Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for dialing in. On the occasion of Kerry's 50th Anniversary, we're delighted to present to you our business today as we enter a new strategic cycle. I'll start off with an overview of our unique strategic positioning within the B2B ingredient solutions market and bring you through each of our four key growth platforms. Oliver will then share a number of examples which brings to life how we solve our customers' complex challenges with truly differentiated solutions. Marguerite will close out with an overview of our value creation framework, which is a combination of growth, return, and sustainability measures. Before we begin, I would like to note the usual disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements. Beginning with our purpose, Inspiring Food, Nourishing Life.
For anyone that's not familiar with what we do at Kerry, we are a global leader in Taste & Nutrition, currently reaching over 1 billion consumers around the world with our food, beverage, and pharma solutions. We have an extensive breadth of technology capability across our entire ingredients portfolio, and we have a depth of technical and applications expertise with over 1,100 scientists across our global footprint. This foundation allows us to continually inspire food and beverage products, whether that be new flavors, cleaner and healthier labels, or adding clinically backed functional nutrition. Nourishing life is about sustainability. We are driven to improve the overall food system and to deliver a better overall impact for the planet. Kerry's range of solutions help reduce food waste and the carbon footprint of final products right across the various stages of the supply chain.
Our business today comprises group revenue of EUR 7.4 billion and EBITDA of EUR 1.1 billion, with 152 production locations and over 22,000 employees all around the world. We have a leading global footprint with manufacturing across 36 different countries and a presence in over 50. This allows us to serve the specific local needs of our customers in their markets. Post our recent portfolio developments, our divisions have been updated to reflect our new Kerry Dairy Ireland segment, meaning that Taste & Nutrition now comprises 84% of revenue and 93% of EBITDA on a pro forma basis. Moving next to our review of 2021, which was an important year for Kerry.
Firstly, on performance, we achieved strong revenue growth with group volumes up 8% in the full year, and in Q4, our volumes were up 7.6% with double-digit organic growth. This growth in the year was broad-based across our regions, our end use markets, and our channels. In the Retail channel, we had volume growth of 5.4% in 2021, driven by strong demand for functional food with clinical health benefits, plant-based, taste without compromise, and products with an improved sustainability impact. In the Foods ervice channel, which has been impacted by COVID, we delivered excellent overall volume growth of 18% in the year.
When you look at our volumes on a two-year basis, our double-digit growth in Q4 puts us back above 2019 levels, which is an excellent performance and testament to the work our teams have been doing with our customers right throughout the year. Next, from a strategic standpoint, in 2021, we made a number of important strategic developments. We completed five acquisitions, the most notable being Niacet, which enhances our position in food protection and preservation and is a strong complement to our clean label preservation capabilities. On footprint, we opened our new taste facility in Durban, South Africa, and we also commenced production at our new facility in Rome, Georgia.
Finally, on strategy, we completed a comprehensive strategic planning refresh during the year, which we presented at our Capital Markets Day in October, and this included our new strategic growth priorities, key growth platforms, midterm financial targets, and sustainability commitments for our next strategic cycle. We run our Taste & Nutrition business through five dimensions, all of which are interconnected. End-Use Market is the primary lens through which we set strategy and manage our business across food, beverage, and pharma markets. Our EUMs break down as you can see here. Within the food EUM, we're market leaders in the value-add ingredients and solutions markets for meat and meat alternatives. We're the number one solutions partner for beverage, and Kerry's pharma solutions are used in six of the top 10 blockbuster drugs. Across our customer base, we have leadership positions with global, regional, and local leaders.
From a geographical perspective, over half of our Taste & Nutrition revenue comes from the Americas, with 25% in Europe and 23% in APMEA. We have been delivering market leading growth in our emerging markets over many years. We have 22 core technologies enabled by our 25 process technology platforms and market leadership positions in authentic savory taste solutions for meat and snacks, food protection and preservation, and in probiotics for ambient food and beverage. Finally, in our channels, 74% of our business is in the Retail channel, where we are a leading solutions partner for CPGs and own brands, with 26% in food service, where we've grown over the past decade to be a global leader in our space.
