Thank you, Liam. Good morning. You're very, very welcome to our Capital Markets Day, and I'm delighted you've been able to join us today, both in person and online. Our last Capital Markets Day was just down the road from here in 2018. Boy, how much has changed in this world since then.
I think none of us could have predicted what had happened, what has happened over the past few years. Of course, none of us can predict the future. Ultimately, what matters is resilience and agility. I am very impressed by what Siobhán Talbot and the team have done in terms of how they've dealt with the various challenges that they have faced, be it COVID, inflation, war in Europe or whatever.
Not only do they stay focused on running the business through all those events, they delivered excellent results and evolved the strategic agenda of the group in that time. Since the last Capital Markets Day, we have acquired six businesses, we've sold our stake in Glanbia Ireland joint venture, and we have transformed the GPN segment.
We've become very focused on the attractive consumer categories within Better Nutrition, where we have some distinct competitive advantages and leadership positions. This year, we will make record earnings from those categories. In my role as chairman, I'm proud to travel this journey with the team. A key focus of mine has been board renewal. Following the reduction in representation by our largest shareholder, we have increased the diversity of experience we now have on our board. As employee relations director, I of course get great opportunity to directly engage with our people.
Potentially biased though I am, I can only state that the culture of Glanbia is truly unique. We are a passionate, ambitious, focused team, proud of the role we can play for all our stakeholders in a world never more ready for better nutrition. We have made great strides in our ESG agenda, and this is something that has come up frequently in my engagements with shareholders.
We have ambitious metrics now in place to deliver our ESG agenda, which are linked back to management compensation. I'm not gonna steal anyone's thunder today, but the board and I are very excited about the opportunities that lie ahead for the group. We are focused on growth and talent. Our purpose is clear: delivering better nutrition for every step of life's journey. Our purpose will drive our growth.
We have an incredible group of talented, experienced people, passionate and energized by our opportunity, and focused on driving attractive returns for our shareholders, which you have seen through our progressive dividend policy and the share buybacks that we have executed. With that, I would like to welcome Siobhan Talbot, our Group Managing Director, to give you some more color on the growth opportunities that lie ahead of us, and I thank you. Have a great day.
Good morning. Delighted to be here with you this morning, as the chairman has said, and a huge welcome to all of you who have joined us, either in person or virtually. In truth, it's just too long since we've been able to have an occasion like this. We're really delighted to have it today. The world, as the chairman has said, has been phenomenally volatile since we were last together.
Actually, maybe this is the best time to showcase what Glanbia now is. We have a phenomenal organization. We have a community of over 5,700 people, and the folk you're gonna see up here today, and the folk you're gonna engage with through the day, we're doing that on behalf of that incredible community.
Really passionate, really ambitious, incredibly resilient through the times we have seen in recent years globally, and we will drive this organization forward. Really excited to talk to you about our growth agenda. The Glanbia of today is a Glanbia that really changes as part of our DNA. We have evolved enormously.
The group now is very clear on where we're going to play and how we're going to win in the categories in which we operate. Our markets have evolved enormously in recent times, and we have evolved with that. We've stayed very close to our customers, very close to our consumers, and that has really focused our strategy on where we might take the group.
If you think about Glanbia over many years, we started with that really strong knowledge of dairy, particularly dairy protein, and then we became much more. That more has evolved the portfolio into incredibly attractive categories, and you're going to hear an awful lot about that today. We've invested behind that. I've been very proud to be part of this team for a number of years, and the capabilities that we now have in Glanbia are light years different to when I started, indeed, many years ago.
That's been a continued evolution. We've an incredible mix of really experienced talent blended with really exciting new talent. You're gonna see a lot of that today, hear a lot about it, and it really enables our future growth journey. That evolution of strategy has been immense in recent times.
In Glanbia, we also have a phrase that we don't let structure get in the way of strategy. You're going to hear my colleagues today speak words like transformation, one face to the customer, innovative, highly efficient, focused, and that is really part of what we have been doing over those recent years. That now, as we sit here in 2022, we are really ambitious for where we can drive this organization forward. We know resilience, we know agility, we have reshaped the portfolio. I really think now we have a really unique portfolio in that better nutrition space that we will drive on. If you think a little bit about that journey, as I said, it has been one of incredible evolution.
Just a reference point of 10 years ago, we started on the nutrition journey, and actually, as you'll see Brian and his colleagues speak to later, Nutritional Solutions really was the genesis of that. Our core ethos was to move further up the value chain, move into those areas where you are closer and deeper with your customers, closer to the consumers, better margins, stickier, more sustainable for that long-term growth.
10 years ago, that element of our portfolio was about 50%. Now it's 90% of what we do, and that has been because we've moved away from those largely commodity spaces into those higher value add spaces. That has been all about portfolio evolution, redeploying the capital from areas we've divested, and putting it into those areas of Performance Nutrition and Nutritional Solutions.
That really will be the essence of our future growth, really doubling down on those areas that we can be very strong, and that will be the essence of our growth story. The environment in which we play is always really important, and the one thing I think we can all collectively say in recent times is that the unfortunate effect of COVID is that never was nutrition more important. There is a real global health crisis across so many dimensions. We all know the statistics around non-communicable diseases and the issue that is for so many consumers. We all know the issues of obesity, and we know the issues of ill health.
Individuals and governments now recognize that actually prevention is so much better than medication, and consumers are reacting to that and taking personal accountability for their own health and well-being, and we can be with them on that journey. The essence of Glanbia is helping people fulfill their nutrition goals, and that would be really underpinning to our growth.
As consumers have adapted and taken more accountability for their growth for their nutrition, it has created these mega trends, and these trends, you know them indeed as well as I. Healthier lifestyles, the role that activity and exercise can play, both with our mental and physical health. Consumers, and as consumers, we all want convenience, but we're not going to hostage taste, functionality, nutritional profile for that convenience. We want better nutrition.
All of those trends have in truth only become magnified by COVID as people really have thought about their health and well-being as they look forward. Better nutrition is at the heart of what Glanbia does. It is the essence of our portfolio evolution, and it is where we will continue to drive our growth. If you think of the core pillars which really underpin our later strategic pillars, what is the essence or the foundation of our ecosystem? That very obviously, in the first instance, is that we are playing into growth categories. You're gonna hear my colleagues speak during the day and during the morning a lot about that, a lot about the addressable markets, the growth opportunities.
In truth, a journey we are only starting, and we're really excited about the pace of growth that we can get in those markets, because consumers are embracing that better nutrition trends. We have incredible talent. You're gonna see a lot of it, hear a lot of it. A lot of new people have come into our organization. That blend I referenced earlier of both existing, experienced, knowledgeable, resilient, agile, and all the new skill sets that makes us more relevant to our consumers and customers.
Of course then we have fantastic operations. Operational excellence has always been a core part of Glanbia. We really are good at what we do in those facilities, whether it was, for example, building one of the largest cheese and whey facilities here in the U.S. in recent times, almost half a billion dollars on time, on budget, through COVID.
The entire community of people trained virtually. Our customers have lauded the commissioning of that facilities. We're here in Downers Grove in one of the showcase GPN facilities. We are really good, efficient scale operators. We know what it takes to have plants run well. I'll speak later, of course, about a more, the holistic perspective on sustainable operations that takes that and of course brings it into the wider agenda. Our strategic pillars are clear.
They're focused. They're well-defined for us now. It is about leading and owning the core. I'm going to come back to each of these a little in turn. It is about optimizing our business. We have known great growth in Glanbia. We have known times of challenge. That has made us actually be very agile. We're not afraid of change. We're not afraid to learn.
We're not afraid to pivot and do things that we need to do to optimize our business. Disciplined financial management, probably a core part of our ethos over a long, long period of time, has been that piece. We do that now through two very complementary pillars of Glanbia Nutritionals and GPN. Those are now scale businesses within the organization, and you're particularly going to hear us speak today about Nutritional Solutions, which is the ingredients nutritional solution part of GN, and GPN, which is our global branded portfolio.
A little bit on the Glanbia of today. As I mentioned, we now are very focused on our core platforms. Our business is really very much North America-based. Again, that's been part of our evolution. The U.S. has been a really good market for us. We know this market very well.
We're close to our customers, we're close to our consumers, and from, in many ways, a base here where our nutrition journey started, we have taken that capability to other markets. This references the 90% I spoke to earlier, those two really strong complementary pillars in nutrition that are Nutritional Solutions and GPN.
They've been our focus for growth to this stage of our journey and will be our focus for growth as we go forward. The addressable markets, just to give you a sense, our addressable markets are large, and they are growing. An interesting part of our journey has been taking the capabilities we have into different markets. We don't play in all these markets in the same way as you would expect, but consumers in the better nutrition space are touching all of these categories.
The example I would give you is performance nutrition. We started our journey in nutrition many years ago by developing that efficacious, high-quality, high-protein from our dairy facilities. Sports nutrition was the natural market for that because it is such a high-quality protein. We built relationships with customers in that space, and then we bought one of the brands, so we moved up that value chain of performance nutrition. We've been there in that category really since it started, so Glanbia and that category have evolved together. Now, as you see, we're playing across these sectors with that great science-led, customer-focused, consumer-focused strength that we have that Brian and his colleagues are going to speak to in Glanbia Nutritionals and the leading brands that Hugh and his colleagues will speak to with GPN. Talent, purpose, are really important parts of Glanbia.
It's been a really interesting journey for me personally because I've been with Glanbia a long number of years, and we've always had a great culture, and the chairman touched on that. As an executive team a number of years ago, we wanted to find a really meaningful banner that would galvanize the organization behind a bigger purpose. We spoke a lot with the organization, and we found this purpose that has stood as really good, really in good stead to date and will carry us into the future. That purpose is delivering better nutrition for every step of life's journey. Again, in Glanbia, we've always had a great culture. We're very grounded. We're very ambitious.
We're very passionate about succeeding as an organization, but again, we spoke to the organization about the values that would best represent that because we don't get everything right all of the time, as any organization. We developed this series of values. Our customers are front and center of what we do. We are a performance-driven organization. It does matter. We know that. We are really curious. We think of innovation through its broadest lens. Yes, it is about developing great products, but it's also about process. It's about operating model. It's about that full holistic perspective of how we can find a better way. We like to win together. We have a great team of people that are collegiate, ambitious, passionate, and really do bring all of their collective strengths to winning as a total Glanbia organization. Respect.
I sometimes think if there was one value that probably should stand out in the total society of today that would solve a lot of issues, it probably is respect. We put a lot of emphasis, as we should, in Glanbia, on respecting each other, our perspectives, our views, and of course, the very environment in which we operate. Our talent journey has been really interesting, like our performance journey. Our talent journey has been one of matching our talents with our markets, matching our talent with our customer needs, matching our talent with those consumer areas that we want to address. Unsurprisingly, our largest pool of talent is here in the U.S., and then growing our talent across other regions.
Part of our journey of building that strong capability in Nutritional Solutions and GPN has been a very focused approach on talent, so that we're really building capability of building our brands, really knowing consumers. You're gonna hear a lot about that today from the teams about how we have built a very strong capability across consumer, across channel, across all those marketing areas that have evolved. Channel development, customer engagement, innovation, has been part of the DNA of Glanbia, particularly Nutritional Solutions, for a long time. It remains a core part of what we do there and in our GPN business and will continue. Of course, whole new areas that have become relevant, areas of digitization, e-commerce, and all that goes with that agenda. I referenced earlier the significant part of our group capability that has been around operations.
Of course, validly and correctly, we now think of sustainable operations in that more holistic sense. Michael, my executive colleague, will talk shortly about, and put framework on, the totality of our ESG agenda. Again, not new to us, as you would expect in an organization that has been in nutrition, in some form, for over a hundred years.
The environmental aspect of what we do is hugely important. We have signed up to the SBTi target, and we're very clear on our roadmap now across particularly Scope One and Two emissions. Social agenda has been huge for us. Again, of an area we dialed up, particularly speaking to the organization about that journey, speaking to the organization about our pace, speaking to the organization about what they wanted us to do more of on that. The organization has absolutely embraced it.
It's been a particular emphasis of ours through that 2021, 2022 period. It's a journey. We are by no means anywhere near the end of our journey, but we have made some great strides. The Chairman indeed has touched on the governance. Very significant evolution in the governance structure of Glanbia that has absolutely enabled our progress and will enable our progress as we look forward. Coming then to the strategic pillars.
Those foundations fundamentally enable the strategic pillars of owning, ruthlessly owning and owning our core, optimizing our business, and continuing to have great financial discipline. Again, our core, you're going to hear a lot of that, about that today. We started our journey really owning protein, particularly in dairy. We are now a protein powerhouse within Nutritional Solutions. We are number two global player in the blending of micronutrients.
We know how nutrition plays across the different, whole different suites of ingredients and how we can bring that to meet customer needs. We solve problems for our customers in those two key areas. You're going to hear Brian and Lauren, and later in the day you can actually interact with some of the science behind in terms of some of our Nutritional Solutions portfolio. Of course, from a small start indeed in 2008, we now have the billion-dollar brand that is Optimum Nutrition. You're going to hear Hugh and the team speak to the evolution of that brand, how we have built the capability to get the brand to that scale, and where we can take Optimum Nutrition forward. It is really exciting opportunity for us in the global brand of nutrition space.
We speak also to the healthy lifestyle portfolio, again, broadening the addressable market that we can engage with. The essence of our engagement with you today is really going to be deep diving on that core pillar of owning our core. These themes will be woven through the day. I've referenced science-based innovation as being a core strength of ours.
Again, starting in our nutritional solutions business, Lauren will speak to the capabilities that we've evolved in solving those issues for our customers. Being insight-led, knowing what's happening in the market, knowing where those trends are, and knowing how our capabilities as a protein powerhouse and as that really knowledgeable player in micronutrients can help solve those problems. From a consumer perspective, staying on trend in terms of what consumers are needing on their better nutrition journey. We will always refine our operating model.
Again, Mark and Hugh and all of the teams will be speaking to the journey of transformation we've had within GPN. We continually learn, and we will continually learn about how we can optimize our business. That will drive margins, it will drive efficiencies, we will use technology to enable that, and we will drive Glanbia forward. Mark really will speak to disciplined financial management.
As I referenced earlier, it has been the core of what we've done for a long number of years. We are disciplined in the deployment of our shareholders' capital. We will always be cautious, but we will be ambitious as well, and I think that has stood us in good stead through the volatile times of recent times. Then finally, the numbers. The numbers of course do matter. Bringing the numbers together, we are really ambitious for where we can take Glanbia.
The Chairman referenced that in 2022, we expect to deliver the highest earnings that Glanbia has ever delivered in terms of adjusted earnings per share. We believe that we have now built the capability and platforms that we can really take forward to drive sustainable growth. We have incredible teams of people passionate about the delivery of the total better nutrition agenda and doing that within the capabilities of Nutritional Solutions, cheese, and Glanbia Performance Nutrition. We will grow our top line. Hugh will speak particularly to the GPN metrics of growing between 5% and 7%, an annual average over that period, with our margins bedrocked in the 12% that we will achieve in Q4 in GPN, and driving forward from that over a period of years. Brian will speak to the volume ambition.
Pricing, as you know, can move around in dairy, so we have a volume ambition within Nutritional Solutions. Again, a bedrock of margin that we will drive forward within the business. At a group level, we will overlay those organic metrics with M&A and further activity corporately, and that will drive an annual average adjusted earnings per share growth over that period of between 5% and 10%. Again, sustaining that growth journey that we've been on in the last two years. Cash conversion, Mark will speak a lot to later. One of the hallmarks of the journey we've been on in recent times is really focusing our teams on cash conversion. Cash matters. We know it matters. It probably matters, never mattered as much as it does in recent times.
We have been overachieving this significant metric, and we will drive forward towards that 80% conversion. With that then, we focus on returns. Again, personally, I think returns on capital always matter, and we will be driving to progress our return on capital over this period and averaging that range of 10%-13%. Very excited to speak with you this morning. I hope you really have a good day. We look forward to answering all of your questions. With that, now I'm going to pass to my colleague, Hugh, to talk you through the GPN story. Thank you very much.
Well, good morning. Hopefully, that gave you a flavor for our broader brand portfolio. I hope you were all in the gym this morning. I'm delighted, as Siobhan said, delighted to be here today to share the GPN update story. Our chairman spoke about the last capital markets we had four years ago in 2018. Actually, for any that have a longer-term memory, it's nearly eight years to the day, November 2014, that we had the capital markets day here in this facility, in this room. For any who are here who will tour the manufacturing facility later on, you'll be particularly impressed by the scale that we've built since you saw that one single line, packing line, blender line running in 2014 when we just opened this facility. Lot to cover today. Who are we?
