Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our virtual Capital Markets Day. My name is William Lynch, and I am Head of Investor Relations at Kerry. Let me give you an overview of the plan for today. Edmond will kick off with a strategic update and business overview. We will then have five deep dive sessions covering key growth strategic drivers, which will be hosted by members of the Kerry team across all of our regions. This will be followed by Marguerite, who will outline our value creation framework and targets. Finally, we will have a questions- and- answer session, where we will take your questions, which you can submit via the chat function. Just to cover off a few housekeeping points. Today is not a trading update. We will be releasing our Q3 trading update on the 27th of October. The presentation and webcast from today will be available on kerrygroup.com.
Finally, I would like to remind you of the disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements shown here on the screen. I will now hand over to Edmond.
Good afternoon and welcome to our virtual Capital Markets Day. Thank you for joining us, and as ever, we appreciate your interest in our company. Our team is solving complex challenges with differentiated solutions, and we feel this is a very fitting description of exactly what we do at Kerry. I would love nothing more than to be welcoming you today in person at one of our global technology innovation centers, like we've done at previous Capital Markets Days. As there is no better way to understand Kerry than by meeting our incredible people and bringing you the science behind food and beverage. We're going to do our best to bring Kerry to life for you virtually.
Across the course of the afternoon, you will meet some of our team who will share with you some many examples of how we are solving our customers' challenges with truly differentiated solutions. Before that, I'm going to update you on the outcome of our strategic planning process, which is an evolution of our business strategy as we enter a new phase of growth. We're going to share our refreshed strategic framework, our updated financial targets, and our new sustainability ambitions, which many of you will have already seen from this morning's press release. As you all know, the backdrop for updating our strategy is not ideal in the context of COVID and other current macro dynamics. However, the strategic evolution our business has undergone over the past number of years gives us increased confidence that we're now well-positioned to achieve a step-up in growth.
With the new sustainability targets we're outlining today, we will also deliver a step-up in impact. Beginning with our purpose, Inspiring Food, Nourishing Life, which for Kerry is not just a tagline or something that looks good on our website. Inspiring Food is about innovation, and Nourishing Life is about sustainability. At Kerry, we inspire and create great-tasting, healthier food and beverage products that deliver a more sustainable impact for the planet. It's why we get up in the morning, it's why we come to work every day, and it's why people choose Kerry as the company they want to work for. Our vision is to be our customers' most valued partner, creating a world of sustainable nutrition. You can look at this in two parts. First, being our customers' most valued partner, helping them overcome the range of complex challenges being driven by the consumer.
You will see examples of exactly what we mean by this right across today. Second, creating a world of sustainable nutrition. This is not something any company can do alone. We're going to meet our sustainability commitments and also support our customers, helping them move along the sustainable nutrition spectrum, no matter where they are or where their products are on that spectrum. Moving along the sustainable nutrition spectrum means two things. One, it means enhancing the nutritional profile of their products, and two, it means improving the environmental and social impact of those products.
Our breadth and depth of capability across all food and beverage categories means we've been enhancing the nutritional profile of our customers' products for many years, be it reduced fat, salt, sugar, cleaner labels, adding clinically validated functional benefits to food, such as enhancing immunity, or with our range of probiotics or other health ingredients. We're combining this with improving the sustainability impact of our customers' products as they strive to reduce carbon emissions, food waste, or water usage, and having a better social impact, giving consumers trust and full transparency on their products. We've set an ambitious goal for ourselves, to reach 2 billion consumers with sustainable nutrition by 2030. This is the impact we're going to deliver in conjunction with our customers. The reason we're going to achieve this is the phenomenal market access we have at Kerry.
No matter what market, channel, or geography you look at, Kerry is operating there right now providing solutions for our customers. We run our business through five different 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. This is fully aligned to how our customers look at the marketplace, enabling more value-added partnerships. From a channel perspective, we have leading positions across a multitude of sub-channels with both retail and foodservice. We utilize our breadth and depth of technology across both Taste & Nutrition to deliver solutions for customers across all geographies with our business spread across the Americas, Europe, and APMEA regions. Our customer base spans global, regional, and local leaders, each with their own specific needs.
What we're seeing in our industry is that our customers' challenges are ever more complex, and they're looking for a partner with the business model and expertise to deliver differentiated solutions. Moving to our strategic framework, which is the next evolution of Kerry's story. Kerry has been known over the years for the clarity and consistency of its strategic direction. The markets we focus on are food, beverage, and pharma. Our strategic priorities of taste, nutrition, and emerging Markets have been used for many years to ensure our capital allocation decisions are aligned to our strategy. We're very excited to share with you today our four key growth platforms, which are going to drive growth for us in the coming years. In Authentic Taste, we have leading positions and the capability which we're going to deploy into solutions across our portfolio.
In Plant-Based, our Radicle portfolio, combined with our culinary expertise, will be key to our growth in this dynamic market. In Food Waste, which incorporates preservation and food protection, we've made significant portfolio developments in recent years, and we've a leadership position in this fast-growing market, which is very aligned to our sustainable nutrition goal. In Health & Bio-Pharma, where we've also made significant investments in recent years, we've all seen what's happening with the large players in our industry. Our clinically backed technology portfolio makes Kerry the partner of choice for companies looking to evolve their position in the growing Food for Health, for Life space. Our positioning across these areas means we're more confident in our growth prospects than ever before. What does this mean in terms of targets? Marguerite will take you through each of these in more detail later on.
To summarize at a high level, we're targeting a step-up in growth with a 4%-6% average group volume growth, EBITDA margin of over 18% by 2026, cash conversion of over 80%, and a return on average capital employed of 10%-12%. From a sustainability perspective, by 2030, we're aiming to double our reach to over 2 billion people with sustainable nutrition. We've announced today a step-up in our targets to 1.5 degrees and a 55% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2030, with net zero before 2050, and to halve our food waste by 2030. Our targets reflect the opportunity that exists in our industry, which has never been more dynamic.
This is being driven by an increase in consumer demands, resulting in increased complexity and challenges for our customers with the need for a value-added company with the portfolio, capabilities, and business model to support them with differentiated solutions. Let me now play a short video to bring this to life.
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I hope that gave you a feel for our industry and our business. Over the next 20 minutes, I'm going to highlight exactly what, for me, makes Kerry special. We are strategically positioned as the value-add partner in a highly attractive industry. We have a truly unique business with our leading technology portfolio, integrated solutions capability, and most importantly, our people. We have leadership positions across all dimensions of our business. We have a track record of strong value creation, both organic and through acquisitions. Finally, we have winning growth strategies. Beginning with our industry, we play within the value-add ingredients and solutions market, which has a critical role in the overall end-to-end supply chain.
The types of ingredients and solutions we provide our customers only make up a very small percentage of the final product, but they are the key value-add component, whether it be enhancing the taste to drive repeat consumer purchase behavior, adding functionality, improving the efficiency of our customers' processes, or delivering a sustainability impact through their products. The size of our market is over EUR 75 billion, with a significant opportunity to expand. Such as current industry players evolving into the health and wellness space who are looking for partners, or new industry ownership looking for outsourced innovation partners across a number of different food and beverage categories. As a result of this industry opportunity, we see the potential for this market to expand to between EUR 90 billion and EUR 100 billion as customers continue to strive to meet the ever-evolving needs of today's consumer.
At Kerry, we always start with the consumer, we've spoken many times about the "&" C onsumer. Here we get a sense of the number and complexity of consumer demands, which continue to grow exponentially. As these demands continue to increase, it's placing more and more pressure on the food and beverage suppliers to deliver value-add solutions. For us at Kerry, we view every one of these demands as an opportunity to create differentiated solutions. Our industry has stepped up its response to these evolving consumer demands in the past number of years. Many companies are broadening their portfolios and attempting to evolve their business models to do more for their consumers and to move up that value chain. At Kerry, we have created and defined what integrated solutions mean for our industry.
Moving from single or even multiple ingredients to integrated solutions requires more than just a toolkit. It requires applications expertise, it requires years of experience, and it requires a completely different culture and mindset. This mindset of solving your customers' broader challenges above opportunities to sell one or two of your ingredients, this is a hard ask for many companies. Customers are looking for a strategic partner who can support them from ideation to launch, all the way through to impact. They want a partner that can solve their complex challenges with differentiated solutions. The range and complexity of challenges our industry is facing right now are unprecedented. Here is just a selection of customer challenges here on the left. Each combination of challenges requires its own specific Kerry solution. Today, we will be sharing some really exciting examples of these right across the day.
Whether that be adding clinically backed immunity benefits to coffee for a C-store in Southeast Asia, while adjusting to the latest local regulations, and while also delivering this in record speed. Adding days of shelf life for a bread manufacturer in North America, reducing food waste and enabling customers' processes to improve, and also adding a superior sourdough flavor. Working with a large meat customer in Mexico to provide clean label, shelf life extension, in line with new local guidelines for ingredient declarations and front- of- pack labeling. This is just a small taste of the types of differentiated solutions that Kerry are providing to meet our customers' most complex challenges right now. This is why we are our customers' most valued partner. Moving to the next section, why Kerry is a truly unique business.
To do this, I'm going to quickly give you an overview of our history and how we've continuously reinvented ourselves over the past 50 years. We have a from food, for food heritage. Our early stages were in dairy and savoury. Over the years, we built out our technology portfolio across ingredients and flavors. From here, we invented the Taste & Nutrition space while increasing our breadth and depth of capability right across our portfolio. Taste & Nutrition now comprises the vast majority of our business. We are the industry leader in this space. Our business today comprises group revenue of EUR 7 billion and EBITDA of EUR 1 billion, with 148 production locations and over 22,000 people around the world. Giving you just some stats on our Taste & N utrition business through the 5 dimensions I referenced earlier.
From an end-use market perspective, 70% of our business is in food markets, with 25% in beverage and 5% in pharma. Our customer base breaks down pretty evenly between global, regional, and local leaders. Approximately 1/2 of our Taste & Nutrition revenue comes from the Americas, with 1/4 in Europe and 1/4 in APMEA. We have 22 core technologies enabled by 25 process technology platforms. From a channel perspective, three quarters of our business is in the retail channel with a quarter in foodservice. It's this breadth of market access, which means we are uniquely positioned to support our customers. This next section is all about what makes Kerry truly unique. For me, this is three things. Integrated solutions, technology innovation, and most importantly, our people. Kerry's success is only made possible by our 22,000 colleagues all around the world.
I am humbled by the agility and the ingenuity of our people over the last year. Finding creative ways to innovate and to collaborate with our customers. Supporting each other and supporting our local communities. We have a unique culture within Kerry, which is the key ingredient to our success. Science, technology, and innovation are part of our DNA and underpin our growth strategy. Let me take you through it. Today, we're outlining our four key consumer-inspired growth platforms across Authentic Taste, Plant-Based, Food Waste, and Health & Bio-Pharma. These are driven and empowered by the knowledge and capability we have within the organization. We've invested in our globally connected infrastructure. We have over 1,100 scientists across multiple disciplines. We're part of a broad ecosystem, including accelerators and universities that we collaborate with.
This supports our science and technology foundation, where we're constantly looking for and discovering new technologies, new sciences that would deliver new technologies into our portfolio. Whether it's cell culture assays, predictive modeling, or numerous other disciplines that we use to drive new technologies into our portfolio. We have the industry-leading integrated technology portfolio, capability, and strategy that we leverage to innovate for our customers. We're an extension of our customers' innovation teams, helping them to evolve their portfolios for the marketplace aligned to growth trends. We're one of the first places that innovation, startup companies, entrepreneurs, and universities come to when they're looking to commercialize new technologies into future food and beverage applications. Beyond our technology and innovation strategy, we're also the global leader in science for health, leveraging off our Kerry Health and Nutrition Institute.
We engage with a broad range of stakeholders to deliver the science that can help us solve the complex challenges in the marketplace. This technology platform helps us to deliver the next generation of innovation. We continually review all forms of innovation, looking across the different horizons to ensure that at all times, we're either tracking, screening, engaging, participating, or leading the next generation of innovation. The slide here has a selection of different technologies, all of which we play in at different levels in different ways. We will continue to take a commercial approach, choosing the right time and the right level of investment in our technology capability as we stay at the forefront of innovation in our industry. This foundation and depth of technology is central to the creation of integrated solutions. We create integrated solutions in four steps.
We start with our core technologies spanning across both taste and nutrition. In taste, we've a range of flavor capabilities, natural extracts, and modulation. In nutrition, our technologies include our broad range of protein, probiotics, enzymes, and a range of other functional ingredients. We combine these individual technologies through our extensive process technology expertise, spanning from distillation to extrusion to fermentation. We deploy these two elements to create integrated technologies that are more customized to specific end-use markets and customer demands. Critically, all of these capabilities are leveraged by our teams to create unique integrated solutions designed to solve our customers' specific requirements. To bring this to life, let's hear how we're supporting customer to solve the complex challenges that exist in the plant-based category.
You'll now hear from Dan Curtin, President of Greenleaf Foods, who will speak to how Kerry has helped his business differentiate itself in that market.
