Can you just do this? Thank you. Thank you, Naya. Thank you, John. Good morning, everyone. I wish a very warm welcome to our Coca-Cola HBC Investor Day, to all of you who are with us here in Rome and all of you who are with us online. We really appreciate making the time and being here with us for what we believe is going to be a full, exciting, and engaging day. We have a full agenda today, which we have broken into three distinct sections. Firstly, setting the scene. I'm delighted that we have with us Anastassis David, who is going to also provide his thoughts on our company from his unique perspective as the Chairman of our board.
I will take you through the building blocks of our sustainable and profitable growth theme for today's event. We are pleased to have with us Manolo Arroyo, who is the Chief Marketing Officer of The Coca-Cola Company. Manolo will provide us with an update on the latest thinking on marketing strategies at Coca-Cola and its particular relevance to us at Coca-Cola HBC. There are some very interesting areas where we will be working closely together over the next couple of years. We turn to look in more detail on our strategies for growth and for debt.
I will hand over to Naya, our Chief Operating Officer, who will take you through how we are growing our categories with the capabilities to win. She will introduce four breakout sessions or growth accelerators, as we like to call them. These will be very interactive part of the day, an opportunity to meet more of the team that came here for you in Rome. For our online audience, we will bring to life this with prerecorded films for each breakout. Before then, we actually return to talk about how we are driving growth with our diversified country footprint.
As part of that deep dive, and to showcase why we brought you here in Italy, now I will hand over to Frank, who will take you through how we have been step-changing our growth trajectory in this critical market. It's a real case, I believe, a real case study with a number of best practices. To finish off the morning, we'll have a Q&A session before we break for a lunch around 12:30PM. After lunch, we will return to talk about how we bring all this together by growing sustainably, which will be led by Katya, our Head of Sustainability.
We will be joined by our second guest today, our partner, Nikos Koumettis, President, Europe of The Coca-Cola Company. He will headline a panel session with Naya and myself to discuss the partnership and opportunities that we share in this exciting industry. I will hand over to Ben, who will describe how all this comes together in terms of course, financials, and how we are going to go profitably into the future. After a final Q&A, I will return to wrap up and conclude the presentations with a couple of final thoughts. For all our in-person guests that are here, we look forward to visiting the market, to see the execution in the market where it all happens.
This will be led with our local team that will take us through a couple of groups that we will discuss later. Last but not least, those of you who are staying over tonight, we will conclude with a dinner and a further opportunity to have a chat and conversation with members of our team, we are really looking forward to that. All in all, quite packed schedule. I really hope you will find it interesting and engaging. Apart from team members and partners that I already mentioned, I'm really delighted that we are joined here by a number of members of our senior management team that are here today with us.
You will meet Ivo, our Chief Supply Chain Officer, Mourad, who is our Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Vitaliy, our Digital Commerce Director, Ruchika, Head of Data, Insights and Analytics, Prodromos, Coffee Business Director, and Christina, our Head of Adults Sparkling. They will be leading our accelerator breakouts and joining us for dinner this evening. This is another opportunity to have time to understand from them, as experts, how with their areas of growth, we are driving growth. With that, I'll pause and hand over to Anastasis for his introductory remarks. Anastasis?
Thank you, Zoran. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Rome. This is an important day for all of us at Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company. It's an opportunity to share some of the fantastic progress that has been made under Zoran and his leadership team. An opportunity to give you further insights into what makes this company great. We've got a full agenda planned. In the process, I'm sure you will be as impressed as I am with our strong management team, with all that has been achieved this year. Ultimately, successful business is about delivering consistent results. It is about creating enduring customer relationships and drive repeat purchases. It is about a culture where people can be at their best every day. When all those factors come together, that business is truly resilient. At Hellenic, this is who we are.
Our record revenue, comparable EBIT and free cash flow, published at our most recent full year results back in February, really inspired me, not only because of the numbers, although those numbers were very nice indeed, but because the performance was delivered in a year of unprecedented disruption. A year in which our colleagues and our customers had to deal with the tragic consequences of the ongoing war in Ukraine. I am immensely proud of the way our talented, passionate people have adapted and embraced opportunities, ensuring that our company continues to enjoy such a strong recovery in performance. The board and I would like to thank our leadership team and our colleagues for making Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company a better business every day. Working as a team, delivering our Growth Story, making impressive progress on our journey of becoming the leading 24/7 beverage partner.
As you will hear from the team over the course of today, strides have been taken to execute against the strategy over recent years. Our advances have been underpinned by a core belief in the importance of culture, the goal being to deliver long-term, sustainable return to our shareholders. In what has been and remains a volatile environment, the board has carefully sought to position our company for continued success, preparing to anticipate and seize opportunities and overcome challenges facing the business in the years ahead. In particular, reducing the environmental impact of our business and strengthening the socioeconomic role we play in the communities in which we operate, continuing, as we do, to focus on what is right over what is easy. This ethos will help shape our long-term success.
In line with that view, we remain more committed than ever to achieving net zero emissions by 2040. We're looking forward to updating you on our progress against that and our broader sustainability goals in more detail later today. Given the macroeconomic volatility we see, the value placed on business agility and financial discipline has never been so high. In that context, the board's confidence in the durability of our business and the strength of the company's balance sheet is reflected in progressive dividend payments and the competitive payout ratio. I know the board and the management team remain very focused on continuing to drive long-term value for our shareholders and realizing the company's full potential.
Finally, before handing back to Zoran, I would like to extend a big thank you on behalf of the board to all our stakeholders, particularly to our customers, for their continued support, and to all of you for joining us. I hope you find the insights you will receive today useful to your understanding of Coca-Cola Hellenic, and that you thoroughly enjoy the day. With that, I will let Zoran kick off the main proceedings. Thank you.
Thank you, Anastasi. Four years ago, I presented a slide, not unlike this one, highlighting our strong business with a well-balanced combination of emerging, developing, and established markets, which gave us the confidence to set up the ambitious targets of Growth Story 2025. We were clear where we were on our journey. We had been through a period of restructuring, visibly improving the efficiency of the business to deliver a period of very strong recovery in profitability and operating leverage. Then in 2019, with a robust foundation in place, we said we expected faster top line growth in the future as we invested behind our portfolio and capabilities while continuing to improve margins. Over the last four years, we have achieved, I believe, a great deal.
We've grown significantly, delivering on average 3% organic volume growth and 7% average organic revenue growth, taking our revenue to over EUR 9 billion in 2022. At the same time, we delivered organic EBIT growth of 7% on average per annum, and improved our returns on invested capital. We also added Egypt at the start of 2022, expanding our footprint in Africa to capture a leadership position in this very exciting and third most populous market in Africa. We achieved all of this despite a challenging external environment marked by COVID-19 outbreak, disproportionately affecting our industry. We also navigated a period of wider supply chain disruptions and inflation, and from early 2022, tragically, a war in the Ukraine.
I'm immensely proud, of the performance of the business, what has been achieved by our passionate, talented, and resilient people despite these challenges. We've adapted our ways of working, strengthened our supply chains, and proven the depth and breadth of our capabilities. This is particularly the case for Revenue Growth Management, where we have delivered robust price and mix improvements in the face of significant commodity inflation and more recently, energy cost rises. If I would call out one of the key learnings from operating in these last couple of years, without a doubt, it would be, prioritization. We've been laser focused and clear on the decisions we are making and what we expect them to achieve.
We have honed that discipline in the organization over the last four years as we continue working on our vision of being the leading 24/7 beverage partner. NARTD is a large, growing and resilient industry, the same characteristics are present in coffee, making it an incredibly attractive opportunity for us as well. Back in 2019, we talked about operating in categories with a, with a strong, with very good growth potential, that remains true today. In terms of the industry value, we expect further strong growth in demand, both in non-alcohol ready-to-drink and coffee, Naya is going to talk about that right after me. Key to our success over the last four years and foundation of our future plans is our exceptional portfolio of brands.
Our 24/7 portfolio allows us to cater to meet the needs of consumers across all occasions throughout the day. At the heart of that portfolio are our Panhellenic priorities, sparkling, energy, and coffee. They represent close to 80% of the business today, and still with significant headroom for growth, driven by penetration and share, supported by continuous innovation, and underpinned by our strong customer relationships and unrivaled market execution. The close and strong partnership with The Coca-Cola Company is at the heart of this. With The Coca-Cola Company, we clearly loyalty, supported by strong innovation and marketing investment. With Monster, our close partnership brings a portfolio of energy brands from premium proposition Burn through Monster itself to more affordable option with Predator.
In coffee, we have a complementary dual brand strategy with The Coca-Cola Company's own Costa Coffee in mass premium and Caffè Vergnano in super premium segment. Beyond the top three priorities, we have a diverse offering of locally relevant brands, where, together with Coca-Cola Company team, we make a prioritization of country category combinations based on the attractiveness of the profitable revenue pools in each market. These include important growth enablers such as juices, ready-to-drink tea, enhanced and premium water, sport brand Powerade, as well as our premium spirits portfolio, which enhances our offering to our HoReCa customers. The consistency with which we have invested in our five growth pillars continues to underpin our success, we believe. Looking at our 24/7 portfolio, the last four years have been all about mindful choices and prioritizing the best opportunities within the business to drive growth.
What especially stood out is the strength, resilience, and potentiality of sparkling and energy categories. Our ability to win in the marketplace is down to continuous strengthening of our customer partnerships and investment behind critical value-creating capabilities. You'll hear more about that today. Fueling this growth has required investment behind digital technology and new business models, blended with our continuous focus on productivity and efficiency improvement initiatives. You will see some parts of that in our digital accelerator a bit later today. Cultivating the potential of our people has been deliberately one of our five strategic pillars, as we strongly believe that only with the strength, competence, and engagement of our people, we can achieve our vision and ambitious growth agenda. This is why we treat talent development as our lighthouse capability. I'll touch on that a bit later.
Finally, we have continued to place strong focus and tangible investments to support our sustainability commitments, of course, net zero by 2040 and others. Over the last four years, sustainability has become deeply embedded in the way we run our business every single day. This is an important part of earning our license to operate and lead. Sparkling remains fundamental to the growth of our business now and in the future. A key part of that is down to innovation, coming to us through a close partnership with The Coca-Cola Company, which enables us to keep delivering growth in our core perfect sparkling portfolio.
The introduction of new zero formulations across all sparkling brands, Coca-Cola Zero Sugar Zero Caffeine, new flavor creations within Fanta and Schweppes brands, the relaunch of Kinley, the recent launch of Jack Daniel's & Coca-Cola are great examples of how constant innovation is keeping us at the forefront of consumer choice and customer preference. The same is true in energy, as we work with Monster to help launch new flavors, variants, both within Monster and Burn, as well as the launch of the new brand, Predator. Same is valid for a number of targeted innovations across still brands. We have also invested in acquiring new bolt-on and complementary businesses to strengthen our portfolio and accelerate growth, and I want to highlight four of those.
In 2019, jointly with The Coca-Cola Company, we bought Lurisia, an Italian high-quality premium water and adult sparkling brand with a strong heritage. We have been able to drive scale-up in Italy quite well and introduce the brand to new geographies through targeted expansion. In the same year, leveraging on locally relevant and specific opportunity to that market, we added in Serbia in a targeted manner, Bambi, with its high quality and high profitable snacks portfolio. This portfolio complements very well our core beverage business across several occasions, thus creating a stronger customer leverage and impact on consumer impulse. In 2021, we acquired a stake in Caffè Vergnano, enhancing our coffee portfolio with this high quality and super premium brand. Clear strategy here is to develop complementary to Costa brand, the relevant coffee offerings across the both mass premium and super premium segments.
You'll hear more about our coffee strategy from Prodromos in one of the accelerators. In 2022, we added a super premium Three Cents to our adult sparkling portfolio, as it complements very well our existing brands with its unique product attributes and much higher price positioning. The rollout is still in the early days, but we are very pleased with how the business is developing. As well as brands, we have also enhanced our geographical footprint by acquiring Coca-Cola business in Egypt at the start of 2022. This brings us enormous growth opportunities. Egypt is a large and growing population, over 100 million people, with a low average age of just 24. Per capita GDP growth is also expected to trend upwards, and sparkling soft drink servings per capita are well below our group average.
Overall, the combination of a strong market potential with a good opportunity on market share should allow us to drive growth. We will leverage the experience and capability development, which has underpinned our success across our other emerging markets. Over the last four years, we've made some significant changes to the business. Starting with a major organizational design program we launched in 2020, which we call Dolphin, reflecting our ambition that in the design approach, we merge scale with agility, as the dolphin represents. The focus was to unlock and reallocate resources for accelerated growth by creating a future-ready organization based on prioritized big bets. All this was led with a guiding principle of creating even stronger focus on the needs of the customer.
In terms of progress to date with Dolphin, this is an ongoing program, is that we have redeployed the value of approximately 1,000 full-time equivalents into new areas for growth. This has been done in a way that's effectively self-funding and directly supporting the big bets and other investments that we made into the business. It does not stop with structures. With Project Oxygen, we are tackling simplification, optimization, and redesign of processes throughout the enterprise. Here, the focus is on creating the capacity and more time for people to collaborate efficiently on the things that matter most, which primarily starts with more focus and time on our customers. In most simple terms, this is about creating oxygen so that the Dolphin can breathe. Since we started the program, we've identified over 200 processes that we can work on to create efficiencies.
In the spirit of making sure we focus and deliver in a prioritized manner, we put in flight just over 20 for now, which on their own, have the potential to unlock more than 1 million hours of people's time, the equivalent of 500-600 full-time equivalents. A good example of this is work we've already piloted in Poland around dynamic routing. New optimization tools have reduced travel times by around a third, freeing up over 10% of business developers' time for our customer benefit, with increased and more impactful customer visits. We are now rolling this out into the new markets, and I believe this is also a great example of how we can leverage the investments that we've made into data, insights, and analytics. The result of these programs has been striking and really promising.
We've diverted significant resources into areas that drive capability, enhancements, and future growth, and we've achieved this without destabilizing our effective, efficient business. We maintain a lean, agile, stable core while reinvesting in prioritized capabilities like data, insights, analytics, coffee, digital and technology platforms, digital commerce, sustainability, and new ways of working through agile, cross-functional dynamic pods. The power of our prioritized capabilities has step changed since our last Investor Day, partly because we have continued to develop each one of them, but also because of our outsized investments behind data, insights, and analytics, which has allowed us to strengthen our capabilities and deepen the connections between them.
As a result of Dolphin, we've been able to build a world-class expertise in data, insights, analytics, and digital commerce, but also enhance our tools that allow us to deliver best-in-class revenue growth management, route to market, and customer management. Naya and the team are going to discuss that a bit later. These investments are making a real difference in our ability to execute in the market and bring us closer to our goal of achieving truly personalized execution for every single outlet. At the very heart of our business are our people. Without them, the business simply wouldn't achieve what it does. We do have great people, I strongly believe, but this is also about creating an environment and culture which cultivate the potential.
Key to success as a business, as a team, as individual, is creating a high-performing growth mindset rooted in a customer partnership culture, supported by an agile organization and effective processes. Our talent development focus reinforces continuous learning and upskilling of our people while giving them the opportunities for personal growth. The results continue to improve. As roles have changed in recent years, 86% of leaders have been appointed internally, and this is up from 70% back in 2019. Our employee engagement scores are also very high, at 85%, and now we have women in 40% of our managerial roles. Another area of continuous improvement, and we remain committed to achieving gender balance at management level. All of us as one team are passionate in creating and nurturing diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment.
Over the last year, we took time to reflect on our wider purpose and culture, leveraging invaluable learnings that we gained over the last four years. To do this, we worked with a handpicked cross-functional team, but with inclusive input from many across the organization to set out what we all see as the defining purpose of the business, to open up moments that refresh us all. We strongly believe that while our work requires sealing refreshment in, the real magic and impact happens when each drink gets opened up. Our true purpose comes from opening up possibilities with our customers, partners, and our colleagues to create value for all we serve. It's the optimistic spirit that drives us towards new markets, new relationships, new innovations, development opportunities, and new ideas for a better future.
We launched our purpose and newly defined values this March at our leadership conference in Cairo, and we are rolling it out across the business with very good feedback and engagement. It's the culture that completes the circle. It works with Project Dolphin and Project Oxygen in full interconnectivity to fuel the continuous regeneration and renewal of the business, to provide the resources and focus that allows us to move forward with growth mindset, agility, and efficiency to capture growth opportunities. We put sustainability at the core for everyday decision-making. This is an important driver of how we earn our license to operate, and how we continue to lead the market with sustainable initiatives that make a meaningful difference to our consumers. Our ambitions are high, and as you will hear from Katja, those are very stretchy in several areas.
We have a clear ambition to be net zero by 2040, and to deliver broader Mission 2025 targets, which drive many other improvements along the way. In this vein, we made significant progress on the rollout of our recycled PET, moving to 100% in Switzerland, Italy, and Austria, and investing recently EUR 50 million in new in-house recycled PET facilities in Poland, here in Italy, and in Romania. At the heart of our business is our strong partnership with The Coca-Cola Company. This partnership is the bedrock of our business. The way we collaborate, support each other, and work together in identifying and going after prioritized opportunities, is a strong source of our belief in delivering sustainable and profitable growth.
We are grateful for partnerships with all our other brand owners, like Monster, with whom we are very excited in driving consistent, strong growth in the energy category, as well as with Brown-Forman, Edrington, and few others. We continue to be grateful for our partners' trust and support as we push forward. Before I hand over to Manolo, to provide a perspective on the business, and our partnership opportunities, let me finish with a few key messages I want you to take away from today. We are continuing to grow with high expectations and targets reflecting our strong execution and attractive blend of emerging, developing, and established markets. We operate in strong, growing categories with very attractive growth dynamics, with prioritized, strong, well-invested capabilities that will drive growth across our footprint.
We do this sustainably with a clear eye on the future for our people, communities, and planet. We do it profitably, making agile and prioritized decisions that maximize returns. Of course, we will grow because of our excellent people and partners, who are critical in enabling and driving our long-term success. With that, let me now hand over to Manolo.
Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Morning, everyone. Thank you Zoran, Naya, Anastasios. A privilege to be here today with all of you to share the transformation that we've undertaken of the marketing function at Coca-Cola. First and foremost, forward-looking statements, I'm not going to go through them. I can't read it without glasses, so, you have them in front of you. Let me start by saying that we are delivering in the middle of an incredibly, rapidly, and accelerating, actually, environment for multiple reasons. The demographic dynamics around the world are getting more and more complex and faster. We see significant aging of population in multiple parts of the world.
At the same time, the prior dynamics to the pandemic around middle-class emergence and urbanization continue to be a big driving force for our industry. The digital disruption has changed dramatically how consumers consume media, actually. We come from a prior model in which we were disrupting consumers through TV advertising, but TV is not any longer. No one is watching TV. I don't know you. I got four teenagers at home. We've lived in four different countries. I've never seen them watch a single minute, one single minute, none of the four, of traditional TV. When you really look into the numbers, around the world, Gen Z today, and you add all the different types of screens that they use, not only the cell phones, but all the different screens, it's anywhere between nine-13 hours per day, which is even a scary number.
That's the number, nine-13 hours per day. That has reshaped dramatically how consumers, and particularly the younger generation, relates and connects with brands. That required for us, that we really need to reshape completely a model that was constructed, or what I call a marketing factory, that was traditional TV first, and moving into digital first ecosystem. Third, as the world is very dynamic, the boundaries between content, creativity, media stop to exist. They're interconnected. It's about bringing those two, underpinned by technology and data, to really amplify the effectiveness of our marketing investments. Our transformation is rooted in growth. We are obviously a marketing-driven company, and therefore, the role of marketing is to become and to be the major driver of the growth algorithm for The Coca-Cola Company.
In the last few years, we've taken very significant action and decisions that are clearly yielding results. The first one, we've reshaped our portfolio. We come from a place where we have such a fragmented portfolio with more than 500 brands, where a lot of them we didn't really need. Those, some of those brands were eating away some of the margins and some of the resources across the system, not only on our side, but obviously in our bottling partners. We scaled that down to what we call a very powerful growth portfolio. Still very large, because obviously our size and scale is, is just phenomenal. It's around 200 brands, slightly less than 200 brands around the world.
Today, we have 26, $1 billion or more brands around the world. There's a good combination between global, regional, and local brands. We've significantly reshaped our innovation efforts. Since 2019, our innovation has been accounting for around a quarter of the incremental growth every year. We can see that. We have a line of sight of the pipeline coming over the next few years. That being the case moving forward, that happens across all the different categories in which we play and across geographies. We've been focusing a lot in driving a much more effective marketing. Effective means top-line and bottom-line-driven marketing. We make sure that every dollar that we invest in marketing generates and drives not only gross profit, but at the right margin levels.
We've got an average of around 9% on a GP per case basis. We come from a model where we were managing, in 2019, more than 6,000 agencies around the world. You can imagine the efforts to try to connect 6,000 external agencies in a world where we need one single data and technology backbone. We move into a new agency ecosystem under a partnership, a holistic partnership, around the world for all the categories under WPP. WPP is the largest communication group in the world, and they have more than 200 agencies. We're in the process of finalizing the deployment, a whole ecosystem internally of technology and data that connects on real time, all our marketing efforts around the world.
We're coming across, we see that also for this year, at the top end of our algorithm, of our growth algorithm from our revenue growth. Now, this marketing transformation is driven by metrics, because metrics matter. Marketing is not just about storytelling, it's about driving growth. We were, for decades, for a couple of decades, having one metric, which is great, and a lot of other FMCGs have it, which is called brand love. Brand love is based on perception, you know, like I know, that sometimes there's a significant gap between what consumers say or perceive and what they actually do with their pocket, which is what matters at the end of the day. Our whole transformation is trying to bridge that gap. We've moved from brand love into consumer base.
