Coles launched its first standalone supermarket in Balwyn here in Victoria in 1960, and the ambition was to actually provide a store where customers could buy everything that they had on their weekly shopping list so they could get it all at one place. Then through to the 1970s, by that time, Coles had a nationwide footprint, and then as we moved into the 1990s, data and technology was embraced. So in 1993, Flybuys was launched, and at that time, customers of Shell, NAB, and Coles Myer were able to earn points towards free air travel just by shopping with us. And after 12 months of operation of that program, 3.5 million households had joined up. Today, we have over 9 million households in the program.
Obviously, that first year of growth was a bit faster than what we've been able to achieve subsequently. In 1999, we commenced Coles Online with 23 postcodes here in Melbourne. We were really delighted this year to celebrate 25 years of Coles Online operation by giving away a whole heap of chocolate mudcakes for free when customers ordered with us. Through to 2024, this year will really be marked by the opening of our two Customer Fulfilment Centres . You'll get to see the Victorian one later on this afternoon, but also the opening of our New South Wales ADC, which I know many of you are going along to tomorrow.
And I would have to say it feels like in many ways we've come full circle because 2024 has also been characterized as a year where we have really focused on value and lowering the cost of shopping for our customers. So what you're going to hear from us today are the plans that we have in place to enable this business to continue to trade for the next 110 years and along the way create shareholder value, which takes us to our vision. And our vision is to become the most trusted retailer in Australia and to grow long-term shareholder value. And we know that if we want to do that, we have to build strong relationships with all of our stakeholder groups.
If we start with customers, we have 18 million transactions that go through our checkouts every week across a network of 1,800 stores, which comprise both our supermarkets and our liquor network. And this year, as I said, cost of living has very much been at the forefront of our customers' minds, and they have really been seeking to balance the budget. If we combine that with the fact that we've had a significant amount of political and regulatory scrutiny over the last 12 months, there is a real job to be done to build trust as we move forward from here with our customers.
Now, we are a very important part of the Australian landscape with over 115,000 team members, which does make us one of the largest private employers in Australia, but it's also the place where many people have their first job, and we're very proud of that. We're also very proud of the fact that this year we achieved our best-ever mysay engagement score, which placed us in the top quartile of Australian corporates. We also focus very much on having a diverse, inclusive, and respectful culture in our business, and safety is something both from a physical safety and a psychological safety that we spend a lot of time focusing on as a business. Moving to our suppliers, we have 8,000 suppliers that we work with, and many of those relationships span decades. We know that without great suppliers, we cannot have great products to offer our customers.
That relationship is absolutely crucial. We are very focused on developing mutually beneficial relationships with our suppliers, but also ones that help us to build supply chain resilience and also create points of difference for us when compared to other retailers. Now, moving to community. Given we have stores in pretty much every part of the Australian landscape, the work we do with our communities is a really important part of what we do every day. We're really proud to have contributed in FY 2024 over AUD 38 million to community causes through our partnerships with organizations like FightMND, Redkite, Movember, and Hospitals United for Sick Kids. We've also seen over the last couple of years, as cost of living has become an increasing issue, a rise in food insecurity in our communities.
And so the work that we do with our food rescue partners, SecondBite and Foodbank, is critical to helping to address this. And last year, we donated the equivalent of almost 40 million meals of food to those partners. And it's something that we're proud to see that food getting utilized in community kitchens and pantries across the country to address that. And then finally, to our shareholders. We have over 420,000 direct shareholders and millions of Australians that indirectly hold Coles shares through their superannuation funds. And we know that that is, as many of you would attest to, a critical stakeholder group for us. And we've got an important role in ensuring that we deliver strong returns for that group.
So when we reset the strategy in August of last year, we did redefine our purpose, and we very deliberately chose the words that came together to helping Australians eat and live better every day. So I did want to touch just briefly on each of these words. So helping really means solving problems. For customers, that means what's for dinner tonight? How can I eat more healthily? How can I buy products that are more sustainable? How do we help them to solve those problems? The words eat and live really go back to the grounding of our business model, which is in food. If you go out on the street and you ask customers, "Why do you go to Coles?" they are going to tell you that they go there to get food. And we're pretty unashamed in the use of the word eat in our purpose.
It is the heart of what we do. But we do know, and this is where live comes in, we do know, as G.J. Coles did at the time, that it is very convenient to buy other things that are frequent transaction items when you do your food shopping each week. So things like pet and home care, health and beauty items, liquor, they are all things that are very convenient to grab while you're in the shop getting your fruit and vegetables and your meat for the week. And those high-frequency transaction items, which are close to our core, will continue to be a big part of our focus going forward. Better really refers to the passion that we have as a business to have more delicious, more healthy, more sustainable products.
And finally, every day is a really important concept in this purpose because it points to the consistency that we are aspiring to have to deliver to every customer every day, regardless of whether it's in store or online, a really great experience, and then for them to have a great experience with our products when they get them home. Now, before I get into the detail of the strategy, I did just want to touch briefly on some of the customer insights that have led to its formation. Customer insights form a big part of the conversation that we have every week here. We have our Tell Coles, which is thousands of surveys that are done every week with our customers after they shop with us.
But we also do a lot of focus groups and even accompanied shops to better understand how our customers are responding to the offers that we're putting out there. Now, if you look over the last few years, we've actually had a number of significant disruptions that have come into our sort of operating environment. We obviously had COVID, which was significant. We also had bushfires and floods and extreme weather events coming through. The last few years have been characterized by a level of disruption in the global supply chain networks that we haven't seen for a very long time. And along with that has come inflationary pressures that we haven't seen since the 1990s. And then more locally in our stores, it's also been a very challenging time for loss and for team member safety.
And so at the same time as you've got all of these changes that are happening in our operating environment, you've also got customer behaviors and preferences changing alongside that. And we are attempting to adapt the business to make sure that we are responding to all of those inputs. And what customers are telling us is that right now, value is top of their list every time in terms of what they're considering. We know that over 90% of our customers have changed their behavior in terms of how they shop for groceries in some way because of the need to balance the budget at home. But for many of our customers, it is not just price that makes up the value equation. It is also quality, and they are unwilling to compromise on quality to still be able to put dinner on the table for the family.
We've also seen a real acceleration in digital engagement. Now, this really happened during COVID. So during COVID, our sales penetration in the digital space increased three times. It then came off a little bit as we came out of COVID, but it has since then increased very steadily. And we're now at over 10% of our sales going through our e-commerce channels. Convenience, health, and inspiration is also important. Customers are busier than they've ever been, and you probably all feel that in your own lives. And so they are really asking us to make it a lot easier for them to prepare meals at home. They're also more focused on health. That has been one of the big phenomena post-COVID. And they're interested in the relationship between health, aging, and how diet can influence that.
They're also, we know, most engaged with brands that are helping them to achieve their goals and solve their problems through inspiration that does make life easier. So that focus on the helping and the inspiration, that's something that customers are telling us we really need to do. Now, finally, you see on here sustainability. I would say that sustainability has taken a bit more of a backseat in the last 12-18 months as cost of living has risen up the needs curve. But we definitely still have a large number of our customers that value the opportunity to shop in a sustainable way, particularly if it doesn't cost them anymore to do so. So when you put all that together, what we developed and launched last year was our 3D Strategy. There are three pillars to this.
The first is Destination for Food and Drink . The second is Accelerated by Digital , and the third is Delivered Consistently for the Future , and you can see here that the pillars are presented as a flywheel because actions in one area help to build on the other areas, and that creates a virtuous cycle. So to give you an example of that, if we drive efficiency and productivity benefits through our Simplify and Save to Invest program or the Supply Chain Modernization program, that then gives us capacity to invest back into the customer offer under Destination for Food and Drink . That builds customer engagement. That builds scale, and then that scale gives us the opportunity to drive further efficiencies, and the cycle starts again, starting with the first strategic pillar, Destination for Food and Drink .
In our communications with our customers, we are very much focused on a unique proposition that's the intersection of delicious, easy, and affordable, and we're seeking to connect with our customers on the issues that matter to them most, and when customers talk about delicious, what they're talking about is products that are tasty, but also they have freshness that lasts when they get it home, particularly in the key areas of meat and fresh produce. When customers talk about easy, what they're really saying to us is they want help with planning their weekly meals. When they come in to shop with us, they actually want to be able to find the stuff that they've got on their list, so availability is really important. They want to be able to have a choice of checkouts when they get to the front end.
Some customers like self-checkout because they don't have to talk to anyone. Some customers like a manned checkout and the ability to have a nice chat. And when they engage with our team members, they want them to be friendly and helpful. All of this adds up to a shopping experience that they describe as easy. And finally, customers want their shopping experience to be affordable. Help me stick to my budget. Make your specials and discounts easy to understand. And really importantly, reward me for the loyalty that I show from coming in to shop with you on a regular basis. So you can expect us going forward to see us use these three concepts of delicious, easy, and affordable to be the thing that we really orient our messaging around to the customer. Now, the reality has to stack up to the message.
And so we have key initiatives in this strategic pillar around making sure that that is the case. The first one is value. Real value at the moment is absolutely critical. Customers are able to compare prices more easily than they have ever been able to do before. And we know through our specials, our everyday pricing, and our Flybuys, when the customer puts together that value equation, it has to stack up versus our competitors because customers are shopping around. Moving on to fresh and exclusive to Coles. Fresh quality and days' life that a customer gets on their fresh products in the house is actually just a foundational requirement for us to be considered a Destination for Food and Drink . And Own Brand is an area where we already have a competitive advantage.
So when we do our focus groups with customers, this is something that we very regularly hear from them that they consider our Own Brand to be better than others. And this is going to be an area that we will continue to enhance and amplify as part of our strategy going forward. And it really plays two important roles. One is to be a value option for customers so we can compete against the likes of discounters, but it also enables us to be a point of difference. And you'll see a lot of the Own Brand products that you'll get a chance to sample at lunch today. There are no equivalents for them in the rest of the store. They are unique. They are differentiated. They are a reason to choose to come and shop at Coles.
Now, moving on to tailored ranges, space in our stores and DCs is one of our scarcest resources. We need to think very carefully about how we use that strategically to get the right offer for the customer, and we're increasingly using data and technology to tailor and optimize our ranges in store to make sure that we have the right range for every demographic, and then moving on to the integrated and convenient liquor offering, this is another area that we think differentiates us. From a structural perspective, we're now the largest integrated food and drinks retailer in Australia, and we believe that liquor is very important to us strategically because it is one of the closest adjacencies to food, so think the barbecue with the beer, the great steak with the Shiraz. Those are things that inherently go together in the way that we consume food in Australia.
And the largest part of our liquor network is actually Liquorland that are co-located with a supermarket. And so we intend, as part of our strategy going forward, to make more of that convenience that we have of that co-location. But we are also looking to integrate our proposition much more tightly than we have in the past. And the CFCs have been an important part of us going on that journey. And Michael will touch on this a bit more when he comes up to speak.
So when we put all of that together, that's how we intend to deliver a destination and food and drink so that when a customer is thinking about an event that they're planning or even just weekly meals and what needs to go into the lunchbox, that they're thinking about Coles as somewhere that they can come to get everything that they need to do that. And Anna and Michael are going to elaborate on this a bit more when they get out. So moving now on to our second pillar, which is Accelerated by Digital . As I said, we know customers are increasingly engaging with us through the digital channels. And when I watch a customer in store, many of them now have a phone in their hands when they're doing their shop. They're looking at their shopping list. They're looking at a recipe.
Increasingly, I'm seeing customers start to use our wayfinding tool to find a really tricky product. I ran into a customer the other day who was looking for vodka pasta sauce, and those sort of tools can help them find something that otherwise would have been quite frustrating to find in the past. We also know that our omnichannel customers are our most valuable, and so the work that we do in this strategic pillar is a way for us to engage with those omnichannel customers and to really elevate the experience of our most valuable customers to us.
Now, the way we plan to do this is, first of all, through offering a seamless customer experience, which means that we take all the friction out of the experience that a customer has, make it easier to build a basket, easier to pay, easier to find information, easier to actually navigate through the various channels that we have. Secondly, we are increasingly going to be personalizing our interactions and our communications that we have with customers. Now, customers are expecting us to do this. And actually, they are telling us right now that when we send them mass offers that don't relate to them, that is a waste of their space in their email box or in their app. They want things that are actually personalized and relevant to them.
It also benefits us because it means that we can be far more effective with the deployment of the investment that we have to put into the customer offer. Now, moving to e-commerce, e-commerce is going to be a significant contributor to our sales growth over the next few years. So we will be supporting that sales growth through making sure that we have a set of options that meet every mission that the customer could have in this space. Over the last 12 months, you've seen us rapidly expand (I shouldn't have used rapidly) our Rapid offer, which is our immediacy offer, but also move to the CFCs, actually two offers that are at the opposite ends of the spectrum from a mission perspective. Now, we're also building new revenue streams as part of this strategic pillar.
Coles 360, which is our retail media business, and Amanda will talk to this a bit later on, is really important for us. We've seen many of our peer organizations, peer retailers overseas, have built substantial businesses in retail media. And actually, it plays a really important role in terms of the profitability of your overall digital business. And then, QuiteLike, our meal kits business, and Swaggle, our pet specialty business, are great examples of digital-only businesses that we have launched to move into a space which is very close to our core. It represents a significant market size that we can go after, but it is hard for us to access that through our bricks-and-mortar stores. And so digital-only is actually a great way to do that. And Ben will talk a bit more about these when he gets up in his presentation.
Now, moving on to Delivered Consistently for the Future , I boil this pillar down really to it's about getting the basics right. And that does sound simple, but I am a firm believer that that can be a source of competitive advantage because if you are consistently more reliable than your competition in terms of the availability, the experience, the quality of the product when you get it home, customers will choose to come to you over others because they are busy and they can't mess around with stuff that isn't right. So team capability is a really important part of our future plans in this space. And this is particularly the case as we're starting to use more data and more technology to support our teams in doing their job every day.