Number one sports nutrition portfolio company with a growing position in U.S. lifestyle nutrition. Our mission, what we get up every day to do, is to inspire people everywhere to deliver on their performance and healthy lifestyle goals. We do this through educating our consumers and our customers on the benefits of nutrition, healthy nutrition, the benefits of working out, both physical and mental. We do this through creating advocacy through our partners, which I'll talk about later on, our influencers, our ambassadors, who help us reach our consumers with the correct messaging on why to take our product with credibility. We invest in quality and manufacturing, you're gonna see that later on, so that what we put in our products are the best tasting, best quality products out there. Lastly, we're authentic.
We ensure that what we say about our brands, what we put on our tubs are authentic, which creates trust, and we've been consistently the most trusted brand in sports nutrition for 35 years. 2021 numbers, we did $1.54 billion in 2021, 6% branded CAGR, $172 million EBITDA. We're on pace for $1.7 billion this year, which will be a 7.7% CAGR since 2018. 68% of our business is here in Americas, 32% international. We have nine brands that you saw at the start with the opening video. We sell across 100 markets worldwide. We've just over 2,200 people in the team, and we've consolidated our manufacturing footprint from those that have seen us or met with us in the past. We now have three manufacturing facilities.
Our largest scale facility here, which we consolidated as part of our transformation project, capacity of about 100 million pounds. Our manufacturing facility in Middlesbrough for Europe, about 25 million pounds capacity, and then a small tablet capsule facility also here in the U.S. We've two innovation centers, our scale innovation center about 25 minutes down the road in Downers Grove, that I'm sure some of you have visited, and one in Middlesbrough.
We have our D2C fulfillment center in Holland, which services our international D2C business. Siobhan spoke about this. Our addressable markets. While sometimes difficult to get consolidated information for our global markets, where we play in two big markets that are growing. There's global performance nutrition, EUR 25 billion, growing at between 5%-7%.
US and lifestyle weight management, again, a big market at $17 billion, growing at about 4%. We've a deep understanding of consumer brands. We've invested an awful lot in the last number of years in analytics and insights. We now run brand equity tracking across nine markets, five brands, at least annually, up to 5x , 4 x per year in some markets. That allows us to track awareness, trial, usage. We have extensive custom research. 2022 alone, we've done over 20 research studies. We've engaged with more than 10,000 consumers. We do annual brand spend ROI, which we put in place in 2019. That allows us ensure that our marketing spend is the most effective.
We can shape, reshape our marketing mix, and we've seen our return on marketing investment go up every year since we introduced that in 2019. We have first party insight. We have access now to 3 million consumers that fit, engage, opted in to our D2C and brand.com platforms. What does those, this all mean for the category? We see a continuing mainstreaming of the category and a particular importance of protein. Research actually just from the last couple of weeks with category users, they confirmed with us that over the next 12 months they are either going to increase or maintain their protein usage.
Data we got recently as well around category penetration here in North America, we've seen a 1% increase in household penetration of protein, the protein category, which is quite significant in the space of a year as consumers continue to increase their consumption of protein. We're seeing an increase in interest in the role of nutrition and healthy lifestyle and the ongoing reframing of weight loss and management. This is a little bit of an enigma. We've seen the decline in consumers on a diet in North America of about 2.2%, and yet 50% of consumers in North America are telling us they have to lose weight. They want to do it in a painless way. There's no painless way of losing weight. The only way to do it is to stop consuming calories.
This is a cycle that we continue to watch carefully as those consumers reframe that weight loss journey. We compete in three large consumer segments. This is global, but I'm illustrating with American numbers. About 2 years ago, we did a large piece of global work around our consumers' motivations for consumption of these brands. We can see based on the different motivations, we clustered it into three main consumer segments of performance consumer, lifestyle consumer and weight management consumer. From this we have their different motivations, their relative size, their demographics, their usage profile, and it allows us better target these consumers with our full range of brands, particularly around their primary motivation. To give an example of that, in the U.S this, there's 110.
The screening for this was consumers to work out twice a week. In the U.S, think about 110 million consumers, and we can see that 22% of those are primarily motivated by performance, whether it's build muscle mass, build lean muscle, or maximize athletic performance. That allows us target that consumer better with the range of brands we have.
Our brands are strong and are performing well at shelf. With scale brands, we're the leader in sports nutrition, growing in lifestyle. We're preferred and recommended by consumers category-leading Net Promoter Scores. We're most awarded, most reviewed, most nominated across seven e-commerce platforms that we track. We have been quite resilient in the face of the last 15 months with multiple price increases across all of our brand portfolio.
In terms of actual performing, what does that performance, what does that mean? Global revenue, you'll have seen this from our recent quarter three update. We've had branded like-for-like revenue growth 14.4%. Optimum Nutrition like-for-like globally of 23%, which is volume growth +5, pricing +18. Particularly pleased to see that. Within the category, we're now the number one sports nutrition protein powder in food, drug, mass, and e-commerce, and we believe we're number one in specialty and club channels, but it's, we don't have specific market data for that. That's our own internal estimates. Number two in the US diet category for SlimFast, and number one in the UK. Strong category performance.
US consumption numbers you got at the end of quarter three, Optimum up 13.3% here in the US last 12 weeks, and Lifestyle Brands up 16%. I'll talk about SlimFast later. We're the number one sports nutrition company in the world. We're number one in 18 countries, top three in 30 out of 40 countries as tracked by Euromonitor. We have a consistent strategy that we're executing on in terms of four growth pillars. I'm gonna talk to you about all four.
First pillar is Optimum Nutrition capturing the global potential. Second is building a lifestyle nutrition platform in North America. Third is growing in priority international markets and accelerating that growth. Fourth is mastering digital commerce at scale. That's all enabled by our transformation project, which I'll speak about in a moment.
Talent, great talent and teams, our innovation agenda, and continued M&A. In terms of our transformation project, you've heard a lot about this over the last couple of years. We kicked this off in late 2019. We accelerated it in 2020 as COVID significantly impacted the business, particularly in quarter two, 2020. It had deliberate focus around driving demand and driving efficiency initiatives.
The financial outcome of that we were looking for was margin improvement of 200 basis points. In fact, internally we had double that ambition because we needed to invest more behind our brands. It was to give us headroom to allow us to do that. I'll speak to that later. In terms of demand, we had to fix our international route to markets. We became a truly omnichannel business.
We're selling across all channels, and we accelerated that. Brand focus, particularly international priorities, prioritizing Optimum Nutrition. We brought in additional capabilities such as Revenue Growth Management. We built a new structure and capability in Americas and in international. In terms of efficiency, you're gonna see it today, the consolidation of our supply chain into this facility here today. We took out just under 50% of our SKUs since 2019, which has allowed better focus on the business. We exited private label manufacturing. A scale project that is coming to a close now, but has built very strong foundations for the future as we navigated quite a volatile period through COVID and then inflation in 2022. M&A has always been an important enabler of growth.
The journey of GPN started in 2018 with the acquisition of Optimum Nutrition. We've acquired and integrated eight businesses since then. That allows us, through the scale, the acquisition of Integracore, to scale our organic growth through investment in people, investment in brands, and investment in innovation.
That will continue to be a key driver of our growth as we look forward. We do continue to look at potential acquisitions. Maybe we'll see valuations come down to a more realistic level over the next couple of years, but remain ambitious for M&A. I'm gonna dive a little bit deeper into Optimum Nutrition. Very proud to say that officially as per Euromonitor, we are now the number one sports nutrition brand in the world. From humble beginnings here in Aurora a long time ago.
That really has been great credit to the teams and the in terms of how we've gone around consistently building the brands and how we are the only truly global sports nutrition player that's out there today. I'm gonna share a little bit of video to give you a sense for the power and passion behind Optimum Nutrition. Very good. We're the world's number one sports nutrition brand.
Our brand essence, most trusted brand in sports nutrition. Our role is to help people experience the power of fitness and nutrition. We've consistently strong Net Promoter Scores in all markets we track. A reminder, the reason we track Net Promoter Score is I speak to advocacy at the start, and how many of our consumers are actual promoters of our brand. Anything that's over 30 is strong. Anything that's over 50 is excellent.
We continue to track on an ongoing basis in all these markets, how well we're doing and how engaged we are with our consumer. We've proven performance over the last 35 years, and we've always been a global pioneer, whether it be in new category creation, expansion into new markets, or just a consistent approach to how we build brands.
We're very pleased today with our iconic black tub, which is recyclable. We've put more effort into it. We've now made a number of changes to ensure they can be picked up by recycling companies. We're the first company in our industry for our black tub that now is certified by How2Recycle, one of the leading sustainability companies here in the U.S., as widely recyclable, which will start to roll out on all our tubs early next year.
The pool for optimization is large, and it's growing globally. We talk about our consumer target as the motivated. That's people who are open to or are already using sports nutrition products. From a global piece of work we did last year, there's 147 million consumers in the U.S. that would identify as this. 23 million in the U.K., 10 million in Australia, and 195 million in India. There's lots of opportunity there. When we look at our household penetration in the U.K. in the U.S., it's doubled since 2017, particularly as we started to expand broadly into omnichannel. When you look at the motivators, Optimum Nutrition consistently across all these markets is only bought by 10% of the motivated consumer.
There's significant opportunity as we continue to build out our brand in terms of the scale of consumer pool. Optimum Nutrition consumer is affluent and very engaged in the category. When we look at our consumer versus the category, they have 19% higher income, they spend 28% more on sports nutrition, and they work out 80% more often.
The Optimum Nutrition consumer sees our products as essential spend. We've a brand growth playbook that has driven Optimum Nutrition to $1 billion. Very proud of the growth from humble beginnings here in Aurora in 2008. It's just the consistency in how we've broadened the consumer base from the traditional bodybuilding consumer, who's still a core engaged participant with Optimum Nutrition, to an everyday performance consumer. A focus on our hero product SKUs.
Continue evolution and optimization of our design of our hero products and our brands to make sure they retain relevancy with consumers. Inspiring creative, some of which we share with you today. Driving reach with our best-in-class digital media approach, which has been a significant investment for us over the years. Continued product and format innovation into new products and new categories.
Broadening our distribution footprint, whether it be into Walmart here in the U.S., to Chemist Warehouse in Australia, Decathlon across Europe. Lastly, that's increasing our brand investment. This goes back to progress made in our transformation project. Since 2017, we've increased our marketing spend on Optimum Nutrition by nearly 2.5 times. The non-negotiable across all of that is we're the most trusted brand in sports nutrition. Reasons to believe.
Billion-dollar brand, the only one truly global. We see lots more potential, and we're very ambitious for this brand. It's the number one brand globally, and it's growing fast. We're in categories that are also growing fast, which are compelling to consumers. The consumers are highly engaged in these categories. You saw we have large consumer pools to target in all the markets that we compete in. We have a proven brand growth model showing that over the last 12 years. We now have strong roots to market, distribution capability, and are truly omnichannel, and we have an ongoing commitment to invest behind the brands. I'm gonna dive a little bit deeper into our lifestyle, North America lifestyle strategy and what our approach here is.
If you look at what we've done, if you go back about four years ago, 2020 or even to 2020, we were selling our brands through multiple sales forces. In fact, with four different sales forces calling on the same customer. What was increasingly obvious in terms of our credibility or scale was that it made sense to consolidate that approach.
In fact, that had already happened with the likes of Amazon and Costco. We implemented a major project which was looking at building a best-in-class CPG business for North America, led by Wendy Davidson. We had clear objectives to move from a commercial-led to a brand-led organization. Consumer first, by that I mean strong consumer analytics and insight that I spoke about earlier that allowed us to drive our innovation agenda, and drive growth opportunities for our customers.
Taking a category leadership position, particularly in performance nutrition, but also in weight management within the retailers that we partnered with. Accelerating our digital and e-com strategy. Lastly, attracting, developing and retaining talent. The outcome of that is a one face to customer, a one GPN face to customer here in the U.S. We are organized across three category teams: lifestyle nutrition, sports nutrition and weight management.
We have five channel teams targeting food, drug, mass, club, e-commerce, Walmart, and specialty and field sales. That's all supported by four centers of excellence. I've spoken a little bit about insights and analytics. We also have category management, integrated marketing and trade development. We now are a scale CPG business in North America that firstly can drive the growth, continued growth of Optimum Nutrition, but also can drive a broader portfolio of lifestyle brands.
Biggest brand in that portfolio is SlimFast. Obviously, there's been some challenges on SlimFast, and we've been very busy over the last 18 months in extensive research, and we've identified category challenges, but we've also identified brand opportunities. The diet category is without a doubt one of the categories most impacted by COVID. It's declined 8% since 2020. We've also seen lifestyle. We've seen a blurring of the lifestyle brands, particularly what we call adult nutritional brands, encroaching into that diet space. The biggest impact for us has been the decline in keto as a diet trend. If you look at the graph on the far right, we tried to illustrate this.
When we bought the business in 2018, right around the time we bought the business, we launched SlimFast Keto, and it was the hottest trend in the market at the time, and it was about 8% of our business. Keto is a very effective diet, but it's hard to stay on. You have to be ruthlessly disciplined, because to lose weight, you have to put your body into ketosis, which mean you need very disciplined nutrition. For people to remember, when COVID hit, a lot of our disciplines went out the window. We certainly stopped working out. I consumed a lot more red wine. There was banana bread being made at home, and the discipline around the keto diet kind of went out of the window.
You can see there 2020, we had substantial growth over 2019 and 2020 as our keto range took off. In fact, it was close to 40% of our business in 2020, and you can see there the decline in 2022. Our core focus with our brand restage is on our core lines of high protein, low carb and original. You can see that they have actually outperformed the category decline of 8%. In fact, 2020 to 2022, our high protein, low carb is flat within a market that's been negative 8%.
We see significant brand opportunities. We still fundamentally believe in the diet category and SlimFast as a brand. Weight loss remains as important as ever for consumers. We need to modernize the brand perception. We believe there's an opportunity to expand beyond diet to include weight management.
We are a diet brand, and we also need to continue to support new trends as they come through the marketplace and they cycle in and out. SlimFast has some really strong inherent strength. It's high brand awareness. It's well-liked, well-regarded. It's got a reputation for effectiveness. The SlimFast plan works. You reduce calorie intake with great products, you lose weight. It's nutritionally balanced, good taste, and it's in convenient formats.
For us, we've always felt, even when we bought this business, that the opportunity for us was how do we broaden the consumer from diet into weight management, just like I showed you the brand playbook. We believe we can do that over a period of time. We now have a new expanded consumer target, targeting our dieters and our maintainers.
To put it, to use the consumer pool concept we presented earlier, expanding beyond our current diet target triples the potential consumer pool for SlimFast. I believe we're executing really well on the brand restage, but it takes time. With new pack design, it's going into market now as we speak, but it'll be H1 before it's all fully on shelf, until we transition across the broad portfolio. It's now modern, cleaner, has great on-shelf presence. With new product architecture.
This was a big shift because our core range was advanced nutrition, and the consumer didn't really know what advanced nutrition meant. Now we've cleaned it up and it's now high protein, low carb. The consumer readily recognized as benefits that they're looking for in their products. We've evolved our product architecture.
With new creative campaign, which I'm gonna share with you in a moment, to update the brand image as we broaden into that, what broadened from diet into a broader weight management consumer. We're increasing our media spend next year by 28%. We're somewhat dependent on quarter one performance and whether the diet category comes back. We're also conscious that we're a key driver of that diet category as well. Actually, for quarter one next year, our media spend will be a 120% increase in quarter one, 2022. Yet we're still driving with new trend innovation with intermittent fastings just going into market now as we speak. A bit like with think!, we transitioned the brand thinkThin into think!. It took us a couple of years.
What we're saying is that for next year, I think we're executing really well. We will see sequential quarter improvement from quarter one on, but it will be in half two before we start to see consumption growth in the brand as the velocity in our new products such as high protein, low carb and original start to pick up. I'm gonna share a couple of new videos that are starting on air now, but will be heavily on air in quarter one.
I'm losing weight with the SlimFast plan.
Wait. That's SlimFast of the 1980s.
Yeah, I know.
This is today's SlimFast. We have creamy, delicious shakes like Mocha Cappuccino.
Whoa, radical.
SlimFast fits into your life, whatever that looks like. Welcome to today.
SlimFast is still helping people with their weight?
with new keto and intermittent fasting products.
Is this a peanut butter cup?
Welcome to the future.
Or, uh...
The present.
I'm losing weight, and I'm doing it with the SlimFast plan.
Wait, stop.
What's going on?