Our growth targets and sustainability objectives are linked. The growth we aim to achieve with our customers over the coming decade will involve improving the nutritional profile of food and beverage products by reducing fat, salt, or sugar, delivering cleaner labels, or by adding clinically backed functional health benefits. We're also going to continue to improve the environmental and social impact of these products as we strive to reduce carbon emissions, food waste, or water usage, while also delivering a better social impact. This combination is how we aim to achieve our ambitious goal of increasing our reach of sustainable nutrition solutions to over two billion consumers by 2030. Moving to our strategic framework, which has remained very consistent over the years. The markets we focus on are food, beverage, and pharma.
Our strategic priorities of taste, nutrition, and emerging markets help ensure our capital allocation decisions are aligned to our strategy. Under this, we have four key growth platforms: Authentic Taste, Plant-based, Food Waste, and Health and Biopharma. Each of these platforms will be key contributors of growth in the coming years. Beginning with Authentic Taste. We all know the importance of taste as the number one driver of repeat purchase behavior. Taste for Kerry starts with nature. Our unique set of natural ingredients and our farm food, farm-to-food heritage differentiates Kerry when it comes to taste. This helps us solve the complex challenges of delivering natural, clean label, and great-tasting food. Over the years, we have significantly built out our taste capabilities in our portfolio and applied our deep science and process expertise to create our unique taste technologies. This has resulted in many leading technology positions.
Just to call out a few, we're number one in Smoke & Grill , number one in dairy taste, and we're a recognized global leader in natural extracts and modulation. We've one of the largest teams of technical taste experts in the world, including a global network of over 90 flavors, supported by sensory scientists and analytical chemists, application scientists and manufacturing specialists. The scale and breadth of Kerry's market access right across food and beverage gives us the ability to be globally connected while also meeting our customers' specific local demands across a range of end-use markets and channels. The results of these steps has meant we've built up market-leading taste positions across a number of areas, whether that be authentic savory taste for meat and snack, as a leading partner in taste solutions for nutritionally optimized products, or as a global leader in natural taste solutions for beverages.
Moving next to Plant-based, which is a significant opportunity. Plant-based is complex. Our heritage is a key strength. We have strong expertise in culinary craft and science with over 40 years of culinary expertise and over 20 years working in Plant-based. This is critical when we work with our customers on the range of different complexities within taste, nutrition, functionality, and sustainable plant protein substrates. Radicle is Kerry's Plant-based brand, and it covers the breadth of our Plant-based technology portfolio, which you can see here. This unique set of building blocks sets us apart in the industry when it comes to addressing our customers' challenges. Our integrated approach to Plant-based under Radicle brings together our expertise in insights, regulatory, supply chain, and sensory to support our customers with differentiated solutions that deliver market-leading products across categories, channels, and geographies.
Turning next to Food Waste, which is one of our industry's biggest challenges, and which we at Kerry view as a phenomenal opportunity. Over the past couple of years, with the backdrop of COVID and the enhanced focus on sustainability, there is a greater focus on transparency right across supply chains, and this has highlighted Food Waste as a significant challenge for everyone. Our industry has realized the need to take action. This is the beginning of a wave of activity behind the scenes, meaning Food Waste is a highly attractive, high-growth opportunity. When we engage with our customers on reducing Food Waste, we're quantifying the impact we can deliver for the planet and the impact we can have on their profitability, because every ton of food wasted also translates into dollars lost.
Kerry's leading portfolio of preservation and other functional solutions help customers solve the end-to-end challenges you see here in reducing Food Waste. The next wave that will happen in this space is reuse. Here we utilize our technologies to support our customers in converting and upcycling their byproducts. This is just another example of how we support our customers to generate value while delivering a more sustainable impact. Moving next to Health and Biopharma. Consumers today are looking for food to play a more proactive role in their overall health and well-being. They want it to be more personalized and to play an even greater role in preventing health issues. This is what we call food for health for life.