The consumer base measure an actual, real behavior, and that's at the essence, and that's the central pillar of all of our transformation. If it doesn't drive profitable growth, we're not going to do it. In the past, and this is what you see on the left of the chart, it's a real example from Italy with Hellenic. From the total addressable market in Italy, in the prior model, we would invest our marketing, targeting our total population. Why? Because traditional TV wouldn't allow you to target specific segments or specific tribes. It was a bit of a model of a spray and pray, we call it. You can imagine, sometimes when you spray and pray, if you're lucky, one of the drops goes on the right seed, and you get a plant.
There's a good probability that at least 50, if not 60, if not 80% of the drops fall in a place for someone from which our category or the beverage offering that we are offering to, and to get them to consume, is completely irrelevant, and that is what drives inefficiencies in marketing. The shift, you see it on the right, and it's a real shift. We are segmenting our consumer base. In this case of Italy, we know that today, from the total population, addressable in Italy. Addressable means, for us, it's 13+ , 'cause we don't market below 13. From the 13 + of age, in Italy, we have total portfolio. This is not only brand Coca-Cola, it's around 25% of the population that consumes our products regularly. We have identified three other groups.
As you can see in the middle, there's a very large group that they consume our products, but with a lower frequency. They're part of the base, but they're extremely occasional, maybe couple of x per year, two, three, four x a year. From those, we have clear digital signs declared by them based on behavior, actual behavior, not perception. Some of them are what we call positive intenders. They're today drinking the category, and they love or like Coca-Cola, and/or they have no issues related to the consumption of any of our given categories. That number in Italy is 30% of the total addressable. It's actually larger than the consumer base that we have. There's another group called neutrals. They can also be converted because they don't have fundamental barriers to become positive intenders.
There's on the right, a group that they declare themselves rejecters. They reject either the category and/or the brand. That's a real number in Italy today, only 10%. Through digital media, you can now target very accurately these different segments. What are we going to say to convert them from less frequent into a more regular part of our consumer base? Those positive intenders, some of them react very well to communication connected to consumption occasions. You're going to see examples later on of what we do with Coca-Cola and meals. Some others don't react to that, but they love football or music. They're driven more by a passion point. Others are driven by an innovation.
There's a segment which is not as small, but it's also not as big as many of us think, that they are really reacting to ESG commitments, and we can target and measure that very specifically. We're deploying a combination, and this is where the magic of data technology and the scale of Coca-Cola as a system, but the ability to bring this at the granular level and make it locally relevant, 'cause cultures and countries are different. There'll be a combination of any of those four buckets that you see to maximize one metric that we don't compromise, we don't negotiate, which is growth. Growth measured by our consumer base. Now, the marketing transformation of Coca-Cola goes first to digital. We're moving our media massively and quickly into digital-first ecosystem.
Those photos that you see are real examples of photos today or activations in the Coca-Cola Hellenic territory. In digital, we include influencers. We come in a world where brand marketing companies were very scared of releasing the power and the control of what we say about our brands to influencers, that unless they do it in their own words, with authenticity, they're not going to have the credibility with the audience. We have today, in The Coca-Cola Company, around the world, more than 10,000 influencers at any given point of time, with different segments, with different passion points, different topics that really connect with the, ultimately with the consumer, and that's also absolutely the case in the Hellenic territories. This transformation is not only from a traditional TV model into a digital-first model.
Half of our marketing happens at the point of sale, I think Hellenic is one of the most impressive partners for The Coca-Cola Company when it comes to bringing this to life through what we call retail experiences. That connection with the consumer will also happen in each of the different channels, where we're going to be recruiting and bringing those new consumers into the consumer base. That's a real example, for example, of an activation of Radwan in Egypt. There's also a world, in a world where you're not having any more the ability to connect through traditional TV, what we call live experiences, the third type of experience that we are going to be leveraging to build our brands. That's the world of street marketing. It's the world of events, music concerts, sports events.
Around all of that, it's how we're going to bring the consumers to really experience and enjoy our phenomenal portfolio. In just three years, we've moved 20 points of our media mix, which, as you know, it's in the billions of dollars around the world every year, from traditional TV to digital. Very close last year. In 2022, we hit that number, 50% and growing. We got already quite a few territories around the world, well above the 50%, and we're starting to see the fruits and the results of that higher level of effectiveness of our marketing. Let me give you an example. Kantar has just awarded us last week to Sprite. I'm not going to use the classical example of Coca-Cola because the scale of Coca-Cola. Sprite that a lot of people, you know, forget what or how big it is.
It's a $20 billion in retail sales value globally. Got last year, with this new approach, the highest amount of growth in households around the world of any FMCG. You can name it in beverages, in food, in household products. Number one, by far, Sprite. This transformation was at the essence of why that has happened. We're moving through leveraging experimentation. In the past, in marketing, we used to have a lot of research methodologies that would try to understand what we have just done, try to understand what works, what doesn't work, based on recent activity, past activity. We're moving to a model where 80% of the focus will be in the future. That comes through A/B testing. This is an approach that was not that natural for FMCGs.
It was much more natural for technology companies. What that means is that through A/B testing in social media, connected to a partnership with retailers, whether it's in a hypermarket, a convenience store, we can measure multiple messages and content and ways of connecting with the consumer with actual transactions at the point of sale, and with actual conversion of those intenders into actual consumer base or not, or lack of conversion. Allow us, it is allowing us to really understand how we can drive the maximum level of growth most effectively. We're talking in the dozens and dozens of experiments of that size and scale per quarter around the world, leveraging the scale of our network around the world. I'm going to give you just an example of how all of these can come together. It's coming together, actually.
It's a real example. This is what we call the intersection between experiences, passion points, and consumption occasions. Some humans need to understand rationally why I should drink a Coca-Cola. Give me when, where, and why I should drink this. Others don't care about that. They're moved by emotions. For example, music, we know, is the number one passion point that has a transformative power in the heart of people.
If you bridge and you think about Oktoberfest, but in the 21st century, with digital at the core, an intersection of a massive food festival and music festival all together, where you bring not hundreds, but thousands and thousands of consumers, the retailers across the whole city, tourism coming from other cities because of what's going on in this festival, engaging stakeholders, including authorities, around our ESG and recycling activities in one big celebration with data and first-party data at the heart of it. This is what we're talking about. We started in Hanoi. We moved to Kolkata. 300,000 people over a weekend. 400,000 people over a weekend.
We were in Cairo together, 40,000 people in Cairo, in a massive celebration, and another 40,000 ready to enter and pay, by the way, you can charge them as well, to join this special experience between Coca-Cola, food, and music. Video in, please.
That is just an example, driving a incredible amount of growth we've seen a before and an after, not only among the area, but across the whole city, cascading then into the rest of the country in terms of growth. Our transformation is really rooted on growth first. We're driving growth because we have a phenomenal opportunity to increase our consumer base. We think we know exactly what is going to trigger that conversion into consumption. Our model is driven by data and technology at the heart, with actual facts and insights that allow us to segment appropriately the consumer base, and this comes to life with a phenomenal partnership that we have with Hellenic. I've been around for 27 years, and I don't say this, people know me, I don't pay lip service.
This is a real pleasure because the complementarity of the skills and capabilities that we have between The Coca-Cola Company and Coca-Cola HBC segmentation, RGM, in-outlet execution, is just mind-blowing. We actually, as a company, learn a lot from them. Our marketing comes as an intersection between what we do at The Coca-Cola Company and what they're capable to execute in millions of outlets every single day. Thank you.
Thank you, Manolo. Good morning, everyone. Waiting a little bit for this to work. I'm Naya. I'm with Hellenic 26 years. Assumed this role in 2020. I met with some of you in 2019 in London, when we presented our Growth Story, and it's a great pleasure to be with you today. Let me share with you more about the first two growth pillars, our 24/7 Sparkling -Led portfolio, and how we're winning in the marketplace. As you've heard from Zoran, we're lucky to operate in a really attractive industry with significant growth opportunities. The NARTD category overall is large. We estimate the whole of NARTD was worth about EUR 68 billion in value in 2022 across our markets. It has been growing, and we expect it to continue at 4%-6% over the medium term.
I will talk to you later about how our growth drivers within our segments are working. For now, I will stick to categories across the group. Growth in NARTD is being led by Sparkling, where we, together with our partners from The Coca-Cola Company, continue to see the largest opportunities across all our markets. Energy has been a great driver of growth. We expect this to carry on, driven by Monster fantastic business. Outside of NARTD, as you know, we are very excited about the opportunity in coffee. In all cases, we want to continue to go ahead of the market and take share. We are proud to have a truly 24/7 Sparkling -Led portfolio that caters for all consumer occasions. We are prioritizing categories with the highest potential. These are Sparkling, Energy, and Coffee.
In sparkling, we see very good growth opportunities, driven by ongoing demand of low, no sugar products, by relevant consumer-centric campaigns across all brands, as Manolo mentioned, as well as further innovation opportunities, and also tremendous potential in adult sparkling. The energy category has grown very strongly, and here we see further growth coming from innovation, growing per capita consumption, and further distribution expansion. Our opportunity in coffee is huge. The addressable market is significant, and we're investing ahead of the curve to build our right to win to really capture this potential. These are the three categories where we see the largest opportunities, and we are making active choices to prioritize them across our markets.
The benefit of a 24/7 sparkling-based portfolio means that in some categories, we play in a targeted, locally relevant way, depending on the market opportunities, with a clear view for creating value for us and for our customers. This is the case for us in hydration, in juices, in ready-to-drink tea, in premium spirits, and in snacks. We couldn't mention sparkling, premium spirits, and innovation without saying how excited we are about the launch of Jack Daniel's and Coca-Cola. We launched in Ireland, Poland, and Hungary last month, and the initial feedback has been amazing. Now, this strategy of prioritization is working. We are winning in our prioritized categories, and we are gaining share. In sparkling, we've gained 230 basis points since 2019, and are the clear number one in 23 out of our 24 measured markets.
In energy, we've gained 370 basis points since 2019, and in coffee, we are growing rapidly in a sizable market. We are the leader in the fast-growing energy industry, where we've gained 270 basis points of market share since 2019. We are well-positioned to continue gaining share, driven by our advantage, portfolio momentum, and capability-led share gains. Let's dive into our prioritized categories in a bit more detail and give you some confidence on future growth. Sparkling is our foundation. It is so today, and it will be so in the future. Sparkling is a growing category in all our markets. We have consistently been growing volumes and revenues and see clear drivers for this to continue.
You saw from Zoran, the investment and innovation we are driving behind our core brands, be it zero sugar formulations, new flavors, Coke Zero Sugar Zero Caffeine, the recent launch, Jack Daniel's & Coca-Cola, or the relaunched Kinley. Our strong partnership with the company is critical here in identifying the exact innovations that work in the exact market or channel. We also continue to activate our drinking moment strategy to ensure we bring the right proposition for each occasion for our consumers, led by meals, snacking, and socializing. Our core Coke and meals association, which resonates with consumers, adds value to our customers and is the primary profit driver for trademark Coke. Coke and meals has had dedicated activation plans across our markets, leveraging our in-market execution capabilities, and you will be seeing more in the market visit.
I want to call out two specific parts of sparkling that we expect to continue to drive outsized growth. Firstly, low, no sugar sparkling variants. These have grown volumes 22% on average since 2019, and they now represent 26% of our sparkling portfolio. Coke Zero has played a leading role in this, driven by a successful reformulation and targeted campaigns. Contribution varies across our markets, with Ireland at 47%, but emerging markets still underpenetrated. There is more to come from Zeros, with Coke Zero Sugar Zero Caffeine being launched and accelerated. We're increasing the number of flavors with a zero option, as well as Coke Creations, which Zoran mentioned. There is further opportunity to expand our distribution and increase presence in emerging markets. Adult sparkling is a very important business for us.
Volume growth has been stronger than total sparkling, and its revenue per case is accretive. All the work we're doing on mixability, which you hopefully got to experience last night, is critical here, and I'm very excited for Christina to get into more detail on our segmented offering in the adult overall sparkling accelerator breakout later. Energy. Energy is one of the fastest-growing categories in non-alcoholic ready-to-drink. We've driven double-digit volume growth over the past seven years, averaging 32% in the last four years alone. This category now makes up 6% of our group revenue. This performance is a result of a well-defined strategy. We offer a complete brand portfolio to address various consumer needs with mainstream Monster, Premium Burn, and Predator and Fury in the affordable segment.
We are using disruptive marketing platforms and offer a range of flavors to give consumers choice and entice newcomers into the category. As you can see on the slide, we're aiming for double-digit contribution to group revenue from energy in the medium term. We are very excited about the potential of this category, and we see three clear drivers. Number one, continuous expansion in per capita consumption in our markets. Number two, further distribution expansion within the markets. Number three, broadening our reach to new markets. You know, we added Fury into Egypt early this year. That is off to a good start, and on Monday, we also launched Monster there. Coffee represents a tremendous expansion opportunity with a EUR 10 billion distributor value, and it is accretive to our core business, with 2 x revenue per case versus core sparkling.
Here, the value is the distributor value. On the earlier slide, you saw the total industry value. We are continuing our journey to scale and invest into this business. We have a segmented portfolio approach that allows us to reach multiple price tiers, from mass premium to super premium, thanks to our Costa Coffee and Vergnano brands. We have steadily expanded our out-of-home distribution of Costa Coffee, doubling the number of outlets covered versus 2021, while at the same time, we have brought our distribution of Caffè Vergnano into 17 different markets. Our aim is to reach, in the midterm, a low- to mid-single-digit market share, and you will hear more from Prodromos later. In 2019, at the Investor Day in London, we shared our execution capabilities that were critical in driving our growth.
I'm so excited to show you the progress we have made since then, which has allowed us to make a step change in our ability to win in the marketplace. Our capabilities are critical for us to better understand the real and changing needs of our customers and consumers, drive profitable revenue growth, and anticipate or react to new challenges faster and smarter than our competition. Put simply, by accelerating our core capabilities, we drive our growth algorithm. If there is one takeaway I want you to keep when it comes to our capabilities, this is that we're targeting to drive personalized execution for every outlet, and it is the interconnection of our capabilities in data, insights, analytics, revenue growth management, and route to market that is allowing us to personalize execution.
The intention with this slide is not to get into the detail of the wheel, but just to see the vast sources of data we're using to drive our business. Data and analytics is one of our prioritized growth capabilities. Ruchika and her team have been driving and scaling this for the last three years, and we see this as a competitive advantage to accelerate value delivery to all our customers, and it is an essential driver of our customer-centric focus. Everything we do in this space, primarily through prioritized use cases, is done with the customer in mind and to strengthen our revenue growth management and route to market, and we have four prioritized use cases. Our foundational use case of segmented execution, this is where we identify the right outlets, perform the right activities, allocate the right resources, and offer the right assortment.
Promotion spend effectiveness is the second one, where we enable algorithms to ensure every euro of investment gives the best returns to customers and us. The demand forecasting, where we predict demand at the most granular level, both short and longer term, to be able to keep high fulfillment levels and service to our customers. The last but not least, improving retention of our business developers to give us valuable insights, how to reduce churn and have better consistency, longer tenure with better performance. You may already understand RGM well, but allow me to take a little time to really flesh out how it has developed and how it drives value, regardless of the macroeconomic environment.
As we shared, with some of you before, in 2016, we developed a new RGM framework jointly with The Coca-Cola Company, and over the following two years, it was rolled out across all our markets. We took on board the learnings, refined the capability, and invested in tools, structures, and people. It was our RGM capability that allowed us to navigate COVID and drive revenue recovery in 2021, and it was what allowed us to navigate the significant inflation in 2022. RGM allows us to improve revenue per case across our portfolio while addressing both affordability and premiumization, focusing always on three priorities, pricing, mix, and promo optimization. Let me first state pricing. Our pricing decisions are data-driven, proactive, and agile.
Based on our profound understanding of demand elasticities and the broader competitive environment, we can make changes to a particular pack within a category in a specific channel. It is due to the strength of this capability that we have ensured that all pricing has been executed according to the plan, and while gaining share and driving value for our customers. Equally important is the mix. I have already shown in earlier slides the ways in which we're making active choices in our portfolio to drive positive category mix. Our continuous focus on sparkling, with emphasis on adult sparkling, energy and coffee, is showing tangible results. Our channel mix strategy, focused on HoReCa acceleration, is contributing to drive healthy growth together with deliberate actions to drive package mix. This has led to an improvement of 4.4 percentage point in a single-serve mix since 2019.
We have seen the quality within this mix improve. For example, can packages grew 22% in 2022, and our 250 ml premium glass pack grew by 24%. We have also focused on the growth of multi-pack single serves, which has significantly grown its importance post-COVID, as part of the premiumization strategy for the at-home channel. Pack mix is one of the key levers to drive both premiumization as well as smart affordability, while still enhancing revenue per case. When we talk about affordability, we do not mean only large two liter bottles. Rather, we mean using smaller entry packs at attractive price points to meet consumer spending needs while still driving up revenue per case.
Examples of that are the 850 ml pack we have in Poland and the 660 ml pack we have here in Italy, which we tailored precisely to their specific market dynamics. In Africa, we're using returnable glass packages to make the product accessible for a large segment of the population. Finally, and in coordination with our data insights and analytics, we continue to improve the effectiveness of our promotions. Our enhanced focus on promotional return on investment, enabled by analytics, gives us more opportunities to profitably gain revenue. We have a vast route to market. We have 50,000 business developers across our countries that service 2 million customers every day, and we have 1.4 million coolers. This results in multiple route-to-market models with different salesforce roles, different last-mile models, and different execution strategies.
We have an appropriate 24/7 dynamic sales and distribution model and maximize profitable growth through data-driven execution excellence. We are constantly upgrading our physical route-to-market fundamentals to adapt to the digital transformation. We are incorporating data and analytics as well to make it even more efficient. Let me give you some examples of how we're doing this. Starting with coolers, we continue to invest in new coolers as they help to drive single-serve mix and revenue growth. We have focused on using data to increase our profitable cooler coverage. In 2022, we reached 90% coverage of our top customer outlets. We have been increasing the number of coolers with online connections, which improves their efficiency. 49% are now energy efficient or eco-friendly. When it comes to tools, I will call out three things.
We now have image recognition in 24 countries to help us understand, in a precise and efficient way, our quality of execution at the point of sale and drive the needed corrective actions. We are enhancing our physical coverage by using dynamic routing tools. We are supporting our indirect distribution partners by connecting them through a CCH integration tool. Finally, we are expanding our digital coverage enabled by our eB2B platforms. This evolution gives us both digital and physical coverage. We have invested in our digital commerce team over the last few years, both at the group and country level, bringing in outside experts to create a new team comprised of diverse talents, championing agile collaboration across CCH. Our digital commerce strategy is focused on both route to consumer and route to customer.
Within our route to customer, we have been developing and investing in a suite of digital B2B platforms and solutions. Vitaliy will get into more detail on this later. We'll be able to show you demos of the actual platforms. E-retail and FSA is a fast-growing channel for us. We have almost tripled our e-retail and FSA business over the last two years. Very importantly, these channels are margin accretive and have higher single serve and no sugar mix than the rest of the business. The diversity of our markets means that we have markets like Ireland, with highest incidence of FSA across all Coca-Cola countries in the world, right through to our emerging markets, where the channel still has ever larger room for growth. This takes me nicely to customer partnership.
NARTD is an attractive category, not just for us, but it's also an important driver of growth for our customers. In 2022, we were the number one driver of incremental value delivered to customers among all FMCG players in Central and Eastern Europe, delivering more than twice the incremental revenue to our customers than the next manufacturer. We are committed to put the customer at the center of everything we do, and creating value jointly with our customers is at the heart of our successful partnerships. To maintain our competitive advantage, we need to ensure that we listen and respond to each and every customer and can course-correct almost real time.
To this purpose, a few years ago, we embraced a new tool, CustomerGauge, as a way to connect with customers, to listen real-time, with the commitment that we close the loop, we close all their complaints and issues with 48 hours deadline. We have this live in all our markets, each country can see actually real-time customer feedback and what their net promoter score is, which ultimately links to customer loyalty and business growth. To give you a sense of the reach of the program, over the last 12 months, we have passed a massive 740,000 customers, over 50% of our active customer base, and this gives us a chance to be even more customer-centric.
Our people are an essential driver of our growth algorithm, and we continue to accelerate investing in development across our suite of learning academies that span our key functions and categories. As Zoran mentioned, our flagship academy is our sales academy. Among several, our sales academy starts with the customer in mind. Before our business developers first meet a customer on their own, they pass our training to ensure they have the right knowledge to serve our customers and resolve any issues from day one. Last year alone, we completed 180,000 hours of learning and capability building. If we break down this number, 180,000 hours, that's 20 years of learning in just one year. We keep developing our people, ensuring that the combination of tools and critical upskilling drives more and better customer interactions than ever before.
Let's take a look at a short video. To summarize in a phrase, we are well positioned to continue growing ahead of the market, driven by our advantage, portfolio, momentum, and capability-led share gains. Thank you very much for listening, I'm excited now to introduce our four accelerator breakout sessions. These sessions will give you more detail on how we're stepping up in four specific areas, we are excited about those for our next leg of growth. We want to show you 2 + 2, so two of our prioritized categories that we have been investing, coffee and adult sparkling, and two of the critical capabilities, again, where we're investing, data insights, analytics, and digital. Thank you very much.