That's the SlimFast of the eighties. This is today's SlimFast. We have shakes that'll curb your hunger for up to four hours. Like four rounds of golf?
One.
One? I mean, one.
Wow, this is delicious.
It has 20 g of protein.
How'd you fit a steak in that bottle?
All right. Very good. Along with SlimFast, we have a portfolio of strong, unique brands that operate in a growing health and wellness space. We have think! targeting active wellness bar consumers. Our 20-gram protein bar with the brand investments think! strong, growing nicely at 12% versus 2021. We have Isopure with the consumer target aspiring purest protein powder users. Add less, do more, growing very strongly, +77% versus 2021.
Amazing Grass, our natural, plant-based natural nutrition targeting natural nutrition enthusiasts, growing 6% versus 2021, and the number one in the greens category. We've a similar playbook that we spoke to you about in ON, broaden the consumer target. If you go back 4 years ago, we broadened from a predominantly female consumer to male and female consumer.
Hero product focus, whether it be our 20-gram think! bar, whether it be our Isopure Zero Carb, or whether it be our green superfood under Amazing Grass. Optimum design and architecture, distinct creative, reach driven digital media, product format innovation, whether it be our layered bars in think! or whether it be ISOPURE Infusions.
Broader distribution footprint, so Isopure TDPs up 134% in Walmart, Amazing Grass 42% in Target, and think! up 23% in Walmart. Lastly, again, the same increasing brand investments as these brands all have over 10% net revenue invested behind the brands on a consistent basis. Our third growth pillar is our international business, accelerating growing priority international markets. This is really one of the things that makes us quite distinctive.
There's no other global company in our space that continues to invest behind their international business. It's a scale business of 32% of GPN, 38% of our business e-commerce. If you look at some of our smaller markets where we have partner distributors, when you look at who they're selling through, our e-commerce business in international is actually over 50% of our business.
We have a scale presence in 10 markets, within market presence in 13 more. 75% of our business globally is Optimum Nutrition. We've over 900 employees, of which about half of that will be centralized in the U.K and Holland because of our product supply footprint. Our product supply, we supply out of Middlesbrough for Europe. We now locally co-man for India and for China, both to avoid tariffs.
U.S. fulfills for the rest of the world, and we have our D2C fulfillment center in Holland. In terms of international markets, strong growth potential. It's got higher growth rates than the U.S. In terms of the opportunity, the markets are all at different levels of growth, but consistently growth rates are higher than in the U.S.
What we would say is while the top-line growth rates are higher in international, the margins are lower given the level of investment, given the maturity of some of those markets, the investment around brand and people. We get a nice balance between the two businesses. We have a large pool of consumers I spoke about earlier on. These are scale businesses. We've been building in international. We bought Optimum Nutrition in 2008. It had an export business. They shipped from here.
They never went to market. We had nobody outside of the U.S. We had no control of our pricing or brand, and we'd no people on the ground to help build. We have spent the last 12 years building a scale international business. We have strong, well-perceived brands, both in terms of Optimum Nutrition, but we also have nice local and regional brands as well that do quite well for us. In terms of our prioritization and actions for the international business, it was to focus down on Optimum Nutrition, to truly drive the distribution and increase the awareness of our Optimum Nutrition brand in these international markets. We streamlined our route to market. Some of the challenges we had in 2018 were frankly, we just had outgrown a lot of our local partners, and we had to build our own route to market.
We've enhanced and upskilled our business and brand building talent, particularly on our brand building talent in international. We have local manufacturing capabilities you spoke of us, which frankly, if we didn't have, we wouldn't have businesses in those markets given the tariffs that are in place now from imports from the U.S. or export from the U.S. I think our chairman spoke about it earlier on. We do a good job on navigating and managing volatility, which always is just part of doing business in a lot of these international markets, whether it be COVID restrictions, whether it be Brexit, whether it be war in Ukraine, which impacted our Russia business, whether it be currency volatility, tariffs, et cetera. We're a battle-hardened team in international now who can navigate the way through a lot of these challenges.
We brought you here today to the U.S., our biggest market. U.K. is our second largest market, and I felt a lot of people, particularly dialing in, would be very familiar with the U.K. market. We wanted to share some of the passion that we have in our international teams. I can't bring you there, but these are gonna profile, which are two of our largest international markets, both growing double digits, both performing very strongly in 2021. One, Australia, that we've actually been in for more than 10 years. We're the number one sports nutrition company there. The other one will be India, which is the first country where we moved to local manufacturing because of the confidence we had in our team on the ground to navigate and to build a brand in a very strongly growing market. First to Australia.
Hello, I'm Marshall Adams, and on behalf of the 35-strong team down here in Oceania, welcome to Melbourne, Australia's sporting capital. Across Australia and New Zealand, Optimum Nutrition continues to dominate inside the largest sports nutrition channel, being specialty retail. In both physical stores and through our retail partners' e-commerce platforms, we continue to claim more than a 30% share of the protein market, the largest category in sports nutrition. Testament to the brand's strength, 2022 saw us once again take home multiple gold medals in the Australian Supplement Awards, including Best Brand for the fifth consecutive year. Late 2021 saw us launch into Oceania's largest pharmacy retailer, Chemist Warehouse, with over 450 stores in Australia.
Rounding out our omnichannel strategy for the region is the highly important gym channel, not only used for the distribution of our ready-to-drink portfolio, currently growing at 120% year-on-year, but a channel that plays an important role as a media vehicle through our marketing communication strategy. With unaided awareness levels two times that of other brands tested, we will continue to expand our investment in above-the-line media to drive further brand awareness and trial. Through continued work with high fame athletes, amazing feats from everyday people, plus associations with professional sporting codes, such as the official protein powder of the AFL, we will continue to demonstrate the transformative power of fitness and benefits behind our brands to drive greater penetration and share into 2023 and beyond.
Actually, that last bit, Ned, if you look it up, Ned is a psycho. That was the phenomenon. Ned ran from Perth, Australia, 100 kilometers a day to Sydney in 43 days. Optimum Nutrition was his nutrition of choice that supported him on that journey. It was an ordinary guy, a carpenter, and he did it to raise money for homeless people in Sydney. It was a significant achievement. It's those type of authentic stories that we as a brand owner try and capture and partner with because they're real. Now to cut across to India.
Namaste, and a warm welcome from New Delhi, India. I am Satyavrat Pendharkar, and I'm very proud to present to you one of the fastest growing businesses for GPN globally. Optimum Nutrition is the number one brand within sports nutrition category with a strong omnichannel presence across 150 cities in India. We started locally manufacturing our hero product under Optimum Nutrition and Isopure brands, and by end of 2022, 75% of our net sales will come from locally manufactured products, growing to 95% by the year 2023. Over the last two years, we have grown awareness and consideration for Optimum Nutrition by over 40% through strong partnerships with star athletes like Rishabh Pant and Bajrang Punia, as well as building long-term associations with teams like Delhi Capitals of IPL.
A strong and diverse roster of 40 influencers and over 1,500 personal trainers help us build trust with our consumers. E-commerce is India's largest sales channel, which is driving penetration in tier 2 and tier 3 towns, reaching almost 19,000 pin codes across the country. This investment in brand building, driving distribution expansion, and local manufacturing has got us accolades in India as well as in the global GPN ecosystem. All these results were possible only because of a dedicated, highly motivated, and talented homegrown team, which is building cutting-edge system capability, which in turn is helping us to build a strong foundation for tomorrow, assuring us of sustained success for the years to come.
Very good. Final point in international, one thing that in terms of the brand investment that I've spoken about consistently, we've doubled our brand investment in international as a percentage of revenue from 2017 to today, which is clearly, as you can see from some of the growth numbers, part of that success. To talk, the last pillar of growth is our digital commerce pillar. Really, it's. I've spoken about e-commerce as a scale channel for us. 31% of our global revenue, whether we're competing on the likes of Amazon Marketplace to Rakuten, Tmall or Flipkart globally. We also produce.
also with our brick-and-mortar partners, and lastly, our D2C channel, whether it be brand.com or our D2C brands only, where we have scale capability now to and have 3 million consumers that we engage with on our platforms. LevlUp now as of last month is now fully integrated onto our platform, tech platform, and also within our fulfillment capability in Amsterdam or in Holland. Our broader digital strategy, best-in-class digital marketing. You know, this is really important from a consumer perspective.
We continue to broaden our community and engage directly, whether it be our 7.5 million consumers that follow GPN brands on social media, the 3.5 million that follow ON, or the 3 million consumer opt-ins we have on our brand websites. Calling out content, we have a 30-strong internal team that produces thousands and thousands of video content for multiple formats. If you think about the different formats, the different technologies, different platforms, and that's always something that our consumers want to see is inspiring content, but also educating content. It's something we do. It's a core skill internally, and it's also partnering with content creators.
People externally, the likes of TikTok, that are not part of the GPN team, but are passionate about our brands and work with us in terms of, again, creating and engaging with potential with our consumers and potential new consumers. Lastly, impactful activation online digitally, whether it be Double Eleven Day live stream event, a 100,000-view video on Tmall.com in China or our integrated YouTube platform activation this summer on Amino Energy, where over 50 million consumers engaged with the brand on YouTube. I spoke about this at the very start, our program around creating advocacy, and we do this through engaging directly with consumers, reaching them, and helping them understand the benefit of sports nutrition, the benefit of our brands, the benefit of working out.
We do this with a deliver pro with 32 icons, top-tier athletes across multiple sports, 24 C-level leaders, 1,200 influencers, and more than 4,000 personal trainers that drive brand recommendation at point of sweat. That all connects into what I was talking about earlier in terms of Net Promoter Score as well. Our objectives there is driving reach, driving engagement, enabling conversation. 'Cause we know that one of the barriers to consumption of our products is "I don't know why to take these products. Explain to me the benefit of these products," and this is a very. This digital activation is a key part of that. There are four key growth strategies that I just took you through briefly. What does it all mean?
Look, myself and the team that you'll meet in a moment are very ambitious with the business. We've a clear, compelling growth strategy, but we also have a clear and compelling growth opportunity. Optimum Nutrition, $1 billion with lots of potential for growth, and we continue to invest behind the brand. We have a unique portfolio of lifestyle brands in North America, and we have a scaled CPG business now that can handle that portfolio of brands and continue to drive growth.
We're in really on-trend categories with large consumer pools to target. We're truly a global business, the only global business in our category that established infrastructure and capability. We've a track record of organic and acquisition-driven growth. We've a great values-led culture. The brands that we represent, we're all brand ambassadors. We have great passion for our brands across the team. We are a true omnichannel business.
That wasn't the case if you go back a number of years ago when specialty was such a strong business. Now we are truly omnichannel, and we continue to invest behind that, and we have a talented team of brand and business builders. What does that mean? Siobhan shared the metrics with you earlier on. Our financial ambition is for average revenue to go to 5%-7% over the next three years and average EBITA margin of 12%+. That's it on GPN. What I'm going to do now is we're going to break for Q&A. I'm gonna ask my colleagues to join me on the stage, but as they're doing that, we're going to have a video. Siobhan will join us as well.
Just to share, which is some of the latest creative content around our More campaign.
When you're younger, you eat whatever. You have no clue about nutrition. It has an impact. I'm trying to stay on the pitch as much as possible. With Optimum Nutrition, I can really fuel myself well to meet the next session. Now I know how important nutrition is, there's no limit on where I can get to.
I was always a pretty small guy, but I always knew I was fast and I could use that to my advantage. I knew I had to double down on my training. I had to get faster. I knew I had to get stronger. Optimum Nutrition took a massive front foot in my training. I can sleep easy knowing that I've done my preparation, nutrition. To have that confidence when you step on a field has been a revelation.
Getting to this point wasn't easy, but it's all I ever wanted and all I've ever worked for. Competing with the world's best demands my best day after day. I've earned this moment. I've trained for this moment. All that's left to do is prove to the world that I'm ready. Okay, everybody. We're going to go to questions. As we go, actually, it'll be good if the members of the GPN team could introduce themselves as well, before we get going. Yeah.
Good morning. Steve Yucknut. I'm the Chief Operating Officer. I've been here just about eight years, and prior to coming to Glanbia, I was at Kraft Foods for about 30.
Hi, everybody. Andy Shaw. I joined almost three years today, actually. Previous to that, I was at Red Bull for 14 years across multiple markets and ran their U.K. business most latterly.
Hi, everyone. I'm Wendy Smith, the CFO for the GPN business. I've been with the company just slightly over 2 years, and prior to this, I was at Amazon for about 2 years. Before that, I worked for Kellogg, Procter & Gamble, and Johnson & Johnson, mostly in FMCG, and worked in Asia, North America, and Europe as well.
Hi, I'm Colin Westcott-Pitt. I'm the Chief Brand Officer. I've been with GPN for six years now. Prior to that, I was in with Heineken for eight years in roles in New York and in Amsterdam.
Hi, I'm Wendy Davidson. I've been with Glanbia for just about two years, actually, today. I joined from the Kellogg Company. Before that, I was with McCormick & Company, and before that, Tyson Foods.
Okay. Who wants to go first with a question in the room? James Targett.
Hi. Morning, everyone. It's James Targett here from Berenberg. If I may predictably just ask about the guidance for GPN, and on the 5%-7% organic growth, can you talk a little bit about the drivers of that between the performance nutrition business in North America, the lifestyle and weight management, and the international, the relative growth rates or contribution you're expecting from those three areas. Secondly, just on the margin, you didn't talk much about kind of the drivers of that 12%+ going forward. I mean, obviously, we're already at, well, Q4, hoping to be at Q4 at 12% already. I appreciate there's a plus in the guidance.
You know, historically, you got up to a 16% margin, albeit in, you know, different times, different structure of the business. You know, going forward, how should we think about your margin progression, mix, productivity, savings to give an idea of where that could go? Thank you.
Do you wanna go ahead?
Yeah, maybe. Hi, James. It's always good to start with a good one. I'll maybe take the second question first, which is margin. You know, I think our biggest challenge across 2020. If you remember 2020 into 2021, our margin profile was increasing all the time post the transformation project. Our biggest challenge in 2022 was we had to deal with 27% inflation in terms of our cost of goods.
We've just passed through our third price increase. You know, our reference, we're particularly pleased with our performance considering we've had actually at a macro level, three major price increases in the last 15 months. Third one just went live on first of October. Those prices will be in place as we move into next year.
While we do expect to see inflation growth next year, nothing like the 27%. We're probably saying mid- to high-single digits. We do expect to see probably some softening on dairy as well. I think what you're going to see in terms of margin growth is the benefit of the pricing increases, the price increases, the benefit of reduced inflation and the benefit of dairy turning. I think the unknown for us is within those price increases that are just in place. We're watching elasticity carefully. There's substantial price increases in a lot of markets. To date, very early, three weeks in, pricing is in line with our elasticity assumptions. That's a big driver of margin.
I think as well, we're probably being a little bit cautious as we look into next year, given the volatility we're all seeing in the marketplace and potential recession in the future and what that means. We are optimistic to see that margin growth. I think in terms of breakdown, what I said was, in terms of growth, the key driver of like all of our business growth, SlimFast will be challenged until we get into half two because we're just tracking until we get that velocity up, until the new brand is in marketplace. That's built into our assumptions of 5%-7% top-line growth. We'll see international grow higher than 5%-7%. We'll see North America in and around that, maybe a little bit less.
All rolls up to that 5%-7% average net revenue ambition over the next three years. In terms of the margin mix, look. You're right, our margin was higher if you go back a number of years ago, but that's really where I'm landing the point around brand investment. We deliberately set out in 2019 that we need to invest more in our brands. If you look at, if you just do the simple math around, if you think about the margin at the time in 2017-2018, we have now doubled our marketing investment in international. We have substantially increased two and a half times the marketing investment at ON globally as well. So while a little bit of double.
We are putting more behind our brand, putting more behind our people as we invest. That's important because the life stage of a lot of those international markets is very different to, let's say, North America, the U.K., or Australia. That would be how we'd see margin. Margin higher in the U.S. because of the more maturity and the scale of organization we have and the consistency of approach. A little bit less than average in international as we invest in markets of different maturity.
Okay. Next question is from Richard. There you go, Richard.
Hi. Richard Jenkins from BlackRock. Colin, I see you sitting next to Wendy, and I'm interested in the on the stage, the conflict between incremental marketing spend in the digital space and the cycle back on return on investment. Because if you're doubling your marketing spend, the question would be, why not triple it? I know Siobhan wants to fall out of her chair with that question. But if it's, if you can start to get better feedback on that loop, how is that interrelationship between the financial returns and targets and control and the desire to actually step on the gas? And then I have a second question, if I could. Thank you.