Hello, everyone. My name is Dan Curtin. I'm President of Greenleaf Foods in Chicago, the division of Maple Leaf Foods out of Toronto. As both a veteran to the food industry and the plant-based meat category, I am so energized on how fast the plant-based food industry is growing and how big of an impact companies like ours can have on this planet. We believe consumers should have delicious plant-based food options that they can feel really good about serving themselves and feeding their families. Additionally, on top of this, we want a greener planet and a more sustainable food system. Greenleaf is the only, yes, the only plant-based food company that is carbon neutral. The real future of plant-based foods is around cleaner, tastier, nutritionally superior products.
We've backed up this by reformulating all of our Lightlife products, and we're seeing positive results from this initiatives with our consumers. Kerry's been a great partner. Yeah, a great partner to collaborate with on some of the innovative plant-based products that we recently launched. This is about both of us picking sides for the right partners for short-term and long-term successes. If it were easy to make plant-based products cleaner while still delivering on taste and texture expectations, all brands would be doing that, but that's not the case. By partnering and working side by side with Kerry's taste and nutritional people, their application experts, their sensory and insight professionals, along with our marketing teams, our culinary people, and product development experts, we've been able to solve these complex plant-based challenges to deliver on our brand proposition that is unique in the marketplace.
In a category that's cluttered with many new entries and many new startups, we know having partners like Kerry who can help us differentiate our products and push us into new channels such as foodservice and club stores is a must-have for our continued success and the future of the environmental impact. We've got products in over 30,000 grocery stores. We're expanding rapidly into foodservice, and we're committed to the long-term growth of plant-based products. I want to thank you for the opportunity to share some of my thoughts. I'm incredibly passionate about this category, and I hope you have found this insightful. Have a wonderful and productive day.
Moving to our leadership positions. Using the framework of our five business dimensions, in our end-use markets, we're the market leaders in the value-add ingredients and solutions markets for meat and meat alternatives. We are the number 1 solutions partner for beverage. 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, we're number 1 in taste and nutrition in North America. We've been delivering market-leading growth in our emerging markets. Across our technology portfolio, we're number 1 globally in authentic savoury taste solutions for meat and snacks. We're number 1 in food protection and preservation. We're number 1 in probiotics, in ambient food and beverage. In our channels, we're the leading solutions partner for CPGs and own brands.
In the foodservice channel, we've grown over the past decade to be the global leader in our space. Just to pause for a moment here to give you our perspective on foodservice. Clearly, the channel has been impacted by COVID, but it's recovering fast. We've gained market share and strengthened our relationships with our customers right through the period. We feel confident the overall growth levels in foodservice will recover above retail over the course of the plan, and we're expecting the growth rates of these channels to be much more closer than they were in the past. Finally, we will continue to be the leading partner to the foodservice channel. Now to our track record of value creation.
We have a strong track record of growth, with revenue growing at 9% CAGR, trading profit at 13%, and adjusted EPS at 12% since we went public in 1986. M&A is a key strength at Kerry, and we've created significant value over the years. We believe we are the best company in our industry at creating value from acquisitions. M&A for Kerry is part of a multi-step process within our overall business development strategy. Our strategy has been to integrate, build out our strategic platforms, commercialize, and build up key barriers to entry and achieve market leadership. Some recent examples we've shown you, starting with ProActive Health earlier this year. Food Protection and Preservation last year, and we did deep dive on Red Arrow at the Investor Day a couple of years ago.
We feel this strategy has served us well in the past, but we're conscious that people love to be with you on the journey, and we've made the decision to do our best to give you as many signposts as we can. The strategic priorities of taste, nutrition, and emerging markets make up our overarching framework for how acquisitions align into Kerry's strategy. You can see this from the examples here on the page. Over the past 10 years, we've been delivering strong growth value from M&A, adding incremental revenue for Kerry of EUR 1.6 billion, for a total consideration of EUR 3.5 billion. We create strategic value by adding new technology, new functionality, new applications, new geographies, new customers, new channels, or new solutions. Let me now share with you a few examples to give you some further color.
Here we're going to look at three recent acquisitions we've made as part of our ongoing business development strategy and how we've created value in all the different ways that I've just spoken about. In the area of taste, Nature. In nutrition, GanedenBC30, and at the intersection of taste and nutrition, Fleischmann's. On Nature, which is based in the Shandong province in China, and a leader in local, authentic, savoury taste for the meat, snacks, and meals markets. It's a fantastic business with an amazing local team and a strong culture of innovation. Nature has been part of Kerry for less than a year. Its growth has accelerated to strong double digit with significant new launches right across the course of 2021. It also has brought us into noodles, where we see an opportunity for other Kerry technologies to make a traditional category more nutritious.
Fleischmann's Vinegar, which we acquired at the end of 2018, which has broadened out our clean label, antimicrobial preservation portfolio, and enhanced our fermentation process technology capabilities. We're a customer of Fleischmann's for many years, and we felt there was tremendous potential to leverage this technology right across our portfolio. In the past three years, we've significantly expanded our level of clean label launches across beverage, bakery, and meat markets. In the deep dive session shortly, you'll see the key role this will play as part of our strategy around Food Waste. GanedenBC30. This was an early stage technology company based in the U.S., who brought leadership in spore-forming probiotics. We view this as a business with an under commercialized technology, and we saw the potential to leverage this technology across food and beverage applications using Kerry's broad market access.
We brought it into new applications. Previously, it was in hundreds of products. Now, it's in well over 1,000. We brought it into new geographies. In 2016, outside of the U.S., it had just 10 launches. Last year, it had well over 120, and it has grown at over 30% CAGR since we acquired it back in 2017. Finally, to give one last example on how we integrate businesses under Kerry's global platform. We developed a dried kombucha beverage using BC30 probiotic ingredient, Fleischmann's antimicrobial vinegar technology, and a Kerry taste solution. This is a perfect example of an integrated solution that uses multiple core technologies, Kerry's process technology and applications expertise to create a great- tasting nutritional beverage with a reduced carbon footprint, delivering a better sustainability impact. This is the power of Kerry.
We have a strong track record of value creation and organic growth in emerging markets. I have a particular interest in this area, having spent many years as part of the local Kerry team in a number of these markets. Our growth in emerging markets has been primarily through organic investment, building out our local presence, local relationships, and a deep local deployment of our business model. Marcelo, our CEO of Kerry LatAm, will bring our winning business model in emerging markets to life later for you in the deep dive session, and the team will give you some really exciting examples of how we're solving our customers' complex local challenges. Our performance in emerging markets has always been, and will continue to be, a key underpin of Kerry's growth. We've set ourselves a target of 10% average volume growth, reflecting the opportunity we see in these markets.
Moving to our winning growth strategies, which you're going to see across the breakout sessions. Firstly, Antoine and the team will take you through why we're winning in Authentic Taste. We have a breadth and depth with leadership positions across our taste portfolio, and we have unique market access. The team will take you through how we utilize our leading technical expertise across a number of different food and beverage examples. Next, we have Plant-Based, where Elizabeth and Thomas will give you an overview of Kerry's approach to plant-based innovation, and we're uniquely positioned in a dynamic, fast-growing market. And we have a leading capability in our industry with our Radicle brands , which covers our leading plant-based portfolio, our fully integrated approach, and our 40 years of expertise in culinary craft science, and over 20 years in plant-based.
In the area of Food Waste, Juan and Emma are going to give an overview of the attractiveness of the market, our capabilities and solutions that we use to help our customers end to end, and the potential around sustainable nutrition. In Health & Bio-Pharma, Albert and Vivien will explain the latest industry dynamics and how Kerry's clinically backed technology portfolio, expertise across food and beverage applications, and are combining nutrition with taste, are making Kerry the partner of choice for companies looking to evolve their positioning in the growing Food for Health, for Life space. With that, I thank you for your time, and I'm now going to hand you over to the taste team.
Good afternoon. My name is Antoine Nourrain. I'm based in Singapore, and I lead our Authentic Taste business in the APMEA region. I love food, and I've been fortunate to work in the taste industry for more than 25 years. What excites me most today is to see the possibilities we have at Kerry to address customer challenges and create the future of taste. At Kerry, our vision is to create a world of sustainable nutrition, and our taste technologies are playing a pivotal role in helping us achieve this by making products healthier without having to compromise on taste. As we know, taste is the number 1 driver of liking and repurchase for consumer. No matter how nutritious or sustainable a food product or beverage product is, if it doesn't taste good, consumer will not purchase it again.
Kerry's great taste capabilities, certainly the best-kept secret in the industry, enable us to solve the difficult equation of nutritious and sustainable while still tasting good. While the traditional flavor industry has its roots in the chemical and pharma landscape, we at Kerry started 50 years ago on our journey to solve the taste equation, starting from natural food and agricultural sources. Our active acquisition and investment strategy in the non-traditional taste space brought Kerry unique assets and capabilities, where we apply deep science processes to nature. Those processes, whether physical, biological, or natural chemistry, are state-of-the-art, energy efficient, and sustainable. Applying this science and expertise to nature, we have created a large portfolio of unique and truly differentiating ingredients, which we have organized around four global platforms, aligned with today's and tomorrow's market needs. For instance, Kerry is the absolute number one in smoke and grill.
The absolute number one in dairy taste. We are also a recognized global leader in natural extract and modulation. Starting from those platform, we build consumer-preferred taste, integrated technology solution, or integrated system. Similarly to the rest of the industry, starting, if I may say, at a much earlier stage, from a much wider, more natural, and in many cases, more unique set of ingredient. For this purpose, we have one of the largest teams of technical taste expert in the world, including a global network of over 90 flavorists, supported by sensory scientists, analytical chemist, application scientist, and manufacturing specialist. As well as having a unique set of natural ingredients and first-class taste technical capabilities, we have a unique market access through our end-use market range, our diversified channels, and our ability to be globally connected while executing locally close to our customer.
To summarize, we have proprietary natural ingredients, first-class taste capabilities, and wide and deep market access. When we line those up through our operating model, we are getting the full power of Kerry, which is unrivaled in the industry and has allowed us to build market-leading positions across a number of areas. For example, we are number 1 in authentic savoury taste solution for meat and snack. We are leading partner in taste solution for nutritionally optimized products. We are a global leader in natural taste solution for beverages. I'm now going to hand over to my colleagues, who will take you through these three market-leading positions in turn.
Firstly, Dr. Kay Marshallsay will speak to our number one position in Savoury Taste solution for meat and snack, followed by Dr. Rajesh Potineni, who will discuss our position as a leading partner for taste solution for nutritionally optimized product. Finally, Dr. Michel Aubanel will speak to our leadership position in natural taste solution for beverage. I will now hand over to Kay.
Good afternoon. My name is Kay Marshallsay, and I am the Global Portfolio Director for our Taste Fermentation platforms. I have been with Kerry for over 15 years in a number of roles in the savoury world across product development, innovation, and business development globally. Today, I will speak to Kerry's number one position in Savoury Taste in meat and snacks. The savoury market is dynamic, touching every consumer and culture, and continues to evolve and adapt with the ever-changing demands. We see three leading market dynamics. Firstly, is consumer reassurance, whether it's related to traceability, sustainability, transparency of labeling, or food safety. Secondly, we are seeing regulators responding to these consumer demands for reassurance by setting stronger health targets.
For example, the United Nations World Health Organization has made aggressive recommendations on total salt consumption and is calling on governments to act to significantly reduce the levels in foods. WHO members committed to a 30% reduction in salt intake by 2025. Our other countries, for example, such as Brazil and Mexico, are fiscally mandating targets. Lastly, a report by U.S. consultancy Kearney asserted that by 2040, the majority or 60% of meat will be derived from plant-based meat alternatives or cultured meat that look and taste like meat. Over several decades, Kerry has strategically built a distinctive portfolio, which positions us as the number one in meat and snacks. On the left-hand side of this slide, you see the technologies that are the cornerstones in delivering authentic savoury taste, be it for snacks, meat or meat alternatives.
Being number 1 in smoke, grill, and dairy taste and having leadership positions across fermentation, stocks, reaction, and savoury flavors gives us a unique platform to leverage. Why? Dairy is in our DNA. With 25% of all snack seasonings globally having a dairy profile, we operate from a position of strength. The acquisition of Red Arrow in 2015 made Kerry the world's largest producer of smoke flavors, which are used extensively in meat and snacks. Of grill, a key tonality for barbecue flavors, which make the top 5 list of popular flavors globally. The acquisition of Quest International established our footprint across multiple fermentation platforms, and we have continued to expand and invest to create leadership in umami and kokumi, critical to driving consumer preference in meat and snacks. We have been building and adding savoury flavors, reaction flavors, creating taste fingerprints.
We are also a global leader in stocks, a recognized food cupboard ingredient, where we elevate and leverage our expertise to add flavor functionality. We have leadership position in delivery systems in meat and snacks with multiple investments enriching local and regional footprints. The building of our portfolio has been strategic and intentional. We will continue to invest in these areas of strength to further enrich our position in meat and snacks. These core platforms give us depth, capability, and expertise, but also agility to develop and innovate and win with compelling, authentic, savoury taste solutions. I will now provide an example of a customer challenge, which was to help them create preferred taste in a chicken sandwich that would make their restaurant a destination. Kerry knows how to create consumer preferred taste in poultry applications. We are the taste partner to leading retail and QSR chicken brands.
