Hello everyone, and welcome. For those that don't know me, I'm Deirdre Mahlan, president of Diageo North America, and it's great you're able to join me today for an update on our North American business. While our business includes the US Spirits business, Diageo Canada, and Diageo Beer Company, I will focus today on our largest business, US Spirits, as I did at our Capital Markets Day back in May, while touching on examples in our other businesses in North America. We see North America continuing to be a reliable and attractive market. As a reminder of my message at Capital Markets Day, the U.S. is one of our largest global total beverage alcohol markets, and within that, Spirits is increasing its share. Diageo remains a leader in Spirits with a share double that of its nearest competitor.
We have leading brands across categories such as Scotch with Johnnie Walker, vodka with Smirnoff, Canadian whiskey with Crown Royal, gin with Tanqueray, and spiced rum with Captain Morgan. Overall, total beverage alcohol is a resilient segment with a diverse range of categories and growth. Spirits continues to see premiumisation and price mix improvements with Diageo well-placed to leverage these due to our advantaged portfolio and our innovation and executional capabilities. As we look to deliver against our ambition of sustainable growth year-on-year, let me highlight progress to date. For FY 2019, North America delivered strong organic net sales growth of 5%. We achieved that via growth across all our business units, US Spirits, Diageo Canada, and Diageo Beer Company USA. While we saw some increases in cost of goods sold and market mix shifts, we were able to offset these with our continued focus on efficiencies.
We're also strategically and efficiently invested in marketing at a rate ahead of net sales growth, which resulted in some reduction of our strong operating margins. Over this time, we strengthened our growth trajectory with innovation, strong performance from Casamigos Tequila, and the sale of 19 brands to Sazerac. In fiscal 2020, we're continuing to deliver against our base business and innovation strategies. Through our capabilities, tools, and analytics, we continue to build advantages in our routes to consumer. In support of sustainable growth, we aim to exceed our consumer and community's expectations when it comes to positive drinking, inclusion and diversity, and environmental sustainability. Our ambition is to be one of the best performing, most trusted, and respected consumer products companies in the world. At Diageo's preliminary results in July, Ivan explained how we think about this through six goals that support our self-sustaining business model.
Driving sustained quality growth is to execute the best route to consumer by recruiting through our brands and occasions while maintaining the best shape of volume, price, and mix growth. Making intelligent data decisions on where to invest smartly and continuing to drive everyday efficiency that creates room for both increased investment and continued margin improvement. Delivering our ambition also means being trusted by all of our stakeholders for doing business the right way and underpinning our license to operate for long-term growth. Our goals are to promote positive drinking, to champion inclusion and diversity, and to pioneer grain-to-glass sustainability. The six elements are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. Today, I'd like to highlight the work we've been doing across these areas in North America and how they are supporting the delivery of our results. Let me start with our first performance goal, delivering sustained quality growth.
It is at the heart of Diageo to delight consumers with brand offerings that deliver at the right occasions and at the right price. We believe that this relentless focus on the consumer will help us ensure sustainable growth. For this, we need to be leaders in understanding and forecasting consumer trends. We've invested in our technology to build our capabilities in identifying emerging consumer trends earlier in the cycle to inform our brand strategies. We are seeing a range of trends across North America, including demographic growth in multicultural and older consumer groups. People are moving across the U.S. as different and emerging cities are creating jobs and driving growth. Consumers are looking for different serves, formats, and ingredients. Finally, occasions in which people drink are shifting. There are trends of consumption occasions earlier in the day than traditionally with food and with more informal settings.
Diageo brands continued to deliver good value growth through the first three months of fiscal 2020 and on a rolling 12-month basis. American whiskey continued to take share for the ninth year in a row with 57 basis points to the first quarter of fiscal 2020. Bulleit, with value growth of 9% versus prior year, is contributing to that. Tequila share growth in the segment of 71 basis points has been delivered through the contributions of both Don Julio at +30% and Casamigos at +43%. Elsewhere in our portfolio, Diageo continues to be a leader in Scotch whiskey through our brand investment and innovation. According to market share data, our Scotch brands continued to grow faster than the category in the first quarter of fiscal 2020.
The iconic Crown Royal grew value by 13% in the first quarter of fiscal 2020. This is outperforming the category of 8% value growth versus prior year. The brand is showing continued growth in the on-premise and strong equity gains, including being number 1 in distinctiveness across all spirits brands. Additionally, while gin is accelerating and growing double digits in many markets around the world, the category remained in low single-digit growth for the first quarter in the U.S. We have a leading gin brand in the U.S. with Tanqueray, and when it comes, we will be prepared for a gin-naissance in the U.S. Guinness is now the third fastest-growing beer in the imported category. Brand Guinness continues to gain slight value share of category, driven by the strength of Coors Stout.