Yes. Thank you for the question, Richard. Wendy and I work very, very closely together and we're real partners. It's a great question, and it's actually something we've spent a lot of time focusing on in the last two or three years. We mentioned, Hugh mentioned on stage, we now do return on investment studies around 70% of our business. This is all about rebalancing.
The rebalance of our investment between trade and marketing, and then within marketing itself, how do we use the different media vehicles, the different activations across the brands and the products, and how do we rebalance that and optimize that over time based on the objectives that we may have? They may be short and long-term objectives in terms of actually converting into purchase. They might be when we get to diminishing returns on certain media vehicles, which is what we see quite often when we've, you know, after we've started investment.
It's also for certain products, we see certain marketing activations work more effectively. For example, Amino Energy Sparkling is actually really effective when we get sampling, when we get cans in people's hands, whereas Gold Standard Whey can be more effective with media. It's a constant test and learn. It's constant analytics. It's a job that will never be finished because Wendy will hold all of us accountable in the marketing team to make sure those returns are constantly increasing and improving. I think Richard maybe.
A small point to add.
Oh, go ahead, Wendy-Chang Smith.
Just a small point to add to that is at the end, we're looking for sustainable growth, not just more, you know, not just more spend, but sustainable spend that basically gives you a profitable growth rate. That's exactly what we're looking for, a balance between the top line growth and our margin accretion.
the second question, if I could, I don't even know who to address it to, but do you think your brands go across age groups, or will you need a specific brand to target older, active people? I kind of have a vested interest in that.
olin maybe can answer that. Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question, another one we think a lot of. You'll see all of the data we talked about today and whenever we ask consumers 18 - 60 years old. That immediately says to you we're interested in that cohort. It is very important we bring young people into our brands. That's really, really critical.
Doing a lot of work on that. You'll see a lot of the athletes, ambassadors that we use are very, very tailored against that. We certainly see that as people get more and more interested in the role that nutrition and performance plays in their overall health, whether it be across our brands, that's really important. It is an area that we're always looking at, and we think there's a really good opportunity going forward.
Okay, the next question is from Jason Molins.
Thank you. First question, Hugh. You mentioned quite a few times that ON has the number one market share. Can you maybe give a bit of color what your actual market share is, where that sits to some of your nearest competitors? And then following on from that, in terms of the competitive landscape, how has that evolved over the last four or five years, whether that's in the nutrition category or indeed some of the lifestyle brands that you've seen? And then just the growth algorithm, the 5%-7% that you've outlined, that's including price you've articulated, where you see pricing next year. How should we think about volumes in the sort of 12-month horizon? Thanks.
Maybe I start with the last point first, Jason. We're not guiding volume. We're guiding revenue growth for the simple reason that given the volatility in the market right now, the scale of price increases we put through, the potential elasticity that we feel revenue guidance of 5%-7% is the appropriate guidance. We'd obviously be ambitious for volume growth.
We'd like to see how this latest price increase impacts the market and impacts demand for the consumer. In terms of category share, I know it's frustrating, but it's even for us, it's very difficult to get, and that's why I tried to break down some context of what you saw there, which is we're number one now in FDM in the U.S. We're number one in e-commerce.
We believe we're number one in unmeasured channels, but we don't have that data. I could do the same as I go across all of our international markets. We'll be number one in channels in certain markets. In that global performance discussion, we believe we're around 9%-10% share, but that's heavy lifting internal work by our own analysts to try and come up with that, and it's directional. The way we'll track it ourselves is looking at it by channel, by sector, by market to see how we're doing in performance. Okay, next question is from Alex Sloane.
Hi. Thanks. I've got two questions if okay. The first one, just going back to the doubling of marketing investment around Optimum Nutrition. I mean, clearly you're seeing a good payback in terms of the growth delivery. I wonder about what you're seeing in terms of, you know, how that investment is impacting brand loyalty. I think in years gone by, you've described consumers as sometimes being repertoire consumers. They're buying Optimum or potentially a competitor brand if it was on promotion. You know, have you seen that change at all? Maybe, you know, more ON in the frequency of that repertoire or more solo consumers, if that's the right terminology.
The second one, just you highlighted India as a, you know, key success story internationally, and clearly, you know, you have your own local manufacturing there. Is that a blueprint that we should expect to be rolled out in more international markets? If so, what are the kind of CapEx implications of that?
Maybe I'll ask the second question, and Colin, you can answer the first point. I might ask Steve to expand on the second. We were actually very cautious. We're quite proud of what we've done in India because it was definitely a crawl before you walk, before you run. What we did first is we launched a local brand with this local partner. There's no CapEx involved. We work with a local partner. I'll get Steve to talk a little bit about the Optimum Nutrition, the concept of how we protect our IP. We proved that model with the local brand. We were confident, and then we decided to move to ON. It has been a repeated model.
Once we did that in India, we've now done that in China as well. That's been great because as I said, if we hadn't done that, we would not have. We'd have small businesses in those markets, unlikely to be profitable, or in fact, we could have shut them down. Steve, maybe.
Yeah. Maybe I'll build on that just a little bit. If you look at what would it take to expand further, it's probably a conversation between scale and then what is the financial circumstances around tariff and regulatory environment. India is a very scale market, and the tariffs are onerous. It made a lot of sense for us to put the investment in 'cause it's a significant investment. You're trying to balance between maintaining your quality, maintaining your IP, but then being viable on the ground. You have to have people there that are looking after the business for you in all regards. You do need to be scale, and then there needs to be enough arbitrage between making it here versus making it there.
That's kinda what drives it, and the same is really true in China, and the blueprint's just about identical. If you say, "How did you make India happen?" It's the same way we're making China happen. The way we protect the IP is with a black box, right? We have a certain amount of the formula that we protect, that we provide to the third party, and then they mix it with bulk ingredients, and we feel very good about the quality, and we feel very good that we've protected the brand and the trusted aspect of the IP.
A really good question regarding sort of loyalty and I think the way that we think about it is that we realized three or four years ago that we weren't reaching enough consumers with our communication. Didn't really matter what we were saying. If we were whispering it, then they're not gonna hear it very much. Now we look at the actual reach, we look at the quality of that reach, 'cause not all channels are exactly the same. Then we also look at the frequency of that reach to make sure we're in front of the consumer when they're thinking about buying the category as much as we possibly can. That's a key element. We're also looking at engagement as well, but reach has been a real driver for us, and that's where the investment piece plays out.
With regards with loyalty, we make a real effort to make sure we're very much in touch with what we call our super consumers, and they're the profile that Hugh talked about before. That's why we're very active in gyms. That's why we're very active with personal trainers, because that consumer's critical because they're in effect much better ways to sell other consumers, people coming into the category about our brand than we are. We keep very close to them. Again, we've got a big eye on that recruitment and bringing more people in.
Thank you. Cathal Kenny from Davy. Couple of questions. Firstly, back to the 5%-7% growth target. Can you perhaps distill that by format, powders versus non-powders? Secondly, the role of innovation that's gonna in terms of growth over the next couple of years, what's your outlook for that? And finally, on North America, I think in one of the slides, Hugh, you touched upon changing the route to market in terms of how you approach customers with a holistic portfolio. Can you give us some color in terms of whether that's been a success or not? And are you confident that that's the model you'll continue to adopt?
Yeah, maybe I'll talk to Wendy. You might talk to Mullins in North America. I'll speak to the 5-7. Steve always reminds us, Cathal, that powders are king. The more powders we sell, the more efficient we are, the better margin we make. You know, powders is a scaled, it continues to be a scaled part of our business. We do have a significant, I think it's over 60%. We do have a significant RTD business, which would be primarily SlimFast. We'd see some of that velocity start to increase as we go into the back half of next year. The primary growth driver will be powders, powder format and the powder format globally.
In terms of innovation, just to speak to that, we used to have a metric in innovation when you go back a couple of years. In fact, at our capital markets in 2018 we had one. What we found is there was unintended consequences for that innovation metric, particularly across our international businesses. When the primary focus, and I'll ask Andy just to expand on this a little bit, is there's so much opportunity for Gold Standard, Serious Mass and Amino Energy, that the focus is on driving distribution and driving awareness of the brands. We don't want the teams to be distracted in our international markets by innovation. When you look here at North America, you'll see some of the innovation that we have in place, launching our ON RTD into FDM.
Our relaunched plant protein under ON as well, again, evolved and our Amino Energy Sparkling. We continue to be innovative in our tier one markets such as U.S., U.K. and Australia, also in Europe. In our international markets, we're more focused on distribution and driving awareness.
Yeah. No, I just agree. It's particularly outside the U.K, the main challenge we actually had was reducing the range and really focusing on the profitable lines. Focusing on products within the ON portfolio that actually make us good money, and then that actually fuels that brand investment that will give us the sort of medium long-term growth. Yeah, from my perspective, innovation's pretty small part of our strategic opportunity, particularly in markets like India and China and Asia. We've got loads of great products that we can just get on with selling, building distribution and building the brand.
Yeah. In terms of the question on North America, when I joined two years ago, as Hugh said earlier, we had four separate sales forces going after the marketplace in very different ways. Our business was, at that time, a little over 50% in specialty and club. We were highly dependent in those channels.
Over those last two years, we've built a scaled organization to be able to go after the marketplace as an entire portfolio of business. Instead of being divided by brand, our sales team, our commercial go-to-market is divided by channel and customer. That gives us the ability to invest in scaled capabilities. We now have a category management team to be able to talk to our customers. We have insights and analytics to be able to really know what the consumer's doing across all that space.
We've invested in things like shopper marketing, integrated marketing, that allows our team to partner with our retailer partners to be able to grow the brands. Really proud to say that our business is now over 50% food drug mass, not because the rest of the business got smaller, but we picked up share, and we're actually the fastest moving SKUs, most productive in those retail partners. It's allowed us to be able to then sell other parts of the portfolio.
We might, may have had strength with a brand like SlimFast. We've been able to pick up sports nutrition placement in store because of the anchor relationship we had on the other brands. Because of the efficiencies we've driven, we've been able to actually invest in those additional capabilities to go to market the way they would expect a large company like us to do.
Okay. Conscious of time. We're gonna park any more questions in the room. I believe there's a couple of questions on the webcast, which have come in. Donard, can you let us know how many we have and what they are, please?
Yeah. Thank you, Liam. A lot of them covered there actually, but a couple in. There's two here. One is: How do you manage volatility in the international business?
With great difficulty at times. I think actually it's a testament of the team that we've built. If we look at the team in international, the leadership team, 70% of them are new since 2019, and they're all, I hate the word seasoned 'cause you kind of put brackets old, but they're all kind of mature, experienced leaders and actually particularly within their market.
Fantastic to see Satyavrat in the video there. He spent 14 years at PepsiCo. He is, without a doubt, one of the most professional people I've ever dealt with, and he understands that volatility. With regulatory challenges, the Indian market, the RTD market, the government, it's very complicated to do business there. We have the right people on the ground doing that for us.
I think the other thing I'd say is, you know, to that brand piece, the best brands are very resilient in volatile times. But that's why we still talk about the Nikes and the Apples and the Coca-Colas, because no matter what happens, they ride through that 'cause they invest for the medium term and for the long term, and that's very much the plan with ON, particularly across all these international markets. It can be challenging undoubtedly, but if we just keep focusing on the basics and putting really good talent in the markets, so far we're very confident for the future.
Thank you. Our second question, can you speak to some of the additional financial disciplines you now have in place versus a few years ago in areas like promotions and channel inventory?
One of the things we recently introduced about when I first joined the company was Revenue Growth Management, and some of you may have heard of it before. It's basically a discipline where you're trying to drive sustainable, profitable growth through trade management, promotional management, pricing, and assortment.
The way we approached it in GPN was we started by having a small center of excellence, where it's a few people that really own the process, you know, the management, the training, as well as the objectives. What we really went out is to educate and embed Revenue Growth Management within all of our markets. The education came from virtual and in-person training, where we train most of our commercial marketing as well as finance colleagues through Revenue Growth Management.
We had customized case studies that's really related to the GPN business that we shared. I would think my commercial colleagues here would agree that we really did a good job embedding revenue growth management as a discipline within the business. Just basically leveraging all of the strategy pillars such as, you know, trade promotional management, Price Pack Architecture, or even just straight pricing to really make sure that we're delivering the kind of top-line growth and margin accretiveness that we want to bring to the business. Finally, when we look at our strategic plan going forward with 2023 and beyond, revenue growth management is actually very well featured as an enabler to drive growth and margin expansion.
I know currently we have a really great set of playbooks by brand and then for our key markets to really make sure that we drive the activities that we need to see in order, again, to drive top-line growth and to help us drive bottom-line accretion as well. I think in general, it feels like a good success so far. I know we've been going through a lot of pricing increases. You heard Hugh earlier, three rounds and to offset inflation and other pressures, and I think I feel like it's going well. I wanna thank the commercial teams. They've really gone out there, did all the hard work to make things happen. It's still a long road to go, but feels like it's a good enabler we now have in our P&L to drive sustainable growth.
Okay. Right. We're under a bit of pressure for time, so we're going to take literally a very, very short break, five-minute break, just for a nature break. We're gonna come back for GN. We'll see you in five minutes. Thank you.
Okay.
Are we good? Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, can you please take your seats? Thank you. Okay, thank you. We're about to get started with Glanbia Nutritionals. Thank you very much.
Okay, welcome back, everybody. Over the next 30 minutes, I'm looking forward to showcasing the GN, and more particularly the Nutritional Solutions business, with some of the team. If we're just turning to our first slide here. GN, hopefully this gives you a sense of the scale and global reach of the GN business. Strong market positions across whey, premix and cheese. And a global footprint with 20 production locations and indeed 14 innovation locations across North America, Europe and APAC. Revenue of EUR 3.4 billion and NS now scaled at EUR 1 billion. We're gonna cover NS in detail over the remainder of the presentation, and hopefully that'll give you a sense of the scale and reach and capability and the platforms within that.
Just to cover cheese off early on, $2.4 billion business, and the revenue includes the output from the JVs in Clovis, New Mexico, and St. Johns, Michigan. We're required to include those under IFRS as the commercial partner. This is a business that you can think about as a number one position. We produce 1.3 billion pounds of cheese, just under 600,000 tons, and every one in four slices of cheese that's consumed in the U.S. of American-style cheddar is manufactured in a Glanbia-operated facility. We look at this business really as a stable cash generator, strong return on capital employed. It's a business that really matches big with big, and we're supplying all the major retailers and food service companies.
As I said, it's a stable cash generator business. We expect to grow earnings over the 2021 level in 2022 and maintain that over the life of the plan as we've outlined today. Hopefully, as I said, with NS, you'll get a good sense of the key points here. Siobhan spoke about the categories that Glanbia play into, and I guess we look at those categories through three key platforms here. Customized premix solutions, which is our vitamin and mineral premix business. The functional and nutritional proteins, which is our protein solutions business. And then our complementary capabilities, of which we've showcased and talked to flavors today. That's all connected really to those categories through innovation and insights, and you'll hear a lot about innovation today.
Innovation been at the core of our organization. NS, as we look at the revenue journey here, a strong track record of revenue growth over the last number of years across all of those platforms. Good growth within the key platforms and overall 15%, three-year CAGR growth, over the last three years. Good growth, that includes both organic and acquisition growth. Nutritional Solutions is now a scaled $1 billion business. When we set out our capital markets ambition in 2018, we wanted to be a scaled $1 billion organization. We've achieved that target, one year in advance. We set it out for 2022. We've had strong average organic volume growth of about 7.9% and good earnings progression beyond that. We've continued to invest heavily in the ingredient in the NS business.
Global innovation expertise that we've showcased and investing in capability to increase our relevance with customers. We've done that both organically and through acquisitions. We've built on our core strengths in protein and premix, and we've added key acquisitions across the Nutritionals platform and obviously scaled in Flavors. Just within that, I wanted to cover off, you know, a fundamental pillar of our growth has been through acquisitions.
We've spent EUR 300 million on four acquisitions, all completed over the last four years off market. We've engaged with companies who felt that Glanbia was the right home for these businesses. The Watson acquisition gave us complementary customers. It gave us East Coast facility, and it gave us access to new technology.
Foodarom, we had a small startup in flavors because we know how flavors integrate with protein, gave us access to 20,000 flavor library. PacMoore, really interesting and important acquisition for us in protein. We have great ingredients. We are the best at innovation, and this is the technology that unlocks our ability, extruder technology, to allow us to bring protein to the world in a range of formats.