How do we go about delivering a consumer preferred sandwich? Well, imagine your favorite chicken sandwich. Let's start with the "Why you pick it up", the visual cues that you migrate to. What does it look like? What is its texture? What does it smell like? Create an expectation of the taste experience. Will it make you feel good? Is it healthier? Leveraging our Tastesense technology platform to address salt reduction or plant protein modulation. Then we migrate to the eating experience itself, the descriptive intrigue. Not just smoke, but the type of smoke. This is so important to creating great taste and leverages our leadership in smoke and grill. We know that taste is the number one driver of purchase and consumer liking, we go deeper.
Using our fermentation leadership position in umami and kokumi, which drives succulence, juiciness, depth, the "Why you can't put it down." All of these layers are multipliers of what drives consumer preference and liking. The "Why you pick it up" and "Why you can't put it down." The ability to bring all this together is a clear example of why Kerry is number 1 in authentic savoury taste solutions for meat and snacks. I will now hand over to my colleague, Rajesh.
Hello, my name is Rajesh Potineni, and I'm based in Beloit in the U.S. I'm the Vice President of Research, Development, and Application, and also the Global Innovation Leader for our Modulation platform. Today, I'll be talking about how Kerry is the leading partner in taste solutions for nutritionally optimized products. Responding to the health and wellness market trend, Kerry works closely with our customers to create nutritionally optimized products that focus on reducing sugar, salt, fat in various formulations. The global pandemic has heightened the urgency for better health and wellness products in the market. Governments and regulatory bodies are stepping in to create legislative changes and label requirement for such formulations. By leveraging our modulation technologies, Kerry is uniquely positioned to solve some of the nutritionally optimized challenges without compromising on taste. Our modulation technologies are proprietary and science-based.
Within the sugar modulation, we leverage our biotransformation technologies that closely mimic sugar. Our masking and mouthfeel platform leverages proprietary fractionation technology and in-depth science knowledge to mitigate aftertaste, reduce protein off-notes, and enhance sugar and fatty mouthfeel for reduced sugar and low-fat applications respectively. We have the unique expertise to create taste solutions for reduced-fat products. We leverage our dairy expertise to create vegan fat flavors that mimic a fat-like tactile perception. Our salt modulation technologies are based on fermentation technology and proprietary fractionation. Using these techniques, we have developed high-performing building blocks that offer upfront salt impact as well as the backend salt perception, all while adhering to salt reduction requirements. Here is a customer challenge that our team recently tackled. A leading snack manufacturer wanted to create a market-winning vegan crisp that had the dairy profile with reduced sodium targets.
The customer wants a vegan snack, but the one that mimics the experience and taste of dairy. This means that the customer wants the high impact of cheese and low sodium without the negative off-notes associated with plant-based, such as bitterness, blandness, poor aroma, and cardboard notes. At Kerry, we solve the challenge in three phases: base optimization to reduce our aftertaste, enhancing middle taste, and upfront impact. First, we reduce the aftertaste and off-notes associated with the plant-based using our Tastesense masking technology. A key differentiation with our masking solutions is they have been thoroughly tested to withstand high thermal processes such as extrusion and frying, which are common processes for savoury snacks. Next, we brought back succulence, juiciness, and elevated the cultured dairy mouthfeel not present in plant-based seasonings.
We leveraged our savoury reaction flavors for deep culinary characteristics and our fermentation knowledge to build back the mouthwatering juiciness and succulence expected from the product. We focused on the upfront impact using our vegan dairy solutions and salt perception tools to bring back the saltiness and cheesy impact. Our taste offerings are aligned to the regulatory requirements of the market. Natural flavors, kosher, halal, non-GMO, and organic. To create the overall profile, we integrated these technologies synergistically, along with our application expertise to drive consumer preference. After integrating all these technologies, our products deliver the consumer's desired attributes, dairy-like, creamy, cheesy, and balanced. The perfect product for today's demanding customer. I will now pass over to my colleague, Michel.
Good afternoon. I'm Michel Aubanel, the R&D Global Director for our natural taste solution, with over 40 years experience in the industry, linking expertise from North America, Europe, China to Latin America. I'm happy to speak to you today. I need to confess what are my driving force. I love mother nature and working with farmers. I love to optimize processes and way of working, building on our foundation technology. I love customers smiling when they experiment our products. I will now speak to you about Kerry leadership position in natural taste solution for beverage. Within the natural space, we are also seeing a number of dynamic similar to what you will have heard Kay and Rajesh speak to. Increasing demand for transparency, stricter requirements about labeling, and evolving health needs. When you nourish your young kids or your grandfather, you want to be 100% sure of the safety.
Consumers are walking away from chemicals to authentic ingredients. We get the passion to transform solid matter, roots, flowers, leaves, fruits, beans into liquid extracts with traditional and innovative extraction methods. We are one of the top taste companies building on these roots from mother nature. We are a global leader in natural extract with the broadest range of extract in the industry. We are a global leader in low- and no-alcohol beverage. The no- and low-alcohol category is a fast-growing market with a forecast volume growth of just over 30% over the next three years. We have first decoded the spirits, brown and white spirits, to understand the key active component, and then we rebuild the taste and sensation and mouthfeel.
I will provide an example of how we layer our natural taste solution together to deliver against the key challenge for low- and no-alcohol beverage. I will also do this through the lens of non-alcoholic cold scotch whiskey. When you drink a scotch, your nerves are all there to inform you about the cold, the warm, and the bitter attributes. Tastesense targets receptors that elicit a response linked to these three attributes. When we build such taste, we are starting with this modulation piece. The really new Tastesense range allows us to mimic the spirit sensation based on three main cold, warm, and bitter attributes. Besides the sensation, we do need to replicate the core taste.
Here we are created, design, and industrialize in-house technology called ABS, as absolute, to concentrate spirits 800x , allowing to get whiskey without ethanol and water, providing the full, nice front taste and long-lasting one. This is one application. Other example include tequila, rum, brandy. In this case, we use a whiskey absolute, which was transformed from a three-year-old Scottish whiskey into a highly concentrated alcohol-free extract. This absolute, unique in the industry to Kerry, deliver the taste of a spirit that consumer love without any alcohol. We can also build in natural alcohol flavorings to replicate the true taste of consumer favorite spirits. In this case, I'm adding an aromatic oakwood infusion to deliver a nice, rounded, and woody profile to my whiskey base. To add a final touch, as a painter, we do need to build on characterizing taste notes.
We layer these in to deliver premium, unique, and sophisticated taste profile, building on our expertise in science and technology in various domain, such as coffee, cocoa, botanicals, and citrus, where we get leading position in the market. Cocoa is key to add to cold brew coffee, as a touch of vanilla. Our vanilla, by the way, are from sustainable sourcing from Madagascar, Tsara Kalitao program. We do the finish with a drop of basil distillate to allow you, as a consumer, to enjoy such a great drink. Antoine will now wrap up our taste presentation.
Thank you, Kay, Rajesh, Michel. As you can see, we are not only driven by technology at Kerry, but also by expertise, passion, and artistry. To summarize the Kerry taste model, we have breadth and depth across our leading portfolio of technology, inspired by food and nature, applying science and unique natural processes, the most differentiating palate in the industry to solve the taste equation. We have also excellent technical expertise at the intersection of taste and nutrition, industry-leading traditional taste expertise, synergistic effect through our nutrition expertise and portfolio. We have unique market access, retail, foodservice, branded product, systems, whether technology system or integrated system. We are thinking globally, but executing locally. When those key elements align through our business model, we get fantastic traction and access market-leading positions naturally.
Thank you for joining today and giving us the opportunity to present Kerry capabilities and how we are enabling sustainable nutrition through great taste.
Good afternoon. My name is Elizabeth Horvath, and I lead our team of passionate marketers in North America, where we use creativity and insights to connect customers' needs to solutions that create value. In the fast-paced and disruptive category of Plant-Based, we are responsible for building the reputation of Kerry as thought leaders in the category, leveraging proprietary consumer insights and a deep understanding of our customers to develop market-leading strategies. Over the next five years, accelerated growth is projected in Plant-Based, with the segment on track to grow almost 6x faster than the traditional food and beverage market.
This reflects the fact that the modern plant-based market is still new and only beginning to move from niche to mainstream. We believe this presents one of the biggest white space opportunities the food and beverage industry has ever seen, especially for those players who can solve complex challenges with differentiated solutions. Like the category itself, plant-based consumers are evolving. Their motivations for choosing plant-based products are complex, personal, and oftentimes deeply rooted. Despite the very dynamics of this consumer set, we understand their needs and what they mean for our customers. Great taste experience, as an example, is a universal expectation. How do you interpret this in a way that is aligned to local preferences? Our globally connected, locally led teams do just this, pivoting our portfolio to deliver authentic regional flavors and formats. Consumers also expect plant-based products to support better health and nutrition.
Our food science and nutrition teams help manufacturers achieve this using a broad range of solutions that can support product development from renovation to innovation. Because we connect directly with consumers through proprietary research projects, we understand where there are global synergies and regional nuances. From the drive for clean label in North America, to the importance of sustainability in Europe, and the constant demand across consumers for a broader variety of products on shelf. Combining our deep understanding of both consumers and the needs of producers, we have created the Radicle approach to plant-based food, beverage, and meat. Based on leadership in three key areas, Radicle reflects a new way of doing business that sets us apart from other players in the market. First, we have our portfolio, which is unparalleled in the industry, from individual building block ingredients to total solutions.
No one is better placed to support customers on their journey and deliver against what consumers may want most, plant-based products that never feel like a compromise. We start our product innovations in the kitchen. We pair our portfolio with culinary leadership that is unmatched across our industry. The expertise of our people is second to none. Our global team of chefs, food scientists, and technology specialists partner along the entire innovation journey, embedding chef-led thinking in everything we do. We take a fully integrated approach to business, from marketing to regulatory and supply chain to sensory. We bring the best people together to deliver market-leading products and solutions across categories, channels, and geographies. I'm going to hand you over to Thomas to bring our plant-based offering to life.
First, here's one of our master chefs, Richard Troman, who will show you how we use differentiated solutions to solve complex plant-based challenges in the kitchen every day.
Welcome. I'm going to take you on a culinary innovation journey around the globe to experience the world of Plant-Based in a way that you haven't seen before, and to show you how Kerry's radical approach is transforming the category. Let's start with a regular, traditional burger build, and the radical toolbox is in full force. Our textured plant protein and cooking method flavors bring a succulence and meaty depth to the patty, and blending our plant fat systems with our clean, sustainable smoke technology and encapsulated fat flavor systems bring an authentic smokiness, succulence, and meaty depth to the plant-based bacon. Finally, we pull on all of our dairy heritage and expertise to build vegan proteins that bring a class-leading stretch to our cheese. That only reflects where the plant-based category is today. Let's look at the future.
Let's look at the innovation and how Radicle will continue to transform the category. Staying in the U.S.A., there's nothing more iconic to meat eaters than American barbecue, our plant-based version doesn't compromise on this taste standard. Let's replace the standard burger bun with a pretzel bun, utilizing the Radicle vegan protein glazes for a freshly baked shine without the use of egg. Let's swap the burger patty from the traditional burger build for our plant-based hickory smoked pulled pork, leveraging our smoke and grill technologies. Finally, let's bring in a zingy plant-based pepper jack cheese and our spicy plant-based egg-free firecracker ranch dressing. This is a build for the next generation of Plant-Based. Are you ready to jet set?
I think we all are ready to get back to traveling is so easy with the Radicle toolbox as our portfolio flexes for global and regional tastes. We travel with us across the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean, swapping that pretzel bun from the U.S.A. to an Italian focaccia. Next, let's remove that smoked pulled pork and bring in something lighter, a plant-based white chicken and herb burger that uses our ultra-clean succulence technology, so that it's juicy every bite. Top that with a creamy, rich, soft plant-based mozzarella slice and a fresh herby plant-based pesto utilizing our clean protein, functional texturizers, and encapsulated taste technology. Finally, one last stop on our tour, Asia, a region introducing the new frontier of Plant-Based, blending traditional recipes with the culinary wonderland of modern Asian cuisine. We've saved the best for last.
Japanese Tonkatsu, a regional favorite, loved by both locals and visitors alike. Moving from Italy to Japan, let's swap out that herb chicken patty for the iconic plant-based version of the panko crusted pork cutlet, leveraging the Radicle technologies to mirror the juiciness and rich notes in a natural pork filet. Utilizing our plant-based dairy taste capabilities, we can then swap out the pesto for an authentic Japanese plant-based Yum Yum sauce, wrap it all up by swapping the Italian focaccia for a bright matcha bao bun, utilizing Radicle solutions for dairy replacement in the bake process for that visual excitement that comes with Japanese cuisine. Thank you for setting sail with us on our global culinary plant-based journey. From today's plant-based burger all the way to the plant-based category of the future.
I think we can all agree the plant-based category of the future needs the Radicle portfolio, an expansive toolbox to manipulate the sensation, the flavor, the color, and the texture, all for innovative experiences for tomorrow's consumer.