So we have equipped our stores with drillable dashboards and devices to be able to use them on the store floor. And that has all the information in it that our store teams need to be able to plan for their week, but also to run their stores. And we're also rolling out a set of new tools, more sophisticated tools that are heavily grounded in the use of data to support things like workforce planning, loss, and replenishment. And so with the use of these tools and the training that we're putting with them, our aspiration is that our customer, our team, will become much closer to their customer, understand the customer needs in every store, but also will become a lot more efficient.
Moving on to Simplify and Save to Invest, I think most of you are fairly familiar with this, but the purpose of this program is to help us to offset the inflationary effects that we see coming through on our own cost base, and we're aiming to take out AUD 1 billion over the course of four years. FY 2024 was the first of those four years, and we achieved savings of AUD 238 million in that year. We're also very focused on sourcing and supply chain, and the reason for doing that is because a great set of arrangements in this place leads to great availability. And we know that that is a real pain point for customers. We've been really pleased with the delivery that we've had of our automated distribution centers in both Queensland and New South Wales.
Queensland is now operating at business case with a substantially improved cost per carton versus the arrangements that we had in place before it was completed. The next phase of this program will be the Automated Distribution Centre in Truganina here in Melbourne, which we were very excited to announce a couple of weeks ago. Now, complementing these investments is the ongoing work that we're doing on our sourcing arrangements. Really, what we're working on there is how do we become more resilient and how can we set ourselves up so we're best placed to avoid the impacts that we've seen over time from things like extreme weather events and rail outages and the like. We've significantly improved how we're placed in WA, in particular on this front, over the last 12 months.
Store network is also critical for us to continue to grow and to maintain our market share. Even though e-commerce is a significant driver of our sales growth, there is no doubt that the majority of our actual sales will be going through our stores and our bricks-and-mortar network for some time to come, and as such, we are planning through the cycle to grow our new space in excess of 1.5%, and we've also been working to get a more efficient and effective renewal program, which allows us to do more with the capital that we have allocated there, and Anna will talk about that a bit more later as well as Charlie. Now, finally, I just wanted to touch on sustainability. Sustainability continues to be really important strategically to us.
And for those of you who dialed into the AGM this week, you would have seen it was a very big focus of the conversation at that event. It's really important also to our customers in the areas of plastic waste and food waste. And so we have been very focused on continuing to remove a lot of the plastic packaging that we have in our stores. Probably a good example in the last six months has been taking the plastic crate bags out and replacing them with a paper crate bag that now can be recycled kerbside. And then on our emissions, we will achieve 100% renewably sourced energy in next calendar year. And we're making good progress in our Scope 1 and 2 emissions as well.
In the Scope 3 space, this is a topic of significant work and conversation internally at the moment, as is the ASRS and TNFD requirements that will come in over the next few years. We're not going to touch on sustainability anymore today, but if you do want more information on it, please reach out to Anita and the IR team because we have a group of very passionate people internally who would be very happy to take you through it. So that's the three pillars covered, but our Flywheel isn't quite complete. We have an inner ring to it which has two components: Win Together, which is uniquely Coles and really focuses on our team, our community, and suppliers, and also our foundations of financial discipline, technology, and data.
Financial discipline is something that we take very seriously, ensuring we're investing in the right assets and maintaining a flexible balance sheet, and I think you will see as we talk today, technology and data are enablers that really underpin the vast majority of the strategic initiatives that we're working on. Finally, I just wanted to touch on our values, so if our purpose is our why, our strategy is our what, our values are our how, and we wanted to have a set of values that really resonated with our team.
We did a lot of work last year asking the team, "What did Coles look like when it was at its best, and what did they value most in our culture?" And that led to the development of four values of Care for each other, Have courage to make the right choices, D eliver for our customers, and Create for the future. And at this point in time, when business, and particularly our business, is under increasing scrutiny for our practices and our governance, we are asking our team to really take these to heart and to make sure that they are using them in all of their decision-making and activity that they do every day. So bringing that all together, this is our overall strategic framework that we use.
I did want to just take a moment before I hand over to Anna to reflect on our progress that we've made on this over the past 12 months. So back in August last year, we did give a number of focus areas. So under destination, we said we were going to be focused on value and quality, under digital, our digital experience and CFCs. And under delivered, we were going to focus on availability, loss, SSI, and our ADC program. And I think, as you can see from the dot points on the right, we have made a good start in terms of delivering against these. But obviously, there is a lot more to do, and that's what we're all pretty energized to share with you today. I would just like to finish my comments by saying that as a business, we are very focused on our core.
We are very focused on execution, and we think there is a lot of value to be generated by focusing on that execution in the core, and so you can expect to hear me talk about that a lot on the results calls that we have going forward. You should also expect to hear us talking a lot about what we're hearing from customers. We are doing a lot of listening to customers, and we are adapting our offer to make sure that it's fit for purpose, and we are also really focused on maintaining financial discipline, so we want to make sure we are investing in the right assets. We want to have a strong and flexible balance sheet. We want to make sure that we have good generation of cash flow, and we want to make sure that we've got a good return coming back to our shareholders.
So that's what I'm focused on. That's what I talk to the team about every day. And hopefully, you will see that come through in the presentations that we will do today. And with that, I would like to welcome to the stage Anna Croft, our Chief Commercial and Sustainability Officer, to talk through our first pillar of Destination for Food and Drink . While she's coming up, we're just going to show you this year's Christmas ad. So enjoy.
Grandpa, who put the Kris Kringle in the hamper? Elves. They've been helping out. They know just where to find juicy Christmas mangoes. Oh, made it. And they know where to find Aussie banana prawns out at sea. That's why this Christmas tastes even more... Yum. Delicious.
T ha nk you, Leah. And good morning, everybody. For those of you I haven't yet had the great pleasure of meeting, I am Anna Croft, the Chief Commercial and Sustainability Officer here at Coles. I've been with Coles now 10 months, but certainly not new to retail with a 25-year career across both the U.K. and Australia, and some of you will know I actually spent a decade at Coles between 2010 and 2020, and in the last four years, I had the great pleasure of being the Chief Operating Officer at Mecca Brands, the retail business, but it is great to be back. In my role here at Coles, I look after all of our merchandise team and our store development team, so that means all of our buying teams that interact with our suppliers and set our customer offer, and all of our teams that manage our store renewal program.
As of Monday of this week, I have the great pleasure of picking up sustainability as well as we move into the next phase of that strategy and how we align it much further up the supply chain with suppliers. We're very excited about how do we deliver our very ambitious goals in there. Today, I'm going to talk to you about what we are doing to make Coles the ultimate Destination for Food and Drink . As Leah said, we've got a wonderful plan. Let's get straight into it. As Leah talked, we do have six key priorities, but today, I'm only going to talk to you about four of those.
I'm going to talk to you about what we're doing in our fresh quality and how we're going to step change that business, what we're doing on value and incredibly topical right now, where we are taking our exclusive brands and our Own Brands, and how we're going to step change that, and where we are going with range and our space and stores, so let's get straight into fresh. Step changing fresh quality is absolutely critical. We know that 59% of customers choose where they're going to shop based on the quality of the produce of our fresh offer. And we know when customers buy fresh, their basket is bigger, and actually, their loyalty is much higher. However, we know that we have many, many baskets every single week that contain no fresh.
We have a large proportion of our customers that buy no fresh at all from us. So this doesn't just only represent an extraordinary commercial opportunity, but an incredible opportunity to engage our customers in a very different way and drive big customer satisfaction. I think the good news here is we actually have a very strong transformation program that is now underway in fresh, both across meat and produce. And we're making good progress against that, and it will be a multi-year journey. But fresh quality really begins with the partnerships we have with our dedicated farmers and suppliers. And we're working hard further upstream to select the very best partners. Then we are creating very deep and collaborative partnerships so that we can actually mutually invest to drive real innovation, differentiation, and sustained growth over the long term together.
I think a really good example of this in the last month, we have extended by another 10 years our exclusive partnership with Sundrop Farms, who supply, we think, the very best tomatoes in Australia exclusively to Coles. And we will be expanding together over the next decade of partnership to bring innovation, differentiation, and a complete step change in farming practices to Australia. The other area that actually continues to be a key priority for us is the Coles Nurture Fund. Now, since 2015, we have granted nearly AUD 36 million of investment to suppliers and farmers. And actually, what I'm really excited about, the money being used to innovate not only in products, in farming practices, but sustainability. And actually, what I'm looking forward to is seeing those innovations coming to life through our stores and in the market much broader over time.
And pleasingly, on the Nurture Fund, every single year now, we're seeing an acceleration in terms of the number of applicants. So I'm looking forward to seeing that continue to grow. But having an innovative, differentiated, and quality offer in fresh is critical. And we are partnering with farmers and producers to deliver product and quality innovation and differentiation. And these innovations, in many cases, take multi-years to do, require a complete step change in our supply chain further upstream, and are very difficult to replicate. And that is where we are working on for the future. So let me give you some examples of what I mean by that.
It could be Eureka Blueberries that are exclusive to Coles, and we worked on that partnership, or Grandma's Heirlooms Tomatoes with Sundrop, where the team traveled 26,000 km over a number of different months, tasted, I think, probably 100 varieties of different tomatoes to come back and plant with Sundrop exclusively. And we're working on the next phase as to what that looks like in produce. And I'm pretty excited about that future. Or in our meat business, whether it's our Graze program across lamb and beef, whether it's our carbon-neutral meat range, or even hormone-free, as we know, a decade old now, and no one has been able to replicate that. So we have a number of these in the pipeline.
I'm feeling really excited that we are working much further up the supply chain in a collaborative, deep way with long-term partnerships to drive real sustainable quality, both from a product perspective, but also a quality perspective in the products. And then when it comes to innovating and differentiating, and the offer is important, but so is freshness, quality, and availability. And therefore, one of our key priorities is to move to a much more localized manufacturing network. We're aligning our processing closer to our store network for freshness, quality, improved lead times, and improved cost. One example of this that brings it to life, and there are many I could share with you, is our WA for WA meat program. We have this year moved all of our sourcing of meat in WA to WA. We process in WA, and we supply the stores to WA.
And what that really means is we have much faster lead times. We have much better quality fresh. And actually, we are much more resilient when we have supply chain challenges to the west. And we're continuing to do that. We've just moved all our pork into Queensland. And actually, we're also seeing not only the commercial benefits coming through, but the customer benefits are enormous, and that localization and community feel really coming through in our customer NPS. So many more examples coming that way. But also, this has to ensure if we think about fresh, we have to make sure we have the right operating model end to end, and it's really critical.
We are reviewing every single touchpoint in our entire network to make sure that we are speeding up our lead times, we are improving quality at every single touchpoint, and that actually we have much better quality, much fresher, faster flows hitting stores and our customers through both in-store and online. This has to be underpinned by a transformation of an operating model in-store. We are using technology to really step change that, be that all our in-house production tools for bakery and actually our other processes across all of our fresh departments, meaning that actually we have incredible quality, brilliant freshness when the customers want it. More importantly as well, we're much more efficient in that process. That means that actually we can be faster and much more cost-effective through it.
And then finally, but certainly not least on fresh, we are investing very, very heavily in training and development of all of our team members, whether that be further above store or in-store or throughout the whole network to create a real culture of obsession around fresh. And I think that really will be a differentiator when no one walks past anything that is not where we've wanted to be. And then moving on to value, we are going to step change how we execute value because we need to drive customers into store. We are going to move to a more trusted pricing model on more everyday value lines on the right lines. And this means that actually we'll have increased trust for customers that they can rely on Coles for pricing on every day. We want to make specials truly special.
We want to really, through a data-led program, invest in lines that make a true meaningful difference. We will do fewer, bigger, execute with impact, and make a more meaningful difference to our customers, and then finally, we will drive more customers through the door by hyper-personalization of value that you can only get at Coles, and we're already making increased inroads into personalization through Flybuys and through the work through all our digital assets, and Amanda will talk to you about that in more detail later on, but when I put all of this together, what we're trying to do is make it easier for customers to find relevant value at Coles. We're optimizing our investment we are making into value so that we're investing in the things that really make a difference and will move us forward with the greatest impact.
Now, moving on to where are we on our exclusive portfolio. Now, this plays an enormous role for us. It is a key differentiator. It is a key driver of quality and value for us, and actually, we think we are distinguished in the market by the exclusive brand portfolio we do have. It is over 30% of our total sales, but in our food business, over 40%, and will continue to increase. Now, last year alone, we launched over 1,000 products and won 69 awards, and I think that's a real testament to the amazing efforts and the innovation that the teams are creating, and therefore, we need to continue to drive this hard, so what are we going to do? Well, firstly, we have to deliver quality consistently. There is no other option for our customers.
Hopefully, you'd have all seen our Great Lengths for Quality campaign that we've been running recently, that I think demonstrates the great lengths we go to every single day to bring amazing quality products to our customers. Actually, that campaign has already started to change customer perception around our Own Brand and the quality perceptions that we do have. Our most recent campaign focuses on our dairy farmers and our partnership with 109 Aussie dairy farmers to supply us 500 million liters of milk every single year. I think it really talks to the partnership we have further back up the supply chain where we want to work in a very different way with all of our partners. That really is coming to life. It's going to be about consistently communicating that to customers, making sure that every single product stacks up.
Actually, we'll be engineering a significant amount of products to continue to improve quality through our Own Brand ranges because we have to stay ahead of the market. But we have to continue to innovate in categories and white spaces to bring delicious, easy, and affordable solutions to customers. And I spoke earlier around the work we're doing in fresh, but you will see that come across so many different categories. We're also going to work very differently with our key part of our business, Chef Fresh, to really think about a new operating model and an innovative way of bringing speed and innovation to customers in a much more agile test and learn way so we can be ahead of market trends. This year, we'll launch over 1,000 new SKUs.
I think at the break and at lunch, you will see our Christmas range coming out this year. Hopefully, you will agree. I think it is our best one yet. We will continue to evolve that space. Finally, affordability plays a huge role at the moment in the total supermarket sector. But for us, this is where our Own Brand can really come into its own. Whether that be across our kind of Coles Simply range, our Coles mid-tier, or our Coles Finest, and a number of our other brands, we think we can marry quality and value at a time that has never been more appropriate for customers as customers are far more receptive to Own Brand.