These are partially offset with the declines of Guinness Blonde. We are pleased that just over a year since opening our Guinness Open Gate Brewery and Barrel House in Relay, Maryland, we've had over 500,000 visitors through our doors. At the same time, we've expanded innovations at the brewery, rotating beers regularly, testing, and learning with our consumers. Across Canada spirits, our 12-month performance to September fiscal 2020 improved by 10 basis points to a share of 27%. Innovation is key in the delivery of our sustainable quality growth efforts. We are the leader in innovation in the U.S., and we continue to focus on building and maintaining this through our recruit, disrupt, and re-recruit model. We have a broad portfolio strategy built up through a granular understanding of consumer occasions and emerging trends.
Our recent successes in innovation are the result of a relentless focus on recruiting new consumers for our brands and disrupting categories or entering white spaces. Our partnership with HBO's "Game of Thrones" on White Walker by Johnnie Walker and our Single Malt Scotch Whisky Collection were examples of consumer insight embedded in our innovation approach. We connected with a moment in culture and created a truly successful outcome of bringing new consumers into the Scotch category and brand. Also important are our re-recruit limited time offerings that benefit the parent brand. Limited time offers can also play a role in bringing new news to a brand with a seasonal offer. This festive period, we have our recent launch of Cîroc White Grape and our Smirnoff Holiday Ornaments pack. We also have had Cîroc Summer Watermelon for the summer just passed.
Our seasonal limited time offerings for Crown Royal Salted Caramel for the fall and Peach for the spring, are highly anticipated by consumers and bring excitement to the brand. We see the continued success of Crown Royal innovations with Peach and Regal Apple contributing to category share gains in the first quarter of fiscal 2020, and the continuation of Ketel One Botanical growth, which is tapping into the low and no wellness trends. Other recent launches, such as Johnnie Walker, A Song of Ice and A Song of Fire, also in collaboration with HBO, have shown signs of good uptake on launch. However, compared to White Walker by Johnnie Walker last year, their contributions are expected to be smaller. Vodka and spiced rum categories continue to be areas to address, and I'd like to talk about them a little more here. Across the industry, vodka continues to grow.
The category is losing share of total spirits. In the first three months of fiscal 2020, the vodka category grew about 3% in value. Smirnoff remains a leading vodka brand in the U.S., and our category approach is to sustainably build our position and the category as leaders in the medium to long term. We continue to focus on transforming and innovating within the brand to reach and recruit new consumers while re-recruiting current Smirnoff consumers into brand extensions to deliver sustainable medium and long-term growth. Examples include the launch of Smirnoff Zero Sugar Infusions to recruit consumers looking for flavor without sugar and our brand campaign with personalities such as Ted Danson, Jonathan Van Ness, and Laverne Cox. Throughout fiscal 2019, we have seen increases in Smirnoff's equity scores, including spontaneous awareness and distinctiveness.
In fiscal 2019, Ketel One returned to growth and gained share on the strength of Ketel One Botanical. To continue driving growth in our core Ketel One brand, we've recently launched Drink Marvelously through our partnership of the 71st Emmy Awards season. We hope to create a unique sense of discovery and spark imagination instead of simply recreating familiar occasions and experiences. The campaign invites viewers into a marvelous world, one full of personality, charm, and of course, delicious drinks made with Ketel One Vodka. Meanwhile, we continue to work on reshaping our approach on Cîroc to connect with a broader consumer base and access new occasions. We are looking further afield from our core consumers to recruit across wider cultural and geographical non-urban moves for the brand. The rum category continues to be flat. As category leader, Captain Morgan has been impacted by the category headwinds.
We have been repositioning the brand to increase both the brand and product relevance, aiming not just for short-term wins or turnarounds. Since our Capital Markets Day, we have announced a national partnership with Major League Soccer, alongside a number of clubs and game sponsorships. As part of this, we plan to engage with fans, for example, with bottle personalization in club colors. We've also sought to communicate new versatile servings that connect with flavor and health-conscious trends and highlight key messages on taste. We believe these programs will broaden our consumer base and maintain our core consumers. Across to our second goal, investing smartly. At Capital Markets Day, we shared how we leverage data to align our investment to where we are confident of greater returns. We took you through the benefits of Catalyst in detail.
However, for those that missed it, Catalyst is our proprietary approach to marketing measurement and optimization. Catalyst enables us to optimize our investment in two ways. First, through supporting decisions about which brands to invest in across our portfolio. Secondly, Catalyst enables us to identify and target the most effective growth drivers, such as types of traditional and online media, sampling, and PR within each brand. We leverage Catalyst in supporting decisions made by our marketing teams, and we continue to see benefits from improved ROI as we remove low return investments and activities. This is optimizing A&P investment in order to unlock the next wave of growth. We leverage Catalyst insight to complement our marketing talent. An example of this was where our Catalyst tool identified opportunities for our brand to increase investment on Baileys, despite the investment already generating good levels of ROI.