Thank you, Richard. That was exciting. Hello, I'm Thomas Hahlin Ahlinder. As President and CEO of Europe and Russia, I work closely with my colleagues in the region and across the globe to lead out our approach to the plant-based market. Starting with the science of food and overlapping that with the artistry of culinary thinking and a passion for innovation, we bring a distinctive perspective to the plant-based category. Elizabeth has outlined the three reasons why the Radicle approach to the plant-based is unique in the industry. Our unparalleled portfolio of plant-based solutions, our leadership in culinary food craft and science, and our fully integrated approach. Now let me walk you through these in a little more detail so that you can see for yourself how we are differentiated in the market. We begin with our unparalleled plant-based portfolio.
Using the expertise of our integrated teams, we have strategically evolved the Radicle portfolio to meet the varied needs of the market. Across the four portfolio pillars, we utilize our deep understanding of the science of food to develop a broad range of ingredients and solutions that help our customers win. In taste, we start from the inside out. We can mask the base and build flavor to create an authentic taste experience. We are the only taste player who can deliver a full suite of taste solutions, and we are vertically integrated in each core technology platform. Our leadership in clean smoked, dairy taste, umami, kokumi, and protein sets us apart from our peers. For functionality, we deliver organoleptic properties, ensuring a full sensory experience, taste, sight, smell, and touch. Sustainable plant-bases. We are agile.
We source, create, and process depending on customer need, delivering plant-based solutions through a wide variety of sources and formats. Nutrition. We sustainably nourish life, providing consumers with a positive nutritional experience encompassing clean label, high-quality protein, salt perception, reduction of saturated fat, and ProActive Health ingredients. Wherever our customers are on their plant-based journey, we can help. Our leadership in culinary craft and food science is undisputable. Combining almost 50 years of food heritage with two decades of experience in plant-based, and a team of more than 70 chefs across 16 countries, we know food. From our inception as a dairy co-op, to our approach to plant-based products today, we help our customers bring uncompromisingly good plant-based products to market. By joining the dots of science and gastronomy, our global team deliver holistic solutions that can be adapted to suit local needs.
Our sensory teams bring our innovations direct to consumers, ensuring we get real-time feedback, allowing us to be agile, and helping our customers get to market fast. Perhaps most importantly, our teams work with a Radicle portfolio across categories and technologies, and this ensures they understand the individual ingredients and how they interact within a total product matrix, giving us an application expertise that is unmatched. How do we bring this all together? We do it through the fully integrated Radicle approach. What we do is more than just combining our portfolio with culinary leadership. It's about our values and our commitments. It's our people and our integrated ways of working. We take pride in setting the industry standard, leading the way with sustainable taste and nutrition.
From our deep understanding of the global market and of local consumer needs, to the depth and breadth of the Radicle portfolio, we are the partners of choice for plant-based producers globally. Backed by a strategic business model that brings added value to our customers across the entire food and beverage menu. Ultimately, the value we bring to our customers is very much in the how. How our people use a Radicle approach to create solutions that solve complicated problems, and that is why we are the integrated solution provider for the Plant-Based and beyond. By using the Radicle approach, we will continue to win in the plant-based market, harnessing the power of our portfolio, leading with culinary thinking, and working in a fully integrated way. We will continue to solve our customers' most complex problems with truly differentiated Kerry solutions.
We will focus on developing for the future, constantly evolving our Radicle portfolio to ensure we stay ahead of the competition. We will continuously enable our people, look for new ways to embed sustainability, and leverage our end-to-end global expertise locally. We will listen, explore, and challenge ourselves to use our global understanding to drive innovation in the category, and we will ensure that the consumer continues to be at the heart of what we do. Thank you.
[Break]
Hello, welcome to this session on Food Waste, hosted by Emma Cahill, Global Marketing Director for Kerry's Food Protection and Preservation business, and myself, Juan Aguiriano, Group Head of Sustainability. In this session, we will discuss why the sustainable nutrition impact of reducing food waste is such a great opportunity to do good while partnering with customers to create products that are better for people, society, and the planet. Food waste reduction is a key enabler of our company purpose and vision and is now a strategic growth priority. We hope that by the end of this session, you will share our excitement about the business opportunity. Kerry is leading as the number 1 ingredient and technology solutions company in this space. If, as a society, we can reverse the trend of food waste, there would be more than enough food to feed the world.
Food loss and waste elimination will become even more critical as the global population grows from 7 to 9 billion in the coming years. In fact, the feedstocks and food wasted daily could feed 2 billion people. This is 3x the amount of people that suffer from malnutrition or are undernourished today. One third of all food produced ends up as food loss or waste, and it costs the global economy $ 936 billion a year. Meanwhile, 78% of global consumers associate food waste with sustainability, and 44% are willing to pay extra for food beverage products devoted to solving food waste. Leading brands and customers are capturing this opportunity with new food and beverages launches with a food waste upcycling claim growing 2x-3x faster than previous years. Let's look at where food waste comes from in the supply chain.
Food losses happen at the production post-harvest and processing stages in the food supply chain, and mostly in emerging markets. Food waste is related to retail and consumer behavior and happens mostly in developed markets. Consumers are responsible for more than 40% of food waste. Where's the opportunity to improve? In developed markets, the opportunity is at consumer level. For example, the average American consumer wastes 10x more food annually than the same consumer in Southeast Asia. Studies show that half of that food waste could be prevented or reduced by extra shelf life days. In emerging markets, most food loss occurs early in the supply chain before food reaches the retailer. Many sources of this food loss can be directly addressed by preservation solutions.
Bakery and meats are the highest food waste categories, with bakery contributing the highest volume of waste. One quarter of consumers do not finish their bread before it goes off, translating to approximately 32 million loaves going to waste globally each day. Around the world in 2020, Kerry and Niacet technologies extended the shelf life of approximately 72 billion loaves of bread by up to 75%. Well, that's enough bread to sustain over 14 million people. The environmental footprint of making one loaf is 0.5 kg of CO2 equivalent and 568 L of water. Meat is the category with the highest value of waste, is the number 1 consumer concern about food safety, and 20% of meat goes to waste and is the most carbon intensive globally. Studies with Niacet Provian show that we can safely protect quality and triple the shelf life of some processed meats.
What is the impact of reducing meat loss and waste? As mentioned, 20% of the 263 billion kg of meat produced globally is lost or wasted. Well, that's enough to sustain over 18 million people. The environmental footprint of 1 kg of meat is up to 60 kg of CO2 equivalent and a massive 14,000 L of water. Now, I would like to hand over to my colleague, Emma, who will discuss the portfolio opportunity for Kerry to partner with customers to reduce food waste.
Thank you, Juan. You've just heard about the impact of food waste on the planet, on people, and on the industry. I'd like to take a look at the opportunity that Kerry's portfolio and expertise has to make a meaningful difference in reducing food loss and waste. Let's go to bread and bakery first. We've heard how shelf life days alone could solve half of consumer waste. The market need to achieve this, and our impact, is more than mold inhibition from preservation. It is anti-staling from emulsifiers, enzymes solving for early food loss reduction, and better uniformity, leading to fewer discards. Next, I'll pull up meat safety and spoilage prevention in plant protein.
Extending a product's ability to feed more people and reducing how often it goes to waste is also about protecting taste and texture over shelf life, as well as enabling easier storage from the supply chain and end consumer. We also have technologies that help our customers enhance yield and optimize processes from local grains for a variety of end uses. Lastly, I'll touch on some dairy and beverage examples around heat stability of protein, resilience to an imperfect supply chain in emerging markets, process replacement for debottlenecking, and making a product cost relevant in new markets. All in all, there's great breadth and depth to the measurable ways in which Kerry makes a difference in Food Waste beyond co-creating tasty and nutritious end products that satisfy consumer desires. This is just a sample of the multiple facets of Kerry's positioning to reduce food waste.
Let's look at a couple of case study examples. A customer asked Kerry to improve the shelf life and appeal of their burger buns in 119 countries, reducing visual discards, extending shelf life to further reduce waste, and what else Kerry could do to make a better bun. During our co-creation process, we looked at the back-of-house challenge. The buns were wrinkly and reaching the consumer looking kind of smushed or being totally discarded because they fell apart from being stacked. Shelf life wasn't the main reason for the bun waste, but we looked to see if we could improve that, too. We needed to build a bun that was more resilient and looked and tasted good coming out of the final box with steam from the burger hitting it. We used enzymes, emulsifiers, and glaze to build a really attractive bun.
For shelf life, we leveraged our upgraded fermented wheat, which extended the shelf life beyond the incumbent solution and added a complementary sourdough flavor. The impact was a reported 25% increase in traffic during test launch from consumer preference. All the waste from visual discards was eliminated. Overall, there was a 50% increase in product shelf life, further reducing the customer's bun waste. Let's look at a plant-based meat burger for a global customer. They were dominating the freezer aisle, but struggling to get a viable refrigerated shelf life, which was creating a lot of retail and consumer waste in their test markets. Studies showed that food safety wasn't the issue. It was spoilage that was causing taste and texture deterioration and limiting shelf life. The customer wanted our solution to solve their problem, but also allow them to launch a refrigerated burger globally.
It had to be clean label and regulatory compliant. The customer shared their base material with us so that we could solve for taste, texture, and shelf life in their actual product. As their taste and nutrition partner, we also were able to reduce final sodium content as part of our proposed solution, which would further enable the customer to achieve a market-leading position with their refrigerated products. We solved for spoilage and taste so the product could actually meet its original shelf life without spoiling, and we were able to add four extra shelf life days to take some pressure off the entire supply chain, right down to the consumer. Interestingly, our regulatory knowledge outweighed our customers and was a huge differentiator in the successful launch of their very craveable plant-based burger. I focused a lot on the opportunity for Kerry to reduce food waste and loss.
There's a EUR 3 billion opportunity for Kerry technologies to help customers reduce their waste. Preservation is a substantial part of that, with over EUR 1.5 billion attainable with Kerry's market-leading preservation portfolio across clean label and conventional technologies. Preservation is an attractive market, with mid-single-digit revenue growth overall. Kerry's breadth, vertical integration, a number 1 market position in many of these technologies gives us a market advantage in food waste reduction. Our market leadership in preservation and ongoing investment in innovation and modeling capabilities, building a preservation powerhouse will allow us to shape the future of food waste reduction with next-generation preservation solutions, integrating taste, nutrition, and other functional technology capabilities. That's not all. Nutritional reach is about allowing the planet's resources to feed more people.
We already have some excellent and impactful examples of where we have partnered with customers to help them reuse resources that are ending up in their waste streams. Where we cannot reduce food waste, we can use our expertise to reuse the planet's resources in a circular way to extend nutritional reach. I will hand back to Juan, who will talk you through just one great example of this.
I would like to share an example where we work with a customer to reuse food waste from chicken production to create delicious, tasty, and sustainable stocks and broths. Antoine outlined earlier how we have built out our leading authentic taste capabilities and the critical role our taste team plays in making more nutritious and sustainable products taste great. We also leverage here a number of our differentiated technologies to upcycle food losses to create premium products that are circular, organic, and with zero waste. We are helping the customer to grow their business in new categories and channels with products that are flying off the shelf. Who can talk better about this partnership than the customer? Let's hear what he has to say.
We're an old family business that started back in the early 1890s. It's important to us, the relationship we have with Kerry, and knowing that they're going to come through with us and that some big guy isn't going to put the pressure on Kerry and say, "Well, you have to supply us," and the little guys, they're not the big bucks. We really enjoy all of our vendor relationships. We want our employees, our farmers, our neighbors, our friends, the community, all to be a part of something, which is much how Kerry's model has been put together over the years and from the history that I've learned about Kerry in the U.K. I think it's really a big deal. People want to feel a part of a system. Today, for Bell & Evans, that's going to be our future.
We figured out how to produce great chicken, and now our partnership with Kerry is developing the seasoning side. Whether we're doing broth or other seasonings, batters, breadings, you name it, it's about seasoning. People in the U.S. have really accepted chicken as a wonderful animal protein, and now, it's our job to make sure that we keep it exciting and keep that growth there and that interest for consumers to come back to our products. It's going to be about flavorings and seasonings. Kerry buying this broth plant in Virginia, it soon came together in my mind what a neat partnership this could be. This idea of taking the broth business to the next level and producing a broth with less added water, less salt, less of the idea of it's all about price and it's all about packaging in a certain way.
We want to add it to our product line here, to our retail stores and our foodservice accounts, a product where it starts with all about quality. Now that we are where we are, partly with the partnership with Kerry, I expect that we will probably double our business again in the next three to four years.
Kerry is leading in creating a world of sustainable nutrition. Food waste is an attractive, high-growth market. Kerry has the capabilities and technologies to help our customers end to end in creating circular food and beverage solutions, and the potential for sustainable nutrition impact is endless. Thank you very much.