And as I mentioned then, we often talk to you about just our three tiers of Coles brand, be that Simply, be that mid-tier, or be that Finest. But actually, we have over 50 exclusive brands within our Coles stable. And we are really targeting to how do we make sure we have the right brand, the right offer, and the right tiering in the right categories so that we can meet customer demand. And I thought it might be just worth sharing with you what some of those other brands are because we often wouldn't talk about them. We've talked a bit about Coles Simply and now at 111 SKUs, real entry price point with incredible quality. That means that customers should have no reason to shop anywhere else apart from Coles. We've got Finest delivering restaurant quality solutions at home and growing last year at north of 20%.
We've got UltraLife in our health business, which actually is the fastest growing vitamin brand in the category at the moment and continues to outpace proprietary. We've got Coles PerForm, which is actually approved by sport dietitians and is outperforming the category by 14 x the growth at the moment and continues to really resonate with customers. In Baby, we've got our Cub Nappy that was made the best by choice in 2024 and is the only nappy now with a Canstar five-star rating, which we're incredibly proud of, and Coles Organic, it actually just received a Canstar Blue Most Satisfied Customer Award and obviously all organically certified. And then finally, if we think about the changing needs and the diets of Australians now, we've got Coles Nature's Kitchen, which is actually the largest Own Brand range of plant-based products offering easy and delicious solutions.
So an awful lot going on, and we believe we are perfectly positioned to deliver trusted value through our Own Brand proposition at a time where customers have never been more receptive to Own Brand. But let's move on to leveraging data and how are we thinking about that to really tailor our range? We have to meet the needs of our customers through the right range and the right store. And we are leveraging technology and data to really do this. We are firstly going to simplify our range. We've grown our range significantly over the most recent period. And actually, in some cases, that has been to manage availability and poor availability on other brands. But actually, there's no doubt this has put pressure on our operating model, and we will simplify that.
We will reduce the range, but we will reduce duplication and put more choice in where it matters most for customers. And then we will move through the use of data and technology now. We can manage store-specific ranging and macro space. So we'll bring specific ranges to customers by using the latest technology and AI to tailor our space and our range at store-specific level. And we now have this capability to do it. We have, I think there's 10 categories on at the moment, and the results are incredibly exciting. And we will roll over the coming years to all of our categories along with a macro space program, which will reset all of the space in store and really tailor it to the demographics. So you think Asian, you think Indian, we think affluence.
We will be able to tailor not only the range, but the macro space using smart technology to do that, and then finally, Charlie will talk more about this on optimizing our store renewal program, but we are continuing to be very focused on how we present our stores, how we bring innovation to our customer experience, and how we step on our entire customer offer, and Charlie will talk more about it, but there's a very exciting plan in this space, so in summary, we are on a mission to make Coles the ultimate Destination for Food and Drink . We want to be synonymous with delicious, easy, and affordable food, and we can only do that by building trust with customers and delivering consistently through quality and value.
And we can only do this with incredible partnerships further up the supply chain and really differentiating the way we work with our partners to enable this. So thank you so much. I look forward to speaking to many of you at both the morning tea and lunch. But now, I'm going to hand over to Ben after a quick advert to talk to you about all things digital. Thanks very muc h.
A t Coles, we go to Great Lengths for our close relationships with Aussie dairy farmers like Steve, Dave, and Kylie. That's why we have long-term agreements with 109 dairy farms across the country. Rain's coming. Because when you go to Great Lengths, you get great quality milk that tastes great. Great Lengths for Aussie dairy. That's Coles.
Good morning. Let me try that again. Good morning. Thank you. My name is Ben Hassing. I'm the Chief Digital Officer here at Coles. And the way I think about it is I've been here a little over four years, but I joined and landed here in Australia three days before the first real lockdown. Very different times but certainly goes into part of the story around our Accelerated by Digital and the history of that time to where we're at today. Now, when we think about Accelerated by Digital, there's essentially five building blocks. First, you have to have a great e-commerce foundation. We've made some pretty good progress, but we'll update you on. Secondly, we're seeing more and more customers, as Leah said, adopt digital before they shop or as they engage with us. Third, you see a lot more personalization. In fact, a lot more of our customers are expecting personalized experiences through digital, but also in store.
And fourth, to the point on in-store, we're seeing a lot more customers actually use a mobile device while they're in store. And we think that's a trend that's going to continue to increase. And we have a plan in place to address that. Lastly, with digital, it allows you to test and innovate, tap into new growth opportunities, new profit pools. And so you'll hear from both Amanda and myself on that. Now, on progress with e-commerce, we've made some good progress. We go back to FY 2020, kind of the first COVID year. Our contribution to supermarket sales has grown from 3.8% to, in the last quarter, 10.8%. We expect that trend to continue. Our NPS is at an all-time high. There's a bit of context here.
If we look at FY 2021, our customers gave us a lot of credit for just being able to be an essential service in delivering or providing Click & Collect service during periods where there were lockdowns or COVID. But we had a platform with an app that wasn't shoppable. We had two separate websites, one with commerce, one with content. And over those two years, we brought those two websites together into one, coles.com.au. And we've made the app shoppable as well as added a lot more functionality that can be used for the in-store experience. And that takes us to today. Our NPS is at an all-time high, and we expect that trend to also continue. Lastly, market share. So what we look at is from the ABS, online food retail and food service.
We've seen a really good trend, in fact, an 800 basis points increase in market share over those last five years, so good progress from a numbers standpoint, but if you unpick e-commerce and customers in particular, we actually don't have e-commerce customers, or we have very few customers that were store shoppers. They adopt online, and then they only do online. 96% of our customers today that shop with us online, within 13 weeks, they also shop in store. So they love going to the store. They love testing the products, smelling the products, touching the products, and we don't see that trend really changing. The great thing about an online transaction, though, is the size. The size on average versus an in-store transaction, 4.6 times larger.
When you think about the economics of a basket that's 4.6 x larger than in-store, you have a lot more gross profit to work with to offset your costs that come with pick, pack, and delivery. The other thing about that large transaction size, when it comes to market share, is customers aren't cross-shopping. They're not cross-shopping when they go to a shopping, I would call a mall or a center where we have a lot of different competitors. They're making a choice on where they're going to do their shopping online. So that's a huge benefit when it comes to driving market share. And of course, it's also a proxy for loyalty. When we see customers adopt omnichannel behavior, shop in-store and online, they spend with Coles 2.2x more than those that don't. Now, as Leah said, we are serving three key shopping missions for customers.
And it's using physical stores, digital platforms, and now also the CFCs. The weekly stock-up is essentially, in e-commerce, our bread and butter. It's where the majority of customers go for online is to fulfill their full weekly needs. We offer the same prices as in-store, the same promotions, the same range, but now with CFCs, we have extended range. But that is our bread and butter. But as we use the network in terms of delivery in stores, we're also able to serve that weekly in-week shop, the top-up, where I need a few items to get through the week or for next week. And then the third area, which is really growing fast for us, is the immediate need. I'm a mom. It's 5:00 P.M.
I've got to prepare three kids' lunches for tomorrow, and I don't have what I need in the pantry or the refrigerator. They could go to an Uber and a DoorDash, and we offer that service. But we've really invested in Rapid, as Leah mentioned. And the great thing about our approach is it's a unified experience. So you can get that same access to that service on coles.com or the app. It's not a separate app that you need to go to. It's less operating complexity and also lower cost of acquisition. Now, CFCs, I think all of you today at least have the invitation to visit the CFCs. I'd highly encourage you to actually experience it. Physically, it just shows you the scale in the business. But the great thing that's proving out to be true that we always had the hypothesis for was fill rate.
The number one pain point in an online grocery is that I place an order on average for 46 items, and from a store fulfillment, I'm able to fulfill 46 items. Those two missing items that we do our very best to substitute for are still a major pain point, and that's why customers will switch back to store or to somebody else. With the CFC, a differentiator in the market, the perfect order rate, the percent of our orders that are perfectly filled, is more than double our rate from in-store. We think it's world-class and certainly best in class in this market. The CFCs also bring a new version of fresh. We're able to commit on thousands of SKUs a minimum day life.
So you could get your, in this case, a no-added hormone beef porterhouse steak and know that you will have a minimum of seven days life. Same with milk, seven days life. There's, again, thousands of SKUs where we can provide this guarantee to customers that they will have minimum days life. That is resonating with our customer. A third area is expanded range. So we do have a few thousand products in the CFCs that we don't have space for in store. And it's a great way for our partners, as well as with Own Brands, to test, trial, and innovate new products, bring those to market at a very low cost, low working capital for us. And we are going to continue to iterate and innovate on that front.
Now, being part of the Ocado family and having other retailers around the world test and try their new innovations is a benefit for us. And there's a number of innovations that will be coming that we'll be talking about at the CFC. The totes, for example. The totes have the capability of having multiple SKUs. So as we think about extended range, there's potential to further extend the range by carrying multiple SKUs in a single tote. Automated bagging stations. For those operationally, they know how hard it is for a human being to simply put a bag in a tote and do this over and over, and it's redundant. And it's really hard to retain people to do this work. We have coming an automated bagging solution in the near future. The third is doing the picking.
Ocado has an automated robot, the OGRP solution, that sits above the grid, can do the picking that is done in the pick station. And so we have one today in place. You'll have a chance to see that. The frame load creates automated, it creates operating efficiency, but it also reduces material handling. So a lot less lifting by human beings. So it actually drives a great safety benefit for our team members. And then we know more and more customers also want same day, like we talked about. And in the future, we'll be able to deliver same day through the CFC, as well as next day. I'd also emphasize, though, you can place an order up to 8:00 P.M. and have that delivered tomorrow at 5:00 A.M. Now, Leah said stores are very important.
Certainly, that's the case for in-store shopping, but also for activating other e-commerce models. Two areas that we've been focused on and we're going to continue to expand is Click & Collect. It makes up more than 40% of our sales in e-comm, has a very healthy growth rate, and we've been focused on experience through technology and geofencing, but also changing process with team members. The number one pain point for Click & Collect is wait time. I park in the parking lot. I don't get out of the car. We don't offer a service beyond just bringing the product to the boot, but I'm waiting quite a while. We've addressed that significantly this year, reducing our wait time for customers, and we're getting a lot of credit in terms of our NPS, as well as retention. The second area is rapid delivery, serving that immediate need.
Through technology, through process reinvention, we've cut by more than 50% the time it takes to pick, pack, and consolidate the order. From a customer experience standpoint, we've been able to provide a live ETA so that when I go on coles.com, not a separate platform, I place an order for Rapid. I know how much time it's going to take for my specific order to be delivered, and on average today, that's less than one hour. But there's also, again, been a lot of operating efficiencies and cost out in what we've been doing with Rapid. Now, moving from e-comm to more of the general behavior changes with consumers. More and more of us in our daily lives are using digital to solve problems, to research.
In fact, we follow customers, and we can see that today, 23% of those customers that shop in store, within three days before they shopped, they researched online before they bought in store. They'll check and try to be inspired by the new categories and new promotions we have. We're running a great Black Friday event. By the way, today is the last day. If you place an order, you can get some really great movie tickets, just a plug there, but more and more customers are researching before they go online, so we're able to facilitate in-store sales by how we surface information. Finding value, of course, is another key reason why customers, especially today, are coming to us digitally, and we expect that trend to continue into the future. We're offering a number of features to enhance that experience to allow customers to find value.
Weekly specials, for example, we certainly offer the weekly catalog, digital catalog, but we're also now personalizing that list of items that you see versus what I see in terms of order, so there's an element of curation there. Product pages. When you go to a product page and the items that we might recommend with that product, also an area where we're personalizing, and then the shopping list. Today, we have over a million customers that are building a shopping list, and they're personalizing their list, of course, but we also offer the service of suggested lists, and we can personalize those lists for customers so they can build a trolley for online checkout, or they can use that list to shop in store. Now, as Leah said, more and more customers that we see in store have a mobile device, and they're using it.
We have a number of features to help enhance their experience through the app. For example, I talked about shopping lists. The customer can build a specific shopping list for a specific location. We tell them we categorize each of those items into each department and what aisle those items can be found. We've taken the next step in 15 stores here in Victoria where we actually wayfind that list. You may have 20 items. We will tell you where to go throughout the store, how you can save time while you shop in store. You think about the other extensions that can come with that in the future, gamification, and certainly when Amanda talks about Coles 360, opportunities to monetize. The checkout experience is certainly key, and there's an opportunity for us to help enhance and personalize that experience.
We'll have a wallet that comes in play this fiscal year, so we're expecting big things from that. And we're also seeing customers engage with us around things like digital receipts. I want to go to the app to understand my purchase history, whether it's in store or online. And I also want the benefit of not carrying or having to carry a paper invoice with me. Now, we have two areas where we've been innovating from really an online pure play. The first is around specialty pet. And we're looking at these businesses as ways to grow outside of the core. And we can't serve from a supermarket. We offer 94% of the SKUs that we carry on Swaggle. We don't carry in store. So it's a great way for us to grow into what is a high-growth category today.
Secondly, with QuiteLike, it allows foodies or people that just enjoy eating to be inspired by great recipes, test and learn, not have any remaining inventory leftover, and this is our meal kit business. The great thing too about these platforms is speed and low capital intensity. Both of these platforms were brought to market in less than nine months, PowerPoint to hands of customer in less than nine months, and done so with very low cash. It also allows us a platform to test and trial services that we could bring into the core. I'd use one example. With Swaggle, you have the ability as a customer to subscribe to a product, and you do so by getting a coupon or a voucher. You can't do that model in a store, in a store fulfillment type, but you could with a CFC.
It allows us to test on a separate platform before we bring that at scale. Lastly, we're also doing some trials and tests, and there will be a breakout at lunch where you can actually try these innovations: smart trolleys, electric shelf labels, and availability cameras. These are spaces where, again, not all customers are going to use the app when they shop, but they will try the smart shopping cart. It's a test to try. We'll learn. I think one thing that I'd say too about it is we didn't build it ourselves. We worked with a global leading online grocery technology partner called Instacart. And that allows us to quickly test and trial versus making big bets on our own. At lunchtime, I'd encourage you to go through the rotation. You'll get a full walkthrough, demo, and trial.