It's all about increased protein in every, in everything, and extrusion is the technology platform combined with our ingredients and our innovation to really unlock the potential there. Sterling, a colostrum business, an ingredient that's well understood in gut health and immunity, adding also to our existing portfolio there, Lactoferrin and TruCal. Really increasing our dairy bioactives capability there and growing the market overall.
Just want to talk a little bit to the go-to-market strategy, as Siobhan Talbot ended earlier. We set out a number of years ago to bring one face to the customer. We wanted to bring our full breadth of capability to those customers to increase our relevance to them. That was to be insight and innovation led, all supported by centers of excellence to give us efficiency and scale.
In terms of efficient, scalable model, I think we've demonstrated the strength of our operating model over the last few years as we've bought and integrated four acquisitions. You know, the strength of that model has really come through in that time. Just in terms of our competitive edge, you know, what we feel our competitive edge is we have unique access to ingredients.
We've got really deep innovation capability, and Lauren will speak to that shortly. We really have an accelerated development in terms of our partnership and collaboration. We would talk to 14 innovation hubs, and we talk about getting customers in, having a real expansive playbook of capability and being able to get solutions quickly to help customers support their brand ambition and to help them solve problems.
The customer is at the core of everything we do, and we bring a breadth of offerings. Certainly, the increased capability of the ingredient business has enhanced the nature of conversations we're having as customers see us in a different light. Obviously, we have a global presence, which is key, as customers say, "Well, can I partner with these companies?
Have the ability to match my ambition to grow internationally?" We have that with a global footprint. Of course, the strength of our supply chain is key as well. You know, that efficiency that a big organization brings. This is a customer testimonial. It's Pat Cavanaugh, Founder and CEO of Ready Nutrition, and he talks here to our journey, the NS journey with them.
Our vision is really to provide products that make a difference for people. Everyone has that athlete in them, and we wanna be able to provide those products that make a difference in their lives, and that also have science that supports it. There's an inherent R&D journey of getting functionality and taste. I think that's one of the things that Glanbia has really helped us with. Our relationship started with a very specific project that was related to a high protein bar that had very specific targets that we needed to hit from a protein perspective. The challenge with that was we needed a certain texture at the same time.
Not only did Glanbia help us accomplish the protein levels that we wanted, but they also did a great job of blending the texture that we needed to get done with that protein level, and at the same time, delivered on the flavor profile that we needed to get done. There's a term partner that's used in the business world today that's really just a replacement word, in my opinion, for a supplier.
Typically, those relationships are transactional. What we learned in that first project with Glanbia, from our perspective, Glanbia really epitomized a true partner. They didn't wanna just deliver us the product to hit the specs, to hit all these other metrics that we wanted, but they also wanna understand, who's your customer? How are they gonna use the product?
They started to understand our business a little bit, not just for that project, but also overall. That was something where we saw the full evolution. As Glanbia's capabilities grew, that was able to allow us expand our portfolio and our different product verticals. Most importantly for me is that we have trust in Glanbia. That trust factor has been there. Glanbia has a spot on our roster in product innovation and as a partner. We're very excited about taking a true partner, not a supplier, a true partner with us as we continue to grow. Because for a company and a brand that's growing triple digits, we're gonna need that pipeline of innovation.
We're gonna need the market data, so we can make decisions quicker, and at the end of the day, develop a world-class product that builds on our portfolio now, so we can provide enhancements and a better product for our customers. Our culture is about helping other people achieve their goals. We get up every day to help people achieve their goals. That's a beautiful thing. We always say, "Make your best better." It's a never-ending challenge to do just that, continue to get better, and we're excited to do that with Glanbia.
Hopefully that reinforces the points. We deep innovation expertise, our accelerated development cycle, building our capabilities to increase our relevance to customers, and indeed, that trusted partnership with these brands. As he has grown, his ambition has grown and we have grown our capability to be able to support his and other customers' brand ambition. I beg your pardon, just move back here. Look, turning to innovation, in NS, we have really importantly, a culture of innovation. Innovation is really at the core of the organization. I want to introduce Loren Ward, who's our Chief Innovation Officer for Glanbia Nutritionals.
He'll really bring to life this global innovation hub and platform that we have matching to be ahead of our customer ambition, and also some of the technologies that we're using to solve issues or challenges for our customers, and to build out their brand ambitions. They have ambition to play in particular sectors, and we're there to partner with them on the journey and to solve the challenges in bringing those products to consumers.
Okay. Thank you, Brian. I'm excited to be here today, and share some of the things that we've been doing, some of the investments that we've been making to expand our global R&D footprint, to develop innovation and collaboration centers that our customers can have access to, and we'll go through some of the rationale of why that's important and give you some examples.
First of all, I'd just like to show the global footprint back in 2018. That's what you see on the screen right now. There were seven sites. If I click, that's what our global footprint looks like today. Some of those have come through acquisition, and some of those have come because we've identified a strategic site where we wanted to build an innovation center.
There's a few to highlight briefly of things that we've done over the past four years. The first, I would say, we've done and built a new innovation center in Singapore. We've also have a new lab in China, and we're just getting ready to put capabilities into Japan. So that'll really help fill out our capabilities to link with customers in the Asia-Pacific area. In Europe, we're doing a remodeling and renovation and expansion of our Kilkenny lab, and that will bring in pilot plant, bench-top facilities, and that will help round out our European offerings.
In North America, we put in new pilot plant and bench-top facilities in Twin Falls so that we could dig deeper into extrusion, confectionery, and flavor applications. It's really important as you look at customers. They want to link with us to be able to link and do rapid prototyping. They want to learn from the scientists that are there.
They want to access the technology that we have. Just in reference to the rapid prototyping, for example, we had a customer, a multinational customer, come in about a month ago, and they had a couple of areas they wanted to develop in bakery and confectionery snacking areas. Over the course of three days, we were able to put together 30 prototypes.
Then with this rapid prototyping, and because they're there on site, you can get the feedback and have the dialogue really quickly. Then we could refine that down to just a handful of prototypes they wanted to move forward with. That probably saved at least a half a year of back and forth and development time. You see that shortened development time with the customer.
The other thing, customers like when they come, we have a lot of base technologies that solve challenges that customers have. Here's some examples of some of the technologies. We've got a custom premix solution platform, functional and nutritional proteins, and complementary capabilities. These aren't all the technology platforms. These are just some of the technology platforms that we're working with today. I'll just give a few examples here.
Well, maybe just to start, when you look at a technology platform, these aren't single ingredients. They can go in a lot of different directions. Take PepForm that's up there. PepForm is a peptide carrier system to deliver amino acids of choice. If a customer comes and they want to use the amino acid leucine, and that's the amino acid that drives muscle growth, we can do a PepForm leucine.
If they want the complementary amino acids, isoleucine, leucine, and valine, we can also do a PepForm version of that with those amino acids. If they want like an anti-stress peptide, we link with the amino acid tryptophan. There's a lot of different types of ingredients that you can do on those platforms, and then they go into a wide variety of formats. It could go into a bar, a ready-to-mix beverage, ready-to-drink beverage.
It could go into a gummy and a lot of different applications. You get a sense of where this can go and how it can be developed as customers come. A couple of real-life examples that have been commercialized that might put a little bit more color and give some examples of some of the things that we've done.
I'll start with the NutraShield and microencapsulation technology as an example. We had a large supplement company come to us, and they were interested in developing a gummy, and they wanted to put in that gummy iron and other vitamins. If you look at mixing those two things together, nutritionally, that makes a lot of sense. If you mix them together from a chemistry standpoint, the iron causes rapid degradation of the other vitamins.
They want a system where you can put it all in the same thing, but you want to hit the nutritional end product, and you want to prevent or limit the degradation of the other vitamins. In order to do that, you can encapsulate the iron. You take the iron as the core. You'll put a shell around the outside of that to protect it from interacting with the other components and develop a system then that goes into the gummy that delivers the right nutrition and the right shelf life and the right taste. You can also use that encapsulation to help mask some of the flavors that come from iron as well. Another example would be if I move to one more, Granuplex.
We had a large nutritional company come to us, and they wanted to develop a tablet that did a quick dissolve. They wanted to put some vitamins in the tablet, be able to drop it into water, and have a very quick, in a few seconds, dispersion of that, of the tablet. The challenge, if you look at the tablets right now in the marketplace, they're very hard, and the reason is they're made very hard because if you make them soft, they chip, crack, and break, and they don't survive the transportation process. The challenge that was presented then is, can you make a hard tablet that dissolves really quickly and rapidly? The Granuplex technology allows us to change the particle characteristics to condition the material for the specific application.
In this case, we took the carrier material, and we changed the particle size. We changed the surface chemistry of that so that we could get good compressibility, so you get a hard tablet. If you looked at the microscopic view of that, there's interstitial spacing that allows the water to go in and disperse that really quick. We were able then, through that Granuplex technology, meet the desire of that customer so they could launch that into the marketplace and have a hard tablet with quick dispersion. Another example, we have deep expertise in bar formulations, across whey proteins, milk proteins, vegetable proteins. We had a customer come who wasn't satisfied with what was out in the marketplace for vegetable proteins.
They wanted to make a vegetable protein-based bar with pea protein, and they wanted certain characteristics and traits with the pea protein, and they also wanted certain flavor traits. We applied some of our protein chemistry platforms and technologies to develop a pea protein solution that gave the right texture. We also added a complementary capability with the Futurum flavors to be able to match that and optimize the flavor. Those of you that have worked with flavors and proteins know if you can specifically match those and tailor that application, you're gonna get a lot better flavor at the end of the day than just dropping in a standard flavor. Another example, the crunchy milk protein bites, the extrusion platform.
If you look at standard extrusion, which is the technology used to make, like, cold cereals, handheld snacks, puffs, things like that. Typically, the protein content of that would have been around 15%-20%. The customer that came to us said, "Can you make something that's over 70%?" The challenge in that is as you try to process proteins tend to gel. They'll plug up the equipment. We combined our protein chemist, along with the extrusion experts from the PacMoore acquisition, to go to work on that problem and develop a platform and a system so that we could do high protein extrusion that would go across snacks, chips, inclusions, that type of a platform, so customers could come.
In this case, the customer then took that high protein inclusion, put it into a bar and launched it out into the marketplace. The last example I'll give is a complementary capability, the Foodarom flavors. We had a large bakery chain approach us. They asked. They were on a time crunch. They couldn't find anybody to do the rapid prototyping that was needed and hit the right timelines.
We were able to work with their contract manufacturer, bring in the base material, do the rapid prototyping inside. Get the flavor optimized for them and get that out in a timely manner so that they could meet their launch timing that they wanted to do out in the marketplace. As just a sense of these technologies, there's a lot of directions you can go with them.
We have a lot of technologies that will help our customers solve the challenges that they have. We have done a good job to build out our capabilities, both globally and our technologies internally, so that we can help our customers have successful launches out into the marketplace. With that, I'll give it back to Brian. Thanks.
All right. Hopefully we didn't go too technical, but I guess it was really important to give a sense to this audience really of the innovation capability within the NS business. I laughed there when Lauren said those of you who are working regularly with flavors integrating with protein. I was gonna say, "Hands up who's doing that on a day-to-day basis." It is important that we do get a sense of the innovation. This is what we bring to customers, and we think about our innovation hub and our technologies. We are bringing technologies that bring functional and nutritional solutions to customers. That's why we're engaged with them. As we filled out this footprint and filled out this capability, we're entering into different conversations with the customers. We're being part of their innovation days.
We're being brought into the conversation around, "These are our plans. This is what we're planning to do. How can you support around that?" Only a couple of weeks ago, we had 1 global food and beverage manufacturer in. We showcased 30 prototypes. We're now working on 5 of those with them. That's the type of capability that we try to bring to the table. Just next up, I just wanna talk to a short video really that brings all of this together, really about innovation at the core. The video really shows how we show up with our customers, we're essentially built around them.
Today's consumers are demanding more from their nutrition. They want cleaner, better, and more enjoyable nutritional products that help them achieve their desired lifestyle. Glanbia Nutritionals is a global ingredient solutions organization. We have built our business around healthy categories and deliver ingredients and applications across mainstream food and beverages, supplements, sports and lifestyle nutrition, and clinical and early life nutrition.
Glanbia Nutritionals has long-standing, deep relationships with our customers. In fact, we've been with many of these customers since their beginning, so we understand their brand ambitions. Some of our customers wanna move into adjacent categories or launch new formats or maybe enter new geographies. Whatever their ambition, we help them bring it to life. By doing so, we've become the innovation partner of choice for many of the world's leading brands, and we've helped to kickstart the journey for some of the industry's most successful startups.
Our protein expertise has revolutionized the world of healthy snacking. We are North America's leading provider of protein solutions. We leverage our technology and ingredients to bring protein to the world in a range of convenient formats. We are one of the world's leading providers of customized premix solutions, which deliver these critical micronutrients into everything from beverages and supplements to infant and clinical nutrition. We serve the growing areas of immunity and gut health. Through our Foodarom brand, we produce bespoke flavor solutions.
When customers come to us with a concept or an idea, we work with them in one of our 14 global innovation and collaboration centers. We have patented and proprietary technologies and ingredients, and our customers use these to help achieve the ideal taste, texture, and nutrition in their end product. We also offer unique experience to our customers in collaborating side by side with our scientists to develop an end product that will help them achieve their desire for brand recognition and growth in the market.
We achieve all this while still maintaining a positive role in the future of our planet. We are Glanbia Nutritionals, and we're built around you.
Okay, turning now to the three platforms we spoke about, and I just wanna take the opportunity to talk to them in a little more detail, giving more color to the journey we've been on, building and growing out our capabilities, and I guess staying ahead of our customers' growth ambitions, both globally and regionally. The customized premix solutions journey started with the acquisition of a small business in Germany. We bought the Seltzer business in Carlsbad. From modest beginnings, we've grown this business to over half a billion EUR in 2021. The last three years, we have a three-year CAGR of 20%. We've replicated our facilities, our Suzhou facility in APAC to get ahead of our customers' growth there. New facility in Springfield, Missouri.
We've expanded in Europe to get ahead of our customers as well, and we're now looking at plans to expand in APAC. Of course, the Watson acquisition gave us a new facility, complementary customers, but a lot of that technology capability that Lauren spoke to earlier on, which now gives us different competencies. We were actually accessing that technology to bring value to our customers, and then we bought the business because we felt this was a good additive piece to our capability. All of that capability, I guess, is helping us play into those subcategories of the four categories that Siobhan mentioned earlier on, and we have opportunities across the piece there.
I guess with that in mind, thinking about our ambition for the business, we are in categories and growth. Hopefully we've demonstrated and you see a strong global scale. Then we have really good customers, both globally, so we're getting ahead of their growth, and then regional customers as well. We have an opportunity to take this technology and leverage it across that global footprint. Hopefully you got a good sense of that from Lauren, and you'll also get an opportunity those of you who are here to and through the workshop to further engage with those technology platforms. We're anxious to grow the business further and do further M&A.
We're not restricted to Latin America or Southeast Asia, but we would like to build out our footprint there. Have facilities on the ground there to grow with those customers. We're ambitious to grow in North America, Europe, and we would see ourselves hopefully acquiring further businesses in this area. On the NS key platform, functional and nutritional protein, we've built up access to ingredients, our primary manufacturing and our Idaho operations, which is a lot of the heritage of the core business. We've done very successful joint ventures with our milk member partners in Southwest Cheese, Clovis, New Mexico, and in Midwest.
Siobhan referenced that, you know, building $470 million facility on time in full through COVID, and that gives us access to obviously it's a cheese facility, but also a whey facility, so it gives us access to ingredients through those joint venture models. We've had a heavy investment in innovation, and you've seen the footprint that Lauren put up and how it's evolved significantly. We've got ahead of that. We want to be strong in innovation. We want to be where our customers are, and we've put a lot of investment into that over the last number of years. Lauren has articulated that, and Joanna across North America, across Europe, across Asia.
Adding supporting technologies, as I spoke about Sterling, that colostrum ingredient playing into gut and immunity health, enhancing an existing dairy bioactives profile are offerings that we have in Lactoferrin and TruCal. PacMoore, which is really the last piece of the jigsaw in that ingredient innovation technology piece to bring protein in higher levels, which is a difficult thing to do, as Lauren said, to a range of customers.
All playing again into those categories that we built up a business that's over $450 million with a three-year CAGR of 12%. Our ambition here is built around categories and growth, strong customer relationships, and an innovative partner. Siobhan spoke about it earlier on. We believe we're a protein powerhouse. That's not just dairy, it's non-dairy.