Welcome to our breakout sessions or growth accelerators. First, we're going to cross from the plenary to coffee, and we're going to meet our Coffee Business Director, Prodromos Nikoslaidis.
Good morning, welcome to all of you. I'm Prodromos Nikolaidis, coffee business director for Coca-Cola HBC. I'm here together with Cezara, our coffee expert from RomaNaya, and Stathis, our coffee expert from Greece. We're very excited to talk to you about coffee and to treat you to some of our coffees later after my short presentation. There are three topics I wanted to cover today in a short presentation. It is, why are we into coffee? What are the ingredients of our coffee strategy? Why do we think that end-to-end capability development gives us the right to win? Let's start with the first question. Coffee category is worth EUR 32 billion in terms of consumer spending. This is equivalent to approximately EUR 10 billion in distributor prices.
Coffee is one of the biggest alcohol-free categories, and it is a category that co- grows continuously. It is very important to our customers, both in terms of revenue and profitability, and it has great relevance and appeal across all our markets and all our consumers. Last but not least, coffee accounts for approximately 65% of consumer spending in at work. From a strategic perspective, we want to grow away from home more than its fair share in the category overall. The reason for that is because we have a route to market advantage and because the away from home coffee market is a lot more fragmented. We see a lot more benefits in coffee than simply the revenue and profit we will get out of it. We see that it strengthens our partnership with our HoReCa customers.
It allows us to build capabilities in direct-to-consumer business away from home, of course, it enables increased penetration for our total portfolio in the at-work space. Overall, we believe that we can get to a low- to middle single-digit share in the 10 billion category, which makes coffee a significant accelerator for Coca-Cola Hellenic growth in the coming years. Let us move now to the next question, the ingredients of our strategy. Let's start with the brands. We have Costa Coffee, as you can see, Costa Coffee we position as mass premium, Caffè Vergnano, which we position as premium and super premium. Of course, coffee is a lot more complicated and diverse than price positioning. This is why also the solutions we offer and the taste profile of the two brands are reflecting a complementary proposition.
With Costa Coffee, we are present equally at home and away from home. In away from home, we are equally present in HoReCa, which is served environment, as well as self-serve environment, like petrol chains and at work and education, et cetera. With Caffè Vergnano, we are focusing right now on premium HoReCa development. As the brand grows and becomes more known, we will expand the activation of the Vergnano brand also in other channels and occasions. Let's now watch a video, which will show you how the two brands complement each other, why the coffee category is so rich, and what are the tools we're using for targeted, segmented execution. You have seen in this short video how the two brands complement each other and how we are well-equipped through our segmented execution tools to target the right customers for each brand.
Let's now move to the next topic, which is let's understand a bit more about the character of each brand. Costa Coffee is targeted towards younger, more modern customers and locations, and it is our priority brand towards on-the-go and self-serve occasions like the ones I mentioned, at work, petrol channel, education, et cetera. Whereas Caffè Vergnano is targeted towards more premium HoReCa locations, where the customers are looking for an authentic Italian espresso experience. Let's move now into capability development. We know very well that we compete in a category where there are a lot of established and very competent players, and for us to win in this category, it has to be end-to-end capability development. This has been our top priority and remains as such. This is why we recruit experts like Cezara and Stathis. This is why we set up training centers in all our markets.
This is why we have developed our Coffee Academy program, which is training all of us who touch coffee, both theoretically and practically, according to our job description. This is why we train our customers and their baristi to share the perfect experience with their consumers. This is why we're investing in telemetry and data and analytics so that we build a sustainable competitive advantage. It is only very confident, well-equipped people that can sell a premium coffee without relying on a price discount. Now, telemetry is a passion point for me, and I would like to share a bit more about it. We have installed in almost all of our machines, a telemetry device, which is transmitting data on a real-time basis.
Through these devices, we receive data on volume of coffee, on transactions, on quality of beverages we serve, as well as other technical data which help us with preventive maintenance and with optimized routing. These data are not only available to us, but they are also available to our customers through a mobile app. It is an innovative journey. I believe we are probably the coffee distributor with the biggest fleet of connected machines right now. We continue to train more and more customers in how to use this data. Closing, I would like to reiterate our confidence in our ability to become a significant player in coffee and to make coffee an important accelerator for the growth of Coca-Cola Hellenic. Thank you. Ready to take your orders and ready to take your questions.
Thank you for the presentation. First one for me is, can you just confirm how many of your markets you're now in with coffee, and how far through your sort of development rollout journey are you in each of those markets?
Yes. Thank you for the question. Actually, we started with Costa Coffee in April 2020. Gradually, we have launched 19 markets, and we started with Caffè Vergnano last year, January 2022, and we are present in 14 markets as we speak. Different stage of development per country, but always aiming towards the same direction.
Really interesting. Thank you. As you think about the medium-term market share target that you've set out today, is that based on your current brand and geographic presence, or do you need to expand into different brands or regions in order to meet that ambition?
We believe that the two brands we have today give us a lot of space for growth. The target I shared is reflecting our current portfolio.
Another one for me, please. Can you just explain how in the HoReCa channel you displace an incumbent? What is it that you do with customers to try to make them take your product when they're already being served by another supplier?
Yes, this is an excellent question. Actually, what it takes to switch a customer from another brand to one of our brands is to build their confidence in our ability to provide the service they expect. It is important for the customers to understand that we are ready to train them and support them, so they have uninterrupted supply and uninterrupted business, because the moment the machine breaks down, they run out of business. Effectively, we need to create this level of confidence to them that the way we are set up, the way our people are trained, there is no reason for them to be worried. We know that from a taste perspective, we are winning.
Both Costa and Caffè Vergnano score very high in our customers' preference, and over time, by recruiting more and more customers, we also provide the confidence to them that we are well established to serve their needs.
For both brands, how do you think about where you go to market for each, and what sort of customers and opportunities you target for each?
Of course. Costa is a brand that comes from UK, from London. London is a scene where a lot of coffee innovation is happening. Costa is a brand which is more higher on Arabica content, lighter roast, and it appeals as such to younger audiences and more modern tastes for coffee. Caffè Vergnano is a traditional Italian roast. It is darker, it has more of a blend between Arabica and Robusta, and it appeals to customers and consumers who have an affinity for Italian espresso definition.
Yes, I started in coffee industry almost 20 years before, what I was doing in parallel with my studies as a civil engineer. When I graduated, I was in front of a dilemma to do what I studied or to do what I love. I am 4 x Greece Brewers Cup champion and 2 x number three in the world. Since last July, I am part of CCH, a proud member of CCH, and a part of the 14 coffee experts that we have within the company.
I work in the coffee industry for the past 14 years, and I'm in the Coca-Cola family for the past six years. I'm the first female in RomaNaya who won the Barista Championship in 2015. I will be representing RomaNaya at the World Championships in June in Athens. It will be an extremely huge opportunity for the company because we are going to be present for the first time with the company name in one of the, if not the biggest, World Championships in this category.
Well, I hope you enjoyed that, and all this talk about coffee probably means you would actually like one. We're going to give you a short break, and then we're going to come back with our other breakout sessions or growth accelerators. We've got Adult Sparkling, we've got Data Insights and Analytics, and we've got Digital. We'll see you in 10 minutes. Welcome back. Here we are at our Adult Sparkling breakout session.
Hello, good morning, and welcome to Adult Sparkling Accelerator. My name is Kristina Djordjevic, and I'm the Head of Adult Sparkling in Hellenic Group Commercial. It's my privilege to be today here with you and to share what we have done on Adults as one of our key strategic system big bets, but as well, great passion point and something that we are all very proud of, since many of the successful cases that we have done have already become a global best practices from our territories. In order to do so, we have prepared a video that can walk you through Adults portfolio, consumer and pricing segmentation, but as well, that can be very informative for you and provide a greater context of something that we will discuss later on.
Adults acceleration is one of our system bet for already several years by now. Let us explore together why adult sparkling soft drinks are primed to go after significant revenue pools by addressing an even wider range of consumer preferences, complementing well-established brands with the new ones. As well, how to further address premiumization opportunities led by HoReCa while replicating mixology experiences for at home.
Hi, I'm Javier, and I lead marketing in Europe for The Coca-Cola Company. Our opportunity to accelerate adult sparkling beverages is immense, and it all starts with a relevant consumer trend, aging population. In the territories where Coca-Cola Hellenic operates, we have 60% of the population above 25 years old. There is a huge space to grow our portfolio competitiveness to capture incremental share. Today, we have around 50% value share in the bitter mixer segment and only 33% value share overall in the European markets. Third, we also have a premiumization opportunity by accelerating the HoReCa channel, by further driving our mix to our glass and single serve, and by developing a super premium segment. Therefore, to achieve our vision, we must accelerate our growth in the upcoming years.
We start from a good place with the right system portfolio to address booming, socializing trends and occasions. Coca-Cola trademark plays an important role, both as a straight and mixing consumption. In fact, Coca-Cola Original Taste is the most widely used mixer with whiskey. While Zeros and Lites address low sugar preferences of adults and now complemented with Coca-Cola Zero Sugar Zero Caffeine. The most recent introduction of Jack Daniel's & Coca-Cola is a bold move to offer convenience and mixability through a low alcohol, ready-to-drink cocktail that's going to be highly attractive for the retail.
Hi, I'm Jasmin. I'm Global Category President for Sparkling Flavors. The adult sparkling soft drinks opportunity is massive. With a wide variety of adult consumers drinking for an equally wide variety of reasons, there is a need for a portfolio of brand solutions. By understanding these consumer segments, we are better positioned to provide the right brand and package in the right channel at the right moment. The first group of adult sparkling consumers are the self-indulgers, who we will win over with Kinley. Self-indulgers are young adults who seek activities that bring them joy, who look for ways to reward themselves after long days of work. Kinley will target them with early evening self-love opportunities. Next, we have the socializers, who we are targeting with Schweppes. Socializers are social explorers.
They enjoy attending social gatherings, intimate get-togethers with their nearest and dearest, or more adventurous communal minglings at the bar. Embracing these social environments allows them to loosen up and find fun any evening of the week. Moving up a notch, we find the consumer segment of the status signalers. Status signalers never settle for less, always strive for more, and show an appreciation for top-quality experiences as a way to stand out. For these demanding consumers, we have our super premium brands, Three Cents and Lurisia. Status signalers show up confident and assured. They enjoy embodying status and letting others know it. Nothing better than Three Cents. Lurisia will please status signalers in search of top quality because it differs from other brands with its artisanal craftsmanship. With sophisticated Italian flavors, Lurisia targets a slightly older group of consumers, 30+, who are willing to pay more.
Hi, I'm Kristina, I'm the Head of Adult Sparkling in CCH Group Commercial. Building upon differentiated consumer preferences and consumer tribes, our brands are addressing different price tiers, like super premium, and mainstream, but as well, different segments of consumption, like soda, flavors, alcohol replacers, and tonics. Schweppes is the iconic brand for socializing. With its unique heritage and signature fizz, the brand is widely consumed and has a strong equity across our markets. Portfolio-wise, it plays across four segments, price positioned as premium, with Index 120 versus Coke trademark. Today, we have Schweppes present in Egypt, Nigeria, Ireland, RomaNaya, Greece and Cyprus, Adria, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, North MacedoNaya, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, ArmeNaya, and Baltics. Among those countries, we are proud to share Schweppes' strong cases, like Egypt being the number one country for Schweppes globally.
Several countries with value market share above 90%, like RomaNaya, Serbia, BosNaya, and North MacedoNaya, while Adria and Greece are widely recognized as European Schweppes best practices for HoReCa. Kinley is our mainstream challenger, currently playing in two segments with an intention to expand in four. Among our territories currently present in Italy, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, Czech, and Slovak. Three Cents is a brand made by bartenders for bartenders, with a portfolio of tonics and crafted sodas, both aimed for mixing of the most exquisite cocktails in the high-end bars. Three Cents do play in the super premium price segment, and as such, does not overlap with Schweppes and Kinley, given its 2.5 to 3 x higher price per bottle, but as well, its pack mix, since the whole Three Cents portfolio goes behind 200 ml NRGB in HoReCa.
Lurisia is a distinctive Italian brand of water and crafted sodas, mainly for straight consumption and much higher price positioning per unit case. The whole Lurisia portfolio goes behind glass, with a selected coverage across Italy, Switzerland, RomaNaya, and Greece.
With a combined understanding of our different consumer groups and their key reasons for drinking, along with knowledge of differentiated pricing, we can execute our full adult sparkling soft drinks portfolio in a meaningful way. What does this mean? As an example, in Greece, where we have both Schweppes and Three Cents, the Schweppes socializer goes to a premium bar because he wants to have a gin and tonic with his friends. The status signaler is drinking Three Cents at an exclusive bar with his friends because he's seeking an upscale drinking experience and finding it with a recommendation from the bartender. In Italy, where we both have Kinley and Lurisia, the self-indulger orders a Kinley flavor because he's treating himself after a long day at the office. The Lurisia drinker orders a Lurisia because he wants to look more sophisticated through a discerning choice of drink.
All mentioned so far can be easily replicated in practice. To explore how, we invite you to the adults bar.
With this one, let me invite you to adults master bar. Further and above to the portfolio, it is very important to emphasize the role of HoReCa, not only by its primary role as a channel of distribution, but in experience building. This is the place where brand love, consumer affection, and connection to brand is built by the way we activate and position our portfolio in unique servings and events. Replicating HoReCa experiences for retail further builds spillover effect of occasion building, from socializing away from home to socializing at home, but as well, creates a space for further premiumizing our brands.
Our any RTD value share in the overall commercial beverages pool is estimated to be 8%, which on the one hand, gives a significant opportunity to further grow our any RTD share, but on the other hand, it gives even broader opportunity to tap into the broader commercial beverages pool and grow from premium spirits and coffee. What does it mean for us as Hellenic in front of our customers? Once we are operating as a total 24/7 supplier, our contribution in the customer purchasing value can vary from 50%-75%. Let me give you a very good example from one outlet in Greece, where we are operating as a 24/7 supplier. Being present with an RTD category of stills and sparkling captures 20% of customer purchasing value.
While on the other hand, once we are tapping into the sizable pool of coffee and premium spirits, brings additional 35%, summing up to the 55% of the customer value. On top of this, activation-wise, this is where mixology comes into a place, because it brings a connection to the holistic portfolio and the way that we activate all of our categories. Moreover, this portfolio builds competitive advantage and differentiates us as a supplier from the other players in the market that are skewed to one category only, like Inbev or Lavazza. This creates efficiencies for our customers in terms of timing, investment, negotiation, and commercial policies, which is highly appreciated by our HoReCa customers, and this further builds customer loyalty. This is what builds relevance of HoReCa for us as a system.
I will hand over to my colleague, Bruno, that will walk you through how we are doing this.
Thanks, Kristina. In HoReCa, one of the key success factors is to truly understand the different needs of our stakeholders. In the bartender's mind, our relevance directly depends on our ability to affect and impact and improve their offer and their image as a bar. Obviously, our goals and our customer goals are very, very connected. We want to build the relevance of our portfolio and our brands. They want to build the relevance of their bar. If I were to describe the right HoReCa approach by answering the what, how, and who, the what would be easiest. Offering premiumized, tailor-made, and experiential solutions to bars, ensuring profitable growth by investing in their knowledge and their community relevance. Now on the who and how.
The person offering these solutions should be at least at the same capability level, if not higher, as its main stakeholder. They should share the passion for the HoReCa industry. They should share the same network and the same lifestyle. All of these factors are crucial and critical in becoming a part of that small inner HoReCa circle, and that HoReCa circle is our best advocate and the only type of marketing that cannot be replicated. Why not try recruiting directly from that circle? Finally, why am I the one telling this story? I am a former bartender, then brand ambassador, now premium spirits marketing manager, and most importantly, for this story, a permanent member of my HoReCa circle. Now let's see how we build both internal and external capabilities through our connections with the top bartending community.
Now let's hear it from our customers.
For me, opening my first bar meant making transition from bartender to bar owner. To win in this very challenging and competitive environment, I knew that to ensure profitable growth, I needed to differentiate my bar through consumer experience that cannot be easily replicated. This helped me a lot in defining my vision, which is focused on cocktails and mixers with bigger margins comparing to beer and wine. In order to simplify everyday work, I was looking for a partner offering full bundle portfolio of brands that are relevant for my bar. Having one person to discuss about the whole business saved significant portion of my time and money. This is where CCH Adria jumped in. Tailor-made approach to my bar, matching my visions, was one of the deal breakers to work with CCH.
We further grew our cooperation with local bar swaps and international guest shifts, which increased my reach to premium consumers and trained my bar staff to upsell, which consequentially allowed me to charge more and earn more versus regular cocktail scene. This kind of knowledgeable approach, respecting my specific needs and offering diverse approach to consumer, is something that I personally see as a difference between just a distributor and a true partner.
With this one, we are finalizing, and we are open for your comments and questions.
Thank you. Who do you view as your competitors in the adult sparkling market, and does this vary from market to market?
Well, in the European territories, ironically, this is Schweppes, because in several territories, like Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, and Czech and Slovak, we have Schweppes brand under Suntory, defined based on the different arrangements before the business was acquired. In these territories, we are operating with the Kinley brand.
Thank you. What consumer trends are you seeing in your markets?
Well, apart from the obvious one for the total category, like health and wellness, value for money, or choices that the people are making very consciously nowadays, I would say that for this particular category, we have something like a low tempo, which means lower tempo occasions, like aperitivo or after work, that younger audience tends to enjoy more and more. We have low sugar, which is obvious for the consumer audience of adults, and low alcoholic categories that are growing a lot in the recent period.
What makes adult sparkling a premium category in your mind, and are all the brands within the portfolio premium?
On the one side, adults' core cohort is more affluent in comparison to the other target audiences because of the higher disposable income. On the other side, adult brands are less elastic because they play a very distinctive role, like mixing, but as well, neighboring categories that represent the sourcing pool are playing in the higher retail value per unit case, which plays a nice opportunity to source from. Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you for your interest and your questions.
Thank you to Kristina and Bruno. Now let's walk past these beautiful paintings down to Data Insights and Analytics with Ruchika.
Good morning, everyone. We are glad to have you here. Welcome to the Data Insights and Analytics Accelerator. My name is Ruchika Sachdeva. I lead the capability of DIA, Data Insights and Analytics for CCH. I'm a seasoned analytics professional with 18 years of experience in this field. Together with my team of over 50+ people, we are responsible for building and deploying analytics solution that drive value for CCH. Today, I'm going to share with you how we leverage data intelligence as a competitive advantage and how we are building capabilities for sustainable growth. Let me start by sharing an interesting fact about data. Did you know that more data has been created in the last two years than ever before in the history of mankind? We live in an era of data and technology explosion. It's a unique opportunity if we monetize it.
Data by itself is just information. The capability that translates data and converts it into meaningful insights through the use of advanced machine learning, artificial intelligence, business analysis, is what we call as Data Insights and Analytics, and that's what we do at Hellenic. Let's see how we use this today for our business. DIA solutions and data intelligence powers today the foundational elements of our business, Revenue Growth Management and Route to Market. Revenue Growth Management defines what to offer our customers, and Route to Market defines how we serve them. Data and algorithms today allow us to understand our customers better and personalize our services through segmented execution. This allows us to treat every customer as a segment in itself. Let me tell you more about it. Segmented execution is all about segmenting our customers, as one size does not fit all.
Our customers have different needs, so to personalize experience, we first must understand them from an internal and an external perspective. Data enables that with a 360-degree view of the customer, as you also saw in Naya's presentation, and algorithms help generate outlet-specific insights for personalization. We first start by segmenting our customers. We understand what assortment to offer them. We estimate the value of revenue that we could have with the customer and offer the right service model, how to serve them. Once we start serving them, we personalize the execution in every way, and as the customers engage with us in different channels, we make sure it's personalized and relevant interaction.
Once we go towards promotions, and we start investing together for joint value creation, we make sure we are investing in the right areas, ensuring joint value creation and profitability on every EUR that we are investing. Today, data-enabled insights power our 2 million active customer base in Hellenic across all our markets, personalizing 24/7 execution and assortment approach. This, combined with our partner network of The Coca-Cola Company, Monster, Costa Coffee, Caffè Vergnano, Brown-Forman, gives us a unique competitive advantage versus any other bottler. Let me share some specific insights from our markets to bring this to life, starting with segmented execution for relevant assortment. We all know Amazon. Amazon is one of the most customer-centric organizations because they understand customers' needs and proactively makes relevant suggestions.
Translating this for our business means making proactive assortment recommendations, ensuring every outlet has the right product, in the right pack size, at the right time. We deliver this experience via suggested order algorithms. Through these algorithms, we bring the intelligence that sophisticated retailers have to our fragmented trade customers, mom-and-pop stores, traditional outlets. This is how we start personalizing the assortment approach. Let me give you an example from Nigeria that you see here, where algorithms are zooming into more than 200,000 outlets and segmenting them into 80-plus micro segments. They have the ability then to zoom into a particular outlet, understand the characteristics, and start making relevant suggestions. As an example, you see here a local and traditional outlet categorized with premium opportunity.
The algorithm sees highest potential for premium SSDs and energy products. A suggested order is created with Coke Zero and Monster, and the algorithm sees that similar outlets are also buying Predator, and it adds it to the list. A specific order with exact pack sizes is then created, and business developers sees this as a targeted recommendation. Our customers see this as smart orders when they log into the Customer Portal, very similar to the frequently bought feature we are all so familiar from Amazon. Call center agents also leverage this intelligence. Irrespective of the channel, we ensure offering personalized and relevant assortment recommendations in every customer touchpoint, and this happens for all markets of Hellenic on a weekly basis. Let's move forward and hear about another example, segmented execution for personalized in-store activation.