Thanks for your time, and I'll invite Amanda, our Chief Customer Officer, to the stage. Thank you.
At Coles, we go to great lengths to select Eureka Blueberries that are just the right firmness, color, and size for a delicious flavor that you love. Morning. Only at Coles.
Thank you, Ben, and what a great advert. Hello, everyone. I'm Amanda McVay, our Chief Customer Officer. This is my first time with you today, as I am 17 months into my role at Coles, as well as my time in Australia. I came to Coles with 20 years of experience across two major retailers in the U.S. I spent 10 years with Target Corporation across merchandise buying, category management, and financial planning roles. I then spent 10 years with the large regional grocer Meijer across the central U.S., leading commercial, digital, and customer teams.
At Coles, I look after our customer research and insight, marketing and brand, customer engagement and loyalty, and our retail media network. I'm happy to share updates today specifically on Coles loyalty and retail media. Customers are seeking value more than ever. What they are looking for most is value that is relevant to them and just makes it easy to meet their needs. Customers expect that when they choose to shop a particular retailer, that retailer should know and understand their interests and reward their shopping behavior with relevant offers that save them time from shopping around and help them stick to the budget. Customers are increasing their expectation to be provided offers to be shown content that actually matters to their specific shopping needs. We reach a large number of Australians with the Flybuys program.
We have seen strong growth in the participation and engagement with our Flybuys loyalty program, seeing an over 14% increase in our active members. Customers responded favorably with the introduction of an easier redemption service experience at our checkout. After that introduction of easier redemptions at checkout, we saw more than 2 million customers redeem their Flybuys points for the very first time at Coles. We also brought to market additional opportunities for customers to invest in subscription services that offer even more value to customers. We are in the early stages of our introduction of Coles Plus Saver, which allows customers to pay monthly for a 10% discount of any one shop of choice in store or online every month. We continue to see increasing engagement with our Coles Plus subscription offer, which provides free delivery as well as free access to our Rapid Click & Collect service.
All of our subscription offers provide additional Flybuys points for members as well. When a customer chooses to identify themself with us, we are able to provide greater value they expect that meets their specific needs. Customers demonstrate higher loyalty with Coles in return with their increased spend and visits, and they rate their experience with Coles more positively as a whole. We do have more work to do to continue to enhance our customer offering with a focus on creating more personalized value and show more personalized content to these identified customers by leveraging the insight of that first-party shopping data. This focus will not only generate demand for shopping at Coles, but also creates value for our Coles 360 advertising offering.
The rich customer first-party shopping data that is captured from loyalty and engagement programs is what fuels the value and performance of retail media for the advertising industry. This rich customer shopping behavior data understood through these programs captures transactions across both e-commerce and in-store fulfillment choices of customers. Before I jump into specifics regarding Coles 360, I would like to share what has been happening globally in the retail media space. Why are we seeing a shift in advertising spend to retail media networks? What value is being created? First of all, there is interest pointing towards targeted advertising over traditional mass media due to the strategic effectiveness of precise demand generation. The effectiveness in targeting is amplified when the identifiers of customer demand are based on actual past purchase behavior, which is what retailers know best.
Retail media also provides a wide range of access points presented to the potential customers. From the targeting of ads throughout daily life prior to shopping to access points presented when the customer is in that purchase mindset further down that path to purchase, with the ability to capture that attention so close to the moment of the customer purchase decision. The sophistication of measuring the advertising exposure points, whether that be a singular activity or a strategic combination of activity, correlated to the purchase behavior outcomes and then the objectives, correlating the purchase behavior objectives then, of course, to the purchase behavior outcomes is what makes retail media networks' unique proposition. Because of this unique proposition and the value created for advertisers, that has been why we've seen that high growth globally. Our Australian market is on this retail media journey, but we're in the early stages.
Australian brands are interested, especially those that have seen success in those other markets. It is good to remember that there is not more advertising spend in aggregate, but a shift in where the spend is pointed. According to IAB Australia, 40% of retail media investment is coming from new budgets pointed at retailers. Due to that interest in the targeted and measured advertising investment, these budgets are pointed away from investment that can't provide that first-party data shopping behavior targets and outcome. There are various projections that show our market will follow similar trajectories, with expectations that the share of digital in total ad spend in the Australian market will reach 70%, which is in line with the other developed countries. This is due to that consumer behavior of time spent on digital devices, as well as that efficacy of the measurement of the activity.
But there is work to be done to be ready to create that value for advertisers in retail media. We have to have the advertising inventory available at those key access points I spoke of in front of the consumers, and we have to be able to understand and connect our customer first-party data to those access points. For Coles 360, we are building advertising offerings across that consumer's path to final purchase. The activity offerings create interest by capturing that attention of the intended consumers while they spend time in their daily life outside of shopping, especially on those digital devices. We then have the advertising offerings available when that potential customer shifts into that shopping mindset on our website or our app, and of course, in our in-store aisles. Here are some examples of our in-store advertising assets for Coles 360.
Our Coles Magazine is the number one most read magazine in Australia, and the readers are customers seeking solutions for their meal prep tasks, and advertising can play a role in that relevant content. Our in-store digital screens, our Coles Radio audio offering, as well as the absolute closest moment of that customer decision-making, our at-shelf assets complete the in-store offer. These advertisements serve as great opportunities to reach consumers when they are so close to that moment of purchase. Our digital advertising assets on our website and our app are also opportunities to reach customers in that shopping mindset. This is our digital storefront, and as you heard from Ben, where consumers conduct their research to seek those solutions to solve their shopping needs, deciding ultimately what they will purchase at Coles.
The digital nature of that advertising allows us to further target and measure the effectiveness of these activities. The off-site targeting of advertising is where we are very early in our journey. However, it is where the growth will come as it did in other markets. Prior to shopping, this advertising targets the customers from an audience perspective based on the Coles shopping first-party data, and then it measures the impact on actual purchases. This is where retail media's unique proposition really is powerful, as brands can target and measure effectiveness of their ads across the entire digital advertising universe using Coles' first-party shopping behavior data. There is work to be done to build out this offering, but we are focused on creating and demonstrating that value that we can bring to advertisers.
Importantly, the measurement offering is where the focus has been and will continue to be as we build out the retail media network. We are in our infancy, but we are confident in the setup of our suite of measurement capability. In order to cater to those differing advertiser objectives coupled with all of our different assets, there are different measurement frameworks that are offered. The market lift measurement is focused on that in-store activity on the basis of a test and control store basis. The customer lift measurement compares outcomes of those consumers that are exposed or not exposed to the advertisement, and the final offerings are just getting off the ground, and this is where we are very excited to begin to measure the sales impact of targeted audiences of customers outside of the Coles-owned assets.
We have the focus to enhance our loyalty proposition that leads to more personalized value for our customers. This value created, in turn, unlocks further understanding of our customer shopping behavior, which not only informs how to generate further demand for Coles, but then also can be leveraged to create value for the advertising industry through the unique proposition that only retail media can provide. I will now turn it over to Anita, which I believe it is now morning tea. Thank you.
So we're just going to take a short 15-minute break. Morning tea will be held outside where you were gathered before you came in the room, and we'd ask that you all come back in here by 11:10 A.M. because we're running a tight program today. Thanks, guys.
At Coles, we're on a mission to help inspire Aussie kids to eat better and to get active too. Isn't that right, Jeremy? Sure is. We're proudly sponsoring kids' sports programs like Coles Mini Roos, Coles Little Athletics, and Coles Healthy Kicks to get kids moving and to support local communities all over the country. Coles, proudly supporting kids' community sport.
Good morning. My name's Matt Swindells, and I am the Chief Operations and Supply Chain Officer. I look after our end-to-end operations from manufacturing through automation, through our distribution centers, our transport network, and all of our stores. And I'm going to talk to you today about the third pillar: Deliver Consistently for the Future. You've already heard from Anna, Amanda, and Ben about the shift in customer expectations and our plans to have a Destination for Food and Drink and accelerate our digital business. This brings with it a degree of personalization, a degree of tailored ranging, a degree of multi-shop permissions that adds complexity to the retailer. Deliver Consistently is how we overcome that complexity through simplicity and efficiency to deliver on those customer expectations and meet our overall business needs. It is about excellent execution every day. I'm going to talk through three main parts to that today. The first is our track record of delivery.
We do have a history of execution in this space, and we are not at the start of a journey. I will then touch on the key transformation programs that are either already underway or will be evolved in the future to continue that program, and then finally, I'll talk about how do we see the opportunity to integrate and leverage these assets for further value, so here is our track record. Over the last five years, we have delivered just over AUD 1.25 billion in efficiency improvement within the business. The first program, Smarter Selling, started back in FY 2020, and that covered a series of structural and technology-led initiatives. We delivered service transformation, probably the biggest change in the checkout process for some time. It is a more flexible experience for the customer.
It provides a store 20% more capacity at the checkout and reduces queuing time, and it's more efficient for our team members. We've also leveraged our advanced analytics capability to introduce dynamic markdowns. Our stores are given a markdown value by item, not just by day, but by the hour on the rate of sale. We are able to target the clearance value to that degree of granularity, and we're also able to track the execution to create a feedback loop that then tells us whether that was delivered consistently and executed excellently and what the outcomes were. It's a capability to learn as we go. Importantly, it's not just technology that helped deliver the first billion.
We had a people and process change where we brought the two operational teams together between supply chain and stores under one group, and we moved away from functional budgets to an overall P&L approach, unlocking further value and moving a lot quicker to drive further efficiency. So this program, this methodology is always on, and we are already one year into the next phase of Simplify and Save to Invest, and we have already delivered AUD 238 million of efficiency. The changes we've made in this horizon are broader, and they're more encompassing. We have gone back through our meat operating model, and we have rationalized parts of the range. We've reduced lead time in manufacturing. We've revisited in-store process and applied some of the tools from grocery to fresh. They're still structural changes. They're technology-led. They are absolutely customer-facing and driving improvements in efficiency. We have also digitized our stockrooms.
We've taken advanced analytics and insights, and we've found even more efficient ways to replenish our stores, and we've worked with Ben in the digital team to improve not only the efficiency of the pick through our in-store Rover tool, but also we've automated the call center to take out further cost. This is an all-of-enterprise approach, and we all work together to drive the right customer outcomes with the right cost base. The next billion dollars excludes ADC benefit. That is incremental to that value, and I'll start with our supply chain transformation. Supply chains historically have been manual sheds, large assets, highly labor-intensive, responding to the flow of inventory in variable degrees of control. Technology, automation, and data is transforming supply chains.
The manual processes moving to automation not only give a higher degree of productivity, but also a higher degree of accuracy and, importantly, a higher degree of safety. The way in which the omnichannel customer shops means that no longer do we think about a supply chain from a distribution center to a store. We think about a supply loop. The CFC is now part of that. Customers can shop in-store, they can shop online, and we have to meet all those needs. We also have to control the flow of product more accurately. We have some fantastic replenishment planning systems, but we've also got to make sure that all the product movements are visible and controllable and data-led and optimized, and that now also includes transport. I'll talk to the ADCs. We are now live in Queensland and New South Wales.
Redbank is fully ramped and is delivering against its business case. Kemps Creek is just over 85% ramped. We'll complete early next year, and it is a twin of Redbank. They are identical. If I look at the performance metrics from Kemps, they are as good, if not better, than Redbank, and they should be because you get better as you do more. And we have got absolute confidence that both of those sites will deliver back against the investment case of half the footprint, twice the capacity, two-thirds of labor cost. What we're also seeing, though, is improvements in availability. Having the total range in the state brings it one day closer to the stores in Queensland, and having the total range in one location means that we've got 20% more frequent deliveries for slow-moving items to stores.
Our availability in New South Wales improved 20%-25% in the stores that converted in the same way that Queensland did, and there's further benefit in optimizing for store-specific deliveries, and there's further benefit coming through in the accuracy of those orders that are going out to stores. It is very consistently performing. We are still very pleased and very confident that Witron, our exclusive partner here, are absolutely the right people to work with, and that is why we were so excited to announce our Victorian ADC recently, the third ambient automated distribution center down the eastern seaboard that will not only service Victoria and Tasmania, it also integrates into the existing Western Australia and South Australia networks.
When the Vic ADC in Truganina goes live, every single Coles store in the network nationwide will receive in some part a delivery from an ADC, and those availability and efficiency benefits will also flow through. The CFC you will get to see later on is a fantastic example of how do you partner with the right people to solve possibly the hardest problem in retail. How do you fulfill the ultimate customer experience, extended range, perfect availability, incredible freshness consistently? And Ocado has been doing this not only as a technology partner, but as a retailer in their own right for two decades. The density of the solution here enables us to service a volume of orders with an extended range through a quality of service that no other solution can provide. Yes, the productivity in the facility is more than twice that in stores.
Yes, the last-mile component is also optimized through the software. Ben's already mentioned the fact that we've got more automation coming. When you see the on-grid robotic pick, it is not a PowerPoint presentation with a video. It is a real piece of automation that is enabling item-level picking for consumer, and it integrates into the rest of the solution. The benefit of this partnership is not only what we get today in solving the hardest problem in retail, but it's the future R&D that comes down the pipe. It's the 2,000 engineers in Sofia, Bulgaria, that work for Ocado that are constantly refining the software, that are constantly looking at the advanced analytics to say, "How do we get more capacity on a better shape of cost curve? How do we delight the customer even further?
And importantly, how do we stay strategically ahead of everybody else in the market?" So I'm excited that we are now live, and I'm super pleased that the metrics that Ben's talked to are playing out in terms of customer expectation. But what I'm really interested in is what comes next. And then on transport, we operate with our third-party providers nationally. We are one of Australia's largest transport operators. 20,000 trucks a week go out from distribution centers to stores, and our longest leg from Somerton in VIC goes all the way to Kewdale in Perth and up to Kununurra in the Kimberley is 6,600 km. That is a long way for a product to go. In that operation, fewer fuller trucks makes a material difference. It's a material difference to not only the commercial performance of the business, but also the environment and to safety.