This growing demand and blurring of lines between traditional food, health, and pharma presents a significant opportunity for Kerry due to our breadth of expertise right across each of these markets. Our extensive range of clinically backed technologies is key in supporting our customers to win across multiple need states. This range of technologies includes probiotics, enzymes, proteins, bioactives, botanicals and the industry's leading clinically backed immune health ingredient. By leveraging our technology portfolio, our insights, and our ability to provide great nutrition without compromising on taste makes Kerry the partner of choice for customers looking to evolve their position in this fast-growing food for health for life space. We've a long history of continuous strategic development, expanding into new markets, evolving our technology portfolio, and moving into higher value-add ingredients as we progress on our journey of becoming a market-leading Taste & Nutrition company.
Our strategy continues to drive our portfolio development. Looking back over the past 12 months, we divested our consumer foods, meats, and meals business. In Food Waste, the acquisition of Niacet significantly enhanced our food protection and preservation capabilities. In Health and Biopharma, Biosearch Life and Natreon added to our proactive health portfolio. The strategic biotechnology acquisitions of c-LEcta and Enmex enhance our capabilities in enzyme engineering, precision fermentation, and bioprocessing. In Authentic Taste, Afribon and Almar extend our local taste presence in East Africa and Southeast Asia. We will continue to evolve our portfolio into areas where we can add the most value and deliver the best solutions for our customers. With that, I'll now hand you over to Oliver.
Thank you, Edmond. There has never been a more dynamic time in the food and beverage industry, filled with incredible growth potential, but also filled with momentous challenges. The consumer of today wants it all, and as a result, customers need to address a broader range of more complex challenges to win in the marketplace. Examples include the need for elevated nutrition, improved taste, cleaner labels, speed to market, Plant-based, regulatory, and so much more. Our aim at Kerry is to be our customer's most valued partner, working in partnership with them to solve their largest challenges. We layer unique technologies, products, and expertise together to create solutions unmatched in the industry. To bring this to life, I want to share with you three groundbreaking examples of how Kerry works with industry leaders to make an impact on the world around us.
Over the last two years, the Food service channel in North America has gone through significant challenges, including the rising cost of labor. For one of our food service customers, a leading sandwich chain, these challenges came to light in their bread baking process. Their bread baking process takes 15 hours end to end with five steps from frozen to consumer ready. When you combine the high cost of labor in the market and the fluctuating demand of how bread is needed for each operator, this customer was wasting a significant volume of bread daily or losing sales due to being out of stock. When approached with this challenge, Kerry's bakery application experts got to work utilizing our portfolio of enzymes, texture solutions, food protection, and preservation technologies.
Because of our deep knowledge of industrial baking processes and our ability to provide at-plant technical support, not only was the Kerry team able to formulate the most optimal recipe to solve the 15-hour bake time challenge, but also work to scale up four industrial bakeries who are suppliers to this food service operator for a step change solution. The end result was a bread formulation that significantly reduced the bake time by 13 hours, delivering a more premium, softer texture and a clean label. We solved this challenge and saved 30 million loaves of bread from going to waste annually. In addition to solving challenges in bakery and food service, we are a market leader in revolutionizing taste for the beverage market. The hard seltzer category is all about taste.
While the hard seltzer category has slowed in the last two years, new innovative products continue to come to market. For this customer, their innovative place in the market is predicated on having an organic claim. Organic claims are new to mainstream alcohol, but seeing immense growth potential. The customer challenged Kerry with delivering an authentic, true taste profile that would be USDA- certified organic and formulated and launched within a 60-day timeframe to meet a high-profile national rollout. By working with Kerry, the customer was able to deliver an organic hard seltzer solution formulated with organic coconut water and organic blueberry flavor. These organic raw materials were then minimally processed utilizing proprietary Kerry technology into coconut crystals, which is a very unique format that retains the authenticity of the coconut and offers made with real coconut water claims.