Today, with algorithms, we are helping our customers personalize the in-store execution based on the shoppers they serve. An example that you see from Bulgaria, where for outlets that are serving high-income shoppers, algorithms are prioritizing placement of cooler and positioning displays of single serve. For outlets serving primarily relatively low-income consumers, algorithms prioritize placement of affordable packs and ensuring our products are on the shelf, so we maximize shelf share. Data intelligence is also being leveraged today under segmented execution for driving targeted product activation. An example again from Bulgaria, where we drove a targeted and laser-focused approach when we launched 300ml PET Coke.
By selecting 1,700 best outlets that would benefit from this pack size based on the outlet characteristics and the shopper profile, relevance of the selection resulted in close to 100% outlets agreeing to the distribution versus the traditional average of 50%, emphasizing the relevance of our segmented approach. As you can see, we have several other examples from our markets, as this is one of the best practices now being leveraged across Hellenic markets. Let's continue moving forward and talk about coolers, because we also use segmented execution for cooler management. I would like to draw your attention to the two pictures that you see on the screen. Can you spot the difference between the left and the right image? The cooler on the left shows our products are set in an orderly manner.
The brands are clearly visible, and the cooler is adequately occupied with the right product categories and right pack sizes. It's a good cooler and will drive higher sales. On the contrary, the cooler on the right does not reflect that. We have competitive products, we have empty cooler, the brands are not visible, and this cooler means lost sales, missed opportunity. Today, through algorithms, we are monetizing pictures being taken from our cooler fleet across all markets, and algorithms are helping us understand these opportunities. Combine this with door-opening data, outlet sales.
We are getting super targeted in assessing profitability of every single cooler placed in the market of the 1.4 million fleet we have in Hellenic markets, where we are driving targeted actions to improve coolers and to improve performance of coolers, giving guidance on where to place a cooler, when to remove a cooler, how to improve the merchandising standards, and this is helping our markets and our customers grow through these cooler investments. Let's continue moving forward and now talk about promotions, such an integral part of our business, because this highlights joint value creation with our customers. Today, with algorithms, we are helping determine effectiveness of our promotion investment at a brand, pack, promotion type and discount levels. This is helping us identify insights for joint value margin improvements, emphasizing when to promote, how often to promote, how much to promote, and how to promote.
An example that you see here for a particular customer. Zoom in and see the data shows us the trend of the sales for the last three years. We can clearly see the peaks of promotion highlighted in the yellow. You can understand how insights from this data then helps guide the questions on when, how often, how much, and how to promote. Today, 50% of our spending in modern trade retail customers is being analyzed by algorithms. This capability is running already for 10 markets and more to come. Another important element of customer centricity is to ensure availability of our products to maintain service level with our customers. This is where demand forecasting comes in.
Today, with demand forecasting algorithms, we are helping predict demand for our products at a customer level, location level, so we can manage the right inventory at the right points and fulfill customers. An example that you see for RomaNaya, where we expanded these capabilities and improved the demand forecasting. This capability running already in seven markets and rapidly ramping up, you know, for more. Last but not the least, we are also using analytics to improve the turnover of a critical part of our workforce, our sales force, and our business developers. With data, we also analyzed drivers of churn in this critical population, because having a longer tenure of sales force means improved continuity with the customers and improved customer satisfaction. Data clearly highlighted to us three areas of attention. Number onthree, need for improved onboarding support.
We launched Sales Academy, as you also heard from Naya. Second, need for increased time with line manager. We introduced new modules into the Sales Academy. Third, need for improved target setting. We improved the operational target setting by linking it to data. A BB serving an outlet into a rural area had a target, for example, on generic Fanta and not Fanta Zero. This way, we improved the bonus settings and targeted all the three action items that emerged from data. There are so many other examples that I can walk you through, and some of them you will also hear in the other accelerator, in coffee, in digital, as truly this is an end-to-end capability that we are ramping up and progressing very fast to drive value and monetize data.
I hope these examples demonstrate how we are using data, insights, and analytics to support customer-centric actions at Hellenic and driving profitable growth. Scaling these capabilities is critical for future growth. We are also investing in our people. We have our own data and analytics academy, which is offering a comprehensive platform for improving data literacy. Already more than 1,000 people in the organization are investing time to improve data literacy. This curriculum will be mandatory for critical workforce, so that we continue enabling data-driven decision-making and create a workforce which is future-ready, data literate, and data equipped. As you see, this is such a critical capability for the future growth of our company. That's why we are scaling this journey. I hope you enjoyed hearing our journey today in this booth. Thank you very much for your time and attention.
Our final breakout session this morning is digital.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Mourad Ajarti. I'm the Head of Digital and Technology in CCH, and together with Vitaliy and Ivo Bjelis, we will take you through the journey of digital transformation in CCH. Almost everything that we will show you today did not exist back in 2019 when we had our last market capital market days. It shows the depth of the transformation that we have led, both as an organization, in the case of my team and the team of Vitaliy's digital commerce, but also in terms of technologies and product that we are sharing with you today. Digital transformation in Hellenic is an accelerator of business transformation, focused on delivering results on three business imperatives. First, customer centricity by delivering digital tools that enhance our capability on delivering personalized execution in every outlet.
Employee experience is focused on team collaboration and personal productivity and digital-first workplace. Last but not least, operational productivity on an enterprise-wide fashion. To deliver this transformation, we leverage three digital enablers. The first one is secure scaled platform that gives us the modularity and integration for seamless experiences for consumers, customers, and employees. We also leverage breakthrough technologies and innovation like AI, ml, and computer vision and automation. Last but not least, we focus on transformation of ways of working, anchored on scaled agile for product and software development across all functions. To tailor execution for every outlet, we have digitized our customer relationship management by leveraging three critical and skilled capabilities.
We've organized a 360 view of all our customer interaction and put it on the same system that our business developers, key account managers, and call agents have access to. We also deliver the eB2B platform, where our customers can interact and order our products 24/7. The last capability is a closed-loop, real-time NPS feedback from our customers, with a commitment from our side to work on customer pain points within 48 hours. Digital enable us to augment the capabilities of our business developers, leveraging data, insights, and technology. We are able to embed algorithms from AI and ML that gives us suggested orders and suggested activities for every outlet that we visit. We also are leveraging computer vision in a way that we
that can help us execute the shift picture of success by taking a simple photo, a simple video, with a calculation of a score that happens real-time for the business developer to still action it while they are still in store. Together with Vitaliy, we continue pushing the boundaries, leveraging the latest technologies, whether it's metaverse, whether it's the automated retail, for us to test and experiment new business models that defines the future of commerce. On employee experience, we are focused on teams collaboration, as well as personal productivity by leveraging Microsoft 365 and Teams on that. We democratized access to technology. We given access to all our employees, including the line operators, in the shop floor, that enables them to drive efficiency and be more connected to all the company.
Compared to other FMCGs, we are ahead of the curve when it comes to digitizing the core. We are already on SAP S/4 across all our markets, and that gives us access to the latest and greatest capabilities from SAP, including real-time reporting. We have created a capability in-house that we call The Edge, which enables us to take all KPIs across all our markets and consolidate them and put them on the hand of our employees and leaders. It also helps us to standardize the way we run our business and read our business. In supply chain, we are going through a transformation anchored on Industry 4.0, leveraging automation, leveraging computer vision, leveraging data and analytics. And my friend, Ivo, will take you through some of the examples from the shop floor on that.
Last but not least, we are co-creating with Microsoft new-to-the-market capabilities that we call digital twinning, leveraging data and analytics, but also metaverse capabilities. For us to drive efficiency, but also sustainability when it comes to water and energy, amongst others. With that, I hand over to Vitaliy to take us through digital commerce transformation.
Thank you, Mourad, and thank you, everybody, for taking the time to listen to a topic I'm very excited about. Digital commerce transformation is a real transformation because two years ago, when we saw each other last time, it didn't even exist as a concept. Today, we have a big business unit. We have business impact that is quite significant. It quadrupled over the last four years. We have over 100 professionals. 75% of them came from outside over the last two years. Working on this topic, we are really putting financial and organizational resources behind what we believe is a very important growth bet of Coca-Cola Hellenic. Digital commerce is represented by two big pillars that are scaling already and a lot of invisible things that you don't see today.
In order to have these two big pillars that are scaling, we are constantly experimenting, learning, and failing with the things that haven't worked, but we learn from them in order to get those things that are scaling and bringing business impact. The two pillars I would like to talk about today are route to consumer, represented by e-retail and food service aggregator programs that we have, and eB2B, represented by Customer Portal and service our marketplace. Our vision in these two pillars, and that's why they are the scaling pillars, is quite straightforward. We want to win with the winners in e-retail and food service aggregators. We want to have higher market share than in offline and grow faster than competition.
We want to connect digitally to 100% of customers in B2B, which means our eB2B or electronic B2B programs are enhancing our physical omni-channel route to market that is arguably the best in industry and best-in-class. We create this transformative omni-channel model that will define the future of our route to market. When I think of e-retail and FSA, I'm very excited about this channel. It's actually very profitable for us, and unlike many peers, we are profit accretive in e-retail FSA channel. We are making sure that in each of the sub-channels of this exciting space, we are growing profitably. I would like to double-click and talk a little bit about our food service aggregator programs, and in particular, about one of our more advanced markets, Ireland. Food service aggregators are a very interesting space.
That's where at-home consumption occasions connect with out-of-home customer universe. This means these consumption occasions are incremental to our business. Being smart about it and having strategic collaboration with food service aggregators, we are able to transform our brand programs into conversion to transactions. We are able to develop tools to measure execution online, and with all this, we are able to create more profitable business for us. If you think of Ireland, 47% of all meals delivered from restaurants to homes are containing a Coca-Cola HBC beverage. This is a benchmark level. From what I know, it's either the highest or one of the highest in the world. We do believe that this is way to go for the rest of our markets, and we are growing rapidly in this direction.
30% of all out-of-home revenue growth of last year in Ireland was delivered through food service aggregator-driven transactions. It's another remarkable indicator. Without food service aggregator business, our growth would have been six percentage points slower. We are not in that space. We are actually excited to take it higher, further, and bring it to 100% one day. This channel that is very profitable, fast-growing, is, by the way, also enabling us to combine our capabilities in field execution, where our field people work with those restaurants, and our data processing and insight generation capabilities that Mourad talked about. Our eB2B platforms are represented by two big programs. You might ask yourself, why two? It's quite straightforward.
We have two large route to market archetypes, direct route to market, where we sell directly and invoice directly and deliver directly to small supermarkets, bigger out-of-home outlets, some chain outlets. We have indirect route to market, where we rely on wholesalers to deliver to outlets. Customer Portal is the system that connects us to our direct outlets, where they can order our products 24/7, have access to their invoice history, order history, analytics, and also equipment services, like performance of their cold drink equipment or coffee machines. This is very direct, very intimate relationship with Coca-Cola that is based only on our portfolio. serviZy, on the other hand, is a marketplace proposition where we aggregate multiple wholesalers that supply to multiple outlets.
We aggregate multiple logistics service providers that provide flexible logistics service and also financing providers, because where the relationships are not one to one, sometimes buy now, pay later services can really create a much better customer experience and drive transaction conversion. We have two different models for two different go-to-markets. Customer Portal is scaling fast. What is very important about this program is that it's a standard proposition for all our markets. We have quite a few markets in Europe and in Africa, and we are able to have a standard tech stack that is working everywhere. That is why we are scaling fast. We have over 140,000 registered customers. We have over 40,000 monthly active, and this is growing, and we have already a significant share of total orders generated by Customer Portal.
This scale means we can do digital marketing directly. We can create engagement outside of the normal working hours of our field force, all of this is delivering results. We are not only digitizing the business, we are delivering incremental transactions, this program will continue to scale. serviZy is a very daring proposition. It was launched in Italy in Q3 last year, this is a marketplace that connects many wholesalers to many outlets in Italian HoReCa universe. This is one of the most exciting and most complex markets in Europe, that's why we believe what works in Italy will work in the other markets. We launched in Q3 last year. We already have over 15,000 SKUs on the platform. We already have external providers integrated on the platform, for example, for payment services and financing services.
We have flexible logistics services on the platform, where customers can decide to order from multiple locations and get flexible logistics faster or slower, paying more or less. This is just the beginning. We see the retention rate of 65%, meaning 2/3 of the customers who ordered once stay on the platform. We are very excited to be taking serviZy to four more markets this year and scaling it in Italy. I hope I gave you a glimpse and a taste of our customer-facing programs and why we are in digital commerce transformation. I'm sure you are now curious about what's happening further down the value chain. There is no better person to tell you about that than my friend and colleague, Ivo Bjelis.
My name is Ivo Bjelis, I'm leading supply chain in CCH. It's my pleasure to demonstrate the digital transformation in supply chain. It is completely connected with our imperative to implement Industry 4.0 solutions. Industry 4.0 solutions are covering four pillars. One is about data and connectivity, another one about analytics and intelligence, human-machine connection, and then advanced engineering. We have developed the wide range of solutions covering all of four areas. Here you can see just a few of them, illustrating what are the solutions we are talking about. Whenever we are implementing new solution in area of digital under the Industry 4.0 umbrella, we are looking if solution is following three critical criteria. One is about improving the customer service or agility of our organization. Second one, do we improve the cost?
Obviously, the third one, are we moving forward within our sustainability agenda? We have many solutions which are already implemented. There are a couple of solutions under implementation. Obviously, the pipeline is filling continuously with the new ones. How we are doing that? We have actively searching the market. We are doing that through our internal resources. Also, we have been approached by the best industries in the world and best providers in the world to collaborate and apply these solutions in the industrial environment.
It is a pleasure to work with some of them, being the leading companies in the world, and I have a short video just to show you how this collaboration works in real life, where we have implemented solution in the area of digital metaverse, in particular, the digital twin solution in one of our lines in Austria, in a very close collaboration with Microsoft. Let's see the video.
In 2021, in partnership with Microsoft, we created a digital twin prototype for one production line in Austria's Edelstal plant. Digital twin is a virtual platform and a part of the industrial metaverse, which can be accessed from anywhere using Microsoft HoloLens. It enables real-time visibility of performance across production lines and puts all different elements into one single view. Virtual AI assistant can run potential data simulation in real time, thus increasing the ability to make data-driven decisions and take appropriate actions on the go. The process was demanding, but through deep commitment and strong partnership, we managed to create sustainable value.
Let's dive into the projects here on the digital twin, for those who haven't seen it. We were executing a digital twin on top of the production facility, specifically targeting an energy optimization. This project's interesting because we're actually saying, incredible technology, how do we massively commoditize the cost to deploy at scale?
Our roadmap to 2025 considers creating 17 production lines in digital twin environment, energy, water, line changeover, equipment performance losses, and operational performance losses.
We should never forget that still significant part of our supply chain is connected with the physical world. We see the role of digital transformation as a key enabler to make the physical part also be more efficient. In particular, the area of machine-human connection is benefiting a lot from the digital transformation. A very good example of that is our Connected Worker program, which we started a few years ago in a very small scale. The basic idea was just to digitize the paper part of the operations standards and procedures and put them in a digital world. But we have realized very fast that there is more to be used over there. We are now using the system in order to do the task management for the operators, especially in the area of maintenance, in the area of quality.
We are adding photos, we are adding videos. We have now connected the workers from various plants, which of course, helps them to fix the problem in close collaboration with the colleagues who can help and overall raise their capability to be faster and more efficient. There is more to be done over there, especially in the environment of artificial intelligence, where we are going to have the new generation of solutions, where the operator will be supported in real time using artificial intelligence in a very similar way like you have seen in the digital metaverse solution with Microsoft, but for the wider area of solutions. We are also very proud that our flagship capability development program, Supply Chain Academy, also went digital. All the trainings and all the certification process over there is available online for the wider group of employees.
In short, we are future-proofing our supply chain through putting in place the most innovative solutions, taking care of our sustainability agenda, which is always there, but also in on top of that, building the capabilities of our people. With this, we believe that we are fully ready for today, but also for tomorrow.
We hope that together with Vitaliy and Ivo, we brought to life how digital transformation is an accelerator of business transformation, centered around delivering results on customer centricity, employee experience, and operational productivity. We thank you for your time.
A very big thank you to all my colleagues this morning. I hope it's given you the chance to learn a bit more about the growth accelerators in our business. It's now time for another coffee break. We will see you back soon in the plenary session for our COO, Naya, talking about our diversified country footprint. We'll see you soon.
We're good? Welcome back. I hope you learned a lot from our growth accelerator breakouts, whether you're in person or joining us online. We have discussed how we're driving growth in our categories, and how our capabilities are setting us up to win. What is critical to our success is how we then drive growth in our diversified markets. We have a natural advantage when it comes to our geographical footprint and the mix of countries we operate in. We span Europe, from West to Central and Eastern Europe, as well as two of the most populous countries in Africa. Each segment brings something different to the table to drive growth. Let me call out a few highlights from each. Our established markets have the highest net sales revenue per unit case in the group.
Developing, has a great balance of price mix and volume growth historically, with revenue growth of +10% on average over the last four years. Finally, our emerging markets, where we have seen the highest revenue growth as we continue to capture share in countries that are growing sparkling per capita consumption. Let me break it down further by segment. Our established segment comprises mainly geographies with high but generally stable per capita consumption. The exception to this is Italy, which currently has a surprisingly low per capita consumption and therefore is a great growth opportunity, as Frank will discuss later. This segment has delivered strong growth from category mix, driven by sparkling and low or no sugar variants. The strongest performance in sparkling has come from adult sparkling. Energy is also very important in Established, with 27% growth on average each year in the same period.
Established is the segment with the highest exposure to the out-of-home channel, more specifically, HoReCa. The segment benefits from tourism, for example, in Italy and Greece, but also Switzerland and Austria, and even northern Italy in the winter. We have seen recovery in the out-of-home channel, now above 2019 levels. This also helps package mix as we continue to drive growth of single serves. Our Established segment is the only one where single-serve mix is higher than multi-serves. For all segments, our top strategic priorities are sparkling, energy, and coffee. As we look towards the medium term, sparkling will remain our core driver of growth. This will be fueled by low/no sugar variants and adult sparkling. We see great headroom for growth in energy, with flavor innovations in Monster expected to continue to drive demand.
We also expect growth in coffee to accelerate in all our established markets, except for Italy, where Caffè Vergnano directly manages local operations. Let me give you a couple of more examples. In Greece, we will continue investing behind our seasonal activations, taking advantage of the extended tourist period to drive more growth in our premium offerings and single-serve packs in out-of-home. Greece is a great example of what success can look like for our 24/7 Sparkling-Led portfolio, as we have a significant presence in all categories, resulting in our 45% value share in NARTD. Looking across the Established segment, for Tuesday, we want to capture targeted opportunities for growth and have specific plans in Italy, Austria, and Switzerland. For Italy, more broadly, Frank will share shortly how excited we are about the opportunity here. Moving now to our developing markets.
Developing markets have delivered substantial price mix and volume growth, while per capita consumption is the highest of our three segments. Single-serve mix is also the lowest due to the lower exposure to the out-of-home channel, but we're proud that our strategy to drive multipack of single serves in the at-home channel has been delivering results. As a result, the volume growth of our multipack single-serve for sparkling has grown over 40% in the last four years. Developing markets have the most meaningful potential for premiumization and category expansion, particularly in our prioritized areas of sparkling, energy, and coffee. Sparkling growth will be further supported by growth in demand for low/no sugar variants and adult sparkling, with the relaunch of Kinley making strong progress. Energy growth will be supported by all three brands, Burn, Monster, and Predator.
Coffee has the highest volume contribution in this segment of markets, now in all markets, except for the Baltics. We're really excited for the potential here. Let me give you a couple of examples in this segment. In Czech, we see opportunities to continue growing strongly in the out-of-home channel, helped by Kinley. We also expect to drive further customer and consumer recruitment in Costa Coffee and Caffè Vergnano. Looking across the segment, we will continue investing behind multipack of single serves, which should support improved package mix. We will continue our efforts in premiumization behind our key strategic priorities while addressing affordability through smaller packs of multi-serves. Before moving to emerging markets, let me double-click and briefly discuss our biggest market in this segment, which is Poland.
In 2021, Poland introduced a significant sugar tax, the highest ever experienced in our markets, which required a price increase of more than 25%. This had a one-year impact on volumes, which fell 7%-8% in 2021, and reset our margins in the country. We were quick to adapt, driving our low/no sugar portfolio, which was under-penetrated at that time. Our strong execution in the market during this period was critical, as we leveraged all our capabilities and used data and analytics to make smart choices on pricing, and we're very proud of how the team addressed the situation. This resulted in significant share gains in the country and further improvement of our leadership ratio, even though the non-alcoholic ready-to-drink market declined. The learnings we took from Poland have been crucial as taxes have been introduced in other countries in the last few years.
We now have a playbook on tax introduction to put into action in any market. Looking forward, we're expecting growth to come from our sparkling portfolio, fueled by our low/no sugar variants and adult sparkling again, behind the key relaunches and introduction of Three Cents in the upper end of the premium segment. Energy will be supported by all brands. Poland is also the largest market for Costa outside the UK, and we're very excited about the rollout of Caffè Vergnano, further strengthening our coffee propositions to the Polish consumer. We are very pleased with the rebound of volumes we saw in 2022, and early signs in 2023, where we are addressing inflation and affordability challenges. We are confident that Poland margins will improve towards pre-sugar tax levels in the medium term. Last, but certainly not least, emerging.