Good afternoon. My name is Dr. Albert McQuaid, and I'm Kerry's Chief Science and Technology Officer based at our global technology and innovation center in Naas. Together with Dr. Vivien Sheehan, who leads our Applied Health and Nutrition Science teams, we will bring you through the growth opportunity that Kerry sees in the Health & Bio-Pharma space. As Edmond outlined earlier, our purpose at Kerry is to inspire food and nourish life. The consumer's perception of the role of food is changing, and increasingly, consumers want their food to be sustainable and more nutritionally balanced, and that their consumption choices contribute to their overall wellness. Over the past 10 years, we have seen a strong focus on clean label, where the consumer wants the transparency around what is in their food and that the ingredients used are recognizable and trusted. This continues to evolve.
Consumers are looking to how fortifying food can nourish life and play a more proactive role in their overall health and wellbeing, can be more personalized, and can play an even greater role in preventing health issues and complement treatment of existing conditions. This move towards what we call Food for Health, for Life requires our industry to have certain capabilities to address these consumer needs. Our customers need products that can be trusted and that are based in science and technology that is validated through strong clinical data, products that have superior quality and meet the most stringent regulatory standards. This leads to the necessity to build a strong brand identity at both the finished consumer product level but also at the ingredient technology level.
As you will have seen earlier from our Taste team, consumers still want their nutrition-focused products to taste great, especially as consumers move to more functional food and beverages. The consumer and industry insights on this slide further confirms this evolution. From an industry perspective, we see the major CPG brands acquiring emerging brands focused on health. We also see large biopharma companies moving into this space as they not only look to treatment but also to prevention. When it comes to the consumer, six out of 10 consumers are seeking products to improve their health. Almost 40% of consumers state that they're more likely to buy a healthy lifestyle product after seeing scientific data that supports the product benefits. This is borne out by an overall 11% growth in annual launches in functional food and beverages.
When you look at this space from a need state perspective, you get a sense of the scale and potential. Consumers are looking to both supplements and functional food and beverages to satisfy their needs. What is interesting is that more and more consumers are looking to consume their ProActive nutrition products as a food rather than as a tablet. Immune health has been and will continue to be the top concern for consumers. The desire to meet other need states is on the rise. For example, cognitive health, heart health, joint health, sleep, et cetera. With these growing demands, the opportunity exists to create the white space in the market and address these desires via functional food and beverages. Kerry is the partner of choice for companies looking to evolve their position in this growing Food for Health, for Life space.
We combine taste optimization, functional ingredient formulation, science-backed nutrition technologies, and holistic end-to-end supply chain partnerships to enable our customers meet the diverse needs of consumers in this space. Our extensive range of clinically backed branded technologies enables and supports our customers to win across multiple key need states. We are the number one probiotic company in ambient food and beverages, and we have the industry-leading clinically backed immune health ingredient. We continue to build out our technology portfolio through targeted acquisitions like Biosearch Life and Natreon, through internal innovation, and through partnering and licensing with suppliers, research institutes, and startups to bring clinically backed technologies to our customers in this growing marketplace. I will now hand over to Vivien to bring you through the biopharma market.
Thank you, Albert. Hello, everyone. My name is Vivien Sheehan. I've been working for Kerry for the past 14 years, and I am currently based in our Beloit, Wisconsin, Taste and Nutrition Discovery Center. I oversee our research activities pertaining to our globally relevant applied health and nutrition technologies. This slide showcases why the pharma market continues to experience significant growth. It is driven by a number of important factors. Aging populations, rising prevalence of acute and chronic diseases, as well as overall population growth. Governments and healthcare payers, including insurance companies, are moving to value-based medicine to secure efficient and sustainable healthcare. The accelerated investment and advancements in pharmaceutical R&D with the development of vaccines, gene and cell therapy technologies are also fueling growth. The importance of vaccines has never been higher. For COVID-19 alone, there were approximately 300 vaccine candidates listed on the World Health Organization's vaccine tracker.
The increasing prevalence of biosimilars is notable. With biologic patents expiring, access and affordability is improving globally. Currently, there are 55 biosimilars approved in Europe for 15 biologics. Finally, generics make up a large volume of this market, with the uptake in pharma emerging markets driving most of this growth. Two-thirds of the global medicine volumes, mostly comprised of generic medicines, are consumed in these markets, and this is expected to continue with their increased buying power. Kerry has a broad portfolio of technologies that make us a key partner for the pharma and biopharma industries. Six out of today's top 10 blockbuster drugs are produced using solutions provided by Kerry, whether this is our industry-leading media solutions for fermentation or excipients for drug delivery.
Our recent Niacet acquisition makes us the number one supplier of acetates to the pharma industry, where it's used for dialysis and as an API in the treatment of renal disease. This next slide showcases how our depth in science and technology fuels innovation. We bring new technologies to market in three ways: via organic innovation, by licensing technologies, and through acquisitions. As a result of these three approaches, Kerry has an enviable portfolio of ingredients, as seen on the top right-hand corner, that encompass probiotics, enzymes, proteins, bioactives, botanicals, and more to mine for health benefits through our best-in-class discovery programs. We have robust screening platforms to select the most promising ingredients for further characterization. We're currently expanding our probiotic portfolio. The early discovery phase entails assessing robustness of different strains through food manufacturing processes.
Weeding out heat- labile strains as an example, and then predicting their performance and survivability during gastrointestinal transit, and assessing mode of action via in vitro predictor models. Strain profiling and in silico analysis of genomic sequences required as part of the regulatory approval process enables confirmation of safety by verifying absence of virulence factors. Metabolomics is leveraged to characterize mechanism of action and assists in predicting health benefits. For example, production of short-chain fatty acids and carotenoids are associated with nutritional benefits. As large data sets of ever-increasing size and complexity are produced, digital tools and artificial intelligence are leveraged to critically analyze the data, determining ingredient impact with the goal of enhancing precision and efficacy. We partner with academics for some of the more fundamental research aspects. Developing a pipeline of internal expert talent capable of extracting the maximum value from these interactions is a continued focus.
These screening strategies allow us to be more confident in the commercial viability of the end product. Once a stable strain, metabolite, or bioactive ingredient is developed, further science is built through our clinical research program, as shown on the bottom right-hand side of the screen. Our internal preclinical capabilities allow us to proceed with greater confidence as we partner with external clinical research organizations to generate unbiased, credible efficacy data. Building science, connecting microbiome profiles to traditional gut, immune health, and need states beyond these is a key strategic priority. Moving over to the left side of the slide, a core element in commercializing these technologies is developing scalable manufacturing processes to deliver stable strains and metabolites in a commercially viable manner. Kerry's strength in bioprocessing enables us to differentiate and offer flexibility to our customers with respect to how these technologies deliver in the final application.
Finally, the Kerry Health and Nutrition Institute is a globally relevant thought leadership platform enabling our scientists to showcase their scientifically backed data and insights via webinars, papers, and short stories. KHNI is ranked as the number 1 website on global Google searches for the term nutrition trends. We translate science for our customers in an impactful manner to help meet the growing need for better and more sustainable nutrition. Thank you for your attention, and I'll pass you back to Albert.
Thank you, Vivien. We've discussed the market and industry environment and Kerry's leading capabilities to enable and support our customers to win in what is a very dynamic space. I will now share three examples of market products where Kerry has helped our partners to win and grow. This is a category-leading functional beverage developed in collaboration with Liquid I.V. in North America, targeted at recovery and immune health. Kerry provided end-to-end support to bring this product to market and delivered on both the nutrition validation and trust through our scientifically backed, branded Wellmune health ingredient, and on consumer preference through clean label taste excellence using natural ingredients. Another example is the growing women's health segment, where in partnership with a key global player, we've created a new to category product that is clinically proven to enhance the ability to breastfeed by reducing the incidence of mastitis by 50%.
This product has been rolled out across a number of geographies, supporting a key global nutrition and health target as outlined by the World Health Organization, which is to increase the level of breastfeeding across the globe to 70% by 2030. As we've all seen during the pandemic, vaccinations represent the most effective strategy to prevent infectious diseases, and vaccine manufacture is crucial for public health. Kerry's cell media range, comprising protein hydrolysates, yeast extracts, and recombinant proteins, support superior yield and performance for the leading biopharma vaccine manufacturers. Our cell media is currently used to produce over 70 different types of vaccinations globally and has been used in the development of many more.
To summarize, we see Food for Health, for Life as a growing category driven by consumer and industry demand, and we believe that Kerry is strategically positioned to help our customers to win in this space. We do this through our deep consumer insight and customer intimacy and focus by delivering on great nutrition without any compromise on taste, and by leveraging industry-leading, clinically backed technology portfolio. Thank you very much.
Hello, I'm Marcelo Marques, President and CEO of Kerry in Latin America. I'm delighted to speak to you today directly from Brazil, my home country, where I've been working with Kerry for over 16 years. In this session, I will present our emerging market ambitions. With me, representing our emerging market teams, are Thanh Nguyen, our Chief Operating Officer for Asia- Pacific, Middle East, and Africa, based in Thailand; Irina Anaya, General Manager for Mexico, CACAR, and Andean region, based in Mexico; and Busi Mkhwanazi, our Marketing Director for Sub-Saharan Africa, based in South Africa. As you know, at Kerry, we always start with the consumer. Here we see some of the macro trends impacting our industry in most of the emerging markets, with some of them also observed in developed countries to a certain extent.
What's noteworthy in emerging markets is the speed at which consumer habits and behaviors are evolving. What we call love for local has become even more pronounced in recent years, with local brands and international companies looking for authentic and local taste connected to the culture of countries like South Africa, India, Mexico, and China. We also have the rise of the middle class with hundreds of millions of people entering it, bringing with them an aspiration for premium experiences at accessible price points. Other trends that are gathering pace are around health and wellness, as well as sustainable consumption. In a recent proprietary survey carried out by Kerry with 5,000 consumers across a number of emerging markets, over 70% expressed that they are more concerned about environmental issues and are also becoming more conscious of their overall health and wellness.
Finally, we have digital, bringing new ways to consume food and beverage, and trust and transparency, all accelerated during the pandemic. The statistics here speak for themselves, with emerging markets representing 85% of the world's global population, with a very significant increase of about 50% in the number of people becoming part of the middle class in the next 10 years. China is continuing its economy growth, while the Southeast Asian countries combined will be the equivalent of the fifth-largest global economy after the U.S.A., China, Japan, and Germany. Russia, one of our emerging markets, will see its retail segment grow by over EUR 40 billion. India, another important opportunity for our business, will have over 160 million additional households in the next 10 years. Africa continues to grow at an incredible pace and is the continent with the youngest median age.
Finally, Latin America, with its largest packed food headroom, completes our emerging markets overview. I would like to speak to the three key reasons why we have, why we are, and why we will continue to win in emerging markets. Firstly, as Edmond highlighted earlier, we have a track record of delivering strong performance in emerging markets. Secondly, our winning business model, partnering with our customers in solving their challenges. Thirdly, how we convert our strategy into action, which we will show shortly with some exciting case studies. In the next slides, we'll take you through each of these. We have a track record of consistently delivering double-digit growth in emerging markets. Our approach to the market has been to really understand the local consumers and the opportunities ahead of us, to invest heavily and at a fast pace in select markets.
By building strong local relationships, leveraging our integrated Kerry approach, and deploying our global technologies locally, we've been able to meet local needs and help our customers solve their challenges. While we've only been present in emerging markets for just over 25 years, the level and speed of investments in diverse talent and a local footprint have placed us in leadership positions in segments and in countries. Our unique business model and fresher view of these markets, combined with our capacity to bring relevant consumer insights and deploy our technologies locally, have created a very solid base to enable us to continue delivering on our growth ambitions, outperforming the market and growing by EUR 1 billion in the next five years. We have a business model that sets us up to win in emerging markets by solving our customers' challenges. Our winning model is all about solving complex challenges.
These challenges are placing more and more demands on our customers, who are looking for a partner that can support them with speed of innovation, nutritional improvements, and help them meet their sustainability goals. Our breadth of technologies, our presence within different channels like foodservice, industry, and direct to retail, from global CPGs to the more fragmented markets, and across various geographies, on top of that, our ability to combine different technologies at speed to meet consumer demands places us in a very unique position to partner with our customers. We can do that from bench to factory, leveraging our technical teams, processing knowledge and expertise, working hand in hand with our customers to deliver the best solutions to their challenges and supporting them end to end.
Because we understand their menus, their operations, and how our products perform in their equipment in the restaurants, we also partner with our foodservice customers from insight to the product being served in a dynamic, smooth, and consistent way. How do we translate our strategies into action? To explain our third pillar, I will pass over our talented local team.
Hi, I'm Thanh Nguyen, Chief Operating Officer at Kerry APMEA, coming to you from the beautiful city of Bangkok, Thailand. It's my pleasure to share with you one of the many successful collaborations we have with a leading convenience chain in Southeast Asia. When the customer came to us wanting to improve the health and well-being of their customers through their beverage and coffee category, we responded with our Wellmune solution, a proprietary technology utilizing yeast beta-glucan, developed and clinically proven to help strengthen the immune system. Leveraging our global supply network, our knowledge of the local market, and our ability to execute with excellence, we delivered our Wellmune solution in a new single-serve format, uniquely positioned under our leading foodservice brand, DaVinci Gourmet.