And we've done a great job in the last four or five years of bringing in transport expertise into the business, working closer and more strategically with our third-party partners and growing our Coles Collect business, which is a service that takes our primary transport into DCs and leverages the assets that are already out to stores. 40% of all trucks into a DC now. They come through Coles Collect. they come through leveraging those assets, being more efficient, and they are at a better service level than the rest, and they come through more efficiently. We've now implemented a new transport management system. We partnered with Manhattan, a global software provider, and they said to us, "We know you now know transport. We are upgrading our base product.
We would like to work with you on your designs to be bespoke to go into base. And that is exactly what we've just introduced. This gives us revenue and cost visibility. It onboards suppliers faster, and it also has full tracking and traceability. And for us to continue to grow Coles Collect, drive better availability, and better revenue, this asset is absolutely imperative. But we're also investing in technology and data in our store portfolio. And I talked earlier about the importance of fresh. Historically, our stores were all on central replenishment, a forecast, an order plan, system-generated, shared with the supplier what you would expect in terms of modern retail inventory control. Produce was the outlier. We finished this a year ago. And what I really like about this is we used our own internal advanced analytics team to build and own and create the forecast.
We ran a bake-off with best practice solution providers, and we came out on top. Our depth of knowledge over two decades in replenishment planning has set us up really well to get control of our fresh supply chain. And so we can now control range. We control the operation, both within store and within the distribution centers, and we can give suppliers more certainty. And what does all that mean? It means that the speed at which we can move fresh produce will be faster than ever. And in fresh, speed wins. The freshest product with the most efficient operation. In our stores, you could think of activity in three main buckets: Fill, Fix, Serve. Fill is obvious, stock onto shelf. But fix as a process is maintaining inventory accuracy, is making sure the layout is right, is rotating products and code-checking.
In a business of our scale, it is a large amount of activity. Historically, we have asked our team members to fix across the whole store every day, scan every gap, investigate every low, investigate every high item, make sure you check for all the things that should be rotated, rework the load out the back twice a day. If it goes on shelf, take it out the back. What we know is that 15% of all of that activity resulted in an action that drove no value. We've used advanced analytics to create guided counts and guided fill, and we've digitized the inventory in stores even further. A team member now is directed, based upon data, to the activity in the store, and we can now measure that the effectiveness of that activity has gone from 15% to 70%.
Again, better availability, better working capital, more efficient. Now, the advanced workforce management piece that Leah talked about earlier is a slightly complex problem. Retail organizations tend to engineer process to the nth degree. It's called kind of an efficiency program, but you time and motion, you measure every task. And we are no different. There are 24,000 standards to run a Coles shop in a week, and they are measured to 15-minute increments. They reflect the activity by day in department, and they reflect the sales we project for you to take through that period. You'd think that's quite optimal. The reality is process alone does not generate value. You have to have people. And so this part of our strategy is bringing data and analytics to a depth that we've never done before.
And it takes all those work standards by day, by department, by store, by 15 minutes, and then at a store level, it correlates them against the team. Who works there? What is their capability? And importantly, what hours do they want to do? We're not trying to force the team to an efficiency standard that's a theory. We are bringing for the first time the activity in a store to the desired hours and capability of the store team. It is a fundamental difference. And we've partnered with an organization called Palantir. They are global leaders in data analytics. And we said, "Can you help us? We have a complex time and motion system, and we have a team member rostering and capability system. We want to bring the two together." And they've done it. And our team member churn rate has reduced 25%.
80% of all of our team are now working the desired hours that they have told us are the shifts they want to do. Not only is our efficiency still in place, but our team member engagement is up a quartile, and our performance improves. This is really powerful. Where there are cost pressures, the ability to drive efficiency with the team, not against them, is a differentiator. In the next phase, we will look to integrate customer NPS data to then bring the third dimension in: efficiency of process, engagement of team and capability, and customer outcomes. Remember, this is store-day-team-member task level. So we've got the ability now to have a way of working efficiently for the right outcomes. The next two have been socialized quite broadly: service transformation. I think we probably have not spoken enough about the customer experience.
When I go to Elsternwick, which is a very busy Melbourne trading shop, and I talk to the service manager, she will tell me, "Had you not transformed this front end, we do not cope on weekends." The 20% additional throughput we now have is a lifesaver, not only for the service team, but for the priority one calls that don't come through that take other people off tasks that need to be done, and the team members, they really appreciate the ability to stay focused and work in the environment, and the customers have ultimate flexibility. I think this has been an incredible success, but you'll see out in the breakout rooms earlier, we're not stopping there. We're working with Ben and the digital team onto what's the next generation of efficient, frictionless, assisted checkout. How do we keep that momentum going?
It's a key part of the shopping experience and a key part of our operation. And the final part is loss. Loss has not gone away as a problem, although we have worked really hard together to try and solve it to the extent that we can. And we've made a big difference. The technology we've rolled out in Smart Gates, in Skip Scan, in Bottom of Trolley, in the stores we've deployed, it has met our business case returns and continues to provide a level of support for the team through, frankly, some difficult customer interactions. It's done a great job. The numbers of trolley push-outs in our store are down 60% where we've implemented that technology. And the team member feels safer, and arguably our customers feel safe in that environment. But again, out in the breakout rooms, you will see we're working on the next generation.
We've got weighted shelves that can detect behavior that is more aligned to someone who may not pay on the way out, and we've got virtual curtains that can also intercept and interact with the consumer if we think that they need a bit of assistance. We have to keep the technology ahead of the problem. We have to keep our team members working in a safe environment, and we have to keep making sure that not only is loss a problem in the P&L, it's a problem in availability for other consumers, so that's quite an extensive set of assets and technology investments we've deployed. Here's the part that we are seeing, though, and this is the interesting part.
While all of those components have delivered against their standalone business cases and the team have done a great job of implementing them on time, on budget, and within spec, we're starting to see other benefits. And I'll give you a couple of examples. When the ADC went live in Queensland and the more accurate deliveries improved availability on a higher frequency closer to the consumer, we also started to deliver our friendly pallets that made replenishment in the store easier and reinforced that availability and efficiency beyond the business case. But what we didn't think we would see is that when the FSI team, the ones that measure the fixed part of the store operation, how much activity is going away, they came to me one day and said, "Queensland is now 20% lower in fix than before the ADC." Have you checked the data? We've checked the data.
Because those components of more frequent, more accurate, more fulfilled deliveries are going to store, the store process is better, and the inventory drift is lower, and the need for that fixed component is reduced. I went to a store in New South Wales a few weeks ago, and it had had the conversion to Kemps Creek, ADC deliveries. And I asked the store manager, "Adam, how are your availability gaps?" And he gave me a number that was too low. So let's go and walk down the health and beauty aisle, slow-moving inventory, highly promoted, always difficult. It looked like a new store. And he was right. They were his numbers. But what I didn't expect is he then said, "We've also migrated our online home delivery to the CFC.
And not only is my availability best from the ADC, that online pick now does not disrupt availability through the day. And my weekend trade is no longer congested, and my customer NPS is lifted. And actually, we're growing sales in some of these areas." The efficiency and the simplicity of the process is multiplying through these assets. These structural solutions are creating a virtual play. And so we see the next era of being one where we take data, and we take this technology, and we work with our global best practice partners that we have chosen to work with, and we think about the end-to-end operation to, over time, continuously refine and improve with full visibility and control how we are meeting the cost-to-serve pressures of the new customer. That personalized, tailored, digital omnichannel shopper will be serviced through a data-driven, technology-led, digitized omnichannel operation. I'll now hand over to Michael to go through Liquor.
Whatever the reason, we'll bring the dreams. Cheers. Liquorland.
Good morning. I'm Michael Courtney. I've now been at Coles for just over five years, just over nine years, and I've just completed my first year as the Chief Executive of Coles Liquor, and I'm really excited to be here today to talk to some of the opportunities that exist within Liquor. Because while it's true that we're currently navigating a tough market from a growth perspective, heavily influenced by some cyclical factors, I'm a firm believer that there is significant opportunity for us to be improving our customer offer and improving our competitive position within the market over the short, medium, and long term. Before I get into our strategy, I'll start to talk about some market context and what is influencing growth in the market currently.
First of all, from the two charts that you see on this page, you can see that structurally, the Liquor market, in terms of retail, has enjoyed very strong growth over the long term, with the compound annual growth rate being 7% over the 40-year history of the ABS dataset. But growth is currently constrained. FY 2024 was the lowest growth year in over 30 years, and that's being heavily influenced by two key factors. So firstly, cost of living is driving customers to be more choiceful around their spend, and that is weighing on growth within Liquor. The second important factor is that if you look at spending on alcohol as a proportion of total consumer expenditure over time, that ratio has remained elevated since COVID. You can see on the charts that COVID led to a big increase in spending.
What we've seen over FY 2023 and FY 2024 is that ratio is reverting to its long-term average, which has been relatively stable over the long term, but that mean reversion is causing a short-term headwind to growth. That has continued into FY 2025. You can see that from the September release of ABS data that speaks to negative year-over-year growth for the first quarter of FY 2025. So in a period where growth remains challenging, where cost inflation remains high, there is downward pressure on margins. But there are reasons to believe that the market will improve from its current low-growth position.
While it's easy for me to talk about a compound annual growth rate over the last 40 years, importantly, if you look over a shorter period of history and if you look over five years pre-COVID to now, what you will see is that if you take the growth from first quarter FY 2025 and compare it to first quarter FY 2020, which is just prior to COVID, the compound annual growth rate over that five-year period is in line with the long-term average of 7%. So what that speaks to is healthy continued underlying growth in the market over a period of time. So we anticipate that market growth will improve as you see cost-of-living pressures abate and as alcohol consumption as a proportion of total consumer expenditure stabilizes. So with that in mind, I'll now talk to some evolving customer trends. I've just spoken to the economic headwinds.
Leah earlier today spoke about, for customers, value is paramount at the moment, so in response to a more challenging growth environment, we have focused on our entry price points. We focused on our exclusive liquor brands, which offer fantastic quality at tremendous value, and importantly, we've also focused on premium price points where we as a business have historically under-indexed, but we're seeing customers trading from some out-of-home occasions to in-home consumption where they are willing to purchase at a premium price point. We've also, over the last year, been able to offer value beyond price through improving our loyalty offer, and the performance of our loyalty program customers has been far ahead of our non-loyalty program customers.
So when you combine this, what this means is that despite FY 2024 being a challenging year, we continued to perform either in line or ahead of the market, depending on which market dataset you want to look at. If I move on to the structural trends, so spend per capita is one that has been relatively stable over the last few decades. When you combine that with the fact that there continues to be growth in the drinking-age population, this supports the outlook for continued growth in the industry over the medium and long term. Whilst it's true that some customers are choosing to drink less, we have continued to see the industry innovate around this to be able to bring products to market, to continue to engage with customers. And there is a trend for those customers who drink less that they drink better, which is supportive of growth.
Customers are also, post-COVID, showing an increased propensity to drink different, so to drink across more categories, which gives us the opportunity to engage them in more occasions moving forward. In terms of the second structural trend on digital engagement, Amanda and Ben both spoke to the importance of personalization, and that's going to be key to the next phase of growth within Liquor, as is digital adoption, which continues to increase, and from the perspective of Liquor, I think this is a huge opportunity to improve discovery for customers and give them more confidence in different purchasing occasions, so we're moving with the group in terms of the key digital trends, but importantly, we're going to leverage group assets as we do it, and the recently opened CFCs is a great example of how we've been able to improve our online offer through being part of that solution.
The last trend in terms of convenience, again, Leah touched on our preferences for stores that are co-located next to supermarkets because it's where we see the greatest returns, and it's where our network will focus on going forward, but convenience is not just about the location of your stores. In an omnichannel world, if you want to win with customers over the long term, you're going to need to have a superior fulfillment experience, and we aim to have the leading fulfillment experience within the liquor market. So with these evolving customer trends in mind, I'll now talk to our strategy, and as you can see from this slide, our strategy is aligned to the three group strategic pillars, with a particular focus on the nine initiatives that you can see on this page, and I'll now talk to those in more detail.
So firstly, in terms of Destination for Food and Drink , this is led by our need to evolve our customer value proposition. In September, we announced the intention to unify our banners under the Liquorland brand. We think that this is going to enhance our customer offer. We think it's going to simplify our go-to-market strategy. It's going to support better execution, and it's going to better allow us to leverage the strength of the Liquorland brand in the market. Following on from this, we've got a focus on right range in the right locations. And moving to a single banner is a great unlocker of this. Historically, the range that we serve in our stores has been heavily dictated by the sign that sits above the store, more so than it has been about the products that customers in a given location want to buy.
So we think that by making the master range more accessible to all of our stores so that our stores can draw down on the stock that is of most relevance to their customers, that we're going to be able to offer greater choice and value in more of our locations. And lastly, in terms of an integrated food and drink solution, we see a huge opportunity over the long term to leverage the ecosystem of Coles to give a seamless fulfillment experience in terms of food and drink. And this is something that we're working closely with our counterparts in digital and in the food space to be able to deliver. In terms of the Accelerated by Digital pillar, the first initiative in terms of personalization and loyalty remains key for us.
As I've already spoken to, throughout FY 2024, we had very strong performance in terms of our loyalty customers. In FY 2025, we're going to simplify that experience by converging to one loyalty program within Coles Liquor, and personalization is something that we commenced with in the second half of FY 2024 and will continue to build on throughout FY 2025 and beyond. In terms of retail media, we're on the journey with Coles 360. We've embedded that into our offer throughout FY 2024, and that remains a strong opportunity for income growth in FY 2025 and beyond, and we'll continue to invest behind that. In terms of accelerating omnichannel development, you saw Ben refer to the five building blocks of a great digital experience, and they're the same five building blocks that we're focused on within Coles Liquor.