Our emerging markets comprise a broad range of countries, including our most recent expansion into Egypt. Emerging markets have the most attractive long-term demographics. Even though we have experienced the highest growth in per capita consumption, our emerging markets' average is still lowest of our segments. As I have mentioned, emerging has delivered the highest volume growth in recent years. In terms of categories, sparkling has led the way, and energy growth has been very impressive, driven by the excellent performance of our affordable brand, Predator, in Nigeria. Our continued focus on improving single-serve mix has delivered an increase of 45% over the last four years. Even though the revenue per unit case in this market is the lowest of the group, we have seen good improvement the last couple of years due to our conscious decision to drive value through actions on pricing and premiumization.
Looking forward for our emerging markets, we remain confident despite the current macro challenges we're facing in certain markets. In emerging, we see the biggest opportunity in serving per cap, we will continue to deploy our capabilities to further unlock this potential in the medium term. By category, our strategic priorities are unchanged. In sparkling, we see a good opportunity for growth in flavors, as well as low/no sugar and adult sparkling. Energy growth should remain strong due to Nigeria as well as Egypt, where we have recently entered the category, as I mentioned in the morning. Let me give you a couple of examples for emerging. In Nigeria, we will drive growth in sparkling, supported by targeted activations in the market. We will continue to address affordability with our RGB proposition and address premiumization with further growth of energy, adult sparkling, and juice.
Serbia is another great example of our 24/7 Sparkling -Led portfolio, with presence and strong market share in the NARTDs, one of the highest in the group, over 40%. Let me now discuss our newest acquisition, Egypt, starting with a very attractive demographics. Egypt has a population of more than 100 million, projected to grow further. That population is young, with an average age of just 24 years. We see a good growth opportunity in servings per capita, right now, circa 18% below the group average. Also, in Egypt, we are not the market leader, and we do see this opportunity to gain market share. In the first year of Egypt, being in the CCH family, we saw a promising start despite the macro challenges we faced. Our integration is progressing according to the plan.
Back office activities have been completed, and we have actively started implementing our key capabilities, driving value through revenue growth management, improving market penetration through go-to-market improvements, and using data and insights and analytics to drive personalized execution for every outlet. Indeed, we have already gained significant market share, and our initiatives have helped us overall to drive revenue per unit case to record levels for the country. At the same time, we have been investing in our go-to-market, adding 20,000 new coolers in 2022. Finally, we have seen the first signs of portfolio improvement, reducing our non-premium water contribution, which is one of the highest in the group, and we launched into the energy category from the start of this year.
2022 and the start of 2023 has certainly been challenging, but our experience in managing volatile emerging markets has been critical and enabled us to make fast, smart decisions in the market. As I look forward for Egypt, there are two key areas where we can unlock our potential in the market. First, we want to gain market leadership in NARTD. This will come from further expansion of our portfolio as we are already in the energy category. We will also continue to invest behind our key strategic priorities in sparkling, particularly with Schweppes, which is very strong in Egypt. We will balance affordability with further scaling of our RGB portfolio, which, as you know, has proven very successful in Nigeria. Our aspirations for Egypt are clear, one, drive per capita consumption, two, increase market share, and three, improve EBIT margins in the midterm.
To summarize, as I stated in my introduction, we are privileged to operate in a combination of different geographies that creates a unique balance for us. This provides us with different opportunities to grow and utilize the whole spectrum of our 24/7 Sparkling-Led portfolio dynamic, and we have proved that we're able to capture the right opportunities and manage the challenges we see. I wanted to close my presentation with this chart. This demonstrates very well that most of countries have the room to grow more in servings per capita, and this is exactly what we intend to do. Thank you, and now I'll hand over to Frank to talk more about Italy, our host country for this event.
Thank you, Naya. Good afternoon, buon pomeriggio. My name is Frank O'Donnell. I'm General Manager of Coca-Cola Hellenic here in Italy. I've had the great privilege to work for our organization for the last 31 years, mainly in positions in commercial and general management across a variety of different countries. Today, I have the pleasure of sharing with you how we will accelerate our Italian business over the coming years. Just a few headlines about our business here in Italy. We directly employ 2,000 people, 60% of whom are in our commercial, so our sales teams. Throughout Italy, we have a significant manufacturing footprint. We have three factories.
We have six manufacturing facilities, three of which are dedicated to sparkling, tea, and sports drinks, tw which are water, and one which is a preform manufacturing plant, which I'll speak to you about a little bit later. Let me talk to you about the great opportunity that we see here in Italy. Italy is a market with great potential. The chart on the left shows the industry per capita consumption of sparkling soft drinks for Italy, compared to two other Mediterranean countries, Greece and Spain. You can see clearly that there's a significant difference, with Greece being 20% higher in industry consumption for sparkling beverages, and Spain being significantly higher, again, than that. We see a huge opportunity here to expand our business in Italy.
The market conditions are favorable for us. Starting from the structure of the market, the HoReCa channel is huge in Italy. It's over 300,000 outlets, which represents a great opportunity for us to present our beverages to all the Italian consumers. Indeed, the retail industry is equally fragmented, with 120 different retail chains operating in Italy. Tourism in Italy is very significant. Italy is the third-largest tourism country in Europe. There are over 200 million tourist nights in Italy each year. That's in terms of foreign tourists. There are also another 200 million domestic Italian tourists who holiday in the country as well, so a very big, significant tourism industry.
Many people, sometimes when they think of Italy, they say, "Well, the population is a bit aging." Yes, it is, but there are 17 million people in Italy under the age of 30. Finally, what the Italians are really passionate about are three things. In Italy, they're phenomenally passionate about food. It is the absolute topic that occupies the dinner table every day in the country. There are Italian people in the audience, and they're all nodding their head, which is great. But that's also followed by football and by music quite closely. We've really started to activate those passion points, because they're the key occasions that we can match our brands to strongly.
As we all know, Italy is the home of pizza, and the estimates on how many pizzas are eaten in Italy, they vary widely, but it ranges from 2 billion - 3 billion pizzas eaten in Italy every single year. It's the equivalent of a pizza per person per week. Now, historically, the consumption of Coke with pizza was extremely low. Back in 2019, for every 10 pizzas that were consumed, only one had a Coke with it. We've put in place a very strong plan to drive the consumption of more Coca-Colas with pizza. It's part of our overall Coke and Meals program, and obviously, pizza's at the central part of it. We have a significant level of programs in terms of outdoor, in terms of above-the-line sponsorship.
what we do, not only in the out-of-home outlets, in terms of meals, communication, but also what we do in the at-home outlets as well. We sponsor a Pizza Village roadshow, which visits cities throughout Italy, and communities come together to have a pizza. In a short space of time, so just in two years, so between 2021 and 2022, we've almost doubled our incidents of Coke with pizza. We know that looking at this opportunity, there is far more to come. The second area that we focus on, in terms of our association with sparkling soft drinks, is around football. We have sponsorship relationships with some Serie A clubs. Let me talk about Napoli in particular.
We, we formed an association with Napoli at the start of the 2022, 2023 season, which is actually also the year that Napoli have won the Serie A championship in Italy for the first time in 33 years. We've really, throughout the whole year, been able to leverage our relationship with Napoli by being able to execute tailor-made promotions in the stores with our customers. Our customers in Campania, in Italy, have really got behind the association that we have with Napoli as well, and we've also supported it with outdoor advertising. Our association with football and how we drive that, either with local teams and how we drive football association overall, has proven very successful for us here in Italy. To round football off, we're also sponsors of the Coca-Cola Football Show, Coca-Cola Super Match on DAZN.
For those of you who don't know who DAZN are, they're a sports broadcaster. They're similar to Sky Sports. On this show, it's a live commentary of a football match with the hosts, and they really enjoy, and they make some fun of the show. What's key for us is not that it's a Coca-Cola sponsorship of it's that the hosts are consuming pizza and enjoying it with a Coke as they commentate on the match. Music is the third leg of the strategy that we have to drive sparkling. Here, we're focused on three main areas to drive transaction. The first is around the promotions that we do in store to drive consumers with free giveaways that we have on our products. The second is that we directly sponsor music festivals.
Last year was Coca-Cola Beach music festivals. This year it's the I-Music Milan Festival, which is a huge festival in Milan. It's a week-long series of concerts with loads of international stars that are playing in it. The third thing that we do around music, and it's maybe a bit more Mediterranean, what we do, but we develop a summer single with a leading music artist each year. They either the lyrics of that song or the name of the song itself features strongly Coca-Cola within it, and the songs prove to be not only fantastic songs, but hugely popular during the summer. When it comes to Fanta, there's two areas that we focus on. One is around an association with fun x, such as Carnevale. Carnevale is an occasion in Italy during February when people dress up in costumes.
It comes before Lent. Also Halloween, where equally, we sponsor Halloween, which many of you are aware of, is another time when people are dressing up and having fun together. One of the things that we identified with Fanta is around snacking, and the snacking opportunity for Fanta. We have a year-long program for Fanta in stores, associating Fanta with crisp companies as well. Given Italy's older population, adult sparkling beverages are really key for us. In 2019, we really were not playing here at all. At the end of 2019, as Lauren mentioned earlier, we acquired Lurisia, which is a really premium Italian craft soft drinks, as well as a premium water business. Since our acquisition of Lurisia, we have trebled the business.
In 2020, we relaunched Kinley onto the market, providing more packages, driving distribution. We've done a rebranding as well this year, but our Kinley business also, in the same period of time, has grown four fold as well. We're seeing really accelerated growth as we become a serious contender in the adult beverages market, in Italy. We've also been driving other categories, which represent very solid, profitable growth for our business. As you know, at the group level, our key priorities are sparkling, energy, and coffee. In Italy, we don't distribute coffee, as Naya had already mentioned, as Vergnano are the owners here. I'll just focus on sharing a few headlines with you around energy, sports drink, tea, and also premium spirits.
Let me start with Monster, where we've seen exceptionally strong growth over the last four years, quadrupling the business again. We are now the number one player in energy in retail in Italy. We've achieved this via significantly widening both the availability of the portfolio of Monster, almost doubling the range that we have, and we've combined this with intensive sampling, promotions, and sponsorships as well. Each quarter, we run a very successful consumer-orientated transaction, driving promotion in the stores. With ready-to-drink tea, once again, it was a category that we really didn't play in up until a number of years ago.
We launched Fuze Tea in 2018, it is now already the number three tea brand on the market in Italy, with over 10% share. Once again, a business that we've enjoyed significant growth with. Finally, sports drinks. Where with Powerade, we've had great growth since 2019. That growth and that success had been built on a very much a ramped-up approach around in-store execution, tailored promotions, widening our distribution net, and growing our portfolio via the introduction of zero variants. We also developed a unique association with Padel. Now Padel is a sport, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is a sport similar to tennis. About 800,000 people in Italy play it.
We got on the bus early with this sport as well in terms of our sponsorship and relationship, and we leveraged that with what we do with Powerade in store. In Italy, we've built up a strong premium spirits business over the last five years. We're in just that short space of time, we are now already the fifth-largest distributor of premium spirits in Italy. Our portfolio is a combination of international brands such as Barceló, Nemiroff, The Famous Grouse, and others, combined with local players as well, such as Lucano and Silvio Carta. We've worked hard in building our capabilities. Let me start with our route to market, where we've been on a journey here to drive our execution and to drive our coverage. We've invested significantly, recruiting over 200 business developers in the last 18 months.
That represents an increase of 20% in our sales force, that is helping to drive execution across a far wider number of outlets. We have grown our market coverage by 57%, calling on an extra 45,000 customers. Versus 18 months ago, we're now calling on 45,000 customers more. Supporting this strategy has been an equal uptick in the number of coolers that we've placed on the market. Between 2022 and 2023, we'll have placed an incremental 25,000 coolers in Italy. To support the business developers better, and to make better use of technology, as you've seen from Ruchika already, we have been leveraging data, insights, and analytics to help us in three areas specifically.
As we go to the market recruiting these 45,000 new outlets that we've been doing for the last 18 months, prospecting, which is about identifying the right type of outlets, becomes really critical. There, we've leveraged on our data, insights, and analytics tools to guide our business developers towards the right type of outlets. When they're there, it's about the type of things we ask them to do, which is around the suggested activities that are tailored for that outlet. It will be around the priorities and the cooler management programs that they have in place, and finally, around suggested orders. How they fill portfolio gaps and what are the portfolio gaps identified at that output level, how they create suggested orders for wholesalers to fill. When you look at digital commerce, Vitaliy has shown you what we're developing with serviZy.
Service is an eB2B marketplace platform. It's designed to make the ordering process both easier and digitized for HoReCa outlets. It allows a HoReCa outlet to source supplies from a variety of suppliers and wholesalers in their own time. Service was piloted in Italy last year, launched fully onto the market this year. Early indications from our customers are very positive. Finally, we have a laser-like focus on ensuring that we drive our revenue, not just through price, but through a significant effort behind mix improvement. 90% of the growth that we have had here in Italy over the last four years has been driven by single-serve packages. A big driver of this was for sure the extra outlet coverage that I've talked about. Also, we've made sure that our category mix improves as well.
The right single-serve packages, but also the right types of categories that are growing. Our category mix, so less water and more beverages that have a higher revenue per case and a higher profitability, they've also improved by three percentage points since 2019. A sharp focus on our capabilities has been critical to driving our business forward. Equal to the investment behind marketing programs and capabilities, has been a strong investment behind sustainability and capacity. Katya will delve into this shortly, but let me share a few headlines with you specific to Italy. In 2021, we replaced all our multipack can plastic packaging with a cardboard packaging solution called KeelClip.
By the start of this year, all of our PET, for sparkling, tea, and sports drinks, was made from 100% rPET in every package that we have on the market in Italy. The 100% rPET preforms are manufactured in-house by us. It's a really great story about an old unused plant that we had in Gaglianico, in northern Italy, that we reopened. I was saying last night there that the guy who closed down the plant was actually the guy who reopened it for us as well. That plant provides us with all the rPET that we need for the market in Italy. Finally, as we continue to grow our business, we need to invest in manufacturing capacity, and we're focusing investment on three new lines over the next number of years.
One is for sparkling cans, where we see a lot of growth in our can business, two is for glass, and three for energy. This new investment in capacity will give us an expanded manufacturing capacity of 18%. Ultimately, with all this effort, we've seen a good set of results for Italy. Our revenue grew by 22% in 2022, driven by a very good combination of volume and price mix. That growth in volume has seen us grow our servings per capita by nine, which represents nearly 500 million more servings of our product in Italy in one year. In retail, we have become the number one value creator over 2021 and 2022, generating almost EUR 190 million in additional retail value.
Value creation for our customers is a very important metric. It's a key component of our customer selling story. As I mentioned earlier, a sharp focus on single serve is delivering really the results that we see, and we see it in the improved price and mix. Finally, all this also comes together in terms of what we see in the market. Our NARTD share has grown by two percentage points over the last four years, with share gains across all the key categories that we play in. A very solid delivery of metrics in Italy, which gives us great confidence in how we will drive the business forward.
Equally, we're really looking forward this afternoon to going into the market with all of you and translating what you've seen here on PowerPoint right into what you'll see in the marketplace as well. Before I move to the last slide, as I'll be starting a new role as a regional director in Naya's team from June, I would like to introduce Miles Karemacher, who is the incoming general manager of our business in Italy. Miles previously spent three years here with us as commercial excellence director, helping to shape large elements of the strategy that you see here today. He's been for the last three and a half years, the very successful general manager of our business in Ireland. Welcome back to Italy, Miles.
To conclude, we continue to see an accelerated growth potential for Italy. We expect the Italian business to deliver organic growth, sales growth ahead of the group algorithm in the medium term. We see huge opportunity to drive sparkling per capita consumption, with Italy almost half the size of some other Mediterranean countries. Out of home, and the out-of-home channel, is the catalyst for this growth. It's 40% of our business in Italy. It's more than 50% in all other Mediterranean countries. We have clear prioritized categories to keep driving our strong growth. First is with sparkling. This remains the biggest growth opportunity for our business here. Start meals, not just about continuing with pizza, which of course we will do, but also by focusing on lunchtime.
Our incidents of Coke at lunchtime is half of our incidents of lunch in evening time, so we see big opportunities, and we're very clear on where they are. We will continue to drive Zeros. Last year, we launched Coca-Cola Zero onto the marketplace, Zero Zero onto the marketplace, and combined with Coke Zero, we see this as a real strong driver of forward momentum. With Lurisia and Kinley, and as you've seen from the adults booth that Christina showed you, we really have two fantastic winning adult brands. We also see significant headroom for growth and market share with our flavors, and we expect that the momentum that I've talked to you about behind Monster, Tea, and sports drink, that momentum continues. Behind all of this are our capabilities, and they continue to underpin what we do.
We will continue to expand our market coverage, placing additional coolers and expanding our marketing programs to more and more outlets. Revenue growth management will stay firmly fixed on volume, price, and mix. Increasingly, we will do this with an even more digitized sales force, ensuring that our customer is truly at the heart of our business here in Italy. Italy is a great opportunity for Coca-Cola HBC. We are already seeing the results. I believe a much stronger future lies ahead. Thank you.
Thank you, Frank. I think you're due to join us for questions, so if you'd like to maybe take a seat with Naya and Zoran, that'd be great. What we're going to do is we're going to run a question and answer session now. We've got another opportunity a little later, so we'd like this one, if possible, to focus on the content around the strategies for growth, what you've been hearing from the teams in the accelerators, from Naya, from Frank, and then we'll bring up the larger questions about the group and the group performance after you've heard from Ben in the afternoon. Ben and Zoran and Naya will take those questions later. I should point out, as we're settling, that there's an information code, a QR code, on the back of your badges.
You can access all of the presentation materials on that, so if you need to download a PDF at any stage today, please feel free to do so. Right. What I'm going to do is I've got online questions as well, but we'll take questions from the audience first, and if any online questions come in, then we'll do those in due course. Perhaps maybe start in the middle, and we'll work out to the outside. Sanjeet, do you want to kick off?
Hey, guys. Thanks a lot for the presentations. It's Sanjeet from Credit Suisse. Question for Zoran. You ticked up the medium-term organic revenue growth algorithm to 6%-7% from 5%-6%. Can you just break that down with how you see volume and price mix progression? You know, to what extent is that accelerated growth just a function of the changing geographic composition of the business? You know, Nigeria is bigger today than what it was in 2019. You've got Egypt now coming through. What level of inflation, consumer price inflation are you embedding within that 6%-7% medium term? Thanks.
Yeah. Thank you, Sanjeet. There are two factors here. First of all, as as we've seen that this last year, this year, in a two year timeframe, it was pretty much price mix, a lot of price. This period embeds for sure a more balanced combination of the volume and price mix, and we would see that from next year, there has to be, you know, more on the volume side. Secondly, this also reflects the fact that we have a stronger coffee business, and yes, it's also the fact of the territories that you mentioned.
We do see that overall, categories in the market, versus what we showed in 19 are, you know, slightly better prospect, which proves the resilience of the whole industry that we have witnessed over the last few years. All these kind of factors. This is blended with a stronger confidence that we have today versus 19, in terms of how we feel about capability of the organization to sail through in rainy and sunny days.
I don't want to I think we talked a lot about capabilities, really, after these few years, seeing revenue growth management, how it balances not only price mix, but volume, so all the levers there, that really gives us a better view how we think that we will be able to be in in this corridor. We take the assumption that on, in terms of inflation, that it will start easing towards the end of the year. We would expect that that translates to the commodity and input cost from end of year, hopefully, and next year.
Got it. Just to be super clear on this, when we think about your pricing philosophy over the medium term, is CPI a bit of an anchor for the business across each of the segments, or is there a need to accelerate affordability initiatives, particularly in the emerging segment, to drive that volume growth?
Right.
It's both. There are very different opportunities, not only in the segments, but also within the segments among different countries. The next phase for us when it comes to pricing overall, would be how to leverage all different types of pillars. Pricing, but also the mix, whether this is category mix, channel mix, package mix. Very important in that, at the very core, is actually balancing between what you just said, affordability in markets like Nigeria, for example, with initiatives that we said earlier, with premiumization. We still see that there is huge potential in terms of how to play and win, balancing both.
Why don't we keep the microphone over there, Jeremiah, and if you maybe Ed?
Thanks for the question. Ed Mundy from Jefferies. I've just got one question, Naya, for you. You mentioned in your first presentation about the importance of personalized execution, you know, by outlet. Where are we on that journey? My sense is a lot of the things we learned from the breakout session are quite new, and how much of that's still to come, you know, really in driving that execution at the next leg up?
Yeah. It's like this is a never-ending sort of journey, especially when we raise the bar in each and every market. From the accelerators, you got a feel in terms of the how, when it comes to data, when it comes to the digital and overall digital commerce. This is the how the enablers, but also clear bets when it comes to the priorities in the three categories that we shared, sparkling, energy, and coffee, but also pockets of opportunities. For us, we feel very, like, pleased with the progress on that. We call it the strategy S equals One, which is we treat every outlet as a segment of one, and this is very important.
The pandemic really surfaced the criticality of making sure that we are very close, not only to the channel or the area, but each and every outlet out there. What we do is we're using all the different alternative route to markets that we're having, with the main focus to be relevant in that particular area and double-clicking in that area, the specific outlet. An example from Nigeria, where from the insights, Ruchik and her team pulled information where we saw that outlets that are close to churches, and every Sunday, church is something very important for the Nigerians, they're going there, so they open specific hours of the day. We picked up that information, and we went in a much more targeted way towards that. In all, pleased with the progress.