We know how protein work in a range of applications. We're the protein experts, and that's what we bring to the table with customers. We're leveraging the technology to bring protein to the world in a range of convenient formats. We want to replicate our dominant North America position in international markets in Europe and APAC, and a lot of that innovation investment is to get ahead of that. Obviously, we're ambitious to do further M&A activity, as appropriate and as we see as complementary to what we have. On the complementary capabilities, largely today we're focusing on flavors. We wanna scale the flavors. As I mentioned, we up weighted our investment here to bring. We knew how flavors integrated with protein. We've now accessed a catalog of 20,000 flavors.
We want to unlock that potential across the nutritional solutions, the global platform, and we want to continue to innovate, and we are anxious to do further M&A and double down on this over the next while. Our growth ambition, I think Siobhan has covered this, then again, Mark will later on as well. We're building on our core strength in premix, scaling existing protein, scaling complementary technologies and M&A across the entirety of the piece. We're looking at organic volume growth of 3%-5% and EBITDA structural margins of 12%, overall. I suppose in conclusion, hopefully you've got a really good sense of the NS business today, a real sense of global reach and scale. Hope you got a sense of the deep innovation capabilities, a sense of the track record of organic and acquisition growth, and a sense of the ambition.
I think you've seen the video where you had some of the team on, Lauren has been on, and you'll engage with some of them in the room and indeed in workshops later on. We're ambitious to grow this platform and to grow the business. Thank you, and I'll hand over to Michael.
Good morning, everybody, and to those of you in Europe, good afternoon, and thank you for being with us. I'm delighted to have this opportunity to share details with everybody about our ESG journey and update you on our sustainability targets. As you are aware, and as Siobhan spoke to earlier, delivering better nutrition for every step of life's journey is our long-standing purpose.
Our purpose defines why we exist and also how we have a positive social impact and generate shareholder value. As Siobhan said earlier, our purpose and products have real meaning and impact in a world where lifestyle diseases are the number one killer worldwide, and where better diets and active lifestyles are the most important preventative measures. That's at the core of what we do and how we do it.
In the GPN sense, that's products that go with better supporting consumers directly. With Glanbia Nutritionals, it is through the wider food industry and the customer base. If delivering better nutrition is our purpose, our ESG focus is about how we bring that to life. It's about delivering better nutrition responsibly. We have clear science-based targets. We are focused on delivering positive impacts inside and outside our organization. We have strong governance that goes from the board and linked to our remuneration outcomes. While we've been delivering sustainability and CSR initiatives for many years, Glanbia has had a formal sustainability strategy since 2015 focusing particularly on our direct environmental impacts.
In 2020, we evolved that further to take a more holistic view of ESG with strategies that span climate, environment, people, ethics, quality, safety, transparency, and reaching through all parts of our business. Our prioritization of ESG matters is informed by our biannual stakeholder materiality work, which evaluates the areas that our stakeholders feel generates the most positive and negative potential impacts by Glanbia. Though the assessment methodology has evolved over the years in line with the GRI, the feedback has been remarkably consistent. In addition to our long-standing focus on quality and safety across our organization, which are at the core of our business, our stakeholders are concerned about climate change and environmental impacts on diversity and inclusion and on good business practices.
Supported by external advisors and aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, we have taken a rigorous approach to measuring our impacts through data, baselining, and risk assessment. We have a clear strategy aligned to science-based targets and other relevant benchmarks. Our focus now is about driving action to achieve our targets. In doing so, we keep our stakeholders informed with GRI-aligned reporting, our CDP disclosures, as well as our annual TCFD and non-financial reporting. We are currently evolving our data systems and processes to meet new disclosure requirements, which are coming with the forthcoming EU CSRD directive. Finally, in this area, we work very closely with EcoVadis on benchmarking, scorecarding all of our supply chain to ensure that their impacts are in line with our objectives.
Today, I'm gonna focus primarily on our environmental sustainability agenda, where we recently updated some of our targets at our recent IMS. In 2020, we set out our Pure Food, Pure Planet sustainability strategy, which prioritized four key areas, being climate, water, waste, and packaging. We also linked our ambition to remuneration, which was formally approved by shareholders at our 2021 AGM through our updated remuneration policy.
Senior management long-term incentives are now directly linked to achievement of our environmental sustainability goals. Moving first to climate, and specifically our Scope 1 and 2 emissions, we aligned to the science-based targets in 2021, and our SBTi validated our plan for a 31% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions.
However, in line with a changing global consensus, we have increased our ambition to achieve a 1.5-degree temperature target. The implications for that as a business is that 31% target is no longer sufficient to get us there. Through extensive work done by our engineers, procurement teams, and operations teams, supported by external advisors, we have now updated our targets to achieve a 50% reduction in Scope one and two emissions by 2030 in order to reach this 1.5 ambition, which is so important globally. The question is, "That's great, but how do you get there?" There's a number of actions we are taking. First of all, our operating emissions across Glanbia are roughly 50/50 between Scopes 1 and 2, and that therein lies the opportunity.
We intend to achieve 100% renewable electricity across Glanbia by 2030. Our sites are going to migrate to this target progressively over the next number of years through a mix of PPAs and self-generation. In fact, our facility in Orsingen, Germany, is the first to move to onsite generation, and we are advancing plans for other sites. We've also laid out plans for driving energy efficiency across all of our operations based on comprehensive energy audits across our estate.
Those energy efficiencies will be driven on a mix of technology improvements, upgrading our facilities, enhancing our energy management systems, and will be delivered in a number of phases over our plan period and will specifically and particularly address Scope 1 emissions. Our work in Scope Three is ongoing, focusing in particular on the dairy supply chain.
In 2021, again, SBTi validated our target of a 25% intensity reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030. Our current approach, by the nature of Scope 3, is very much partnership driven. Within Scopes 1 and 2, we are in direct control. Our decisions actually decide when and how we make the move. In Scope 3, it is very much working with your supply chain and working in collaboration and close partnership, and that's a very important principle which we are pursuing. We were an early leader and collaborator as part of the Industry Environmental Stewardship Committee that delivered the U.S. Dairy Net Zero Initiative, which remains, you know, the core U.S. focus on net zero by 2050.
We're working in close collaboration with our joint venture partners who share our commitment to reduce emissions and who also, in the case of dairy farmers in America, have an ambitious SBTi target. Our approach overall in this area is four-pronged, and it's quite iterative as technologies evolve and we learn more.
First of all, working with the rest of industry and with our advisors, we've evaluated the technologies available to reduce on-farm emissions to understand the most effective, but also as important, those which are economically viable and feasible. We've also undertaken data mapping of our direct milk suppliers, and now we have 100% of that supply mapped. That's a very important step because this allows each farm to understand its specific emission sources and calculate its baseline emission factor.
On a per farm basis, each farm that you visit will just have a slightly different structure. It'll have its own way of doing things, and it's really important that the technologies actually match that rather than a vanilla approach. We're currently conducting further work in this area to drive insights and build a more robust profile of all of the actions across our supply base.
Our JV milk partners are doing likewise, and this is currently where we're putting most of our effort. Bringing it all together, understanding technology, understanding the individual's farm structure, we bring together an emissions plan on a per farm basis that delivers the reductions that we're looking for, but equally are economically viable.
In that regard, working with the U.S. industry and our supplier representatives, we are looking at a range of incentives and supports which underpin that transition. The adoption of low carbon fuel standards across many U.S. states, federal schemes, and supports and related tax credits now coming available under the recent Inflation Reduction Act are all opportunities to create the incentives and supports to allow farmers to make an economic transition
Many of our farmer suppliers are already adopting anaerobic digestion and other emissions reduction technologies, and our ambition is to promote that more widespread. A program such as this is large, it's complex, and it's multi-stakeholder, and we strongly believe, as I said earlier, in a partnership approach which will best deliver the reductions we are seeking. It's very much work in progress, and we will continue to update as we go forward.
I think an important point maybe to iterate at this stage is that our current work on TCFD financial quantification, which will be in our forthcoming 2022 annual report, has largely concluded that Glanbia is mitigating our identified risks in a transition scenario through a combination of supply chain arrangements and the delivery of our emissions reductions programs by 2030, and that's very encouraging. Moving on to our water targets. Water has been a long-standing focus for Glanbia over many, many years, and as an organization, we are hugely committed to water conservation. A lot of the programs which we have run over many years, you can see actually where we are today.
Since 2015, we have reduced fresh water consumption intensity across the organization by about 17%, and we're now focusing on a further 10% absolute reduction of fresh water use by 2025. That's an annualized saving of over 500 million liters of water each year. As an organization, we've become quite adept at recovering water from our fresh milk deliveries as we separate out the nutritional content and reuse the water in our processes and then ultimately treating it and returning it to the environment. That means that overall as an organization, we actually have a positive water balance. Actually, more water leaves our factories than we actually take in as fresh water.
An example of how this is done would be in our Gooding plant in Idaho, where we harvest the water that comes in our milk supplies. We use it in our processes, we treat it, and then we use it for irrigation, which grows crops, and those crops go back to farms, and the process starts all over again. It's quite circular in that regard. It is an example of the focus that's there. In relation to waste, and this is an important area for us, food waste, as you may know, is ranked as perhaps one of the top three actions that can be taken in terms of climate change.
As a planet or as a society, 30% of food is actually wasted and isn't actually consumed. In the developing world, that's caught in process, but in the developed world, that is largely post-consumer. There is a strong emphasis on working on our food waste. Like many in our sector, we are committed to a 50% reduction in our food waste by 2030. Our current focus, you know, in terms of a higher order of use of our waste, as 78% of our current food waste actually is recycled into animal feed. Our absolute target is to actually reduce that level of surplus, our non-deployed resources, and actually get that overall number down.
On our overall waste target, we had a zero waste to landfill target. We've actually upgraded that to achieving TRUE certification. Why that's important is that zero waste to landfill could be just a diversion strategy, whereas a TRUE certification is actually waste reduction. It's targeting absolute waste reduction. We are committed that by 2025 all of our sites across Glanbia will be certified against that TRUE certification. Moving on to consumer packaging, and Hugh touched on this area earlier. Our overall target is for consumer packaging to be 100% recyclable, reusable, or compostable by 2030. This is a major focus for GPN, in fairness. The recycling element and focus is well advanced.
Dedicated resources are in place with projects running across all packaging types within GPN. Also the development of new packaging types for the future. Hugh did mention the work that was done on the black tub. That was an important piece of work. It's an iconic part of the GPN brand. It is broadly, widely recognized and valued by consumers.
At the end of the day, just to ensure that it is maximizing its recyclability, it's already made of a recyclable material, but just to ensure that actually when it goes through the whole life cycle, that those recyclability rates are actually achieved. The new iteration of the tub, which is coming on stream, as Hugh already said, is going to be widely recycled and certified as such. Good work taking place there.
I want to update you briefly on our diversity, equity, and inclusion work, which again has been the subject of a full strategy review in 2020. The achievement of our goals, again here, is directly linked to our annual incentives for senior leaders. Glanbia as a company does have a strong culture, and it has good employee engagement scores overall. However, our DEI review in 2020 did call out that we needed to make more explicit what we felt was our internal culture. Our support and sponsorship of diversity and inclusion, and to ensure our work practices enabled a more diverse workforce. A board-approved strategy is being executed right across the organization, building on.
Working on building an actively inclusive culture, growing gender and racial representation in senior management in particular, and creating more equitable work practices and benefits. Our work to date since we completed that strategy has largely been working on our leadership, building leadership awareness, building leadership skills and impact, but equally going to our employees and giving a voice to our diverse employees through the establishment of employee resource groups for women, racial and ethnic, and LGBTQ employees.
We're supporting that with a focus on smart working and flexible working principles, which are being implemented to make the workplace more accessible overall. More recently, we've also focused on parental leave benefits to create global consistent standards. We are tracking how this is going down with our consumers. We do track employee perceptions of our culture of inclusion.
To date, thankfully, we are seeing positive results, but we have a distance to go, and we are very committed to it. We are working, as I said earlier, to build increased diversity representation at management levels through retention, development, succession, and hiring. Our business unit leaders are incentivized to deliver annual representation improvement targets, although we do see that as a multi-year program. In conclusion, as I said at the start, we are on a journey.
We have a well-developed governance process. We've built good data analytics, and we've set stretching and relevant targets, which are subject to external reporting and validation. Our incentive programs are designed to support delivery. Overall, we believe our business has positive social impact, supporting population health and well-being.
Our climate goals are now aligned to global momentum to slow and limit global warming to 1.5. We are informed by our stakeholders in setting clear priorities. People are at our core as employees, customers, consumers, communities, and investors. We are committed to making Glanbia a purpose-led, dynamic place to work for everybody who shares our purpose.
As we go on this journey, we will report openly and transparently as we progress on our journey, again, aligned to GRI reporting. Finally, as Bill Gates famously said, "People overestimate what can be achieved in a year and underestimate what can be achieved in a decade." Thank you for your time. I'm now gonna hand over to Mark. There you go, Mark.
Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Michael, and good morning to everyone here, and let me extend my welcome to all of you here and online as well. You've now heard a detailed overview of the strategy and ambition we have for Glanbia Performance Nutrition and Glanbia Nutritionals, as well as our goals on ESG. What I would like to do this morning is take you through some important points regarding the group's financial performance and also to summarize our overall financial ambition for the next three years. You'll have seen that Glanbia as a group has signifi cantly evolved since our last Capital Markets Day.
In 2018, with a focus on leading and growing our core, optimizing our business, and applying disciplined financial management. Hugh has outlined how well we are positioned to capture the global potential of a $1 billion Optimum Nutrition brand, as well as our ability to build on the GPN lifestyle portfolio. Brian has shown how we can build on our core strengths in customized premix solutions while also scaling our extensive capability in proteins. We've been optimizing our business through innovation and refining our business and operating model, most recently, of course, with the sale of our 40% stake in Glanbia Ireland. We have also and will continue to look for ways to expand margins by further leveraging our group operations and using technology to ensure our operations are efficient and effective.
We do all this with a disciplined approach to financial management by ensuring that we have strong cash generation, strong balance sheet, which allows us to invest behind our businesses organically, as well as to pursue accretive acquisitions. We have consistently returned capital to shareholders via dividend, and more recently, through share buyback activity also.
Firstly, I would like to take a look back at our track record of performance. Here you can see our reported adjusted earnings per share and dividend payout over the last 10 years. From 2011 to 2021, we have reported a compound annual growth rate of 6.5% in adjusted earnings per share, notwithstanding a very challenging year in 2020 when the pandemic was at its peak.
Adjusted earnings per share has grown from €0.463 in 2011 to €0.778 in 2021. In 2022, we are on track to report adjusted earnings per share between €0.98 and €1, based on our latest guidance of 10%-13% constant currency growth or 26%-29% reported growth. During the same period, we've increased our dividends at a compound annual growth rate of 13.5%. This, of course, was impacted by our decision to move to a payout ratio of between 25% and 35% from 2017 onwards. This was well received by our shareholders, and the group's dividend has increased from €0.083 a share in 2011 to €0.293 a share in 2021.
You will also be aware that we also increased our 2022 interim dividend by 10%, which was paid out last month. Turning to operating cash flow performance, the group introduced operating cash flow conversion as a remuneration metric in 2018, and as such, we've ensured cash flow and working capital optimization have been an important focus for the business. In the five years to 2021, over 90% of EBITDA was converted into operating cash flow. Based on the expectation for this year of an 80% conversion, that would mean over EUR 1.6 billion of operating cash flow will have been generated for the five years ending 2022. We have a centralized approach to liquidity management, which has served us well in recent years, particularly.
An important part of our focus on operating cash flow has been to ensure we have appropriate receivables and payables terms, as well as strong sales and operating planning processes to manage inventory levels. The last three years with COVID and post-COVID related supply chain disruptions, as well as significant inflation, have made working capital management more challenging for the group, but we've navigated this well and will continue to ensure strong focus on cash generation going forward. The return on capital employed metric is also an important one for the group, and we are in the process of improving this metric following 2020, which was impacted by the pandemic-related reduction in profit after tax when the metric dipped below 10% for that year.
The five-year average return on capital employed to 2021 is 11.3%, and we expect to finish 2022 above 10.5%. The metric is a key factor for investment decisions, as I will outline later, and we know it is an important metric for our shareholders also. The group has maintained a strong balance sheet over the last five years, which has allowed us to invest behind strategic capital investments as well as acquire businesses in GPN and Nutritional Solutions. Our year-end debt, which has varied between approximately EUR 370 million and just over EUR 600 million, has consistently been below 2x at the end of each of the last fiscal years, and this year we expect it will be below 1.5x. This is well below our bank covenant of 3.5x.