The change to our approach in digital over the last 12 months has been that historically, Liquor has focused on building digital assets for Coles Liquor, whereas now our primary focus is leveraging group assets first and only spending on bespoke assets where absolutely needed. This should increase our speed to market and lower our cost of delivery over time to give us greater impact with customers. In terms of our third pillar, deliver consistently for the future, we want to grow and improve our network. FY 2024, we saw the acquisition of a network down in Tasmania, which is a great example of the opportunities that still exist for us in the market, and we've continued to renew our stores across the course of the last year. What we're focused on moving forward, first of all, is capitalizing on small box opportunities, but we want to improve our returns.
And how we're doing this is we're refreshing the blueprint to make sure that we can achieve better sales density out of smaller boxes at the same time as lowering our cost to build, which when you combine those will improve our returns. In terms of Simplify and Save to Invest, we continue to deliver cost savings as part of the group program, and this gives us the opportunity to keep investing in the growth drivers of our business. And then lastly, in terms of modernizing core systems, this is a huge opportunity within Coles Liquor. In each of the key functions of our business, we are highly, highly manual currently. This is true of replenishment. This is true of price and promotions. This is true of how we do our ranging in stores.
There is a huge opportunity moving forward to modernize the tools that we have to increase our efficiency and our effectiveness. We're already on this journey with the rollout of automated replenishment already underway in FY 2025. As I turn to the final slide to look at our strategy outcomes to date, FY 2024 in many ways was a transitional year for the Coles Liquor business in my first year of leadership and as the team looked to adopt the new trends of customers in a more challenging growth environment. What this slide shows is that despite the challenges in the market, we continued to make progress on our three strategic pillars. While we are in a tough market currently, market conditions will improve.
In the meantime, we're focused on making sure that we're taking the opportunity to accelerate our strategy in FY 2025 to ensure that we continue to improve our customer offer and deliver on our ambition to win market share over the short, medium, and long term. Thank you for your time. I'll now pass to Charlie.
At Coles, we've spent years forming strong relationships with experienced cattle farmers who help us select juicy, great-tasting Coles brand fresh Aussie beef. We go to great lengths for quality.
Great. Thank you, Michael. And good morning, everyone. It's great to be here, and I look forward to taking you through our store network strategy and the important role it plays in delivering our 3D Strategy, but also bring together what our strategy means from a financial perspective and how I look and how we look at financial performance over the next few years. So why don't we start with the store network and move from there? It goes without saying that our store network is vital to delivering our 3D Strategy. While our e-commerce business has grown materially over the last five years, and you heard Ben talk about this earlier, Leah did mention that we still expect the majority of our sales through our store network. And that's with our customers being delighted by our CFC offering.
Our store network underpins our e-commerce offering, whether it's in store or whether it's very much the physical shopping by customers in stores. Click & Collect will still be fulfilled out of stores. It supports that particular mission, but also a number of the home delivery aspects as well. So just to recap, our store network is critical to 3D. Firstly, we want our property team to actually deliver stores that actually are destinations for the future, that customers want to shop in, that optimize space, that actually ensure that it delivers on the communities in which we actually want to serve. Secondly, we have digital sales that originate from stores. The physical and digital sale becomes even more blurred when you are in stores.
As you see, we are investing in the digitization of our stores, but also how it supports our home delivery and Click & Collect from our store network. Finally, and delivered consistently, our customers and team members want a consistent experience in store. This can only be achieved by continuing to renew our store network, innovate within our existing network, and really have a clear blueprint for what those stores look like going forward. Our property portfolio is one of our greatest assets that we have. We have an extensive national, and you heard Leah talk about our national footprint of supermarkets across Australia as well, together with our Liquor footprint. We have 857 supermarkets, which includes 27 Coles Locals.
Coles Locals play a really important part in our network because they can provide infill stores in highly dense populated areas where they actually serve those communities, including perhaps more of the affluent locations. We have 991 Liquor stores, and you heard Michael talk about the importance of the store network and the renewal of their store network within Liquor. A clear plank of our strategy is to actually target space growth in excess of 1.5% per annum, which is underpinned by population growth. Our new stores have consistently delivered strong returns. We love investing in new stores. They are high returning, and they support the in-store customer mission of shopping, but also our digital experience.
We actually have a large property team who use data and analytics and AI to actually forecast population trends, demographic changes in order to provide us with the confidence around where to invest and what the stores need to deliver in the particular locations for long-term growth. When it comes to new space, our focus is on growth corridors, greenfield sites, but also infill stores in more densely populated areas of Metro Melbourne, Metro Sydney, Brisbane, and where we see a network gap, and the Coles Local format that I spoke about earlier plays an important role in actually dealing with space constraints, but also where the demographics of that area actually support that format. We're excited about the growth opportunities in the catchments, which actually are served by the CFCs. As we have seen, the CFCs have reduced the congestion within those stores, really picked up the shopping experience.
Our customers love those stores at the moment. Matt spoke about the congestion in the afternoon, which has been sort of taken away as those stores are now supported by the CFCs. It's a better customer shopping experience, and not only that, the optionality, what it has done is opened up more and more slots for in-store fulfilled digital orders, like Click & Collect, like same-day and immediate offers. These were previously restricted in some of those most busy and congested stores. We're taking a more innovative approach to new store development to offset the rising costs in construction without compromising what the store outcomes are. We've actually dedicated a lot of time over the last 12 months around value engineering, redesigning the blueprint to not only take costs, get bigger bang for our buck from where we are deciding to invest, but also improve that customer experience.
All of this is all about how do we actually make the process simpler, faster, increase the end-to-end process for our team, enabling more store openings for our customers sooner. In terms of store renewals, we're focused on optimizing existing fleet of 850+ supermarkets. Similar to new stores, our renewals generally deliver an improved customer experience, leading to higher sales, higher NPS, so improvements in NPS and the customer experience, but also attractive returns on capital. In addition, our renewal and maintenance programs are designed to ensure that we maintain our critical infrastructure, so we do invest in the efficiency and productivity improvements as well as the effectiveness of our store operations. Other key areas, sorry, that are a focus of ours is actually around how do we renew the right stores at the right time, right?
And certainly with a higher frequency, optimizing the level of investments. And this depends on the age profile of the stores and ensuring that we have the right look and feel and services that our customers want in those stores. Over the last five years, we've actually opened 70 new stores across our network. We've actually renewed close to 300. So 70 new stores, 300 renewed stores. Importantly, we've touched a lot more than this, though, in terms of general maintenance and efficiencies. So for example, our renewal program, we've invested in upgrading our refrigeration, our transcritical, cool rooms, HVACs, electrical systems. So in the last three years, over 175 stores have actually received, in addition to our renewed stores, significant critical infrastructure improvement.
When you actually look at the number of stores that we generally touch, you think about on average 50-plus stores, 60 stores a year from a renewal perspective, 14 new stores on average. There's 15 to 20 stores a year where we're actually making significant investments and changes to the critical infrastructure. We're actually touching over 100 stores a year or close to 100 stores a year quite significantly. As we look forward, generally speaking, we'll look to renew a large or core trader, some of those very large traders that we see every five to seven years, with the balance more in that 10 to 15-year timeframe. What a renewal entails, they're not all the same.
Renewals are going to be very dependent on the age profile of the stores, the experience that we want to deliver for the customers in the store, but also the physical attributes of that particular store and location. Our focus is that we have the right blueprint that seeks to maximize the outcomes of the renewals while maintaining the cost. We know from our customer feedback that the look and feel of the store is the greatest driver of positive customer sentiment, but also the disruption. So in a renewal, if we can minimize the disruption to a customer over a period of time, we know that delivers a higher NPS and a better customer experience. And that's what we've been doing in value engineering. It's not all about cost. It's about process. It's about time. It's about delivering an efficient and effective renewal for our customers.
Growing NPS leads to better sales and obviously our better returns. In the past, we've sort of perhaps taken a bit of a standardized or peanut butter approach to renewals. Going forward, it's going to be smarter. We're going to work smarter and make our investment dollars actually go further. Getting us right provides us the bandwidth of doing more renewals for at least the same amount of money, if not less. So in summary, our ambition is to open more stores through a simpler and cost-effective store design that takes. So if I can then move on to our financial framework, and this is where I really want to touch on how our strategy comes together from a financial perspective, but also what are our financial priorities.
So as Leah mentioned earlier in the day, our vision is to become the most trusted retailer in Australia and grow long-term shareholder value. In order to do this, our financial priorities are clear. Firstly, we want to deliver top-line growth supported by those macro trends that we spoke about, including delivering on our customer proposition that Anna touched on earlier with Amanda and Ben. Secondly, our profitability is underpinned through initiatives that look at range and space, productivity improvements, efficiency programs, and new earnings streams. And finally, we'll look at delivering shareholder returns underpinned by strong cash flow conversion and also a disciplined capital allocation. You can see from the slide here, and I'll touch on each one of these in the next few slides, but how we think about our earnings pathway over the next few years. So let's start with top-line growth.
As we said in the past, Australia has one of the highest forecast population growth rates of any developed market, and you can see on the chart here, this underpins the long-term growth of the sector. We're also seeing a shift back to in-home consumption. What you see in the second chart is that the food services market share remains above pre-COVID levels, but we're starting to see early signs of a reversion back to in-home consumption, in-home dining and entertaining, and this is driven primarily by the cost of living pressures that customers experience today. In addition to these two tailwinds, through the effective delivery of our 3D Strategy, we aim to grow at or above market.
Hopefully, you had a sense today from all the presentations that my fellow ELT members have delivered that we're trying to do this from a strategic point of view, whether it be focusing on improvements in the customer experience, focusing on availability, focusing on the execution of the value campaigns, the innovation through our exclusive brands. There are many ways that we as Coles differentiate ourselves in the marketplace. In addition to growing the top line, we intend to invest in value and increase profitability supported by a range of productivity and efficiency initiatives. Matt spoke about a lot of these earlier. We have a history of delivering growth and a history of delivering solid returns.
As you can see from the slide here, we're aiming to do this through optimizing our range and space, continuing to improve our loss rate, drive continued improvement availability, realizing the full benefits of the investments that we have made in the ADCs and the CFCs, and certainly deliver on our cost savings in our Simplify and Save to Invest program. From a gross margin rate perspective, we're also seeing the tailwinds of an improvement in the GM rate because of the decline in tobacco sales, which are obviously at a lower margin. And Amanda spoke about the growth opportunity that we see in Coles 360. In FY 2026, the major project implementation costs relating to the ADCs and CFCs, they all go away. So this year, we talked about AUD 130 million of implementation costs in FY 2025. They go away going forward.
There's significant benefits and earnings in that year that we don't expect. In addition, we don't expect any notable implementation costs from the Victorian ADC until FY 2028. As we have flagged, we're continuing to reinvest in value for our customers at the same time we feel we have the right building blocks in place to deliver strong returns for shareholders. Finally, as you've heard us say before, in the past, we've actually got a very disciplined approach to capital allocation. At its core is that we want to maintain a solid investment-grade balance sheet, generating sustainable operating cash flow and converting 100% of our earnings and over 100% of our earnings into cash. We'll use our cash flow to maintain our business through essential and maintenance CapEx and pay down our debt obligations.
The excess cash is then used to create value through capital investment and growth initiatives where we choose to invest in some of the transformational areas that we have already spoken about historically. These initiatives provide great returns and are an attractive use of our balance sheet capacity. We also know that dividend is really important to our shareholders, and it's a key differentiator for Coles as an investment proposition. As such, excess cash is also used to pay dividend to our shareholders in line with our dividend payout ratio, which we have stated to 80%-90%, which we have consistently delivered on since the merger. And if we have surplus capital at that point in time, we'll continue to look at optimal ways of returning this to shareholders.
But rather than just talk about the principles here, I think the best way to look at this approach is actually on our track record in terms of our financials, our return on capital, and where we have been from a dividend perspective. In terms of ROC or return on capital, you can see we have delivered a consistent growth over the last five years. And this has been done at the same time that we have invested AUD 5.7 billion in CapEx. So it's a really strong outcome relative to our CapEx investments. We've also seen solid growth in group sales, growth in EBIT, and our annual dividend at the same time has resulted in a consistent dividend yield of over 4%. So to summarize and bring this all together, we actually want to be the most trusted retailer in Australia and grow long-term shareholder value. That's our vision.
Through the macro trends that we are seeing, in addition to the operating levers that we have in the business that I've discussed earlier and my fellow ELT members have talked about, I believe that we can grow our top line, grow our profits, deliver returns on our investments that we're making, and deliver long-term shareholder value. And with that, thank you. I'll ask my fellow ELT members to join us on stage. But we're going to play a short little video of our CFC facility that you'll get to see this afternoon.
Welcome to one of our new Customer Fulfilment Centres , or CFCs. Our Sydney and Melbourne sites have a footprint of more than 87,000 square meters each and can hold 3 million units of stock while having the ability to process more than 10,000 customer orders per day when running at full capacity.
These CFCs use cutting-edge technology, utilizing artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and automation to transform the way Coles online orders are picked, packed, and delivered. The state-of-the-art sites feature a centralized hub known as the Hive, where a fleet of more than 700 bots can fulfill a customer order containing 50 items in just five minutes. An artificial intelligence air traffic control system oversees the bots as they move around giant 3D grids, transporting containers of grocery items to be packed and delivered by Coles team members. The facilities each have an on-site bakery, which will bake to order twice a day, as well as a fresh produce area where produce is cut and packaged to order, leading to less wastage.
The CFCs will employ more than 1,000 team members each, including drivers and fulfillment roles that will use high-tech packing equipment, and there will be a fleet of home delivery vans specially designed with dual compartments to ensure fresher products while reducing emissions and a side door to make it easier and safer for delivery drivers to unload. Delivery times will also be improved, with the Ocado's technology giving Coles the ability to calculate the most efficient routes based on real-time conditions and tonnage of the home delivery vans. The CFCs signal a major step change in our online grocery deliveries that will offer our customers greater choice, better availability, improved freshness, and more flexible delivery options for our Greater Melbourne and Sydney customers.
Great. Well, I hope everyone's enjoyed the presentation so far. We have got a lot of questions through from our Slido today.