We have accelerated the last two years. In the next five years, our plans and investments are going after this particular bet.
To briefly add, here is its foundational use case that we use. There was Version 1, segmented execution focused on what Naya talked. Now, we already rolled out Version 2.0, because the more you learn, the more you see, and availability of relevant data that we are embedding into the whole algorithms and how also technology works, artificial intelligence, all these things have are enabling that there is going to be constant evolution. You can't do Version two without starting where we started, so I feel confident that this is going to be iterative, evolving process, to make it more sharper, clearer for those who execute in the market.
Excellent. Let's come back over this side. Perhaps we'll start with Andrea and then move around the table.
Yes, I have a question for Frank on Italy. The per capita consumption opportunity in sparkling has been there for many years in Italy, partly because of the sort of large penetration of bottled water in Italy. What gives you the confidence now that you can really narrow that gap? Is it the data capabilities you have or something else?
Yeah, I mean, let me start by saying last year alone, we grew the per capita in Italy by eight. We had a big jump up already. Yeah, everything that I kind of presented there about the use of data, the marketing programs that we've put together, the incremental output coverage, particularly the driving the meals occasion, this is a real strong catalyst. You know, the pizza plan definitely worked very well, but we know that the lunchtime occasion, where, you know, we only have half the consumption of the evening occasion, when you aggregate it up, it's absolutely a huge opportunity, so we're very focused on capturing that as well. We see, yeah, strong proof points already in terms of the per capita expansion in 2022 already.
Andrea, to add something here, the important person in the room also is Philippine, who is the counterpart of Frank from The Coca-Cola Company side. Our confidence comes here also from the fact how we together approach, you know, understanding of consumer, what Manolo was talking about, the understanding what are really What Frank just mentioned, and then how we blend that together. That really gives us huge confidence that it's a momentum that we know that we are doing the right things behind the right opportunities that will drive, you know, tangible impact.
Let's pass the microphone to Robert. Thank you very much, Andrea.
Thank you. Robert Ottenstein, Evercore ISI. I want to follow up with Frank on another question on Italy. I think you said that you, in, was it a few years, had increased the number of customers by 45,000? Is that right?
Correct. Yep.
That sounds like a really big number, and you've been in Italy a long time. Could you give us a little bit of a sense of how it could be that there were 45,000 customers that you weren't serving, and then specifically, what you've done to bring on, you know, an incremental 45,000, which again, seems like a large number?
Yeah, look, it's a large number in a large country as well. One of the opening comments I made about Italy is that there's over 330,000 out-of-home outlets in Italy. You know, clearly, there was an amount of those outlets that we were calling on, we saw the opportunity to significantly expand the coverage, which is what we've done over the last two years. There's still a large surface of outlets out there.
I think what we can add there is that pandemic also reset the base, and Italy, being a big country, obviously had a lot of this resetting. This, combined with what Frank mentioned, + the segmentation when it comes to execution, popped up, incremental opportunities.
Robert, that doesn't mean those customers' outlets were dry.
Yes.
They were served by a network of distributors. When Frank presented that we added 200,000 salespeople, almost exclusively behind out-of-home channel, that means that we created capacity to now call on those customers and outlets, which were previously served by someone else, among other products. With this product, focus, attention, relationships, prospecting, everything. That makes a quality difference.
Robert, could you move the microphone, please? Sorry.
Was it then the additional sales people was the key lever to get the increased reach?
It's combinaC
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Combination of many things, but big part is that plus , obviously, targeted actions and pooling opportunities in those outlets are in the full portfolio of any RTD.
The 300,000, is that the entire opportunity set in Italy?
Yes. Yeah, it is. Yeah.
How, and what percentage of that is still to go in terms of what percentage of that do you not call on?
Well, look, there's two things. I mean, there's a piece here about, you know, the volume weighted element of this. How much of the opportunities are out there? We're capturing a much bigger amount of the opportunities that are there. There's a long tail of outlets where it may not make sense for us to call on at all. I would say, you know, that we're already capturing quite a large chunk of the opportunities.
Excellent. Let's take the next question.
Thank you.
Olivier Nicolai from Goldman Sachs. A couple of questions. First, can you talk about how categories like coffee and energy will impact your margin and ROIC over time? Essentially, how much do you expect from these categories in your medium-term guidance? That's the first question. Just following up on one of your previous comments about input cost inflation, which is fading. Do you expect much pushback from retailers on pricing towards your end and next year and back about?
Okay, I'll take the first one, and Naya, if you can take the second one, please. On energy, on the business with Monster, over the last several years, we worked very well with Monster in terms of the quality revenue growth management, which has enabled that, we've been improving our margins. Our margins on the energy business are around or even slightly accretive margin-wise to the business. As you might have heard from previous calls, when I talk about coffee today is margin dilutive, which is not surprising, because we, as Prodromos talked about, we are front-loading a lot of investments, teams, technical service, machinery, everything, to really build capability to enable us to right to win. It's a conscious choice that we are investing upfront.
It's a huge market, and it's not walk in the park, so that requires investments. That's why, in this midterm, primary objective is that year on year, our profit and profitability, you know, moves in the right direction. I didn't hide that in the first years, even we were negative with the P&L just because of how we have approached it, but this is a long-term play. We are not here hesitant whether next year we might be in coffee or not. That's not the question. Coffee is a tremendous category, and that's why, it's a blend of the portfolio that enables this play.
Coffee, in terms of the direction of travel, is definitely a category where we have ambition that it has to be at and above margin, average margin that we have.
Excellent.
To pick on the pricing overall, first of all, we deliver strong price mix of 21% in quarter one. We do have confidence when it comes to our pricing plans, because it's always like, well thought, for the full, in a holistic approach. The capability of revenue growth management is really helping us. That said, as Zoran mentioned, moving forward, we will be focusing more on the mix part of other elements, like category pack price. This will be very different per channel. We'd expect price mix to phase out in the second half of the year. Moving forward, our plans will be adjusted to per customer, per channel, to continue play and win in this overall, inflationary environment.
Excellent. Let's take the next question from the middle table. Maria, you're good.
Thanks. It's Charlie Higgs from Redburn. A lot of great initiatives today across Coca-Cola Hellenic, I'm just wondering your perspective on how you see the company as a platform for maybe adding on additional Coca-Cola bottling territories. Have you kind of built a model that you could quickly scale into other markets, as you have with Egypt over the last few years? My second one is just on sparkling. I mean, Zoran, what gives you renewed confidence in the category? Also, how do you ensure that the move into low and no sparkling doesn't cannibalize some of the existing full sugar variants?
Yeah. Thanks, Charlie. First of all, on the territories, I can say that Egypt demonstrates very well the well-structured, disciplined, fast approach in how we integrate market. Even that happening in a very difficult year, like Egypt had last year. We really made and assigned functionally our experts, who were then combined with local team leads, and we had a joint group really working function by function. On one side, helping that we don't drop any ball operationally, but at the same time, elevating the operation to the necessary standards of Hellenic. This doesn't happen overnight. I'll give you one example. Throughout this whole year, we are moving and working on a very sizable project of moving the SAP version that Egypt has to Hellenic S/4HANA.
It's a one-year project. On January 1, I'm looking at Mourad. I'm happy you are nodding with your head. On January, we start with Egypt being fully embedded on systems. If and when in the future, any opportunities in terms of geographies would come to the table from The Coca-Cola Company side, of course, we are fully ready. I'm perfectly confident that we would be able to replicate that on whatever the scale would be. Second, I think that when I took over this role, there was lots of questions about, you know, sugar thing, questionability about sparkling as a category.
I think that we, as a system, it starts with The Coca-Cola Company and with what The Coca-Cola Company team globally and Europe level and Africa level have done with the category to, you know, make it relevant to new upcoming consumers. So much innovation that we mentioned today has been so critical, all the reformulations, to tackle those concerns. Content-wise, now all brands have zero sugar or low sugar variants. Packaging, which is another barrier for certain types of consumers, where we have again among us, aligned approach with 100% recycling under the umbrella World Without Waste. All that impacts sparkling, removing the mental barriers of consumers or whoever in terms of being in the category.
Relevant campaigns and promotions and what Manolo talked today earlier, we can talk about many categories, but truly, biggest chunk of focus and attention and team effort is behind Sparkling. Before COVID, it had already fantastic momentum. It's the key highlight during this crazy period of pandemic that Sparkling performed so well and in so resilient, and now in the recovery, again, performing so well. By no means it's by chance, but it's because of all these things that are happening together. Look, I really have to start and say, like, we are the recipient to say that it starts with a great marketing and how Coca-Cola Company approaches this category to really make it constantly relevant to the new generations and new waves of consumers.
I think it will be also good when we are later in the panel with Nikos, we can touch on that as well. We'd really love.
That's a great place for us to break this Q&A session. We've got more time for questions later. We've got to go for lunch, which is upstairs on the ninth floor. We're going to be back down here for a hard start again at 1:30 PM. I'm afraid there's not a lot of time for lunch. Please get up there, enjoy, fantastic view as well. Come back down for 1:30 PM, we'll recommence with the presentations then. Thank you very much. Thank you to our team, look forward to seeing you back here at 1:30 PM.
Perfect.
Yeah, yeah.
Good afternoon from my side. My name is Katya Ryabets, and I'm Head of Sustainability in Coca-Cola HBC. In the next 15 minutes, I'll take you on our sustainability journey that we started more than a decade ago, and which is today central to our business strategy, creating value and strengthening our resilience. Not only do we believe it's the right thing to do for people and planet, but also it strengthens our right to win with customers and consumers.
We have a proven track record of delivering on our sustainability commitments and being first movers when it comes to setting and achieving our targets. We were among the first companies who set Science Based Targets for climate. We were among the first companies who announced net positive biodiversity commitment last year. In the last 12 years, we reduced our emissions end to end in all three scopes by 30%, while global emissions went up by 12%. Our performance is recognized externally by the leading scores from major ESG benchmarkers, such as CDP, MSCI, and the DJSI. It's no surprise that all our stakeholders' expectations are increasing fast. We see how climate, social, and economic challenges become strongly intertwined, and this requires end-to-end approach and strong partnerships to address them.
We see how this increased pressure also creates opportunities for us to work even closer with our customers, for example, on joint net zero or zero waste programs. We see that growing importance of ESG requires a different thinking to address it in a way that is accretive to growth. We believe this is what sets us apart. Our approach to sustainability is doing what's right while creating value for business and strengthening our resilience. Let me please bring some facts that illustrate this thinking. We have reduced our energy use by 30% since 2010. Not only does this have benefits for emissions reductions, but without this change, we would have EUR 50 million higher costs. 99% of our electricity in EU markets and Switzerland is already from renewable or clean sources. This secures our resilience in highly volatile energy market.
Through implementing deposit return schemes across our EU markets, we expect to reach collection rates at above 90% and have better access to fit stock at stable prices. We invest more than EUR 50 million in three in-house rPET production units, which allowed us to decrease cost of rPET and also secure rPET supply. We reduced calories in SSDs by 17% per 100 ml, and this helps us to decrease emissions and also driving market share growth. As we have heard from Naya, low and no-calories products are what our consumers prefer. Our sustainability strategy covers seven areas, climate, packaging, water, agriculture, nutrition, people and communities, and biodiversity, which we introduced last year. Most of the targets form our Mission 2025 agenda, with bold commitments on net zero by 2040 and biodiversity coming on top. Partnerships are absolutely key to delivering across this broad range.
We have a solid progress across. Let me double-click only on the first three pillars, climate, packaging, and water, which will be the focus of my presentation for today. Net Zero by 40, announced in October 2021, is our most complex, ambitious, and forward-looking commitment. Over the past 12 years, we halved our direct emissions and decreased our total emissions by 30% in all three scopes, which highlights consistency of our approach to decarbonization. In our Net Zero roadmap, starting point is 2017, which is the baseline for our science-based targets. We progress as per plan. By the end of last year, we reduced our emissions by more than 15%, which is ahead of the roadmap.
Our next milestone is to deliver 25% reduction in 2030 versus the same baseline. Relevant reduction plan is already approved and endorsed by the Science Based Targets Initiative in line with the one and a half degrees pathway. Our emissions targets are baked into the management incentive plan and performance share plan, making it both an organizational and an individual priority. Our big bets for reduction in scope one and two, direct emissions and purchased energy, are the following, shift to renewable energy optimization initiatives, green fleet, and incorporating green technologies in our CapEx projects. Almost 90% are in scope three, meaning indirect emissions. Here we focus on the initiatives in three major areas, packaging, ingredients, and coolers, of course, underpinned by close collaboration with suppliers. Let me please play a short video that illustrates our supply chain decarbonization priorities.
CCHBC has reduced overall emissions by 30% in the last 12 years in all three scopes. In scope one and two, we have reduced emissions by 50%, while during the same period of time, global emissions went up by 12%. We continuously invest in solar energy, covering 18 plants at the moment, with 17,000 square meters of installed panels, with a total output of 20 megawatts. We're also applying the latest innovative solutions, like the solar cooling and heating test in RomaNaya, where a solar thermal field will save 74 MWh of electricity and 4,300 tons of CO2 per year. Using biomethane instead of natural gas in Northern Ireland will result in saving more than 12,000 tons of CO2 per year, leading the Knockmore Hill plant to become a net zero site.
In collaboration with Protium UK, we are investigating the usage of green hydrogen as a replacement for fossil fuels in our plant in Austria, with an aim to save 5,000 tons of CO2 and to reduce exposure to energy pricing volatility. On top of the additional plant becoming a net zero site, we plan to utilize hydrogen to decarbonize the whole logistic fleet as well.
Let's turn to the second area of our focus for today, which is sustainable packaging. This plays a critical role for emissions reduction, but also for waste reduction. Our efforts in increasing packaging circularity start from collection. In Mission 2025, we go for 75% collection rate as a target. For this, we are leading industry efforts in introducing deposit return schemes in our European Union markets, as well as efficient collection schemes in our remaining markets. This year, our primary focus would be to support the RS go live in RomaNaya and Ireland, while also making progress in Nigeria collection and being primary advisors in the design of national collection system in Egypt. We are committed to achieving 35% of recycled PET in our plastic packaging.
Our strategy here is to develop an own infrastructure for in-house rPET production, building on the investments in three markets, Italy, Poland and RomaNaya. While at the same time implementing transition to 100% rPET portfolio in selected markets. Such transition has been already deployed in Switzerland, Italy, as we heard from Frank, and Austria last year. Our next big bets are transition in RomaNaya and Ireland later this year. We rely a lot on innovations to increase the share of reusable packaging in a value generating way. We are accelerating the shift to returnable glass bottle from non-returnable because it helps us to decrease emissions, collect at higher rates, and also have stronger margins. Austria is our lead market in end-to-end glass strategy, capturing new occasions and premiumizing consumer and customer experience.
We are also experimenting with new package list machines, such as Compact Freestyle in our out-of-home channels. Consumers can have new and more sustainable consumption experiences, enjoying 40+ beverage choices with up to 70% less emissions versus PET. The beauty of these dispensed machines is that they allow our customers to transition to plastic-free or packaging-free venue or office environment. We continue to innovate in secondary packaging. The KeelClip cardboard can holder is already live in all our European Union markets, replacing plastic with paper and saving around 2,000 tons of plastic annually. Another solution here being piloted as we speak, is LitePac Top. This cardboard holder for our family bottles, for the multipacks of the family bottles, allows to eliminate shrink film as well. On to water stewardship.
Water is the essence of our beverage production, that's why we are committed to protect this valuable resource, both reducing the amount of water we use in our activities and increasing its availability in our communities. To achieve our Mission 2025 objectives, we are working to minimize water use by 20% in plants in water risk zones. All our plants, except those that are recently acquired, are certified by Alliance for Water Stewardship, which confirms that they meet global benchmark for responsible water stewardship. We plan to have water projects in each water risk area where we have plants. Last year, we doubled the number of projects, expanding support in Cyprus, Greece and Nigeria. One of the examples, we started a new water stewardship project in Nicosia, Cyprus.
That includes gray water reuse, rainwater harvesting, information and communication technologies for smart watering, water efficiency applications and awareness building. We are expecting that this project will save around 3 million liters of water annually. In Greece, we launched another program, which is Zero Drop, with the same partners, where a new water piping network is expected to save around 10 million liters of water annually. Another great example, an impactful project recently launched in Nigeria to supply water to 1 million people by transforming river water to drinking quality water. We are proud of our diverse partnerships network, as only due to them we can achieve scale and impact in our sustainability performance. There are far too many to mention all of them here. What I would like to highlight is the increasing importance of sustainability in our customer partnerships.
It is becoming a green thread, as we call it. Busy participating in initiatives of our customers or creating bespoke joint programs, we aim to capture both sustainability and commercial opportunities for our business, our customers' business, and our planet to win, win. One of the examples could be our energy-efficient coolers. Not only it helped to save more than 120,000 tons of emissions, but also brought estimated EUR 72 million cost savings to our customers' energy bills. Our partnerships are beyond only that. We intensively work with our suppliers, and we are also scouting for promising startups. We partner with academia, and among the latest examples is the project on enzymatic recycling of PET with the University of Portsmouth.
Needless to say, that the Coca-Cola system has a long legacy of partnering with NGOs, being close to our communities when and where they need us most. When it comes to funding our ESG agenda, our approach is to integrate sustainability benefits in overall growth-driving initiatives. In 2022, more than EUR 200 million CapEx spend was aligned with our decarbonization and circularity agenda. Last year, we issued our first green bond of EUR 500 million, with the framework fully aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Our key priorities are our PET infrastructure, returnable beverages containers, and energy-efficient coolers. The first-year allocation report will be released later this year. Looking ahead, we want to continue integration of sustainability in our decision-making processes. It already becomes our how, instead of just being a standalone business pillar.
Overall, with every investment that we make, we consider sustainability impact, whether indirectly in productivity or energy efficiency, or directly in, for example, emissions reduction. In our CapEx, the share of spend allocated to the projects with sustainability benefits is increasing. Net zero is integrated in our management incentives. Pack Mix of the Future was launched as one of major organizational initiatives this year. It connects our revenue growth management thinking with net zero thinking, through unique set of tools developed first time within the Coca-Cola system. We are working to introduce a sustainability lens in our new product launches decision-making process, and we will accelerate building sustainability as an organizational capability, with the first sustainability boot camp for customer-facing teams planned for this year, adding to the suite of academies that shared by Zoran and Naya. Let me please conclude with key messages.
Sustainability is embedded in our daily culture. We were reducing amount of packaging, consumption of water, consumption of energy, long before sustainability became a thing. At the end of the day, it has a good business sense to be efficient with resources, because it may help to reduce our costs and increase our margins. It also has a potential to grow our top line, because our customers and our consumers demand more and more of sustainable products. That is why, as Zoran mentioned earlier on, Deliver Sustainably is introduced as one of our four core values, aiming to continue our growth story in a responsible way, in a repeated way, in the right way. Thank you for being with us today.
Thank you, Katya. Right. Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to have a little panel discussion now. What we're going to do is, I'm going to ask Zoran, Naya, and Nikos from The Coca-Cola Company to come and join us. We're just adding a fourth chair. Thank you. No, just at this end, it's fine. Just here is fine. Just turn around, it's perfect. We can hold a discussion. Right, let's do that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Let me bring it a little bit this way. That's fine. Well, look, we're absolutely delighted to have Nikos join us.
We've got a few questions that we're going to go through, which open up some of the themes about the relationship between The Coca-Cola Company and Coca-Cola HBC. I think it's fair to say the last four years have been challenging for the industry. I'd like to maybe pose the question about, Can you share how we've worked together, how you've worked together as a system to develop and manage through these difficult periods? Maybe, Nikos, you'd like to start first.
Of course. Of course. Great to see you all, first of all. I'm working with the company 23 years. Out of those 23 years, 20 with Coca-Cola Hellenic. Very, very happy to partner for a long time with Coca-Cola Hellenic. Let me also say that, you know, probably you have read all about the impact of the pandemic on relationships, and it had mainly a negative impact, right? On partnerships, relationships, et cetera. In our case, it was the opposite. We had a very good partnership even before the pandemic, and the combination of the pandemic and the war made our partnership even stronger. I will expand a little bit on how that happened.
The focus areas that we had the last four years were, first of all, and you heard all of it, just let me a little bit repeat, revenue growth management. I'm not sure you're aware, but, together with Hellenic, we developed, back in 2016, the 10 steps of revenue growth management. Those steps now are adapted by all the world, so the way we work in revenue growth management across the world are, based on the work that we did few years back.
Revenue growth management is very, very important at this point because it really, in this inflationary environment on the one side and recessionary on the other side, it's important to have the right balance of affordability initiatives and premiumization initiatives in order to be able to manage overall, your PNL and hopefully your mix, to be better than pricing alone. This is what we are trying to achieve. The second area that we focus very much, especially during the pandemic, was on adult sparkling. You know, you keep hearing, you saw in the booth, but I cannot underline how important this is for our future. The big data point for Europe is that, as you probably know very well, population is aging. At the moment, the average age of Europeans is 42 years old.
It used to be 38 only 10 years ago, right? It's aging fast. We know that as you age, your taste profile is changing. That's why we're developing a range of brands that we call adult sparkling, because it's very, very important to attract this aging population as better as we can. That's why it's so strategic, so important, and by the way, it's very, very profitable. The third area that we really focused, even before the pandemic, but very much during the pandemic, is sustainability. You know, Hellenic, of course, must be very proud to be the number one beverages company in the Dow Jones Index. In reality, what Katya presented before, that we decided last year to announce a net zero target of 2040, was really a very, very bold move.