We were able to fully meet our customer's requirement with a product that is 100% compliant to local regulations, and we did this all in record time. This collaboration has led to many others that has resulted in profitable growth for our customer and Kerry. We've also leveraged our Wellmune solution to other regions and other customers across our emerging markets. For example, we were able to execute on a very similar proposition with a leading convenience chain in Mexico. Now, let's hear directly from 7-Eleven on how Kerry was able to fully meet their needs on this project and many others.
Hi, I'm Angela Fong. I work in 7-Eleven Singapore as the Head of Commercial for Fresh. One of the key pillar of growth in 2021 is to accelerate sales through creating exciting and exclusive offerings in the 7 Café category. We have been facing challenges in the past years trying to put four flavor menu options in our stores, especially in the self-serve counter. Through conversations with Kerry, quality and commercial team, we identified opportunities to work together, filling up an entire year of product launches. One of the most add product we have launched this year, in view of the pandemic situation, was the single-serve Wellmune, targeted to boost immunity of our transient customers. 7-Eleven Singapore is probably the first customer to require the application of Wellmune in a single sachet format due to the unique nature of the convenience store model.
With all projects, there are some challenges, but the Kerry team is able to come together quickly to resolve packaging issues and launch this in record time. Because this is a very new product to market, Kerry's marketing team worked out the marketing materials to be placed strategically at our self-serve stations and outside our stores to communicate this in a fun and informative manner to our customers. We launched Wellmune within a matter of two months. With this successful collaboration between 7-Eleven and Kerry on the Wellmune project, we were able to identify other opportunities to continue the partnership, which led to other successes, including the launch of Kerry's matcha and Thai milk tea flavors as part of our theme campaigns. The Kerry APMEA team has also demonstrated to my team what and how a model partnership looks like and the exemplary results that comes after.
With the great partnership and successful launches this year, we are moving on to working on some really impactful matching projects for launch in 2022. Clear and consistent communication is really important to us and has really made the projects run smoothly and execution seamlessly. I want to thank Kerry for your commitment and great partnership. I'm looking forward to work together for our continued growth.
Hello, I'm from Mexico. My name is Irina Anaya, and I'm honored to share with you our journey with an important customer who is the leader among meat processors in our region, with presence in many other countries besides Mexico, which includes U.S.A., Spain, and other countries in Europe and LatAm. Sigma approached us around two years ago looking for a better and cleaner label solution to improve the shelf life and quality of some of the products. They reached out to their current supplier in that category at the time, and then invite us to join the challenge after several proactive presentations to Sigma. We presented our proposal, which besides addressing the clean label shelf life request, we also delivering salt reduction, helping Sigma to meet their consumer's demand and the new regulation in front of pack in Mexico.
Several tests were conducted to verify the performance and stability during the shelf life. Once laboratory and pilot plant tests were concluded, our solution performed better than the other alternatives being evaluated. With that, a new challenge arose in front of us, implementation. Leveraging our technical expertise and global network with equipment suppliers, we were able to partner as a team to develop the best application format and identify the most suitable equipment to successfully deliver on the project. As our solution was very different from the previous product being used, we worked shoulder to shoulder with Sigma and equipment supplier to deploy this new technology in each of their manufacturing sites. This was a great example of collaboration and value creation by delivering a clean label and reducing sodium solution for shelf life extension, and opened us opportunities as well in the yogurt and cheese businesses.
Hello from sunny South Africa. My name is Busi Mkhwanazi. Today, I'm so excited to share with you our successful Africa Rising strategy and how that helped us to deliver winning innovation with a leading retailer in South Africa. Africa Rising is about recognizing that Africa is rapidly growing, and the driver of this growth is the middle-class African consumer. Our winning strategy is to leverage Kerry's technologies to develop products with authentic, local, and traditional tastes to meet the needs of this consumer. When our customer approached us, they wanted to launch a product range that resonated with their target customer, who is the middle-class Sub-Saharan African consumer. Our chefs quickly demonstrated our ability to translate home-cooked and familiar flavors into modern, convenient formats. Our R&D team stepped in to develop signature flavor profiles for our customer, applying proprietary Kerry flavor technology to create authentic African taste.
Those signature flavors are achaar, chakalaka, nyama, ushatini, and chicken dust. Flavors which are well-loved by South Africans, but until now, had not been translated into consumer products. Implementing our triangular approach with co-manufacturers and our ability to execute with excellence, we were able to deliver the signature flavors in 45 SKUs across multiple categories. All this took place during the pandemic in time for our customer to launch in- store on Heritage Day this September. This project marks the beginning of our partnership with this customer, and they have already requested that we collaborate with them on developing the Africa Rising 2.0 range of flavors. Let's hear directly from Pick n Pay on how Kerry partnered with them to deliver this pioneering project.
Pick n Pay has 1,020 stores, mainly based in South Africa, but we do have a footprint in Africa. We have an amazing approach in that our target customer is everybody. The conundrum that we found ourselves in was this very African space of understanding the shifting demographics within our market and the need to find a product development offer that was going to be specifically targeted for this customer. However, the challenge was that no one in retail had done this before. I was really trying to find a solution as to how we could work to get to an offer that was going to meet this customer's need in a way that was aspirational and really appealing to the broader market as well. Busi, that's how it kicked off. You guys flew down to Cape Town.
We had a formal presentation, and I remember straight away just thinking, okay, this is a no-brainer. This is a partnership that has the magic of the skills that you bring, understanding this customer, the flavors, and then the products that we have, and understanding what this customer is shopping and how we can then get to an offer that really does meet their needs. It's almost like a bit of a story made in heaven, really, because it was just such a great match. We are seeing some great success in some of the lines already. I think where we're very happy is with the crisps. Every single week, we've seen the sales double and double and double, so that's really a good indication. Look, I would say that we are only going to grow from strength to strength here.
I think we've got to look at what Africa Rising 2.0 is and talk to how we're going to look at what's next and how we develop into that space. I look forward to a good, productive, and exciting journey as a partnership. The more we aligned, the more we share the vision, the more we get the customers buying into it, and the more the sales grow, the more there's scope to do future development. At this stage, we need to start putting our heads together again around, well, what does that actually look like, and how are we going to drive this into the future?
These are all great examples of how we can implement our unique winning model with customers in emerging markets, how we leverage our local consumer insights and deploy our technology, how our infrastructure and local talent sets us up to win locally, successfully delivering on our growth target of 10% per annum, and to be the most valued partner of our customers in emerging markets, creating a world of sustainable nutrition. Thank you.
[Break]
Good afternoon. Welcome back for our final session. I hope you felt the passion and energy of our teams during the strategic growth breakout sessions. I know I certainly did. I hope you found these informative and interesting. We believe that the capability our teams demonstrated, the depth of expertise, technologies, innovation, and market access are what really set us apart. It is why we believe our unique business model and winning growth strategies will deliver on our growth ambitions and drive real value for all of our stakeholders over the coming years. Over the next 20 minutes, I'm going to outline our performance, targets, and ambitions in relation to value creation across three areas. Firstly, our track record of growth and delivery. Secondly, I'll bring you through our updated midterm targets.
Finally, our financial model and capital allocation framework, and how we are planning to deploy our capital aligned to our strategies for growth to drive shareholder return. Here you can see our value creation framework, which is a combination of growth and return and sustainability. Under growth, there are two dimensions: volume growth and margin expansion. We believe that if we drive growth, expand our margins, realize our return criteria, and deliver on our sustainability ambitions, we will deliver strong shareholder returns. Beginning first with our strong track record of long-term growth and financial delivery. Since Kerry became a public company 34 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 for shareholders over this period.
When we look at our financial performance versus the current midterm targets, we were substantially on track to meet our targets before the impact of COVID. You will see here that over the first two years of the current plan, volume growth and return on capital employed were on target. EPS growth and cash conversion were in line with expectations and phasing, while margin progression was tracking behind, mainly due to currency impacts. Our performance in 2020 was impacted by the external factors caused by COVID, as was experienced across our industry. In 2021, we have had a strong recovery in our revenue growth. We have made significant progress over the last number of years on our strategic growth priorities, which you will have seen come to life today.
We are now outlining our plans to build on the strategic progress we have made and to drive growth and return over the medium term. On sustainability, when we track our achievements and performance aligned to our Beyond the Horizon sustainability strategy, we look at it under the three pillars of Better for People, Better for Society, and Better for the Planet. Under Better for People, we are now reaching over 1 billion consumers with positive and balanced nutrition. Our Kerry Health and Nutrition Institute is providing extensive thought leadership with a range of research papers, in-depth articles, and webinars to help our industry and customers make a sustainable nutrition impact on consumers' lives. Under Better for S ociety, we continued to drive social impact through a range of partnerships, including Concern Worldwide and the World Food Programme.
Finally, under Better for the Planet, we have reduced our Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 17% versus 2017 and reduced our food waste by 10% in the same time period. Our progress has been recognized by different rating agencies and benchmarks. In 2021, we have been rated AAA with MSCI. We are among the top 5% of companies leading the transformation of the food and agri sector, according to the recent World Benchmarking Alliance assessment. At the outset, we looked at our three drivers of our value creation framework: growth, both top- line and margin expansion, return, and sustainability. It is this balanced scorecard approach that will continue to deliver strong, sustainable shareholder returns. Before I outline our medium-term targets for each of these drivers, I want to take a moment to cover the different elements under each of these.
Firstly, our growth is volume-led, with margin expansion playing a key role. Volume growth is focused on the three strategic priorities of taste, nutrition, and emerging markets. For margin expansion, there are four dimensions which I will speak to shortly. Secondly, under returns, our focus is on strong cash generation and consistent returns, with disciplined capital allocation being a key enabler of how we will deliver on our return targets. Finally, on sustainability, aligned to our Beyond the Horizon strategy, we will continue to deliver impact under Better for People, Society, and Planet. Our sustainability targets underpin how we create value. Our growth targets, our return targets, and our sustainability targets are linked. Our reach goal exemplifies this, as reaching 2 billion people with sustainable nutrition is a combination of achieving both our growth and our sustainability targets.
Looking at our targets under each of these three drivers in turn. Our new group volume growth target is increasing to 4%-6%, 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 return on average capital employed of 10%-12%. Finally, on sustainability, we have a number of measures across the three pillars I referenced earlier. A range of sustainability measures are outlined here, and I will look at these in more detail shortly. In our updated targets, we have updated our margin target from trading profit to EBITDA. This is now more reflective of how we manage and drive performance in our business and the measure most used in our industry.
We are moving from three growth targets to two primary growth targets as our revenue and our margin targets capture our overall ambition in a balanced way. While EPS will continue to be an important metric for Kerry, we believe that revenue growth and EBITDA are the best growth targets to support and encourage decisions that are right for Kerry in the long term. Moving on to look at our volume growth target of 4%-6%. In our strategic framework, we have three overarching strategic priorities of taste, nutrition, and emerging markets, underpinned by our four key growth platforms of Authentic Taste, Plant-Based, Food Waste, and Health & Bio-Pharma.
In the breakout sessions, you will have seen why and how we are going to deliver in these growth platforms, as well as in emerging markets, given our unique market access, be it channel or customer access, our leadership positions across the five dimensions of our business, and our ability to create differentiated solutions to solve complex customer challenges, leveraging the breadth and depth of our leading technology and innovation capabilities, as well as our absolute leadership in integrated solutions. It is for these reasons that we see significant opportunity to deliver accelerated growth performance over the coming years in these focus areas and to deliver on our overall growth target. Now turning to look at how we will achieve our EBITDA margin target of over 18% by 2026. This will be driven by expanding our EBITDA margin in Taste & Nutrition to over 20%.
There are a number of different drivers of this overall margin expansion, 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. Over time, you have seen how we have evolved our portfolio organically and inorganically, as well as how we have evolved our business model to enable us to create differentiated solutions to address these opportunities. We will continue to do this. Additionally, the focus areas we have under our strategic growth framework will have an important role in the enhancement of 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 Kerry Accelerate Transformation programme. Earlier this year, we extended the scope of Kerry Global Business Services within finance and HR to include new functions such as regulatory and procurement. I will give you more color on the Kerry Accelerate Operational Excellence Transformation programme in a moment. The combination of these operational efficiency initiatives will generate significant margin expansion benefits over the midterm. The final pillar here is all about reinvesting for growth. We have called out the key areas of further investment that we will be making to support the achievement of our growth target. Significant work has been completed under each of these areas as part of our planning process.
Central to this has been the requirement to cater for the major evolving market dynamics that we are all seeing right now, and also balancing the requirement for agility, reliability, and efficiency in how we operate as a business. In summary, and to give some context to what these key drivers are going to contribute to overall margin expansion. For portfolio mix, we expect to realize 10-20 basis points per annum on average, and a similar level for operating leverage. On operational efficiencies, we expect in excess of 20 basis points per annum on average. What I would flag is that the evolution of our margins will not be linear, as the operational efficiency benefits will be weighted to the last three years of the plan. Now moving to look to accelerate our Operational Excellence Transformation programme, which will begin next year and run until 2024.