As a group, of course, we are comfortable stretching this ratio to between 2-3 times should there be an appropriate investment, knowing that with strong cash generation, we can bring the ratio down again over succeeding quarters. The group has committed debt facilities of EUR 1.3 billion currently, with weighted average maturity of just over three years.
We are currently in the process of renewing our revolving credit facility, which we expect to have concluded shortly. At year-end, the group will not have any commitments coming due before December 2027. Therefore, at year-end, we expect the weighted average maturity of our debt facilities to be over 5.5 years. Let me then summarize the key group metrics that we presented at the 2018 Capital Markets Day for the 2018-2022 period and our performance against them.
I think it's fair to say at that time, no one had visibility to an oncoming pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the consequent inflation we're currently managing. In addition, global trade and tariff disputes meant managing a global organization was more challenging than was anticipated at the time.
I'm happy to report that the group has been resilient in the face of these macro factors, and for most metrics outlined in 2018, we have met or exceeded the ambition we set out for investors. The group is on track to generate over EUR 1.6 billion in operating cash flow, with a conversion rate of over 90% in the five-year period. We expect return on capital employed will have averaged over 10.5% for the period within the 10%-13% target range.
The average adjusted earnings per share for the period is expected to be below the target range of 5%-10%, probably around 4.5%, which is primarily due to the impact of the pandemic on GPN sales as global lockdowns took effect in 2020. We will have issued dividends at a payout ratio of over 30% during the period. I might add, we also returned significant funds through share buyback activity during the period which was not anticipated in 2018. Now looking to the future, some of the key areas I want to speak to, firstly, our joint venture model, how we are thinking of optimizing our business and our approach to financial management in the coming three years.
Firstly, just from a joint venture perspective, the group has significant experience in managing joint venture arrangements, and the focus is on having strong partners managing investment primarily through the joint venture, having non-recourse financing arrangements and ensuring strong returns from our arrangements. Following the disposition of the group's 40% stake in Glanbia Ireland, the group now has four joint ventures.
Two in the U.S., Southwest Cheese in New Mexico and Midwest Cheese in Michigan, which are both 50% joint ventures with Dairy Farmers of America and Select Milk Producers. These joint ventures produce premium cheese and whey products and are strategically aligned with our Glanbia Nutritionals business, as Brian referred to earlier. Our joint venture partners guarantee milk supply to these large operations, and Glanbia Nutritionals receives commissions for the commercialization of the cheese and whey output.
These joint ventures also provides an important strategic source of whey to the group as needed. The other two joint ventures, Glanbia Cheese UK and Glanbia Cheese EU, are fifty percent joint ventures with Leprino Foods and are the leading mozzarella manufacturer in Europe. The current group investment in all of these joint ventures is approximately EUR 200 million, and the average return on capital employed from 2018 to 2022 in these JVs is expected to be approximately 15%. In addition, over the last five years, the group has received over EUR 150 million in dividends from its joint ventures, which did include Glanbia Ireland. Another important element of fueling growth for the group is ensuring we continue to optimize our business.
In 2022, we have made progress in simplifying our group structure, most recently through the sale of the group's interest in Glanbia Ireland. We will continue to evaluate our assets with a focus on our core businesses, with a view to investing behind those assets that will drive growth and assist the group in achieving its ambition.
We have centers of excellence in financial transaction services, information technology and procurement, and we continue to evaluate opportunities to further centralize and leverage our operations, for example, in human resources and finance, with the objective of leveraging our scale and therefore managing costs and enhancing our margins. As Hugh mentioned, we've made significant progress with the GPN transformation program, which has enabled that business to underpin margins. We are pursuing numerous opportunities to digitize our operations with our IT strategy to further enhance efficiencies.
We've deployed the leading technologies from SAP as our digital platform, which support the automation of our key business processes. We are currently upgrading our ERP system to SAP's latest technology, S/4HANA, which will bring machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities to the group.
We are in the enviable position of having a single global instance of SAP that acts as the digital core for our key data with one global governance model, standardized business process and at an optimized cost. We have a two-year roadmap to leverage the business process innovations enabled by SAP S/4HANA. Over the next three years, our digitalization program will be focused on supply chain, customer engagement, manufacturing and operations, finance and HR systems. Now let me turn to capital allocation.
As I mentioned, our focus on cash flow allows us to have a disciplined approach to capital allocation, so we can invest for growth and also return capital to shareholders. As you can see here, we've had a balanced approach to capital allocation over the last five years with EUR one and a half billion allocated between growth opportunities and returns. Approximately EUR 300 million has been allocated to strategic capital projects to enhance capabilities across the business.
Key projects included the rationalization of manufacturing operations in GPN, additional manufacturing capability in Nutritional Solutions to meet customer needs, acquisition integration activity, information technology rollouts, and research and development activity. Approximately EUR half a billion has been allocated to acquisitions in the five-year period, being SlimFast and LevlUp in GPN and Watson, Foodarom, PacMoore and Sterling Technology in Nutritional Solutions.
These acquisitions, some of which are very recent, averaged a 10% return on capital employed in the 5 years 2018-2022. Approximately EUR 400 million has been returned to shareholders via dividends in line with our payout ratio range between 25% and 35%. In late 2020, the group initiated share buyback activity, and since then has spent just under EUR 300 million buying back 23.8 million shares at an average price of EUR 11.81. As the group looks forward then at strategic CapEx and acquisition opportunities, our investment committee assesses all material projects with a view to achieving a 12% after-tax return by the end of year three, with the objective of ensuring the group's return on capital employed remains within a range of 10%-13%.
In recent years, this target has been more timely achievable on organic capital projects than on acquisitions, which may take a little longer due to multiples continuing to be at relatively high levels. However, as Brian mentioned earlier, the recent bolt-on acquisition activity in Nutritional Solutions has been completed in a relatively non-competitive environment where relationships have been built over time.
Management from the acquisition target have joined our group post-acquisition, and integration has been executed quickly, enabling us to meet our return target more in line with our target timing. Strategic CapEx has been generally focused on manufacturing capabilities and our manufacturing footprint, information technology project rollouts, as well as R&D and innovation projects. As we look to acquisition targets, we're focused on new and complementary capabilities or access to new markets, channels, or formats.
We are mindful of valuation multiples so as not to overpay for a target as we are focused on return on investment, and we do look for opportunities to unlock synergies via integration into our operations. We expect the average return on capital employed for 2018-2022 will be over 10.5%, and we would expect to see further progression over the 2023-2025 period and to be firmly within our target range of 10%-13%. Now I'd like to turn to the macro environment, which no doubt is a challenging one currently, and just make some comments. Firstly, the current economic environment is uncertain, and it is possible some of our end markets may be in recession in the near term.
We have, of course, seen downturns before, and our brands performed reasonably well during the financial crisis, for example. We believe we are reasonably well positioned to manage through a challenging economic environment given our consumer base and the categories we play in. Inflation has been a big factor in the last year, and we have shown the ability of our brands to appropriately price to recover the increased costs we are facing with the majority of price increases in market now. We continue to monitor for elasticity effect. On currency, the majority of our revenues are in US dollars. With the strength of the dollar, of course, you can see the positive impact on our reported results in euros, albeit we do guide constant currency performance.
The strong dollar is also a headwind for international operations, which has supplied product from the U.S., and it is possible we will see some additional elasticity into 2023 due to this impact. On taxation, we anticipate the OECD tax rate alignments to a minimum rate of 15% will happen in 2024, in which case the current Irish corporation tax rate would rise from 12.5% - 15%. Consequently, we would expect that the group's effective tax rate will gradually rise in the coming two years to a rate above 15%. Finally, on interest and financing. I mentioned earlier that we are in good shape on financing, and we expect that our committed facilities will have a maturity of over five and a half years by the end of this year.
Although interest rates are rising, we currently have a significant portion of our base debt at fixed rates as a result of refinancing we did last year. As a result, we expect our finance charges just to rise modestly during the three-year period, subject to acquisition activity. Before I summarize our three-year targets, I wanted to show you that we have discussed today is tied to our management remuneration also.
From a short-term incentive perspective, remuneration is linked to group adjusted earnings per share growth, operating cash flow, ESG targets, and business unit specific metrics. On long-term incentives, the key metrics are adjusted earnings per share, return on capital employed, and ESG targets. To bring this together, our adjusted earnings per share ambition is compiled from a number of things we discussed today.
Firstly, 5%-7% average annual revenue growth for GPN and 3%-5% average annual volume growth for Nutritional Solutions, both organic metrics. Secondly, earnings growth with both GPN and Nutritional Solutions underpinning EBITA margins of at least 12% with opportunities to move above this over time. Thirdly, capital allocation by continuing to refine our business model, invest in technology, and accretive acquisition activity.
Consequently, we have an ambition to achieve an average adjusted earnings per share growth of between 5% and 10% through organic and acquisition activity over the three-year period. To conclude then, these are the key group metrics that we have ambition for in the next three years. Average adjusted earnings per share growth of between 5% and 10%, average operating cash flow conversion of over 80%, and average return on capital employed between 10% and 13%.
Hopefully from what you've seen today, you can understand why we believe the group is well positioned to achieve these targets. With that, I'll hand it back to Siobhan.
Thank you. Thank you, Mark, and thank you to all of my colleagues who have presented to you this morning. Hopefully, that has given you a really good sense of Glanbia, our ambition, our future growth journey. Suffice to say that we have transformed our group. We have an incredibly strong portfolio in better nutrition. We have built great capabilities to execute our strategy, which is now focused and clear. You'll have seen today the bench strength that we have just a sample of.
There's a superb bench right across Glanbia sitting in the markets where we have all of our activities. You'll see more of those folk as you, those who are here with us, on site this morning. We have an incredible pool of talent, hugely ambitious for Glanbia and for the growth journey.
I think one of the things that hopefully you've seen, particularly in Mark's presentation, is the resilience that we have developed as an organization. The journey of Glanbia over all of the years has been a lot of portfolio evolution, as I've mentioned. We've learned a lot along the way. We've had to be agile. We've had to move with the market, which is great because that's what we want to do. I think that resilience will stand us in really good stead in what is an incredibly volatile world now. We have built new muscles in the organization. We have transformed our GPN business. We had done a lot of work in GN on that one face to the customer a few years earlier.
I think that muscle will be really, really good and will underpin our commitment to deliver the financial metrics that we've shared with you this morning. Thank you very much, those of you who have participated virtually and in person. I think we're now going to take some Q&A with my colleagues will join me up here. Then those of you that are in situ, we have hopefully some exciting further pieces that you can engage with the teams during the morning. Thank you very much.
Hold on.
Okay, everyone.
Sorry, Liam, just a small point. Just as I know you won't have met our group CHRO as part of the presenting team here today. Just to introduce Sue. Sue's been with us a long number of years, very experienced in the whole talent agenda, a part of our executive team based here in Chicago. Obviously, Sue was delighted to join us here for any Q&A you have as well. Thank you.
Okay, everyone. We're gonna go to Q&A. Just to get a bit of balance, I'm going to go to probably a couple of questions on the webcast, first of all, then we'll take questions in the room, and then we'll conclude with questions that have come in on the webcast. Donal, if you could just read out a couple of the questions that have come in, please. Thank you.
Yep. Thank you, Liam. First up, how did the sports nutrition category and your brands perform during the last financial crisis?
A couple of things. If you look back at it, actually, maybe focus on the presentation as well. First of all, have a look at the ON consumer that I spoke about. You saw that what they confirmed for us is our product is essential. When we look at the protein category, we see the increase in penetration, and we see consumers saying they're not only gonna cut back, 70% are going to either increase or maintain their consumption of sports nutrition products over time. I think if you look back at the Great Recession and what we saw, we use the expression internally, recession resilient, not recession-proof.
what we found back then, like who's to know, I don't think the recession will be at the same level we saw in the Great Recession, but as people were losing their jobs, the health became a greater priority for them. We found out that they actually took better care of themselves. They worked out more. we actually did well in 2009, 2010 in terms of demand for our sports nutrition products. If you look at the range, 70% of our products are powder. you know, that's the most affordable format for protein consumption.
If you think about a tub of Gold Standard Whey now may retail for $85, 75-78 servings per tub, you're looking at maybe $1.15, $1.20 per serving of really high quality protein versus buying a protein bar for maybe $3. The mix of our business, the scale of our protein capability would lend itself to a more affordable purchase. We're actually starting to see consumers, some are trading down in terms of size, some are actually trading up because they're getting value, better value per serving. We might see some softening in our ready-to-eat, let's say. You could see that category be more impacted, ready-to-drink. Well, our SlimFast shake is a meal replacement shake. You get a shake for less than $2.50, you know, a lot cheaper than a McDonald's Happy Meal.
You know, we would see our portfolio being relatively recession resilient, and we saw that certainly in the Great Recession in 2009, 2010 as well.
Thank you. Just another follow-up on GPN from the Q&A earlier. Historically, there have been low barriers to entry in the sports nutrition category. When whey prices have declined, this led to smaller brands promoting heavily to gain share. How does GPN protect itself in that scenario?
It's a great question. I think our business is fundamentally, and the category is fundamentally different than 5+ years ago. I think there's probably three reasons for that. One, our customers. Two-thirds of our business now is in FDM and online. Our customers are far more disciplined. They're larger. They're looking for revenue pricing growth within their businesses as well. I think the second thing is our competitive set.
You know, our competitors are also now public companies. They're also more disciplined. They're also looking to drive growth across their portfolio. The third thing fundamentally is the scale, the level of investment. Now, the scale of our business, the scale of the category, the level of investment required to reach the consumers that Colin spoke about, whether it be through food, drug, mass, whether it be online.
You know, the ability to reach those consumers given the scale of the Amazon business, let's say. For those three reasons, I think the barriers to entry are fundamentally different now than they were 5-10 years ago.
Okay, our next question is from Jason Mullins.
Firstly, Mark, you mentioned portfolio optimization in your remarks. Just for clarity, is that a backward-looking comment, or are you thinking about the portfolio maybe disposals going forward? Then in terms of the NS, Brian, a few questions, if you don't mind. Just given the macro backdrop concerns and talk about destocking, can you maybe discuss a bit about visibility that you see at the moment, how those sort of customer engagements are taking place? Then final question on NS is really the innovation centers that you've developed and you showed the sort of, you know, pre and post or certainly where you are today. If we're to look forward, you know, where do you sort of see white spots and further investment required to get to the scale that you want to get to?
Yeah, I'll just take the first one, Jason. Yeah, of course, I was referring to the Glanbia Ireland sale that we made, but I think the point I was also making was that we continuously look at our assets in terms of what we believe are core and non-core. If we determine that something is non-core, we may make a different decision. I was referring specifically to the Glanbia Ireland one, which clearly was non-core for us going forward.
Just in relation to, I guess, we had the IMS last week, we certainly are seeing with some of our customers an element, maybe more particularly on the dairy side, an element of destocking and right sizing the inventory levels. I think in terms of core consumption, our discussions with customers, they're reasonably optimistic in terms of overall consumer demand and consumption, but there is an element of destocking that we're seeing across, I suppose dairy and non-dairy, but maybe more particularly in dairy. On the innovation centers, I think, you know, you could see from the 2018-2022 movement and the chart that Lauren spoke to, we've had significant investment. Is your question specifically about innovation or white space in terms of acquisitions? I presume it's innovation specifically.
We're really happy with where we are today. I mean, I think the key piece for us was having something credible in Europe, and that's what the investment with Kilkenny was all about. Building our innovation hub in Singapore to really get ahead of our APAC ambition was important, and we're seeing the benefit of that coming through now. Lauren referenced that we're setting up satellite in China and ultimately in Japan. There is a white space in China and Japan that we will fill out, and we will have a hub in Singapore with satellite in China and Japan. Then within those hubs, we have a campus in Idaho, we'll start to build out the capability.
We've set a benchmark for the type of overall capability for ingredients, ingredient testing, applications capability that we need to have in North America, in Europe and in APAC. It'll be building up a bit of that capability within those centers rather than maybe further innovation hubs. We'll look at that as it evolves.
Okay. Any other questions in the room? Okay.
Sorry. Go to Richard first, and then we'll go to Cathal.
I wanted to ask a rather politically incorrect question, if I might. Glanbia is actually a fairly diverse company to begin with, so I'm not belittling the targets, but I think all organizations struggle with diversity, equity, and inclusion and merit and individual targets. Give me some sense of what the conflict internally is around that. Thank you.