The result was an organic hard seltzer product line with juicy, true to real fruit sensory attributes, delivering an unmatched taste profile. The impact of this historic launch has created a leadership position for Kerry in organic taste with this organic hard seltzer category now estimated to grow by EUR 150 million over the next year. Lastly, we couldn't talk about solving customers' complex challenges without mentioning our plant-based capability. Since 2020, plant-based innovations are expanding rapidly to all categories in the store, from beverage to snack to prepared meals. Recently, an emerging player in the Plant-based space came to Kerry to develop a portfolio of Plant-based brands across several grocery categories. They were challenged to find a partner who could develop several products across four categories, delivering premium taste profiles that appeal to flexitarian consumers.
The end product portfolio included a meat alternative snack, a meat alternative nugget, a premium Plant-based beverage, and a line of Plant-based prepared meals for launch in national retailers. Let's take the meat snack alternative as an example of what makes Kerry the leading partner of choice for plant-based brands. Together, Kerry and the customer explored the meat snacking category to understand consumer preferences. Working side by side with Kerry chefs, plant-based food scientists, and meat application scientists, the team layered Kerry plant-based technologies one by one.
Utilizing our texture protein solutions as the base, augmented by a vegetarian savory marinade and protein maskers to deliver an authentic jerky flavor. The final product was also complemented with clean label food protection technology for a consumer-friendly label. From our work with this customer alone, across four product categories, the impact to the industry is an increase of more than 500,000 plant-based eating occasions, contributing to Kerry's goal of delivering sustainable nutrition solutions to more than two billion people by 2030. With that, I'll now hand you over to Marguerite.
Thanks, Oliver. Great examples of Kerry's innovation in action and solving our customers' most complex challenges. Today I'm going to give you an overview of three areas: our value creation framework, our strong track record of growth, and our ambitious targets which we recently set out at our Capital Markets Day. Kerry's value creation framework is a combination of growth, return, and sustainability metrics. Our aim is to drive growth and expand our margins while realizing our returns criteria and to deliver on our sustainability ambitions. We believe by continuing to deliver on these metrics, we will deliver strong long-term shareholder returns. Moving next to our track record of long-term growth and financial delivery. Since Kerry became a public company 35 years ago, revenues have grown at over 9% compound annual growth. Trading profit at 13% CAGR and adjusted earnings per share at 12% CAGR.
This consistency of financial delivery has been a key driver of the value we have created over this timeframe. Our sustainability credentials and progress has also been recognized by different rating agencies and benchmarks, as you can see here. In 2021, we were also rated AA A with MSCI and a gold star rating with EcoVadis. Spending a moment now on our 2021 performance and our key measures under the framework I outlined. Under growth, in 2021, group revenue increased to EUR 7.4 billion, driven by volume growth of 8%. Trading margins were up 40 basis points, and adjusted earnings per share in constant currency was up 12.1%. Under returns, return on capital employed increased by circa 10 basis points after including a net dilution from portfolio developments in the year.
Free cash flow was EUR 566 million, which represented 84% cash conversion. Under sustainability, we had a strong improvement in 2021 across all three measures, as you can see here. We increased our reach to 1.1 billion consumers. We stepped up our carbon reduction to 39% versus the base year. Similarly, on Food Waste, we achieved a 19% reduction. Overall, we were pleased with our performance for the year. Moving next to the overview of our targets and looking at each of these three pillars in turn. On growth, we have a group volume growth target of 4%-6% on average, and we have a group EBITDA margin target of over 18% by 2026.
On returns, we have a cash conversion target of over 80% on average over the period of the plan, with a target of 10%-12% return on average capital employed in this timeframe. Finally, on sustainability, we have a number of measures across the three pillars of people, society, and planet. Under each of these, we have a range of measures as outlined here, which I will take you through in a little more detail later on. Beginning with revenue, our volume growth target is 4%-6% on average, as I mentioned, within our food, beverage, and pharma markets. To achieve this growth, we will continue to strategically deploy our capital aligned to our strategic priorities of taste, nutrition, and emerging markets.