With the completion of KerryConnect in the first half of 2022, we will have an enablement platform that gives us a strong foundation to build our next generation of manufacturing and supply chain processes, systems, and ways of working. There are two elements to our Accelerate Operational Excellence plan. The first focuses on manufacturing excellence and the second is all about supply chain excellence. Under manufacturing excellence, we are going to streamline manufacturing processes enabled by digitalization and automation across a number of our facilities of scale. In conjunction with this initiative, informed by our growth strategies and the evolution of current market dynamics, we will be optimizing our assets and footprint utilization, which will result in the relocation of manufacturing activities across our footprint.
Under supply chain excellence, we will be looking at optimizing our warehouse and distribution network aligned to our medium-term growth plans to ensure we can serve local markets in an efficient and effective manner. We will leverage advanced data analytics for raw material category optimization. We will be investing approximately EUR 120 million over the period of the programme with an annual recurring benefit of circa EUR 70 million per annum by 2025. The majority of the investment and benefits are in relation to the manufacturing excellence transformation activities. We will update you with further detail when we commence the programme in 2022. 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%. Our target is to deliver in the range of 10%-12% over the period of the plan, dependent on the timing of key capital allocation decisions we will make to generate long-term shareholder value. Disciplined capital allocation has and will continue to be central to how we achieve both our cash conversion and return targets. On working capital, we plan to improve our working capital days over the period of the plan. There are a number of moving parts contributing to this improvement. We will benefit from lower KerryConnect contingency stock requirements with the completion of KerryConnect in the first half of 2022. We are planning further improvements from the Kerry Accelerate Operational Excellence programme. These will be partially offset by the impact on our working capital days from the sale of the meat and meals business.
All of these elements will be a key underpin to enable us to deliver on both our cash and returns targets. Now moving to sustainability. We outlined our sustainability targets in October 2020 with the launch of our Beyond the Horizon sustainability strategy. Today, we announced the enhancement of these targets in two key areas. As part of our broader diversity, inclusion, and belonging strategy, we are extending our commitment to equal gender representation across all senior management roles by 2030. We are pleased to say that we are increasing our target for Scope 1 and 2 emissions reduction from 33% to 55% by 2030, aligning with the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement. Moving now to our capital allocation framework, which is unchanged. 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 acquisitions. On capital expenditure, we are planning to invest 4%-5% of revenue on average over the period of the plan. I will bring you through how we deploy our capital on capital expenditure and acquisitions in more detail momentarily. We will also continue to return cash to shareholders, which will be primarily through dividends, which we've grown at double digits for the past 34 years. To sum up this slide, we will continue our disciplined approach to capital allocation with our focus on driving shareholder return. Turning to look at how we deploy our capital on capital expenditure and M&A.
We will reinvest in our business in a focused way across our three overarching strategic priorities of taste, nutrition, and emerging markets to continue to create value for shareholders. You have heard our M&A track record from Edmond earlier, and how we have invested to build out our presence in emerging markets over the last 25 years. Central to our growth-led approach is the deliberate deployment of our capital in our strategic priorities to expand our capabilities, our capacity and presence across the globe to generate value. We will continue with this systematic, focused approach to reinvestment going forward. Finally, before I close, I would like to cover a number of assumptions and other financial matters. Starting with currency. We have assumed constant currency for the period of the plan.
On pricing, we are confident that our partnership model will enable us to manage raw material volatility over the period of the plan. This is critical as we work through periods of heightened volatility that we have started to see recently. On tax, based on the current momentum on the introduction of a potential minimum global tax regime, if enacted, we are anticipating that our current ETR will increase to in excess of 15% in the later years of the plan. In 2022, we will be updating our reporting segments, reflecting the recent strategic portfolio developments with two segments going forward, Taste & Nutrition, as well as our dairy business based in Ireland and the U.K. Finally, on financing, we have assumed a consistent debt-to-equity capital structure.
To summarize, we have a strong track record of growth and financial performance, a proven value creation framework across growth, return, and sustainability. We have set ourselves ambitious targets, underpinned by our strategic priorities and key growth platforms. We have a clear strategy and exciting platform to drive our growth and returns. You will have seen the passion and capability of our teams, the strength, depth, and breadth of Kerry brought to life today. It is this that gives us confidence that we will deliver on our targets over the medium term. With that, I'll hand you back to Edmond.
Thanks, Marguerite. Before I turn it over to Q&A, I'd just like to wrap up with my key takeaways from today. We're strategically positioned in a highly attractive industry that's expanding rapidly as customers are looking for more support than ever, driven by the continually evolving needs of the consumer. Our expertise and leadership in integrated solutions is a key enabler of how we solve our customers' complex challenges. We're a truly unique business. We have a for food , from food heritage, meaning we start with nature. Science and technology is part of our DNA and central to our innovation. Our phenomenal market access is a key differentiator for us. We're leaders. We invented integrated solutions for our industry, and we created Taste & Nutrition . We've a leadership position right across all five dimensions of our business.
Across food, beverage, and pharma markets, global, regional, and local customers, within both retail and foodservice channels. In every part of the world, Kerry is present. We have a strong track record of growth and value creation. M&A has been and will continue to be an important part of our story. We have a key competence in this area. We create significant value by integrating new or under-commercialized technologies into the Kerry platform, leveraging our broad market reach, creating strategic value. In emerging markets, we've a strong track record of organic growth with our winning teams and our winning business model, and we're targeting double-digit volume growth going forward. Finally, our winning growth strategies. Under our strategic framework, we're going to continue to grow in our food, beverage, and pharma end-use markets, aligned to our strategic priorities of taste, nutrition, and emerging markets.
Within this, we have our four key growth platforms of Authentic Taste, Plant-Based, Food Waste, and Health & Bio-Pharma. These platforms are going to be key drivers of our growth going forward, where we're targeting a step- up in business performance in the coming years, and we're stepping up our sustainability impact. To close, we hope you enjoyed our presentation today, and I hope this gave you a deeper understanding of exactly what we do at Kerry every day. Solving complex challenges with differentiated solutions as we look to achieve our vision, to be our customers' most valued partner, creating a world of sustainable nutrition. With that, I thank you for your time, and we look forward to your questions.
We're delighted to welcome you to our questions- and- answer session. With me is Edmond and Marguerite, and Albert and Juan, who you'll have met earlier in the day. Thank you for sending in your questions that we've received via the chat function across the course of the day. We're going to endeavor to do is to try and take questions under some key themes initially to try and be as efficient as possible and cover as many questions as possible. We're going to start with the strategic growth platforms. The focus here, Edmond, is in terms of those strategic growth platforms, can you size them and maybe give a sense of the growth ambition for each of those platforms?
Sure, William, thanks for the question. Maybe starting where we just left off and with emerging markets. Firstly, we see emerging markets contributing about EUR 1 billion of growth over the course of the plan. Moving on to Taste, which is primarily made up of our Authentic Taste portfolio. We see Taste as a fully embedded element of our integrated solutions business. For us, it's more about thinking about it from a growth perspective in the window of that 4%-6%. Moving on to Plant-Based. One should think about Plant-Based from a scale perspective in that 2%-2%+ zone of our Taste & Nutrition business, with a growth level of strong double digits. Moving on to Food Waste. From a scale perspective, well firstly, it's primarily made up of our Food Protection and Preservation business.
From a scale perspective, it's in the mid- to high single digits. From a growth perspective, it's in the high single digits zone. Moving on to Health & Bio-Pharma. From a scale perspective, it's in the high single digits zone, from a growth perspective, it's in that mid to high single digits zone. Look, important to note on these strategies is that sustainability is a common thread right throughout these strategies. I believe these are strong strategies, and I believe they're the strategies that give us confidence about meeting both our financial targets and our sustainability targets.
Thanks, Edmond. The next focus area is the new EBITDA margin target that we've outlined today. We've a number of questions in the chat as it relates to the EBITDA margin. I'm going to outline maybe three questions, Marguerite, in this area. Can you size the step change in margin that the new target represents? Can you recap on the main drivers of this margin expansion? The third element is, can you give color on the makeup of the EUR 70 million benefits you will get from the Operation Excellence programme?
Thanks, William. As you say, a good bit in that question, maybe taking each of the components in turn. Firstly, just to recap. We've set ourselves an ambitious EBITDA margin target of 18%+ by the end of the plan from a group perspective, 20%+ from a T&N perspective by the end of the plan. In terms of just giving you a little bit more color on that, recognizing that we're still in FY 2021, perhaps helpful to base my comments on our last report as a set of financial numbers, FY 2020. When one thinks of it from FY 2020 in terms of expansion, it's roughly 350 basis points expansion at a group level, and roughly 300 basis points expansion at Taste & Nutrition level.
In terms of the second part of your question, as I mentioned earlier, the margin expansion and delivery of the margin expansion target is underpinned by four pillars. Firstly, portfolio mix. Secondly, operating leverage. Thirdly, efficiencies and over the life of the plan. Fourthly, we will be investing to support our growth plan. In terms of recapping on the component parts of the contribution of those pillars. For portfolio mix, we expect to deliver 10- 20 basis points on average per annum in relation to portfolio mix, and a similar level on operating leverage. In relation to operating efficiencies, as I referenced, we expect to deliver 20+ basis points on average over the plan, and as I referenced earlier, weighted towards the last three years of the plan.
Suffice it to say, though, that margin expansion is a key component of our plan to be delivered through the medium-term plan. Finally, on the benefits of the Accelerate Operational Excellence programme. The key benefits are in relation to improved conversion costs, in relation to improved warehousing and distribution costs, and raw material efficiencies. Obviously, we also will drive operational excellence in our operations throughout the plan, and unlock growth capacity for growth in terms of supporting our growth plans.
The next question is in the area of the growth targets. Edmond, how should we think about the makeup of the 4%-6% volume target from a retail channel and a foodservice channel perspective?
Yeah. I suppose how we're thinking about the targets is that we do expect to have an uptick in performance versus our historic growth rates. Maybe to take retail first, I know I have said this over the course of the last several months, that we see a significant step- up in performance from our historic growth rate in the retail channel of about 3% to a new level of 4% or 4%+ in retail going forward. In terms of foodservice, what we're seeing is that the level of divergence that we have seen between retail and foodservice in the past, it won't be as wide. The performance of both channels will be a little bit closer because of that step- up on retail.
Okay. The next area is a specific question here on technology, Albert. The growth platforms highlighted your depth of technology across these areas. Are there any specific areas that you would point to that will have the greatest impact?
Yeah. I think everyone hopefully will have seen today the depth of science and technology we have in the company, and we're all really proud of that. I think if I was to pick one area, it would probably be in the area of fermentation science. I think you'll have seen throughout the different growth platforms today that fermentation science already plays a huge part in what we do. It's there when you talk about our taste, we mentioned global leadership in umami and kokumi. It's there when you talk about our food preservation and how we use fermentation around clean label solutions. It's there again when we look at our ProActive Health around the bioactives and the probiotics.
If you think about fermentation science from an industry perspective and from our perspective, we feel it is still only very much at the very start of the journey. We're thinking about fermentation science and its role in sustainable proteins using precision fermentation. We're thinking about the next generation of taste modulation that we can derive through understanding how you use fermentation to deliver new products. We're thinking about it in relation to the new ingredients that we can bring to life by understanding the microbiome science and linking that through to fermentation solutions. There's a broad range of areas that we still see much to deliver when we think of fermentation science.
You'll have seen today, you'll have heard in some of the presentations. The depth of capability that we have across that whole platform, and that we go across the scale of strain engineering to metabolomics and other areas that we're working in. It's our ability to use that base foundational science, link it to how we derive and develop product technologies that are impacting and driving new solutions for our customers. That linkage makes us that we've got science with purpose, and that we actually use that science to deliver new solutions for our customers.
Moving on to sustainability. There's a question here from Patrick Roquas, and I'm going to direct this to you, Juan. Why are you increasing your climate target now? How are you going to deliver on this? Can you clarify your targets from a Scope 3 perspective?
Thank you, William. It's an excellent question. We already have science-based targets in line with the Paris Agreement. The targets for Scope 1 and 2 are a 33% reduction by 2030, and for Scope 3, an intensity reduction of 30%. In line, and in the light of the recent international panel on climate change report, it is clear that the world has to accelerate and really increase the commitments. We are very, very pleased and excited to increase our targets for Scope 1 and 2 to 55% immediately. That's an ambitious goal, but we think we can reach it. We already have decreased by 17% versus a 2017 baseline today. What we will do to get to this 55% target is immediately move as fast as possible to renewable electricity across all our global operations in the next 12 months.
We also are engaging in a very detailed bottom-up deep dive around our Scope 3. In the light of our M&A activities, divestment and investment, we're re-baselining our Scope 3. We're also considering the latest guidance that the Science Based Targets initiative will issue at month end or before year end around net zero. We already have a net zero goal for 2050, but we want to align that to the latest guidance. When we will complete the baselining and have the guidance from the SBTi, we will then announce our targets for Scope 3 in 2050, likely at the beginning of the year.
Okay. I'm going to take one more question from the chat. James Targett has submitted a couple of questions. One of them we've answered already, but I'll take another one of those. Obviously bearing in mind that we're not talking in terms of a trading update, this is more of a midterm view. Do you still expect positive margin development at a group level, Marguerite, and also at a Taste & Nutrition in 2022 and in 2023?