A very bold move, as you've seen also other companies, they don't dare, most of them, to announce that. For us, it was announcing and then raising the bar in making it happen. That's why, as you see in Italy now, we have 100% rPET in Italy. In Europe as a total, we are close to 50%, where 50% on rPET is the global target we have as a company for 2030. We have achieved the 2030 target on rPET in Europe years ahead. What we really want is to continue to raise the bar on sustainability, and that's really very, very important. The last and fourth thing that we were forced to focus on more, if I can say that, is data and digital.
Of course, you know, our life became immediately very virtual, very digital during the pandemic, that helped us really accelerate digital capabilities on both sides. You heard Manolo talking about what we do on the marketing side, on the data side with the consumers. Hellenic did even more work, I would say, in all the other areas of digital, in the route to market, in the trade. As a combination, this is also an area that we focus together and doing quite well. Those four things, in reality, in my view, are the things that really helped us progress and develop.
Yeah, first, I would like to echo what Nikos said about working together. You know, they say in crisis, cultures are not shaped, but they are rather revealed. I think same goes for relationships, and I think in this madness that we were going through, this was really surfacing the quality and the way we work together. Personally, I was, I was grateful and very thrilled to see how fast we were acting and reacting, which you can think sometimes, like we are two different companies and you know, working as a system, the speed with which we were making tough decisions about resourcing, funding, prioritization was great. That's one point.
Second, I'm very proud that even in during these tough x, what Nikos mentioned on sustainability, that we did not drop the ball. Fundamentally, focusing on sustainability really means making business more sustainable, and I'm very happy that even in these tough x, we did not cut back on some things that made us ready now to be on rPET, prepare ourselves for the commitment for net zero by 40, which is not just like waking up one day and say, "Well, let's do it." There is quite some work that we've been doing together, you know, dealing with short-term fires, but never losing sight of the long term. Last thing is that in these tough x, we had a support behind communities.
During pandemic, what we've done together, and also last year, the way we have, you know, together, created support funds and various means in supporting people out from both sides of the system and communities in Ukraine. really is something where we act together. I just want to call this out, because it shouldn't be taken for granted, but it's really something that brings the quality of our work and our relationship become very visible. Naya, anything to add?
I think you covered it all, but the two I would call out here is, like, relentless focus on sparkling. What Nikos mentioned, the RGM, we keep repeating that, but for us, RGM is really a discipline for growth, actually discipline for quality growth. All the work we've done back in 2016 with the framework that Nikos mentioned, but also investing behind talent, tools, and everything, is really paying off. This would be the two I would call out.
Thank you. We've already heard from Manolo about the different changes that are going on in the ways of marketing. What other strategic, and other developments have there been in the partnership between The Coca-Cola Company and Coca-Cola HBC as a strategic bottler?
If I can start, I think that what I mentioned as one big learning of this period is prioritization. I think we have together. I think this is very important, how you know what you want to focus on, but equally what you don't want to focus on. Knowing where across all territories, we put resources and where we invest time, but also in which markets we say, "Look, that's not priority, that category." That was something that was a part of learning. Second thing I would just say, look, in this couple of last couple of years, our play in coffee, I would think leads the way globally because we are going full throttle, no half pregnant, but head-on. And that's what we are doing together through constant joint steer course development.
Third point is, big development that has happened is also now our partnering in Egypt. That's tectonic, with all turbulences at the moment, but I think that also I see as a sign of mutual trust, relationship, belief in joint future. I would just call this out.
Let me add three more. One is that the combination, I think, of the pandemic and our sustainability aspiration, made us become much better in long-term planning. This is something that, you know, we always did three years plan, but now the granularity that we do them is very different. Because of our sustainability targets, we look five, 10 years out, much more than before. That is really something new and better and different that helps us also, you know, understand a little bit the future as much, of course, as you can understand it. The second difference is that during the pandemic, we had in the company a major reorganization.
In reality, in the past, our structure and business model was such that 90% of the decisions were taken in the countries and 10% centrally. That, you know, did not serve our purpose on all sides because of having global brands, right? With our new organization now, the 65% of the decisions, roughly, are taken centrally, 35%, locally. We are very lucky with Hellenic, especially, because Hellenic is one of the few bottlers that have a central structure on their side, led mainly by Naya, that we can agree on those more central initiatives and cascade faster down to the countries, and that is really very, very helpful for us. The third point that I think, we progressed is also an integrated execution. As you know, execution is one of our strengths.
We're always good in execution, but the way now that we come from the idea to the creative, content, to seeing it in the store, is much more integrated and much faster than before. You heard Frank talking about the pizza example of Italy. That is a really good example, on how we are working on integrated execution.
Excellent. We've heard a lot today about how the organization has changed to create a much more intuitive mindset, whether it's to do with learning or development of the organization through process and continuous change. What is it that's happening within the companies to sort of embed that, to maintain that culture within the organization? How is it going to continue into the future?
The biggest change, I think, by far, is the way we approach experimentation and failure. The way we approached it before pandemic was a little bit more static, right? We had our business plan. Every October, November, we agreed on everything, and then went and execute. What the pandemic and the war taught us is that we really need to be much more agile and much better in resource allocation. The way we do things now is very different. We have a small committee, for example, Naya is leading on the Hellenic side, where the teams across countries, no matter what we are doing in the business plan, come with extra initiatives every week, and then very fast, approve or not approve those business case initiatives, so we can iterate all the time. That is creating.
These resource allocation principles really create a competitive advantage, in my view. I guess other companies must work in the same direction, but for us, it's really very, very important at the moment. The second, I think, is daring to fail. Innovation is critical, as you heard all the day. But the way you approach innovation really matters. For us, one is the mindset innovation, second is the process of innovation and the way we work together with our bottlers innovation, and the third is the focus of innovation. Katya also mentioned before, but personally, I'm very proud to see that in Europe, a lot of our innovation is focused on sustainability, whether this is the KeelClip or the other stuff that you heard today. Hellenic is really leading the way in this, which is great for us, but also great for the consumer.
The last three years, we see a dramatic change in what consumers say about packaging. For example, now we know that 2/3 of the consumers in Germany and other big countries say that to make a shopping decision, they really care about packaging. That is really important for the way we see things.
Yeah.
Yeah. If I would add, I would say that another element how there is constant nurturing of this mindset is like being out in the market. Being together, discussing what's going on, seeing competitive reactions, seeing opportunities, not only in the offices, where, of course, sometime we have to be, but I think our passion to be in the market, in the outlets, to look at that, is something I would really call out. In fair assessment, I see that as a stronghold. We can talk about, you know, what we can do better. That's one thing. Second thing is, you said mindset. growth mindset will be nurtured by a passion and excitement and drive, but it's not enough alone.
The data in digital insights, analytics that we have been investing so much over the last three years, I think this is something that gives the substance to the heart and passion, so that it's. We're doing it in a more informed way. Sometimes when we work with consultants who see things that we have in the company, they tell us that we sit on abundance of data like they have never seen two organizations. How do we put that together so that we get the insights, which then blended with, crazy, passion and drive, you know, I think that will help in how we are evolving our mindset. Naya?
Yeah, I would add one more here, the talent exchange overall. To talk numbers, the last three years, we had, like, 62 moves within the system. We're very passionate about it because in that way, we're really sort of go after upskilling, reskilling, but also allowing the talents to be relevant. This is something very healthy, and we're proud for that.
Yeah, it certainly seems to be part of the culture to encourage people to explore.
Yeah.
Within the whole system rather than just within individual parts. It's very impressive. Maybe the last question, what do you see as the most important challenges ahead for both The Coca-Cola Company, Coca-Cola Hellenic, and how we work together?
Naya.
Challenges, I think we covered already, like, when it comes to, the macro is one.
Well, let's look at the opportunities as well.
Yes. I just want to say there, like, you know, the, the way we're doing things, which is not only the what, but also the how, proves that we can go after any challenge, working together as a strong system team. From an opportunities perspective, I mean, many were mentioned before. I would pick up two, the experimentation and innovation that Nikos mentioned earlier, and Zoran. It's not about a new product, a new category. I mean, the way we are trying to bring some type of a fresh approach in everything we're doing, it's something that really registers well in the system. Earlier, we talked about CustomerGauge. This is an example of innovation because, you know, we used to listen to our customers via this once-per-year survey, right?
With this, we do have an always-on sort of approach. This is one example of innovation. The second part is investments. We can all be excited with a new product, with anything new, but, you know, investment is what really makes it very specific in terms of reasons to believe on top of the rest. This would be the two I would call out here.
Let me add two.
Yeah.
Two more. One is how we bring our culture to life. I think similar to what Naya said, for me, from all the numbers we show today, the one that I think is the most important is the 62 people of talent exchange. Maybe it says nothing to you as a number, but only 3, 4 years ago, this number was five per year or zero or three. When you start to exchange 60 of your senior managers, that creates an amazing dynamic and competitive advantage for the system. 'Cause people go, come back with more knowledge on both sides, and that, for me, is fantastic for the years ahead. The culture we create with the trust we have developed together, I think that's very, very important.
The second is the excitement of becoming a total beverage company, sorry, and how we are going to do that. On the company side, we have as priorities, the alcoholic ready-to-drink. We started with Jack and Coke, and then we have more to come. We have tea as another category that also is relevant for adults. It's a category that's very relevant to us, and of course, adult sparkling that we discussed, and we see the progress, and we will see much more progress. That is as part on how we see developing as a total beverage company. That I think is what we need to accelerate more to do even better.
Thank you. Zoran?
I'll build on, I'll build on that. Two, three things. One is that I would build what Charlie asked earlier, is. I think I base my biggest excitement of what and how and what we will be doing with sparkling. That's the, that's the biggest thing. That's our competitive advantage from whenever we do our independent and joint assessments of the next decade or decades, you see the areas from which the growth will come from. Those areas are sparkling, energy, and coffee. Sparkling provides so many avenues and opportunities, so I'll just reinforce that point. Second is, I think there is an exciting part as well, what we are doing in sustainability.
On The Coca-Cola Company side, Europe is a continent that leads the way globally, and we are very proud to be, you know, co-doing, some things on our own, but many things together. It's not only what we are doing for us as a two companies and as a system, or only for Hellenic, but it's also how we are shaping, influencing the whole industry. I think there is a bigger purpose of impact that we want to do, for the broader benefit.
Last thing, I think what Nikos very well said, you've seen I've included in my remarks, a culture piece. I think this is really truly something that you can't, like, touch, but either it helps you or it, not to say a bad word, but, it stops you. That's why being very open, having a mirror view on, yes, where we are great, where we are strong, but also being super honest, what doesn't work, and addressing it very transparently, you know, through people, exchange, how we learn from each other, moving fast. I think that the culture element is something that excites me.
I personally strongly believe in that to be the catalyst and the differentiating factor of how everything that we do on the corporate level, but ultimately, the moment of truth is how that translates in every single outlet.
Yeah.
What people do, but also, are they doing it with a, with a smile? Are they doing it with shining eyes? Eventually, does make a difference of how one executes versus any other competitor. I strongly believe in that, and, this is something where one can never stop.
Yeah.
We will never give up on forcing ourselves to be better every single day, in a very honest way, and, so.
Very good. Well, look, thank you very much. Thank you to Nikos and to Manuel, Manolo, earlier, because we had a fantastic participation from The Coca-Cola Company today. You and Manuel, Manolo, gave us some really good insights into the business. We appreciate your contribution and participating, we know it's a commitment of your time. Thank you very much indeed, thank you very much for taking part in the panel.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much.
All right. Oh, thank you, Nikos, Zoran, and Naya, for that wonderful panel and for sharing with us how we see, how we work as a system. Good afternoon to those of you here today and to those of us joining us via the webcast. Look, I would like to share with you how we've consistently delivered strong financial results and basically, why we have so much conviction, and confidence that we can continue to grow this business profitably over the years. In order to do that, first, let's look at our historical results, because it will help us set the context of where we're coming from and where we are in our journey.
This company has delivered strong financial performance since 2016, showing resilience through different business cycles and also trying x. Our track record speaks for itself. In terms of volume, we've seen an acceleration in growth from an average organic growth of about 3% in the 2016-2019 period, to basically a very healthy 5% between 2020 and 2022. Volume and revenue recovered remarkably well post-pandemic, surpassing 2019 levels by a very wide margin. Approximately 14% organic growth in volumes and 30% organic revenue growth. We have markedly increased price mix across all segments, and the decisive progress we've made in growing revenues is testament to that commitment.
Our focus on cost management help us deliver the highest ever EBIT in 2021 of 11.6% in terms of margins, followed by a record level in absolute EBIT in 2022. It's also worth highlighting that, on average, our EBIT expansion has consistently outpaced top-line growth, that demonstrates our focus on increasing the financial fitness of this business and creating shareholder value. The work that we have done improving efficiencies and moving towards a more variable cost structure has generated tangible savings and also resulted in a more agile business. Let me illustrate with a couple of examples. When it comes to production efficiencies, even though the bulk of the restructuring work in both production and logistics was completed by 2016, we have since delivered a 40% reduction in the number of distribution centers.
We've also embraced automation, automatic line changeovers, predictive maintenance, robotic warehousing, and all of these initiatives have resulted in savings of about EUR 100 million since 2020. In addition to optimizing our infrastructure, we have implemented various projects to improve operational expenses. For instance, in 2020, reacting to the pandemic, we swiftly deployed a series of cost-cutting initiatives or cost-containing measures, reducing our operating expenses by about EUR 120 million in a single year. That annual productivity program is really embedded within our operations. By continuously identifying efficiency enhancements, we have bolstered our financial performance, and right now, from current visibility, we do not anticipate restructuring efforts. Our efficiency initiatives are organized into four distinct pillars, production, operational, sustainability, and digital. Zoran previously discussed our operational initiatives and how we are redeploying our people's capabilities with more adaptable structures without creating additional cost.
Katya just highlighted how our efforts behind the sustainability agenda at the same time, create considerable cost savings for our company now and for the future. Finally, you've heard from Ivo Mourad during the accelerator about how we continue digitizing our company and generating savings while doing so. Let me provide a bit more color on some of the productivities initiatives we're working on. Our ongoing investment to new production lines and the replacement of old ones enable automatic line changeovers. This adds flexibility to our manufacturing process, allowing us to respond faster with less weight, waste to fluctuations in demand. We're implementing digital tools to monitor our production processes. It's precisely that integration of technologies that improves the overall performance and efficiency of our manufacturing operations.
Our new production lines also consume less energy, resulting in reduced utilities cost, in addition to lowering our carbon footprint. This also had the further benefit of decreasing production overheads as percentage of sales. To continue to reduce costs and or our cost to serve as percentage of revenue, we are also enhancing our logistics network by expanding automation across all of our markets. By doing that, we improve flexibility, we minimize any supply chain disruptions. On top of that, we deliver top-notch customer service, which is ultimately what we're after. We see that the energy category, and we've heard it earlier today, is strategic. It's one of our enterprise priorities where we anticipate to deliver outsized growth over the midterm. We're adding dedicated lines to Monster products, one of them in Italy.
Three more are planned. They will be operational by 2024, and this increases our ability to meet demand. This also improve asset utilization and absorption of fixed costs, as well as opening up additional revenue streams through toll filling. Turning to our balance sheet, it remains robust, underpinned by reliable delivery of strong free cash flow, with an 8% growth on average since 2016, despite the challenging backdrop. In fact, in 2022, we achieved a record free cash flow of EUR 645 million, an increase of nearly 50% compared to the levels we've seen back in 2016. This growth is a result of our focus on profitability, because at the same time, we've improved EBITDA by over 60% versus 2016.
In addition, our efficient working capital management and continuous improvement of the cash conversion cycle has delivered substantial inflows for three consecutive years now. While we keep on generating strong cash flows, this has been by focusing on efficiencies, by delivering robust financial performance, we have not compromised on the investments in the business to support present and future growth. We have consistently deployed a healthy level of capital expenditures, which has increased 9% on average annually since 2016. It's very important to note that these investments are disciplined, and we have respected our guided range of 6.5%-7.5% of CapEx as % of revenue. Our investments are primarily focused on driving organic growth within our business as we expand market reach and also enhance our operations. Again, let me share a few examples.
That means installing new capacity in priority markets and leading manufacturing technologies. That means investing in the next generation of energy-efficient, connected coolers that drive our route to market and increase the penetration of single-serve packs. In 2022 alone, we deployed 100,000 coolers in our markets. We continue to accelerate our digital transformation. 13% of the 2022 CapEx went to digital initiatives. Last, but certainly not least, all of the investments that we make in the company are done considering our sustainability agenda, in order to meet our commitments, targets, and deliver a better business. Our strong balance sheet provides us with flexibility. This can help us make investments and realize organic and inorganic value creation opportunities.
Our 1st priority is going to be to allocate the right level of resources in order to generate the organic growth that we're targeting in the business. I just outlined how we're investing in market reach and also in strengthening our operations. Secondly, our strong free cash flow allows us to maintain that progressive dividend policy with a sustainable payout ratio of 40%-50%. We also pursue strategic M&A opportunities, and we have invested EUR 800 million since 2019 in acquisitions, and we'll see more of that in the next slide. Finally, if we cannot find more effective uses of capital, we remain committed to returning it to shareholders, and this may be in the form of special dividend, like we did back in 2019.
Before moving on, a reminder that we target net debt to EBITDA at 1.5x to 2 x, ensuring a prudent, balanced leverage while driving the right returns. Our track record of successful M&A and strategic investments is a powerful instrument for growth. This expands our business, and more importantly, creates value. There are two types of M&A opportunities that we generally pursue. The first one is geographic expansion, and the timings of these deals are aligned in conjunction with The Coca-Cola Company. Of course, any new territory must make strategic sense for us. We remain willing and able to evaluate opportunities when they may arise. Recent examples of this approach is obviously Egypt, which we acquired back in January 2022, and of which you've heard a lot today. The second type of opportunity are the bolt-on acquisitions and investments.
Our focus here is really to enhance our portfolio, either by acquiring brands that add value to existing categories with the potential to be scaled up or by acquiring brands that complement our existing propositions of the categories. Our acquisition of Lurisia and Three Cents, super premium brands that improve our existing adult sparkling portfolio, are good examples of this. Our balance sheet gives us optionality. We can react when the right opportunities come along, and by the right opportunities, I mean those that make strategic sense and also financial sense for Coca-Cola HBC. Before we dive into the midterm outlook, I would like to highlight ROIC and our performance over the past couple of years. When evaluating our results, ROIC is a crucial KPI.
To maintain that vision of being the leading 24/7 beverage partner, it is essential that we make thoughtful choices, ensuring efficient and effective deployment of capital to drive that profitable growth that we're after. I'm pleased that we have driven continuous improvements in ROIC. In 2022, we delivered a ROIC of 15.8%, excluding Egypt, which is a significant step up, 5.5 percentage points, versus the kind of ROICs that we were delivering back in 2016. This is as we continue to invest also substantial CapEx. As revenues and profitability grow, we're also enhancing our asset investment efficiency. We maintain that laser-like focus on improving returns while simultaneously expanding the business. Turning now to growth, we have a profound understanding of our growth algorithm.
In the last four years, we've taken advantage of 5% industry growth and executed our strategies effectively, adding 270 basis points of market share. Our strong revenue growth management capabilities, which you heard from Naya earlier, resulted in those growing volumes, + an improvement in price mix of 4.7% on average per annum over the same period. Again, as Naya described in her presentation, we benefit from operating in the non-alcoholic ready-to-drink category, which continues to expand at a very healthy rate, and we expect to grow ahead of the market, taking share. This is going to be propelled by the strength of our unique and broad portfolio, combined with the increased investments in marketing that we're having and our best-in-class capabilities.
While we don't expect price mix to continue expanding at the same levels that we've seen in the past 12 months, we do see price mix improvements as we go forward, driven by category, package, channel, and yes, pricing, too. This is a result of the commercial strategies that we have outlined and shared with you today. Okay. Right. All right. We expect to drive organic EBIT growth ahead of organic revenue growth, and that's over the medium term. This is supported by four key pillars, price, mix, operational leverage, and cost efficiencies. Pricing will continue to contribute positively to EBIT and derive growth year-over-year, albeit at a more moderate pace versus the recent past, as some of those inflation pressures that we've seen recently ease. In terms of mix, we expect that category mix is going to be positive.
It's going to be a positive growth driver, propelled by sparkling and energy. Also, our continuous improvement in single serve across all categories should help deliver a better package mix. Finally, at a country level, we expect markets like Egypt and Nigeria to improve their margins over the midterm. That's the same also for developing markets such as Poland and Hungary after the reset, from the sugar taxes that have been implemented in the recent past. Another enabler here is operational leverage, as we will continue reducing fixed costs while growing the business.
Finally, as discussed in previous slides, the ongoing cost optimization and strong cost discipline culture that we have in the company will help us continue to grow revenues ahead of operating expenses, which will be another key lever in terms of achieving that goal to drive EBIT faster than we can drive revenue. Bringing it all together, I'm pleased to provide with an update on the midterm outlook for the period beyond 2023. First and foremost, we expect organic revenue growth in the 6%-7% average per year, and that's ahead of our previous guidance and of the industry growth that we see for NARTD in our markets. Secondly, we are confident in our ability to grow EBIT faster than revenue.