We have identified the four key growth platforms of Authentic Taste, Plant-based, Food Waste, and Health and Biopharma, which you will have seen earlier. We believe each of these will be important contributors to our growth over the coming strategic cycle. Moving next to our margin target. We have a Group EBITDA margin target of over 18% by 2026, which will be driven by expanding our EBITDA margin in Taste & Nutrition to over 20%. There are a number of different drivers, and I will address each of these in turn. Firstly, on portfolio mix. Solving customers' complex needs requires solutions with a greater depth of technology and an increased depth of innovation support. We have significantly evolved and enhanced our portfolio over time, which positions us strongly to improve our portfolio mix. The second driver is operating leverage.
As we grow our business, we will leverage our asset footprint and overall business structures to generate further incremental margin expansion. On operational efficiencies, we will continue to build on our continuous improvement initiatives. This will be complemented by Kerry Global Business Services and the Accelerate Operational Excellence program we recently announced. The combination of these operational efficiency initiatives will enable us to generate significant margin expansion benefits over the medium term. The final pillar here is all about reinvesting for growth, and we have called out the key areas of further investment that we will make to support the achievement of our growth target. On cash, we have a target of 80%+ cash conversion. For returns, our target is to deliver a 10%-12% return on average capital employed.
We are currently generating a return of circa 10%, and our target is to deliver in the range of 10%-12% over the period of the plan, dependent on the timing of capital allocation decisions we will make to generate long-term shareholder value. Disciplined capital allocation will be important in achieving both our cash conversion and return targets over the course of our plan. Turning now to our capital allocation framework, which is as we presented at our recent Capital Markets Day. Our primary focus for capital deployment will continue to be reinvestment in our business. This is where we have and where we will continue to create the most value for shareholders. Our reinvestment is a combination of capital expenditure and through acquisitions. On capital expenditure, we are planning to invest 4%-5% of revenue on average over the period of the plan.
On acquisitions, Edmond shared with you earlier how each of our recent acquisitions align into our strategic framework. We will also continue to return cash to shareholders, which will primarily be through dividends, which we've grown at double digits over the past 35 years. To sum up this slide, there is no change to our capital allocation framework. We will continue to take a disciplined approach to capital allocation with our focus remaining on delivering shareholder return. Finally, moving to our sustainability and some of our key measures, as you can see here. Our sustainability strategy, called Beyond the Horizon, covers our ambitious sustainability targets. It has three pillars, as I mentioned earlier. Under Better for People, we have a target of reaching over two billion consumers with sustainable nutrition solutions by 2030.
Over 80% of our Taste & Nutrition portfolio delivers positive and balanced nutrition for consumers all over the world. The Kerry Health and Nutrition Institute was established to bring insights to consumers on the science behind healthier food. Under Better for Society, as part of our broader diversity, inclusion, and belonging strategy, we are committed to equal gender representation across all senior management roles by 2030. Under Better for Planet, we are targeting a 55% absolute reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions and a 30% reduction in Scope 3 emissions intensity by 2030. To summarize, before I hand you back to Edmond for closing, we have a very clear value creation framework of growth, return, and sustainability. We have a strong track record, and we have ambitious targets, all of which we believe are key to delivering strong shareholder return. With that, I'll hand you back to Edmond.
Thanks, Marguerite. Very briefly to close, I hope today's presentation gave you a feel for the Kerry of today. We're very proud of the Group's achievements over the past 50 years, and we're grateful to everyone who has contributed to Kerry's success over that period. We feel Kerry is truly unique in our industry and very well-positioned for growth. As you will have seen today, our breadth of technology capability, depth of applications expertise, and our consumer-led, customer-focused approach is how we aim to solve our customers' complex challenges with differentiated solutions.