Around our DEI targets, I think as Michael mentioned, we've been on a journey, and so we've had a lot of discussion internally, particularly, I would say, around gender representation, and then broadly, just starting to really look at BIPOC and some other types of targets as well. We are really in a process of baselining our current data, and so, you know, where we are and looking at that, I think as you know as well, we've been on a journey, and Michael said it, we certainly have aspirations to do a whole lot better. We're looking at parity, from a gender representation perspective and on BIPOC, I think as you well know, very difficult to get data, from just a privacy perspective.
Really starting, you know, again, looking at baselining that in the United States, and that's where people have to self-identify, so even harder to get some of that data. It is a challenge, absolutely for us, but one which we do have a roadmap. We wanna continue to improve. We wanna set aggressive but achievable targets as we go forward, so we are baselining that right now.
I think just an add-on, Richard. I think it is a great point actually, because obviously there was always that piece about a meritocracy and actually, you know, really keeping that ethos. But what we've recognized on this journey is we don't feel we have to compromise anything actually. That we can actually achieve a better balance, to be frank, in our organization that gives that real landscape that our talent can be their very best within us and within our organization. As Sue has said, part of this early stage of the journey has been very clear to listen to the voices of and we have communities of employees who want to be opened up, more opportunities opened up to them.
I think actually we sometimes say in Glanbia that the journeys we travel across a number of different agendas, we will do it authentically, and that this is a real part of this. We will travel this journey very, very authentically with our teams of people, removing barriers that actually can help them develop their career, achieving therefore the diversity, equality, and all of those goals in a way that is obviously, of course, staying true to driving the Glanbia organization forward as well.
Okay, Cathal.
Thanks. A couple questions firstly to Brian on premix. Your largest competitor is more vertically integrated, upstream. Can you talk a little bit about the pros and cons as you see it to vertical integration? And secondly, same with premix, just on slide 17, you talk about subcategories at the base of that slide. Can you talk about the most important subcategories from a premix perspective? And finally, it's just a question on incentives, to Hugh and Brian in terms of how your leadership teams are incentivized, and is there alignment obviously with today's targets? Thank you.
To, I suppose, the number one in the premix market, I guess.
Access to ingredients, you know, is not an unimportant piece, but we haven't found it as a barrier in terms of our ability to grow and evolve our business. Indeed, the margin profile would be comfortable enough with that in that context. We have a careful procurement strategy around our raw materials for the premix business, and we've built up strong relationships in relation to that. We feel, you know, that that's good for us at the moment. We obviously do have that vertical integration in the dairy side, where we have access to ingredients. We can see the benefits of that, but in that, it's more around tweaking your production process to allow you to have better functionality.
We have technologies, so we source ingredients, we add the technologies, so we feel it's not a significant disadvantage in terms of our ability to serve our customers. In terms of the category, across the board, we see, you know, sports nutrition, mainstream food and beverage, infant and clinical are important sectors for us. Then obviously we can see companion nutrition as something that's actually a newer opportunity at the premium level, where we're seeing opportunities and growth in that category, albeit relatively small at this point in time. All of those subcategories are relevant to us, but I suppose healthy lifestyle, sports nutrition, mainstream food and beverage would be the major ones for us. Infant, clinical are important, and we have good positions with customers in them. Then there's some evolving like companion nutrition.
Does that answer your question?
Incentives.
Do we wanna talk to incentives overall across the two businesses maybe in terms of?
Yeah. I can start and chime in. From a leadership perspective at both Brian and Hugh's level, they are aligned with the exec as well. Specifically looking at the EBITDA of each of those businesses along with revenues, volumes, and also including a step ESG target as well. Again, aligning with the exec, bringing that further down into the organization.
We would have, for instance, volume margin would be incentivized at my level and with the team as well in terms of focus and I guess the same for the incentives for Hugh.
Yeah. Very simple. Margin, margin delivery, revenue growth, cash will be the three main metrics for the team.
I've got a couple more questions in the room. James Targett.
Thank you. Just coming back to SlimFast, and then I've got another more general question. So could you say what the decline in SlimFast year to date was if you take out the keto range? 'Cause I don't think, you know, perhaps it's not as large a part of the portfolio that it had been. So what was the underlying decline? And, you know, do you expect the core keto range to still be a headwind to sales growth next year? And if the diet category doesn't recover, you know, can the SlimFast brand be repositioned to deliver growth even without that traditional market coming back? I guess that's my question on SlimFast, and I'll let you answer.
Yeah. Thanks very much, James. I'll answer the last bit first. Yeah, look, when we bought SlimFast, part of the strategic rationale was always about broadening into the weight management space to extend from diet, and also at a form, at its core level, it's actually a ready-to-drink proposition. It's a meal replacement shake. For us as well, the biggest key is 20-gram protein meal replacement shake. For us, that was a significant opportunity. We absolutely believe in our ability to extend the brand into that weight management, that broader weight management. It will take some time, and the primary format we'll do that with will be ready-to-drink shake, protein shakes. In terms of the overall performance, we don't break it down.
The best I'll give is the two-year example that we had there, that if you look at the core range, if you look at the keto decline, it's about minus 40%, 2020 to 2022. The core range is actually flat. The high protein low carb is flat over the last two years, which we're particularly pleased about given the minus 8% decline in the category. The original is about minus 1%. Actually, within that, there's a diabetic offering we had that we've delisted, which is part of that in powder. We would be positive about velocity growth, sequential velocity growth in that core range of high protein low carb from quarter one on next year.
Thank you. My second question is just on the, you know, the board's view of the future of Glanbia, you know, when signing off on the new financial ambitions and investment plans for the next period. You know, is it fair to say that they've concluded that the best interests of shareholders are served by keeping Glanbia in its current structure?
Yes, it is the simple answer to your question, James. We would always do a very deep strategic process at this time of the year. So we've actually completed our strategic planning process, obviously, before we would come indeed to the market with targets. Part of that process was doing a very deep portfolio review, looking at the market opportunities we have, looking at the portfolio that we might potentially service those markets with. We have concluded, and the board absolutely have concluded, that the structure we have is the appropriate structure, and we will drive forward growth under our current agenda.
Okay. Our next question is Alex Sloane.
Thanks. I have two actually. Starting with the board, Donal opened referencing, you know, the increasing independence of the board that's been achieved over the past few years. I wonder if Siobhan and maybe any others on stage could talk to how the ExCo board interactions have evolved over the last 18 months when obviously the performance of the business has also improved. Just secondly, you've referenced a few times in the presentations that in GPN you're watching elasticities closely. I wonder if these did deteriorate in a tougher environment, if you'd be inclined in the shorter term to prioritize the top line or that margin target, or if the targets that you've laid out do already embed some caution on that front.
Thank you. Firstly to the board, again, I think it's the important reference point I would make in the first instance is that all of the boards that I've worked with through my many years with Glanbia have been phenomenally ambitious for the organization. I think our largest shareholder, clearly, we had a significant representation on our board, has always had a very strong, passionate approach to driving the group forward. In fact, as the chairman referenced, their very decision to actually free up board seats, for want of a better phrase, to actually bring on diversity. The current chairman of our largest shareholder was very clear and very supportive with our own chairman, clearly, Donal, that diversity of thought, diversity of experience would just be additive to our board. Our board is very engaged, as you know.
Our chairman is very engaged with the executive team. We have great constructive conversations. The board has been very engaged, as you would expect, in our strategic process and the strategic review that I've just mentioned. We have really good conversations about driving the group forward. We have lots of constructive perspectives. We've a really new skill set that we've brought on, a lot of North American experience, a lot of brand building experience, a lot of ingredient experience with Ilona and others who have joined us recently. We've always, as an organization, our culture is to be very open and transparent. As a team, as the exec team, we are very open with our board. We really bring the board into the areas of opportunity and, quite frankly, the areas of challenge.
I think that transparency has stood us as a collective very strongly. We have a superb board who, again, likewise with each of us as a team, very ambitious. We engage collectively and individually with our board members right across different agendas.
Yeah, hi, Alex, yeah. I suppose the two things. I suppose the simple answer is we have elasticity built into next year's plans, and it's within that guidance of 5%-7%. As you would expect, given the volatility we're seeing now, we have built in some caution around that as well. You know, it's just we'll be more confident as we go into next year, but given the price increases have just landed on shelf right now, we're watching carefully. They are elasticity assumptions built into the guidance.
Okay, Donal, do you mind going through the webcast questions, please?
Yes, there's a few more here, Liam. The first is: Are there any further cost savings to come from the GPN transformation initiatives? And what is the margin potential of the GPN business?
I can answer the last one because we've just guided 12%+. That's the margin within the business. Clearly we would be ambitious for more, that's why the plus sign is there. We're just being cautious as we face into potential recession next year. Although, as I said earlier on, we do believe our brands are recession resilient. No, the work, the Project Momentum, effectively, the consolidation, the simplification is all complete. I think we have great discipline within the organization now, which we'll continue to apply. I think it's also the margin. We don't see margin movement around that.
I think where we would see potential margin improvement is around inflation coming back, some input material costs starting to come back based on what we saw in 2021 and 2022. Also scale play as we continue to drive growth across the business because we will see some synergies around that as well. Our guidance as we've said is 12%+.
Just a slight build here. I think it's fair to say that the excuse the pun, but the muscle that you've built through the transformation program is that really solid underpin. That's really what's giving us the confidence to say that 12%+, because that has been such an all-encompassing program right through GPN, and that underpin now I think is really secure.
Thank you. The next question is, do you expect your CapEx to increase to deliver growth on your sustainability targets?
Well, I can take it. I mean, for the next three years, I would expect our CapEx would be roughly in a range of probably EUR 70-80 million, if you include strategic CapEx around EUR 60 million and sustain of about EUR 20 million. There'll be many different projects that we even talked about, some of the things that we're doing here in GPN and GN, but very much in line with what we've seen over the last number of years, so no significant increase in CapEx, I would say, over the next three years.
Do you want to take that one?
In relation to sustainability, the projects that we have on the slate at the moment are within that CapEx envelope and are returning.
Thank you. The next question is back to GPN. Are you concerned about larger players moving into the sports and lifestyle nutritional space, such as recent Nestlé and PepsiCo acquisitions? Do you worry that as larger players move into the space, they may outspend you on advertising and promotion, marketing or product development?
I think a couple of comments. One, we take all our competitors. We treat all our competitors with equal respect, small or large. We've clearly seen some of the larger CPGs enter into this space. They've been in this space before. What I'd say as well from what you've seen today, you should have a sense on the scale of our own business as a large CPG business in North America and ability to compete in that. I think we'd be more focused on our own investment levels, our own brand strategy, the scale of the opportunity we have ourselves, but we do keep a respectful and healthy watch on our competitors as well. It's not something we would see as a different threat than any other within our business mix.
Thank you. Just two questions on the group structure again. What quantifiable evidence do you have of synergies between GPN and GN that would not be available to the group if the businesses were separate? The second part is, how do you manage the fact that GPN is competing with GN customers?
Yeah. To the first question, obviously, as we were doing our strategic planning, and indeed as we will do through all our strategic planning, we look at the synergistic piece. I think what you've seen, and we've referenced indeed our as we've journeyed through 2021, 2022, a number of themes. Firstly, supply. I mentioned earlier when I was speaking about the knowledge we have collectively in that growing, very attractive category of performance nutrition. We started as that category started in truth. We started with the evolution of the technology and dairy protein that is centered around nutritional solutions, that innovation that Lauren spoke to, where there's a huge expertise. But we also know what's happening in the primary producer. We know the supply. We have great insight to what the actual supplier, the available supply in that space.
That raw material is clearly a significant input to GPN. I think there was an insight and analytics piece that through this year, it informed Hugh and his team in terms of procurement because Brian and his team could just bring insights as to how the market was moving. We saw that as a very clear financial advantage this year in terms of the procurement of GPN and getting ahead of what became a very spiky market. We didn't get to those spikes in terms of our cost of goods. The other piece I would say wasn't just about price, it was about availability. Our customers in GPN have called out the fact that we could supply and be on shelf in a period of quite significant volatility of supply, where some indeed in our space couldn't. I think that's a very real benefit.
I think there is insights around the consumer lens that both parts of the organization can use. From a category point of view, we are in better nutrition. We have innovation capability across both Nutritional Solutions and GPN. There's certain insights in developing our business we don't need to do twice. We absolutely have two separate commercial faces to the organization, which a little bit to your second question, but of course there is the overarching insights that we can leverage across both. Before I go to your second one, just from an organizational point of view, there is a scale. Scale is beneficial, particularly as Mark touched on in his area. We have really strong centers of excellence on systems and systems development, procurement, finance, all those classic, what I call the infrastructural parts of the organization.
Some folks might say, "Well, you can have that anyway." Actually, it is most efficient when you can deploy that at scale. We saw the benefit of that, quite frankly, through areas like liquidity management with COVID. We have a really strong center of excellence, and we leverage that across both GPN and GN. To the latter point, which was around. Sorry, I forgot.
Oh, yes, of course. Yes. That's a really interesting point, and a point obviously that has been part of the evolution of the group. When we bought GPN actually as far back as 2008, we made a very conscious strategic decision that we would actually, from a commercial perspective, evolve both parts of our group in that area of better nutrition. So Brian and his team would actually develop real solutions capability that could transcend a number of growing categories. Yes, we were anchored in that dairy protein, but we knew that we could take that anchor of dairy protein into broader proteins, into areas like premix, add other things to it, like flavors, and really develop to be that partner of choice for customers. Quite separately then, we were building brands. We were building brands in GPN.
When we talk to our customers in NF, customers know that we have leading brands, but we're very respectful of the relationships with those customers. Our customers know that. It's not been an issue for us because it is a quite dedicated and separate activity, so the both commercial sides of the business treat it as such. Brian can speak more eloquently than I, but GPN is a key customer and has a key customer relationship for NF. There's areas where we can do things together, there's areas we are very separate, and that has absolutely enabled a value additive strategy for the totality of the organization versus an alternative route.
Yeah, I think that sums it up. I mean, GN, GPN are a global key account, and we have a number of global key accounts, and we have regular interactions around how we can support their brand ambition. Remember, they're into a number of categories. We have infant formula and clinical nutrition supplements, which I should have mentioned earlier, and premix as well. We have a lot of categories that we're playing into that are not necessarily categories that GPN are in, but they're a global key account. They're an important, as are a number of other strategic global accounts and regional accounts that we have. And we give them, and engage with them in that way.
Thank you. The next question: Have you any more share buybacks planned?
That's obviously a matter for the board. I think the point I was trying to make today is that we have now clearly used share buybacks as an opportunity for us to allocate capital, and it's something we're very happy to do. I think as we go into next year, we'll continue to assess that as we look at our CapEx program, our M&A program. To the extent that we have excess cash, of course, we're very happy to talk as a board as to whether we would actually deploy additional share buybacks.
Thank you. The last question, a two-parter that's in at the moment: How are lower whey prices likely to impact both GPN and NS? What are the building blocks to margins in both businesses?
Maybe I'll handle that as an overall piece, and the guys can come in. I think we referenced this indeed at Q3. Overall lower whey prices would be to the advantage of the group. Obviously, it's a big input cost for GPN. As we said when we had our Q3 IMS, directionally, they are coming down. We are well positioned and have already purchased for Q1. We've purchased about 50% of Q2. It's probably gonna be maybe the second half of 2023 when we will see that crystallize. In Brian's business, where you're really gonna see that show up is in the pricing. We've actually given a volume metric because really, as you know, the pricing for dairy can move around. You're gonna see probably a negative pricing dynamic in NS on the back of that.
Overall, when you take the totality of the margin profile of the organization, we expect it to be a net positive as we run through the year.
Okay. I don't think there are any more questions in the room. I'd like to ask Siobhan to make some concluding remarks, and then when Siobhan is finished, we're going to shut down the webcast and move on to the next part of the day.
Thanks, Liam. I think I've probably said sufficiently at this point in time. Just to restate what I said earlier, hugely ambitious for this organization. I want to thank all of my own colleagues and all of my wider colleagues here for the huge work obviously in getting Glanbia to where it is today. Obviously, our chairman is massively supportive with the board of our journey. We believe that we have tremendous opportunities to really grow this organization, and we have such a fantastic bench of really motivated, ambitious, passionate people across our total business. I wanna thank you all for your attention, both in the room and virtually. As always, we are very pleased to take any follow-up questions that you might have as you synthesize a lot of information that we've given you today.
Hopefully, that ambition has become very, very clear from us, and we will be taking Glanbia forward to a further exciting phase of growth in the years ahead. Thank you very much.
Okay, everyone. We're going to take another very, very short break. We're gonna reconvene in here with Colin Westcott-Pitt from GPN. After his presentation, which will be quite short, we're going to move on to the plant tour. If you wanna take a very quick break and come back, and then we'll move on to the next stage of the day. Thank you.