As a result, we continue to expect that organic EBIT margin expansion in the 20 to 40 basis points on average per annum, driven by the key enablers that I mentioned earlier. Our focus on expanding ROIC remains. We will continue to invest in the organic growth of the business in a disciplined manner, and as part of this approach, the CapEx to revenue ratio will remain between 6.5% and 7.5%. We believe that this range is sufficient to cover the necessary investments that the organization requires. In addition to the strong revenue and EBIT growth, our ability to generate cash,
has been exceptional in recent years, and we expect to keep on growing free cash flow over the medium term to support our capital allocation priorities. Before handing over to Soren, let me conclude by saying we are confident in our growth algorithm, building on a proven track record. We expect to continue to drive efficiencies in the business. This, in turn, is going to help us deliver EBIT growth ahead of revenues in the coming years. With our strong balance sheet, we confirm our capital allocation priorities to deliver organic growth for the business, and more importantly, value for shareholders. Thank you.
Well done, Ben. Now you're with the Q&A. Right. This brings us to our final Q&A session for the afternoon. If I could ask Zoran, Naya, and Ben to come up onto the stage, that'll be great. Once again, we have the ability to take questions from the online audience. If you are joining us online, please don't hesitate to submit a question, and I will do my best to feed it into the session. Whilst they're getting settled, I've been told for those who are staying for the market visit, the weather's not good. We've got umbrellas. We will hopefully keep you all dry during the course of the afternoon. More on that in a minute. Now, everybody's settled, why don't we turn it over to questions?
I think we'll do the same as we did last time. We'll start in the middle, but we'll start with Fintan. Please use the microphone and give your name, if you could.
Good afternoon. Fintan Ryan here from Goodbody. Within the 6%-7% midterm organic sales guidance, how should we think of that between regions in terms of developing, established, developing, and emerging? Specifically, how does Russia fit into that sort of midterm algorithm?
The last part?
How does Russia?
First of all three segments will contribute to that algorithm. In the established, where we really see in the last number of quarters, we really feel quite optimistic about the established segment. Developing, I think, is really performing really well. At the moment, we have a more, let's say, a bit more soft on the Africa front, but that always comes in like cycle and waves. Emerging will continue really contributing. I would say that all three are to be at the level of this guided algorithm. Maybe, you know, depends on the years.
That's why we say in average, but I think that all three segments are the ones from which we expect growth to come. For Russia question, look, this is not a market where we are driven with current circumstances on our performance management. However, everything as it goes over there, you know, just following the demand within the environment over there, so it also fits in the environment. We see that in this whole new model that has been done, this business has always been in a very good shape. It continues on strong fundamentals that exist there.
We do see that, primarily driven by price mix, the revenue generation, will be for sure in the positive front. That would be my expectation.
Excellent. Let's come into the middle, maybe to Simon first.
Yeah, thanks. Simon Hales from Citi. A couple, please, maybe one for Ben to start with. Just as we think about COGS into next year, clearly, we've talked a little bit about COGS coming down. What are your latest thoughts there now, particularly against the backdrop of higher sugar costs, higher juice costs? Are we thinking we might see cost deflation? How does that fit into your 20-40 basis points medium-term margin guidance? Is that included, what we might see in COGS next year in that guidance, or are we really thinking 20-25 onwards is midterm rather than 2024? That's the first one.
Okay. Thank you, Simon. That is included in there, in that guidance. That expectation, we incorporated the latest that we, that we've seen. Obviously, you know, you said it yourself very well, that the environment in commodities is very, you know, is very volatile at the moment. We were not expecting sugar to go up so high, even then, that's the expectation for us, that the algorithm, it starts beyond 2023.
Just to check, secondly, with regards to the midterm guidance, and coming back to Fintan's question around Russia, if we were to exclude Russia from the midterm guidance, does the midterm guidance still hold?
It does.
Okay.
It does.
Perfect. I'll pass it on to you.
Why don't we just pass the microphone to Sanjeet for now, and then we'll change table.
We need to move here.
Oh, sorry.
Great. Two from me as well, Sanjeet from Credit Suisse. Historically, 11% margins has been a bit of a benchmark for the business, right? I think it's been your previous peak. When we were here in 2019, you spoke about 20 to 40 basis points margin expansion per annum on an 11% base. you know, in 2020, I mean, that would have implied 12%-13% EBIT margin by 2025. If we look at consensus expectations for 2023, I think it's around 9.5% margin. By that point, you know, growing 20 to 40 basis points per annum would only get you back to 11% by 2027.
you know, just love to get a sense of, you know, what's the right base on which we should be extrapolating that 20 to 40 basis points. you know, it's medium term, do you still see, you know, margins potentially getting to the 12%, 13% range, which was the ambition back in 2019? Thanks.
I can take that. Basically, this guidance, Sanjeet, is beyond 2023. What that means is that we need to take 2023 as base, and then we start building from there in terms of the margin expansion. You're right that, you know, given the headwinds of COVID, war in Ukraine, the extraordinary commodity inflation that we have seen over the past two years, then that has put a let's say, a delay in that trajectory. But, we still consider we can get there, even if not by 2025.
I would like to add that, being there in 19, thinking about the world going forward, obviously didn't have in mind what happened from 2020 onwards. We could have prioritized margin element, which would significantly constrain the top line, and then what it would do at the bottom line. That's why we openly said that last year, as well as this year, we felt that it's the right thing for the business to focus on the absolute. To really make the blend of how to really leverage top-line opportunities. It was a choice. It didn't happen to us. We really felt that's the right thing for the business. Going forward, as Ben said, from 2024, we like.
We feel that it's fair to guide with this range. Sometimes this per average means that it can be maybe 10 basis points, God knows what's there, but it could as well be, you know, well above 40. Our ambition is that the business has to continue growing with all the reasons we said, but also that there is a work and opportunity clearly on the margin front. We will remain mindful on how we develop margin, but also not constraining the top line, given nature of the markets.
Got it. Just my second question is just coming back to Russia. Clearly, you've had some good success with the launch of the local portfolio, the new model, and appreciate you're not really investing in that business. You know, should we understand Russia to be a business that is, in the new model, margin accretive to CCH? I think it was last year. Just love to get a sense of, you know, what you think steady state level margins are for the new normal model there. You know, in a situation where you're really unable to extract cash out of that business today, you know, how do you look to extract value?
You know, would you be potentially open to even disposing of that business down the line if you continue to be unable to extract cash? Thanks.
Yeah. I'll touch on the first one. I would think about business in Russia as not being margin dilutive. I think that's fair to say. To which extent with the circumstances they are, but it's not margin dilutive, and with today's visibility, that's what I would say we see. How that evolves, we'll see.
Yeah. So basically, on your point, that's precisely why we said that, you know, we have set up, how we've organized that business. You know, self-sustainable, as Zoran said, is not being to maximize performance management. When it comes to, repatriation of dividends, as you know, it's very constrained at the moment. There's no specific mechanism to do that right now. That is why when we think about liquidity for the group and we think about cash planning and investments, we're not counting on Russia up streaming. That, whatever it is of that business in terms of value, is being accumulated in there for the time being, which is what helps it be self-sustainable without having to require any investment from the group.
Yeah. just to add on that it is not a strategic priority for us, at this point of time, Russia. Yeah.
Let's move to the next table, and maybe to Mitch first, and then over to the other.
Thank you. It's Mitch Collett from Deutsche Bank. Ben, you outlined multiple drivers of margin upside. You've got sort of several countries coming back to previous levels of profitability or closing their gap. You've got the adjacencies, and I appreciate coffee isn't margin accretive yet, but it might be in the future. You've got the operational efficiencies, and you've got pricing. I guess you kept your margin guidance the same. Is it right to think that sort of growth mindset of the business is that if you are able to achieve margin expansion over and above that 20-40 basis points, you just reinvest that excess margin in generating further growth? Is that the right way to think about it? Then you commented on geographic, the geographic component by talking about those countries.
Is it fair to say that, the divisional differentials, even if they're all at the level of the guidance, is likely to be a slight margin drag at the same time?
Okay. Let me touch on your first point, which is, Is there further upside beyond that guidance? That's really the essence of the question, if I understood correctly. We've said, you know, 20 to 40 basis points, and Zoran said it very well, which is there will be years where there'll be more than that. There'll be years where it's probably less than that, because that's what we say on average. What that does is that, to your point, Mitch, it allows us to focus on delivering the right level of investments for the business, reinvestments, create the business of the future, like coffee, for example, create the next generation of our, you know, connected machines, digitization, et cetera.
It allows us to invest, not only on the business of today, but also of tomorrow. It's a good range to have in there, and it will not be exactly 20 or exactly 40 every year, but on average over that period.
There is also an element that there is an element of investment, which, if we don't do it, yes, there could be 10 or 20 basis points that can be margin improving. However, instead of adding 200 people in Italy, could we do an algorithm that it was 100, but then kind of piggyback more in the, in the bottom line and somehow see. As we created and resourced group teams behind data, insights, analytics, and various teams, reflects the fact that we really want to invest. That's why I don't call it cost, but it's an investment. That's why it's a balance of how we think about margin, but also about doing more investments than probably some other companies are doing.
It reflects the belief how we want to build this business, not only for next year, but also that it stands and that it's better for three, four years ahead. That's the balance.
Your second point was in the geographical mix. If I understood correctly, you were wanted to get some more clarity about some of the geographies that are, let's say, margin dilutive, expand faster, whether that put a drag on margin. Was that the question? Okay. Basically, when we look at our algorithm, we have a number of geographies that we need to advance the margins. We talk about Egypt, Zoran has mentioned it in the past, for example. What we expect is that as that business improves, so improves the equation of the total group. We also have the benefit that, you know, we also have other fast-growing geographies that have higher margin than that, so therefore it balance out. The answer is no. There's no mechanical drag.
The expectation is that those geographies are going to keep on improving.
A related follow-up, if that's okay. The digital tools you've outlined today, I guess they help you do a lot of the labor-intensive jobs within the group at a more efficient level. Is the long-term goal to sort of redeploy that efficiency saving in driving growth, or is there ultimately a margin component to being able to do those tasks more efficiently?
I think it's both.
Yeah.
It's not going to be just one way, but it's both. Yeah.
Let's move to another table. Mandeep, I know you had a question, shall we move to the table at the back?
Thank you. It's Mandeep Sangha from Barclays. Just wanted to piggyback on the margin question that's been asked a couple of x. When you acquired the Egypt business, announced it back in August 2021, one of the things the statement said is to get the margin towards the group level over time. On the slides today, the target was to expand the margin. Is it fair to say that it is the target is to get it to group margin still, or is it now that you've had the business, you've seen that there's probably maybe some more reinvestment needed in the near term? That means that margin expansion is the goal rather than getting it to group margin. Is that just trying to see if there's a difference in the wording there?
Yeah. It's more the latter. The reason why I say that is because we know that Egypt has had a very difficult 2022. You know, it's a combination of macro factors. On the one hand, you have the currency that appreciated 97% between January and April this year. Then you have a lot of inflation as well in the market. All of these factors put a lot of pressure in the very near term. Nonetheless, the fundamentals of Egypt remains, you know, we've heard it from Zoran and Maria in the past, it's a very attractive market, and we're very excited to have it in the portfolio.
Yeah. I would just echo that we didn't, we didn't buy that franchise to stay endlessly on a low single-digit no. It, it might, because of really unforeseen, everything coming together in one year, in hindsight, it's not bad that it came in year one. There are also benefits of that in how you rewire faster, what you need to do there. But definitely, Egypt is a market with potentiality, not only on the top line, but structurally, it offers the opportunity that, like a number of other emerging markets, when you see Russia, where it used to be at some point, where it used to be and where it was brought to, and have a strong margin, accretive impact to Coca-Cola Hellenic over time, Egypt for sure fits that spec of the potentiality.
It might take a little bit more time. Now, if that takes one or two, three years longer than we originally anticipated, that's fine. We are not in sprint on this. We are on a longer journey.
Maybe just two follow-on question. If I look back to the 2019 CMD, one of the comments that was made is because you had such a big opportunity in the likes of energy, that sparkling may fall below 70% of the group portfolio. We sit at 72% today.
Given the huge opportunity when we talk about adult per capita consumption in the likes of Italy and Nigeria, as well as low and no sugar. Do you still think below 70% is the right place to think about sparkling as a percentage of group? Do you think it can actually grow from 72% today?
Look, I would say that the fact that sparkling kept its percent above 70% also reflects, I would say, two critical things. One is that within sparkling, there has been a lot, especially in the area of adult sparkling, what we've been doing, and so many things that I don't want to repeat again. I think really reignited sparkling as a category. On the other side, what usually creates a big percent of non-sparkling is water category, in which we make a deliberate choice not to play aggressively in the segment, which is volume competition among many players. We really made that choice that we are not going to go after buying volume. We'll focus on enhanced and more premium segments.
That, by default, a little bit constrains the fact that it's not booming as maybe a few years ago we were thinking about water, so it's part of the learning and making a choice, what we go after and not. We see that sparkling will continue growing, but A, sparkling category growth has to be there, but if that, over time, loses share in the total contribution, no problem.
Let's come back to the middle. Andrea first, and then to Charlie.
Thank you. Andrea Pistacchi from Bank of America. You've been keen in the past to do deals in Africa. I think you potentially still are keen. You've done Egypt. How do you think how much would you be prepared to tilt the balance of the business towards emerging markets, given that so far, I mean, emerging the balance, emerging and developed markets has helped you a lot? Sort of as a follow-up on this, a bit related to M&A, your balance sheet is below the target of 1.5-2. How long would you be prepared to keep the balance sheet under-levered, waiting for a deal, before you decide, say, to do a special dividend?
Yeah. I'll say a few words on the first, and then.
Sure.
Give you the pleasure of the second. On the first one, the fact that we have Nigeria for 72 years, where it all started, and now Egypt, reflects that we really believe in the, in the potentiality of this continent. We are patient, because those who are not patient should not play in emerging markets. That's one learning, because every year brings something. We remain open for the opportunities if they can come up. You know how this works. This is in the, this is, the steering wheel of The Coca-Cola Company. We openly say that we believe we have the firepower, capacity, capability to do things, but they, as always, have to have a strategic fit.
They have to be of the nature that, on the horizon, can and will create value to shareholders. That's why that does not mean that anything in Africa, we would say, "Yes, we go after it." That doesn't mean that. We would be very open, but very choiceful that it has to fit the strategic blend and economic potentiality. That's why there are some things that we would really openly consider if they would come our way, but also some other things, especially, you know, selective markets in isolation, I probably wouldn't see that working.
Yeah, on the leverage, we finished 2022 with 1.2 x, which is a bit below our guided range, but it's not, like, massively below. I think the balance sheet is in a good place. As we've said before, it's just a matter of depending what opportunities come along. Just to give you a point of reference, when we did the special dividends, well, it was 0.6, the leverage, really needed intervention in there. We're not there yet.
Very, a very quick, sorry, unrelated follow-up, if I may? You were talking about we talked about the margins in Egypt. Another market where I think margins have come down probably quite a bit is Nigeria. I could be wrong. What is the path to rebuild in Nigeria? Is it a slow burn or will it contribute shorter term?
I take that? Look, Nigeria again is another market where you've seen some depreciation of the naira, constraints in terms of hard currency as well, and that increased the cost of business. Now, as Zoran says, in emerging markets, we need to be patient. The trajectory is definitely upwards, but it's not a straight line, so it moves, it goes in cycles. We expect Nigeria to continue to improve their margin trajectory over the midterm.
That's why what Naya and the team have been doing over the last few years in a very orchestrated way was a deliberate focus on price mix. Naya and the team are there on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, there is a great focus and reminder that all our leading capabilities, Nigeria is always the first or in the first wave of anything we do, and we do see that it makes us more capable what happens there. I strongly believe that it's on a slower front, but it's going to go in the right direction.
Yeah, if I may, for this type of markets like Nigeria, there is a different type of pace when it comes to the algorithm, different elements of the algorithm. We know that when it comes to Nigeria should be a double-digit revenue growth overall, the pace in terms of the different elements of the algorithm is very different. This year, like, the algorithm will be more driven by price mix, there are different dynamics that we will go after. This is how it works in these type of markets.
Excellent. We have time for one more, so if I may, Charlie, you've been patient. I'll pass to Charlie, and then we'll after that.
Thanks. Charlie Higson from Bloomberg, I'll do a quick one. It's just on working capital and that side of business. I mean, you just spoke about three years of consecutive improvements. How much further is there to go on working capital? Where is there scope for refinement? Do some of your investments in digital, like better demand forecasting, perhaps help there?
Yeah, spot on. You almost answered the question. As we continue to improve in things like demand forecasting, there is an opportunity to, you know, to optimize working capital further when it comes to specialty stocks. This is not a short-term thing. As you rightly said, we have been delivering tremendous inflows of working capital for three consecutive years, and you know that every time that that happens, the bar gets higher and higher. I don't think it is sensible to expect that kind of level of inflows to repeat, for example, in 2023.
Excellent. Well, look, we're going to bring the Q&A to a halt there. I'm going to hand back to Zoran for some closing remarks. Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Naya, for participating in the Q&A. Over to you, Zoran.
Yeah. Thank you all, first of all, for all the questions, and very fruitful conversation. We stay around, so really happy to discuss and any other questions that you have. As we close, just a few final thoughts. When I finished my opening remarks this morning, I shared these few key messages that I would really like you to take away with you from today's session. We are continuing to grow sustainably and profitably, led by very strong categories and capabilities across a growth-rich footprint of countries, and all enabled by excellent, strong people and partners.
When I spoke to many of you in 2019, we've been a period of restructuring, where we improved the flexibility and efficiency of the business, with which we then delivered a period of quite strong recovery and operating leverage. Since 2019, we managed through a period of significant change, adapting to our model as a result of quite challenging market conditions, while still staying the course and investing in our portfolio and our capabilities and delivering strong financial results. As we look forward, while we do see mailing challenges, we also see abundance of opportunities that are out there. The consumer, we see, has pretty much returned to a normal way of behaving with, yes, some definitely visible shifts post-pandemic.
All that is benefiting our out-of-home channel in a positive way. We see that GDP growth in many economies is proving resilient, or I would say more resilient than estimates were maybe end of last year or beginning of this year. We see that in a number of places, consumer demand is holding up, and despite some evident pressures on the affordability. The balanced combination of strong revenue growth, EBIT growing faster than the revenue growth, improving returns, and strong level of growing free cash flow will define whatever is the new normal ahead of us. We are operating in a market with very exciting growth forecasts across different categories.
Within such a growing market, we are applying a prioritized approach as one of the key learnings from operating through the challenging x of the last three years. This is particularly true of how we have continued to develop our categories, placing the biggest and intentional focus behind sparkling energy and coffee, while making deliberate prioritization behind other categories for each market. The investments we continue to make in our prioritized capabilities underpin our growth, ambitions, and plans, and we see that as something that really help us in easier years as well as more challenging years. Our capabilities have been enhanced with value-added tools driven by data, insights, and analytics, as well as digital and technology enhancements, behind which we've really put quite some investment.
As Naya has explained, all this boils down to the fact that these capabilities drive our ability to deliver personalized execution in every outlet in which we strongly believe in, improving our customer experience, and sustaining our position as our customer's leading value creator. All our capabilities are fueled by talent development as our critical lighthouse capability. I share with you how our diversified geographic exposure provides both strong growth opportunities and resilience to the business. This is further enforced by the acquisition of Egypt. Despite short-term volatility, the strong long-term fundamentals for our emerging segment make the segment very attractive, particularly given the favorable demographics and share gaining opportunities in many of those markets.
This combination of market reinforces, our expectation that NARTD industry in our market should grow between 4% to 6% in the medium term, and the sparkling soft drink, in particular, growing 5% to 6% per annum. Our growth ambition is further underpinned with a per capita consumption growth opportunities that we clearly have in a number of markets. As Katja laid out earlier, we are committed to our net zero by 2040 target, and to drive tangible actions to contribute to the World Without Waste, while continuously making more efficient use of resources like energy and water. With this, we want to make a visible, positive impact while increasing the societal perceptions of the acceptability of our products. This is not only critical as our license to operate, but it also makes a more competitive and future-proof business.
We are committed to delivering strong results, but done in a good way. I hope we have also reinforced how essential our people and partners are to our success. Our joint focus on consumers and customers is at the heart of our performance and creating a shared value. Today, we've talked about how we develop the talent in the organization, continuously improving our structures and processes to help them work more efficiently, investing in best-in-class tools, enhanced with data and digital expertise, helping our people add real value to our customers. You will see, hopefully, some of the examples of that in the market pieces that we are just about to embark on.
As Ben said, we have a high level of confidence in the organic revenue growth algorithm, driven by the powerful combination of market volume and value growth, share gains, and the ability to combine and balance price mix and mix changing across our categories, packs, channels, and countries. This allows us to update our financial targets for the medium term with a sustained focus on the organic revenue growth, but at a higher level, underpinned by our commitment to improving organic EBIT margins of 20%-40%, as we discussed, on average, per annum. Return on invested capital and free cash flow will be areas where we expect further improvements as we continue to invest in the business to drive the organic revenue growth for many years to come.
Together with the strength of our portfolio, diversity of our markets, and our capabilities, we, as one team of committed, growth-focused people, continue our acceleration towards our vision of being the leading 24/7 beverage partner. We are very passionate and very excited about the future and our business unfolding and going forward. We can't wait to show you some of that in this fabulous, critical market of ours. I really look forward that we haven't been together like this, that we go to the market and walk it together and see it together with you know, with live eyes. I thank you all for joining us today, all of us who are here with us in Rome, in the room.
I thank everyone who has joined us online, for the online participation. Thank you all. Really appreciate your time, invested, with us, and, until the next opportunity, big thanks, and I wish everyone a good afternoon.