So we may run out of time to answer all of them, but our ELT members will be circulating during the lunch break, so you can ask any additional questions that we don't get through today at that point in time. And obviously, you can always reach out to the IR team, and we'll follow up any additional answers as well. So maybe if we kick off, maybe one for you, Leah, to start with. I didn't see a strategy scorecard in your presentation. Are you able to give us a sense of how you'll measure success?
Oh, thanks for the question. Yes, we haven't provided one this time around. As you would expect, when we work on our five-year strategic planning process that we do with the board each year, we focus on a key set of financial metrics, which cover off sales, EBIT, and ROC.
Then, in addition to that, we have a set of more strategic measures that we look at as well. Many of them are aligned to the KPIs that are in the scorecards for the individuals sitting on stage right now. They would cover things like customer NPS, market share, as well as particular milestones associated with many of the initiatives we've discussed today.
Anna maybe one for you. Can you please give more clarity about the proportion of SKUs on EDLP? Will there be less SKUs on promotion? How does Coles limit the impact on sales?
Yeah, of course. I think it's worth noting that all of our Own Brand SKUs are already on EDLP, and we have quite a significant proportion of our business that is on EDLP. We will look to do this in the categories that matter most to customers and where it's more appropriate.
So you won't see big EDLP, as you would expect, in impulse categories because that's not how we're going to win. It'll be around the categories that matter most to build trust for customers, and we'll continue to do that. And we will look to grow the share. In terms of promotions, it's about putting promotions where it matters most to customers and making them meaningful. So in terms of, you may see an absolute reduction in tickets, but in terms of how we optimize that and really cut through for customers to make sure that we've got promotions on the products that matter most to drive both incrementality but also value and delight for customers is where we're going to focus.
Maybe just a follow-up one for you, Anna. Is Coles looking to rationalize total SKU count? If so, what's the rationale for that, and how much will be cut?
Yes, we are. And it will be double-digit rationalization. And even if I went hard year after year for two years on the trot and did double-digit rationalization, I would still have more range than I had in 2019. So the context behind that would be this is about removing duplication but adding choice. To give you an example, we have 13 basic table salts. We don't need those. We might go to five, and we might add three different types of salt in to give customers more choice. Take one of our leading hair care brands. We have six different pack sizes ranging from 80 ml to 1.1 litre. Now, that drives huge complexity. We might not need six.
We might have three, and we'll work with that leading manufacturer to say, "What's the right architecture, and how do we pull that through in the same space so that we improve availability, we improve efficiency end-to-end?" And actually, the most important bit is, how do we make it easier for customers? Customers tell us when we've got too much range and lots of duplication, it's incredibly hard. So we will be simplifying overall, but we're reinvesting in the categories and the space that makes the most amount of difference to customers. So yes, net reduction, but there'll be reinvestment in categories and removal of duplication that we think we can add more choice to customers and be very data-driven, thoughtful, and purposeful around how we do that to make sure it's tailored to the right categories.
Along the same lines, but maybe one for you, Amanda, will Coles explore member pricing for Flybuys shoppers?
Thank you for the question. So about 18 months ago, we did trial member pricing. And what we are doing is really focusing on personalized value. What we're finding is that customers are most interested in participating and engaging with our programs when they receive relevant offers that are personalized to their specific shopping behavior. So that is where we're focused with our loyalty and customer engagement is to that personalized value relevant based on that purchase behavior data I spoke to earlier.
One more for you, Anna. In 2014, Coles had 30% of customers said 30% of customers bought no fresh. Is that still the case? Has it fallen, or where is it now?
2014 is obviously a long time ago, and things I'm pleased to say have moved on.
I think it's, without giving specifics, we still have a big proportion of customers that don't do their full fresh shop or any fresh shop with us. So we are making good progress over that. But actually, what we're really pleased about and focused on is making sure we're seeing improvements in quality satisfaction, in our range satisfaction, our overall offer. And actually, if we believe we focus on the stuff that really matters to customers by default, that will come through. And we think there is significant headroom for us in fresh over the coming kind of decades, we think, to really drive significant growth for customers. So we're focused on the things that matter to customers most. And with that, we hope penetration and share will grow.
Great. Matt, taking on more sourcing capability, for example, meat or milk, maybe increases reliability, but does it dilute returns and increase risk by being a producer?
Look, I think those moves are very small in the relative scale of our overall business. So I don't think that is an indication of us now expanding our ambition and capability. And in both instances, I think there were very unique circumstances whereby we were looking to make sure that our customers' needs were still being met and our operations could continue. So in short answer, no, I don't think so.
The only build I'd give to that, as we look to do longer-term partnerships with people, we'll look to partner upstream. That doesn't mean that we will manage those assets. So take MAP in WA. We have done a long-term partnership on the back of that.
They've been able to invest AUD 35 million into the facility. It gives us security. It gives them security. And actually, what that really does is enables us to transform the customer office. So they're the kind of partnerships we'll be looking to do, not necessarily using our capital invest, but through long-term partnerships, enabling other people to have the confidence to invest in capital further up the supply chain, which differentiates for both of us and gives security. And for those of you who don't know what MAP is, they do our meat processing for us in WA.
And they do a great job.
They are very good .
And a great example of our preference, which is to contract with great partners on that front versus investing our own capital.
But to put into context what Matt spoke about, the RROA or the meat processing facility was an investment about 10 years ago. The Chef Fresh facility was actually a distressed asset that we actually acquired in that regard. And then I think the third aspect from the milk facility, clearly, that was an asset that Saputo was selling. And again, from a security supply perspective, we thought that was an important element of why that was an important part of why we made that investment.
Speaking about investments, Charlie, what are Coles' plans around the smaller format local stores? This was a bigger plan. It appeared to be a bigger plan previously, but seems to have less focus now.
Oh, we're absolutely focused on the Coles Local formats, Anita. Yeah, I think they have a role to play. As I said in my presentation, yeah, we'll look at it as they can play a really good role in an infill capacity where we have a network gap in some of the more highly densely populated areas, or where the demographics of an area really support that sort of Coles Local format and the local customers. So that's very much they're a very important part of our portfolio, and we will be looking at rolling out more of the Coles Local smaller formats going forward. But it really is going to depend. It's for the right store, for the right location, and the right size.
While you're on a roll, Charlie, based on the number of renewals that you've reported over the last few years, it looks like you're running behind in your renewal program. Should we expect to see a step up in renewal CapEx going forward?
Great question, Anita. And thank you for that. Look, we love doing renewals, as I said. Why renewals are great? They deliver a fantastic customer experience. They do deliver an uplift in sales, and they're one of our higher returning investments. So we love doing renewals. In fact, what we have done over the, if you look at the last five years, we have stepped up our renewal spend. It's almost doubled over that five-year period. As I said earlier, we've done 300 of those, right? So on average, about 60 a year. But we've also opened new stores, about on average, 14 or so a year. But we touch 15-20 stores every year meaningfully from our infrastructure perspective. And some of those are customer-facing elements, like the refrigeration, right?
The doors, replacing some of that sort of key infrastructure, which is really important in terms of the performance of the stores, both from an efficiency, effectiveness, and cost perspective. So we are actually touching 90-100 stores a year in a very, very meaningful way, whether it is a new store, whether it is a renewal, or whether it is that critical infrastructure. So look, what we are focused on, though, is we do acknowledge the rising cost of construction, which has meant we've had to look at how do we value engineer our store blueprints a little differently. And really, it is about doing more with the same amount of money that we do have. So we are spending a fair bit in renewals, and you can see that on our capital split.
But you do need to look at also the efficiency and maintenance CapEx lines, which actually contain an element of renewals, as I spoke of earlier. So the value engineering element is about reducing costs, trying to look at the time to minimize disruption to customers, but also how do we improve that customer experience.
Would it be worth, Anna, maybe giving you a couple of examples on that? Anna's team is actually the team that does all our renewals for us. And this has been a big focus for us over the last 12 months working on this value engineering program. So that capital that we have got allocated, we can actually do more stores with it.
Yeah, I want to do more stores with more customer-facing activity and putting innovation and new ranges into stores that make a meaningful difference for customers.
So actually, we are putting a significant amount of innovation through fresh, through deli, through bakery, and really focusing alongside that, how do we do more on our macro space and our tailoring in store so a store feels very different from a customer perspective. And actually, we have to do more of those, and we have to find a way to make sure we're spending more or making more of an impact. So the team have been value engineering. And actually, what we've also found is that we have to reduce the disruptions to stores. So to give you a sense of what we are doing, even in the deli, historically, we'd have closed the deli predominantly for kind of anywhere between kind of a week to three weeks, on average, maybe 10 days.
We've actually reduced the cost by nearly 10% of what it was costing us to do that, and we can do that turnaround in the deli now in 24 hours, so we close overnight. We open the next day, and actually, it's a meaningful step change, so our aspiration is to do more with the same amount of capital coming up, and we feel that actually we've made some really good inroads this year to do that, so you should see an acceleration in that space, but not on the capital spend, but more impact to customers as we do them as well and less disruption.
Leah, Coles has invested in big projects which are on track to deliver results. However, what does Coles see as its competitive advantage in the market?
It's a good question. So, in my introductory remarks, you would have heard me talk about a few of these. So, I think the first big one for us as a team is focusing on execution. So, the consistency of the offer is just the best of any of the retailers in the market. And one of the big areas you've obviously heard us talk about a lot on that space is availability. We know that an enormous pain point for customers is when you come in with a list of products and you can't actually get everything that you've got on that list. And so, the ability to have that reliability of when a customer comes in, we do have everything there that we believe can be a real point of difference for us in this market. The other one you heard me talk about was Own Brand.
We know customers already see that as a point of competitive advantage for us. We have a very wide range that spans a wide range of tiers, and as Anna really showed in her presentation today, we have built out real strength in a number of brands now in particular areas like Cub baby, and their PerForm range, which is higher protein products and things like that. So that's another big one for us, and then the third one I would call out is probably just around our demonstrated ability to drive efficiency and the capacity that that then gives us to put money back into the investments that we have for customers.
If you look at the partners that we partner with, the likes of Witron, they are world leaders in their area, and they are helping us to actually deliver some of these big investments really reliably and to business case on time and to scope. That means the consistency then that we have to be able to take the returns that we're expecting from those business cases and invest them back into the business or return it back to shareholders. That's an important part of what we would consider to be a point of difference in our culture, which is that ability to drive that cost out, which is a core part of getting that Flywheel going.
A couple of things we talked about in the presentation that I would say are not competitive advantages today but are on our radar of areas that we wanted to develop into. One is the integration of liquor and food together and how we can do that going forward. And CFCs, as we've said, has been a good step in that direction, but we're not there yet. And then the other one I'd say is fresh quality. So we certainly have competitors in the market that, because of their positioning over many decades, would have an edge on us in this space at the moment. But by using technology, data, processes, great partners in terms of the suppliers that we're using, that's an area that we are pushing towards to actually create that as a real point of difference that we can have.
And hopefully, some of you have tried things like the Eureka Blueberries that you had on your desk today. They're a great example of where having genetics in the product, which is exclusive to Coles, it's really giving you something which is quite unique. So please go ahead and try them if you haven't. The Grandma's Heirlooms tomatoes are another great example where we're using genetics that we have exclusivity on, which really do create a point of difference. So that leaning into that fresh quality and lifting that, I've created a massive tray of Eureka Blueberries, but. You mentioned delicious food just before lunch. Sorry, sorry. But that's the other area. So I'd say, just to summarize that, we think execution, Own Brand, and our cost culture are the ones that we've got at the moment.
And then driving forward from here, the integration with liquor and what we can do on fresh qua lity.
Great. Speaking of liquor, maybe one for you, Michael. What are the cost savings that you see coming from consolidating your three brands?
So if we move to consolidating the three brands, there are some above-store savings that are available because naturally, we have people working to support each of the three banners, and we've already engaged the team on what that looks like when we announce the pilot in September. Marketing is an area where you might think that there is some savings available, but I think this is probably an opportunity for reinvestment.
Currently, we support each of the three banners in the market with separate marketing spend, but I actually think over time, the Liquorland banner needs a higher share of voice in the market than what it's got at the moment. So we may not realize savings in that area. We may choose to reinvest it. E-commerce and digital is an area where we currently support different websites. We spend money on different websites. So obviously, if we consolidate to one, that's an opportunity going forward. And I think that when you talk digital, it's an area where we need to increase investment going forward. And so there's also a cost avoidance perspective to it as we move forward because if we maintain three banners in the market, for every good idea we have, we have to think about, well, how do we do that three different ways?
Often in the digital space, that will require incremental spend if you're doing it 3x . So simplifying and moving to one banner creates some capital avoidance moving forward also.
Great. Maybe a couple more follow-up questions for you, Michael. Do you have any loss-making stores?
Yes. Yes, we do. We're a retailer. Most retailers with the national coverage would have loss-making stores. I mean, if you look over the history, we've continued to close stores every year. Like, net, we're opening new space. I think moving forward, we continue to assess each store on its merits, and we'll continue to close stores at expiry where it makes sense.
I think while I'm here today talking to some cyclical headwinds, that's not changing our view on property because property we take a very long-term outlook on, and we still think that the outlook for growth within the industry is a positive one moving forward.
I think you've just answered it, but I might just ask it a different way, Michael. How do you think about the high rates of abstinence and moderation impacts on the liquor market longer term?
So I mean, I think it goes back to what I was talking about per capita consumption, right, which has been stable over the long term. Moderation in terms of spend is not a new phenomenon. Sorry, in terms of drinking is not necessarily a new phenomenon within the liquor market. We've seen that our suppliers have continued to innovate around changing customer trends over time.
Beer is a great example of this, right? If you look at mid-strength compared to full strength, the share of mid-strength now is higher than it was 10 years ago, right, which means not necessarily less liquid being consumed, but it's a way where people are moderating their alcohol consumption. But still, if we stay with beer, what I was talking to before about when people drink less, they drink better. Craft beer is a great example of this. It's often sold in four packs and 16 cartons rather than six packs and 24 cases like mainstream beer, but it's at broadly the same price point. And so that's not a new trend for the industry. And I think the industry has done a great job at innovating around moderation to meet the customer needs and will continue to do so.