Thank you, James, firstly for the question. As William said, we'll obviously update in more detail on near-end trading at the end of the month and also on the close- out of the current year. Just in terms of the progression of the margin expansion through the plan, we do expect positive EBITDA margin development in 2022 and in 2023. My comments around weighting was specifically in relation to the contribution of the Operational Excellence Transformation programme, where we expect to have full- year annual recurring savings on the completion of that programme in 2024, falling into 2025. The other components that I mentioned will contribute to margin expansion in the years you've mentioned.
Okay. We're going to move to take questions from the dial-in lines. What I would like to say is just as we endeavor to try and cover as many questions as possible, if you can keep it to two questions, please. The first person is Lauren from Citigroup. Lauren, please proceed.
Yeah. Thanks, William. Hi, Lauren Molyneux from Citigroup. Thanks for the presentation and taking my question. I'll keep it to two. Firstly, looking at your volume target of 46%, I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about the moving parts and factors involved here. More specifically, what would get you from the lower end to the upper end? Is this mainly internal levers that you can pull, or is this more down to macro or external factors or M&A?
Secondly, just looking at your investment programme, I was wondering if you could give us some more details around the phasing of these EUR 120 million of investments. I know you said that the detail is going to come later, but it'll be quite interesting to hear whether you're thinking this is going to be more equally phased over those three years or more weighted towards the start of the programme. Just linked to that, how did you arrive at this EUR 70 million of expected annual benefits? If there's any more color as to where those have come from, it'd be really helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Lauren. I might kick off, and Marguerite, feel free to add. Firstly, this plan is an organic plan. Everything that we've built up here is based on the portfolio as it exists today. In terms of the 46% and how we're thinking about it, like I said earlier, we are looking at an uptick in performance versus where we were in the past. The first point being what we're seeing from a retail perspective, we see an outperformance going forward in the retail channel from where we were historically. That's driven by a lot of what you've seen today, whether it's Plant-Based and how that opportunity is evolving, whether it's Authentic Taste, whether it's the whole drive towards nutrition and wellness. Everything being underpinned from a sustainability perspective.
For us, what we see is that the market opportunity and the consumer opportunity is coming closer to what Kerry is good at and is great at. We're not aiming here at the bottom end of the window or anything like that. We feel good about the targets. We see our targets as being ambitious. We also believe that we have very strong strategies that can propel us forward from a growth perspective. Marguerite, maybe do you want to pick up the other part of the question?
Sure. Just in terms of the transformation programme, and firstly, to take your question on the phasing of investments, and I may have touched on this just in the previous question, Lauren . You should think of the investments as occurring. We'll commence the programme in FY 2022, and the investments will be phased in FY 2022, 2023, and laterally in 2024, with the benefits coming in 2024 and full- year benefits, as I referenced, in 2025. In terms of the primary benefits of the programme, there's two pillars to the programme, as I referenced earlier, on the manufacturing excellence pillar, and then also on the supply chain excellence. As I mentioned, we see most of the benefits in the area of conversion costs, the efficiencies around warehousing and distribution, and some in raw materials. We will give more color on this programme prior to commencement of the programme.
We've a lot of detailed work stood up in relation to the programme. We'll give you some further detail on it, as I say, when we commence the programme.
The next question is from Alex Sloane. Alex, I'll hand over to you to ask your question.
Thanks, William. Thanks all for the insight today. The first question would be, you're targeting an uplift in sales growth, and you have very credibly laid out the drivers today behind that. You also have an ambition for quite a sizable uplift in margin. Your returns target at 10%-12% at the low end doesn't imply any meaningful improvements. Maybe you can talk a little bit about your assumptions on asset turns, which by implication could perhaps be a slight drag over the period. My question would be, why is that? Is the low end of the returns target conservative, or is it based on an assumption that the capital intensity of growth is stepping up? That's the first one. The second question, you referenced the Kearney report, citing significant growth potential of cultivated meat. Perhaps this is one for Juan.
Can you give maybe a bit more color on Kerry's exposure to this nascent but exciting industry today and how you see that evolving given the growth potential that you highlighted? Is this potentially an area where bolt-on M&A might be considered? Thanks.
Thanks, Alex. I might kick off here, and the team will jump in. Firstly, how we're thinking about that returns target, frankly, is M&A is going to continue to be part of Kerry's story. We endeavored today to give you some insight in terms of the value we're creating out of M&A. We gave some details around how we've progressed BC30. We've given some details on how we've evolved our preservation and food protection portfolio. We feel that that 10%-12% zone gives us flexibility to continue to drive forward with M&A to ensure that we continue to drive long-term shareholder value. That's how we're thinking about it. It's to give us that flexibility. We see what's happening in the market. There continues to be good opportunities for us to generate shareholder value from acquisitions, and it was about giving us that flexibility.
In terms of the other questions, guys, maybe Albert, you want to kick off?
Maybe, yeah, Alex, I'll take that. On the cultivated using cell culture for meat or for other components we would see. Obviously we think it's still early days. This is going to evolve, we think, over the next sort of 10-year cycle. Our view would be that it's going to be probably initially we use that as part of a hybrid model, a combination of Plant-Based with this that'll deliver some of the functionality we maybe don't like yet completely from Plant-Based today. We are already working with over 30 different companies that operate in this space. You may know we referenced today, we're a major media provider to the pharma industry.
One of the biggest challenges in the cell culture arena is how do you get the cost efficiency in the media to derive a product that actually can be competitive with the mainstream animal-based protein that it's trying to replace. We've huge skills in that. We obviously understand the whole meat protein arena, and that combination of knowledge of what is meat and how you make meat taste great for consumers, aligned with that media capability is where we think we've got a real role to play in this industry as it evolves. We are active in that today. I'd say we see that happening first phase in a hybrid model. We think that that will happen actually pretty soon, that we will see products coming to market where they're combined into as an ingredient into a plant-based solution.
In the next phase, as the technology progresses, more mainstream evolution of full-on cell culture meat- derived products into the industry.
I'm going to go back and take some questions from the chat. Heidi Vesterinen has got a number of questions in here. Let me outline starting with, could you clarify if your growth and margin targets are at current scope? What is the latest on M&A? Could you go through how you see the market opportunity increasing from EUR 75 billion to EUR 90 billion-EUR 100 billion?
Thanks, Heidi. Appreciate the question. The short answer is yes, it is current scope. It's an organic plan that we have laid out today. In terms of M&A, the M&A pipeline continues to be strong. Like always, hard to predict how these things play out, but in terms of activity within the company and opportunities that we're evaluating, I would say there continues to be quite a bit of activity within the company.
As always we remain disciplined and ensuring that we've a clear path to delivering long-term shareholder growth. That's what we're driven by. Maybe in recent years sustainability has become a much bigger factor as we evaluate M&A targets. Certainly, it's something that we're going to continue to evaluate and are evaluating, and will evaluate over the course of the plan. In terms of the market we see that opportunity, like I said earlier in the presentation, being currently in the zone at EUR 75 billion, and we see that growing to EUR 90 billion-EUR 100 billion. Maybe just to touch on maybe just the Plant-Based one, just to take one example. That Plant-Based opportunity, for instance, is a new opportunity. It's a new market. We see the major protein players looking to evolve their capability into Plant-Based. Obviously that's not a capability that they have today.
They're outsourcing that innovation to partners like Kerry. From a market perspective, it's a new market. Let's say that market didn't exist to deploy ingredient technologies into in the past. That for us would be an example of an element of the market that's going to contribute to that growth. Another element, as an example, is the whole area of functional food and beverage, where food and beverage manufacturers are looking to put more functionality into their products. We saw some examples over the course of the day. That again expands the scale of the market opportunity for Kerry and our industry.
The next question I am going to take from the chat is from Cathal Kenny. The concept of outsourced innovation is probably building a little bit on what you have just spoken to. The concept of outsourced innovation partner. Can you elaborate on this? Can you give some examples and how significant is this for Kerry? Does it require investment to capitalize on the opportunity? The second part of the question, given the breadth of technology associated with developing plant-based opportunities, will this be inherently higher margin activity over time?
Sure. Thanks, Cathal. I would say maybe building on the last question in terms of that outsource innovation, and actually Albert touched on this in his presentation. Fortunately, we're not calling out a new investment in order to take advantage of this opportunity. Just to give an example, I touched already on the plant-based meat example with the major protein players, or the major meat players today are looking to outsource that innovation around Plant-Based. Another example would be, for instance, the major CPGs that would have had a legacy capability around maybe spreads, and a legacy capability maybe around tea or juice and things like that. These categories now, and these businesses have ended up in the hands of private equity companies that are looking to reinvigorate those categories, and try and change up and find opportunities to grow those categories and grow those businesses.
They're looking to partners like Kerry to try and reinvigorate a juice category, reinvigorate a spreads category, for instance. That is a new outsourced opportunity for Kerry that would have been done under previous ownership. That's one side of the coin. The other side of the coin then is some of these major CPGs, for instance, getting into new areas where they may not have legacy capability. Again, they're looking at Kerry, and they're looking at other partners to see how we can plug into their innovation, how they can plug into our innovation capability and come up with the right products for the particular consumers. In terms of Plant-Based, the short answer is yes, we believe it's a margin expansion opportunity because of the technical challenges that need to be overcome.
Perhaps, Albert, you might just give some examples of some of those challenges.
Well, I think there was some great examples seen today. We talk about Plant-Based and the inherent characteristics of plant doesn't bring some of that consumer expectation that they get from animal-based proteins. Maybe one referred to, maybe that wasn't called out today, was we recently worked with one of the major foodservice operators on looking for a dairy-free product that would function much more like that you would see from cheese today. There's inherent challenges that came with that. Taste challenges that we talked about earlier, but also when you make these products at an industrial scale, you need stretch within cheese. It does stretch naturally. When you go to plant-based products, you don't get that. That led to some very dynamic needs around process solutions that would make this product work in a different way.
We worked with their engineering teams, with the R&D teams, and we're in the process now of rolling that product out with that major chain. The feedback has been really positive of how we've managed to solve not only that taste challenge, but also those challenges that are inherent in how you make a product at an industrial scale to meet a fairly large marketplace.
Sure. Just taking another couple of questions from the chat. How should we think about R&D expenditure going forward as a percentage of sales? In relation to working capital, you mentioned, Marguerite, that there was going to be improvements in working capital days. Can you just recap the moving parts within that?
Sure, William. Maybe the first part of your question first. Similar level of R&D expenditure envisaged across the plan as approximately 5% of Taste & N utrition revenue. In terms of working capital, as I mentioned, there's a number of moving parts. Overall, we're anticipating a number of days improvement in working capital. As I mentioned, given our starting point, we're not anticipating a significant step change. A couple of drivers within our working capital assumptions. Firstly, we will have a requirement for lower contingency stock for KerryConnect on the completion of KerryConnect in the first half of 2022. Somewhat offsetting the headwind from a working capital perspective on the portfolio move on our disposal of the Meat and Meals business. Through the Kerry Accelerate programme, predominantly in the area of inventory, we do see some opportunity to improve our working capital days investment in this area.
That's the predominant component parts of the working capital.
I might just add, just in terms of the R&D, as I think about that question, another element there is the fact that a large proportion of our M&A in recent years was acquiring businesses that had under-commercialized technology. That's something I think that is important, that in terms of a space that makes us really excited about what we can do and the value we can generate from M&A, is finding those targets that have an under-commercialized technology. We endeavored over the course of the day to give some examples of how we bring that technology to market across new applications, new geographies, new channels, new end-use markets, et cetera. Over the last few years, we, of course, have had a reallocation of resources within our R&D to allocate it to areas of growth. Under-commercialized technology that comes from M&A being one, Plant-Based is another.
Just to share a number of examples.
There's one final question that I'm going to take from the chat before we close out. You've outlined a target for emerging markets. Excuse me, sorry. You've outlined a target for emerging markets of 10% volume growth and growing in emerging markets of EUR 1 billion in revenue over the period of the plan. Is there any change in how you will achieve this going forward versus how you've operated in emerging markets over the last 5-10 years?
I think it's probably a point that I have touched on a few times in the past, that the deployment of technology into developing markets is something that we're really excited about, and we touched it earlier today when we talked about Nature in China bringing that noodles category to us. That was a category, for instance, that we didn't necessarily have access to previously, and it's a category that really needs some renovation from a nutrition perspective. For us, that gives us a continued opportunity to deploy salt reduction technologies, MSG replacement technologies into those types of applications. We're seeing sustainability being a bigger factor in developing markets that wasn't there historically. We're seeing nutrition being a bigger factor that maybe wasn't there to the same extent.
For us, I feel, again, the rate of change that we're seeing from a consumer perspective in developing markets gives us that confidence that we'll be able to deploy more technologies into those developing markets, giving us both a growth and a margin expansion opportunity. That's how we're thinking about the next phase in emerging markets.
Okay. Well, we've arrived at 4:30. That ends the Q&A session, and it ends the Capital Markets Day. We would like to thank you for your participation today. We hope you enjoyed it and gained valuable insight from the Kerry team across the course of the day. All that's left for us to say is to enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.