I think in terms of abstinence, abstinence is a harder one to get some longer-term data on. There has been a move to more abstinence in recent years, but you've got to keep in mind that over the last five years, that's following a real increase in consumption throughout COVID. So part of that, I think, is an unwind. I think each of these trends, if I go back to if you ask what my view is on it, if I go back to what I was saying earlier, which is that over the long term, the liquor market has enjoyed strong growth. We're currently at a cyclical low, so expect that it will improve from here. Exactly where that ends up will come down to the differing views on how much of the current landscape is structural and cyclical.
Maybe this is Charlie and/or Matt. Initially, the Ocado announcement indicated about AUD 750 million in turnover per CFC. Is this still correct, and how much scope is there to lift capacity?
Great. Thanks, Anita. And I'll get Matt to sort of expand on this a little as well. Look, when we announced Ocado, that was back in 2019. And obviously, AUD 750 million was in those 2019-type dollars. So with inflation, you'd expect sales to be a little higher. But I think what's exciting is some of the potential in terms of upside and efficiency in those CFCs and capacity. So Matt, did you want to touch on something?
Yeah. Look, I think both Ben and I touched on in our presentations. You've got further automation, some of which those of you that go today, you will see.
But the actual smarts that make the robots work the way they do, that software is continually being optimized. And it's being optimized to get more capacity and more throughput and more range from that cube and that infrastructure. So I think from 2019, yes, there's an inflationary shift that would make the number change. But we can already see in the client partners how much more volume and throughput from the same box is now being delivered. And I would expect that to continue. And it's quite exciting to think about how far could that really progress over time, knowing that in a supply chain world, volume broadly fixes most things.
Speaking of CFCs, maybe one for you, Ben. With the move towards immediacy, do you see a risk that the Ocado sheds won't be filled over time?
No. No, I don't. In fact, we talked about we serve three shopping missions, three e-commerce. And what we see when customers shop weekly stock up, in fact, more than half of them are doing one plus one. So they'll do an in-week or they'll do an immediate need. So the two aren't cannibalizing one another. They're actually accretive. Then I think the overall early signs that we're seeing based on customer feedback going through the transition, they're on track. They're on track to meet our expectations, and customer stores are responding positively. And we all look forward to showing you those in person this afternoon.
And I think, Ben, I think some of the improvements, I think in some of those future elements that we spoke about is potentially immediacy and same-day being delivered out of the CFCs. And I think that is an exciting development where we see that additionally coming through. Certainly, the CFCs playing a much greater role in that going forward.
Charlie, while you're on the topic of CFCs, CFC opening costs were expected to be about AUD 40 million in FY 2025 based on comments at the FY 2024 result. How should we think about the operating costs of CFCs in FY 2026? Is there likely to be a step up?
No, look, I think as we talked about, and certainly when we announced this back in August, so the AUD 40 million, yeah, I put the context, the AUD 40 million this year is what we say, if you like, the operating cost or the cost of the CFCs or the earnings impact of the CFCs coming in line in year one. The CFCs love volume, right? Our focus this year has been, and certainly this half, has been transitioning the volumes out of store into the CFCs.
As the volumes continue to grow through, the CFCs would expect that operating leverage to actually improve. So the cost per order comes down significantly. So as the volumes increase, we'd certainly expect that AUD 40 million to reduce over time. And I think, as we said back in August, and I think there was an answer to a question back then as well around this. I mean, what we see with our partners, and I know some partners have talked about it taking up to five years for these things to break even or sort of generate a return or make money. And I think we are different, right? One of the things that we are different is a number of ways. The first thing is we have that meaningful day one volume, right, today. And that has a huge impact. Secondly, range here and extended range.
We do have, I think, Ben has said up to about 10% more differentiated range in the CFCs than we have before. That is a real advantage of the CFCs sort of going forward. So we are a little different to some of the retail partners globally. So we would expect that AUD 40 million to reduce significantly.
I might just add just one small example too where we're different from any other partner is when we started the buildings, the team members are coming from stores. So they were also the CSAs, those that delivered to customers that drove the vans. What changed was the fulfillment. If you think about just even having things like exposure to management, like in a store, you're not going to have as much exposure.
When you're in a CFC, you have a lot more management, but the culture really thrives in the building, and what we're actually seeing that we didn't call out too is when the CSA is delivering, the ratings on friendliness of the driver are exceptional. And I think that just comes with we have people that worked for Coles before. They delivered for Coles before, and now they're just doing it from a different location, and that's playing through.
Matt, how does the 20%-25% improvement in availability post-ADCs play out in store? Does this mean 20%-25% less gaps on shelf? Sales implications of this.
In simple terms, then we measure availability across a range of metrics, and in-store gaps is one of them, and yes, it is a reduction in gaps in store.
Of course, as we ramp the facility, and if I marry up to the last comment as well, these ADC CFC implementations are significant multi-year investments. And the way in which we have been able to execute the go-lives and then execute the ramp-up, both of the transition of existing stores into ADCs and existing catchments into CFCs, in line or ahead of the plan, and in line or ahead of the benefits, I think is also a credit to our execution expertise. And we don't rush these things. So we're not trying to optimize at the same time as build scale. And we are super mindful of the focus on delivering the right activity at the right point in the journey of each of these facilities. If it's ramp, we're focused on ramp. We will get to optimization at a later point in time.
So I think that that needs to be understood. The availability benefit we see is really structural. So having the slow lines, and they are the ones that historically have been stocked in New South Wales and distributed to Queensland and New South Wales stores, or ranged in Victoria and then distributed to Western Australia and South Australia, particularly where there is high promotional activity, we struggle to maintain great availability. By having all the range in Queensland and all the range in New South Wales for those stores, we are one day closer, but we are also 20% more frequent. And it is the culmination of those two factors that gives us a structural advantage in availability.
The multiplier effect I talked to earlier is then how that also helps the team maintain better inventory accuracy, fill the shelves, and process the load more efficiently and effectively, and how we can then, in that process, have better on-shelf availability, fewer gaps. Yes, of course, more sales over time through that, but also a better forecast accuracy, less cannibalization of the offer from other suppliers, more supplier stability. That multiplier effect just from the change has been quite a pleasantly surprising aspect of this go-live. So I think our aim now is how do we optimize. And when I say optimize, we've got to keep improving not just that availability, but the business case that we signed off for the ADCs. That is not our bar.
We have ambition to go way further, and we are already engaged with Witron to say, as a partner using data, how could we be the poster child for optimization of your solution, and how do we take efficiency and service and availability even further over the next few years and just keep working that solution and maximizing the benefit? So I think, yes, it is availability in store, but there's so much more value that we believe we will get from these investments.
I think most people can see how passionate you are about this space.
No one else really is doing this stuff because you have to have had a history of implementing large data-driven and technology-enabled capabilities to then have the ability to leverage those assets. Lots of people will talk about GenAI in retail or data analytics in retail.
Unless you have the kit to work with, and importantly, the capability in the teams to understand how you then leverage those assets, you can't do it. We can. And so this is two decades of investment really coming together across the end-to-end supply chain. So yes, I am quite passionate.
And that is exactly the detail that sits below that competitive advantage that we believe we have in this cost culture, efficiency culture, and the use of technology and data to really underpin that. Right. We've only got time for a couple more questions. Maybe one for you, Anna. Obviously, Own Brand is a big focus for us. Previously, we had a target of 40% penetration. Do you still have that target?
No, we don't. We are, as I said, in our food business, further along than our total business.
But we're going to make sure that we target white spaces, that we are doing the right thing by every single category. And yes, we do want to grow our participation every single year, but we want to do that through meaningful innovation that makes a big difference for customers and that works in harmony with our proprietary brand so that actually it becomes really purposeful. But we will see participation grow, and we'll be really thoughtful around how we do that.
And one last one, I think we'll just get in, Charlie. With the significant growth in online, do you think you can still continue to improve margins over time?
Thanks, Anita. Well, let's look at our track record. So five years ago, I think e-com has been, I mentioned earlier, or digital sales, they're about a third or less than a third of what they are today.
Over that time, we've actually seen an improvement in our earnings profile. We've actually seen a growth in profit. The e-com business grows significantly and at the same time as investing something like AUD 5.7 billion, we've been able to grow our return on capital, so I'm actually quite excited about that we can continue to grow e-com and grow our profits and grow our returns and deliver our dividends to our shareholders.
Great. Now, I'm sorry to all those who have asked questions because I think we've got quite a few still in the chain here, but we are going to have to break for lunch because we have other things we want you to see and do, but the ELT will be out there.
If you haven't had your questions asked, please do come up to one of the ELT members during the lunch break, but also obviously reach out to the investor relations team, and we can follow up with that as well. We might just hand over to Leah just for some closing remarks, just to send us to lunch.
Thank you very much for taking time out today to hear a bit more detail about our strategy. As I said at the start, we do believe that this is a strategy that is going to set us up long term.
And in addition to the three areas that we're really focused on as a team every day is focusing in on the core and execution, making sure that we're listening to customers and adapting the offer, but also ensuring that we've got great financial discipline as we go through this and make decisions. And you can expect to continue to hear us to reiterate that as we go through our engagements with you over the next couple of years. Now, we're super excited to get you out to the CFCs to see about 700 robots. But in between here and then, we've actually got lunch. And given we've talked this morning about the competitive differentiator that we have in Own Brand, we are really looking forward to showcasing that for you today over lunch. And I believe Michael is going to come up.
Michael Weldon is one of our development chefs here at Coles. He's an ex-master chef contestant. And I think you're going to talk us through a little bit of what we can expect to find out there. Yeah? You want to come in the middle? Come in the middle one.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm very excited to run you through our Own Brand food market that we set up just in the room next door while you guys have been in here this morning. We've got some of our really exciting products to show off. You've already seen a couple of them at morning tea and at breakfast with our Daley St Coffee , our Finest Croissants, some of the stuff we're really proud of. But next door, we're showing you a big range. We've got a big selection. You can go through and try lots of little bits if you'd like.
We can have one big plate, really, whatever's up to you. I thought I'd take you for a tour of the market. I can't talk through every dish, but I'll take you through the highlights. Just open up the line, okay? So we've got a carvery station showing off our Coles Finest carbon neutral Scotch Fillet beef. We've roasted that. We've got little Laurent Finest rolls to put that on. You can make that with whatever you like, gravy or some horseradish cream. And then we have our carbon neutral Coles Finest lamb as well. Lamb racks roasted whole, again, sliced up with a little salsa verde. And then I reckon our Christmas star this year, which is our crackling rib roast. So pork rib roast but brined like a ham and then with crackling on the outside.
It's the best of roast pork and ham together, and it's going to be one of the favorites this Christmas. Next to that, we've got a little seafood stand. We're doing our prawn cocktails with our Black Tiger prawns from up in Queensland. They're about to really take over our shelves and again be a really star ingredient for our Christmas. Next to that, we have our salad station. Leah, you mentioned the Grandma's Heirlooms tomatoes. They're on there for you guys to try and we've just done a really simple caprese salad. Basil, a bit of mozzarella, and some salt and olive oil so you can really taste how beautiful they are. They are my favorite tomatoes over the standard supermarket. We're really proud of those. Then we'll move to sort of some sweet treats.
We have a little ice cream stand, an ice cream cart with all our new flavors of ice cream and sorbet for you to try with little mini coins. If you want one, for me, my tip would be the brown butter and pecan. That's our Christmas star, I reckon, but they're all absolutely beautiful. Then we have a Christmas selection to show off our Christmas products. We've got our Sicilian Finest Christmas pudding. This year we've gone away from the traditional fruit to vine fruit flavors and gone to Sicilian pudding and a little raspberry sprinkle on top, and it's a real winner. Hopefully you're getting hungry. We've got a new cheese too that we're really proud of. It's our French washed rind cheese.
That's sitting on our little cheese and wine station that you can go have a look at and give that a good try. Yeah, it's just hit shelves, and we're really, really proud of that one as well. And then we have our global food station. So we've combined a few of our favorite international cuisines that we've really focused on. So we've got our Cucina Matese pasta inside of a Parmesan wheel. So you get that classic dish with our pesto pasta sauce with it. And Jason will be scraping that and serving that live for you. And then we've also got a little dessert station just to finish you off. And we've got our, I think, the star of that station is our chocolate and hazelnut inspired by Ferrero Rocher three-tiered layer cake.
So if you've got room for chocolate cake at the end, we've got a beautiful slice for you, but we can do a little tiny slice. And on every station, we're really proud to have part of our team. I'm a very small part of the team. We've got chefs in the room and also our developers and technologists who actually work day in and day out on our Own Brand range. And we put a lot of pride in feeding our customers and feeding Australia. And I think the guys in there can tell you all about the trials and tribulations of what they do and how we get beautiful products on shelves. So they're really proud about them. So if you do have any questions about any of the products, anyone in a red polo or a Coles chef jacket, ask them any questions you like.
If they can't answer it, come to me and I'll be able to find the answer for you. Yeah, we've got lots of yummy, delicious things. If you can't find anything you like, I think you'll be lost in there. So much good stuff to try. Enjoy and have a lovely afternoon.
Great. Just before we let you out, I think you mentioned wine. Unfortunately, we can't drink any of the wine today because you're all heading out to the CFC and it's a zero alcohol site. There are people there to talk about it. If you'd like to ask some questions about the wine today, you can. Ideally, participate at home. You'll be heading out to these doors to lunch, and as Michael said, but also sorry, no, you'll be heading out through the back doors to lunch and around.
As you walk through, you'll also see that there's two showcases on either side. One is a showcase around our new smart carts and some of the digital technology that we've got. And the other side, there is some of our new latest technology that we're trialing in store. So during lunch, we encourage you to go back into those two rooms and talk to the people in those rooms who will take you through some of those showcases to give you a bit of an insight into kind of the next leap in our journey. So over to everyone else. We will be back in here in an hour for a very short overview of the CFC just before we head out on the buses to the CFC. So if everyone can gather back here in 1:45 P.M., that would be great. Let's go try some food, which is delicious, easy, and affordable. Enjoy.