It guided us to target our spending across specific media channels and to prioritize specific times throughout the year. This drove activity improvements and optimized ROI for the brand. Leveraging data and insights also helps us with our Net Revenue Management agenda. The pricing environment in the U.S. has been mixed over the last three to four years. We are leveraging Net Revenue Management to pursue opportunities based on insights related to geography, size, mix, and promotional effectiveness. We make adjustments to improve the quality of growth by optimizing price, mix, and volume, short-term performance of some brands may be impacted. We stand to benefit in the medium and long term through the delivery of sustainable, profitable growth. We continue to build our capabilities in Net Revenue Management and continue to embed these learnings.
Our third goal is everyday efficiency, which ensures we are making purposeful and data-led decisions. As I talked through at Capital Markets Day, we are deriving significant insight from our suite of tools enabling EDGE, or everyday great execution, to drive greater sales force effectiveness. We continue to see significant opportunities to capture in-store data and through advanced and predictive analytics, develop insights that differentiate our performance from the competition. We also anticipate and react to consumer trends and their desire for greater convenience. We've been developing our digital capabilities in conjunction with our retailer partners to support the ease of shop. Underpinning these examples is our cross-functional and advanced analytics team. We are leveraging advanced analytics techniques to inform the why, what, and how of performance and to drive future potential opportunities.
To sharpen our route to consumer, we are also sharing insights and learnings with our distributor partners to support decision making and execution. For our fourth goal, we commit to actively engage and educate consumers about positive drinking. For many years now, we've been working to change the way the world drinks for the better, leading the industry in reducing underage drinking, drunk driving, and heavy drinking, and empower our people and brands to advocate for moderation. DRINKiQ.com is our global program that supports this message. In our efforts to educate and raise awareness of underage drinking across North America, we have our global initiatives, Smashed, and partnership programs such as Ask, Listen, Learn. Smashed is our educational theater program which was successfully piloted in the U.S. in partnership with SADD, Responsibility.org, and Collingwood in 2019.
It has already been rolled out across almost 6,000 high school students, and we are looking forward to growing this further throughout fiscal 2020. Positive social impact and responsible drinking is at the heart of Crown Royal and fits perfectly with the brand's purpose. Building upon previous Crown Royal moderation hydration campaigns to promote moderation, we continue with our latest promotion of the water break. Now in its third year, we have national television ads running during televised NFL games, distributed tens of thousands of gallons of water to fans on game day, and partnered with several NFL teams and former legends to spread the message. Another recent partnership between Seagram's 7 Crown and U.S. country western singer Garth Brooks highlights how we couple our responsible drinking promotion with that of our national marketing campaigns.
Brooks is asking dive bar lovers everywhere to take action at JoinThePact.com to pledge to never drive impaired. An inclusive and diverse culture is core to Diageo's purpose and is our fifth goal. Diversity in backgrounds and talent at the board and management levels and across our workforce provides resiliency for the delivery of consistent performance. Globally, Diageo has ambitious targets for gender diversity, and personally, I'm very proud of North America's contribution to this. My exec team is comprised of 50% women. We are recognized as industry leading, and the recent global rollout of our progressive and equalizing parental leave policy is an example of our leadership. Globally, Diageo is recognized as being number one in the world by Equileap for gender equality and one of the best places to work for LGBTQ equality.
Diageo North America has been recognized for 11 successive years with a perfect 100 rating by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation in their Corporate Equality Index. Despite these successes, we are not complacent and recognize we still have a long way to go to achieve true inclusion and diversity. Our brands help shape culture with courageous marketing that we hope touches the lives of our consumers and society. Smirnoff has a proud history of supporting the LGBTQ community through the decades. Recent examples include Smirnoff's Welcome Home campaign with Laverne Cox during Pride Month earlier this year, and a continuation of celebrating love in all forms and LGBTQ equality along with Jonathan Van Ness. Just a couple of weeks ago, we announced our sponsorship in the U.S. of the Creative Equals returner scheme, Creative Comeback.
The program aims to address the lack of women represented in top creative leadership roles while supporting the progress that is needed on gender portrayal in advertising. We look forward to its rollout in 2020. Our sixth goal on grain-to-glass sustainability highlights how we, as a long-term business, seek to preserve the natural resources on which our long-term success depends and positively impact the communities in which we live, work, source, and sell. Diageo sets itself ambitious global targets in areas such as carbon reduction, water efficiencies, and waste reduction. Diageo remains an industry leader in setting absolute versus relative reduction targets. Globally, we are recognized in prestigious rankings such as third in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index. More specifically, in North America, for the last two years, we have won the Green Supply Chain Award for companies making sustainability a core part of their supply chain strategy.
Despite increased production, we have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions in North America by 40% since 2007. Through continuous improvement and innovation, we've improved our water efficiency by 23% since 2007, which equates to 130 million liters of water per year. Waste to landfill in North America is now down 99% versus 2007. To support these developments, North America has invested nearly GBP 170 million over the last three years to develop some of those most technologically advanced and environmentally sustainable distilleries and production facilities in the world. We are proud of the positive impact we make to wider communities where our consumers, suppliers, and employees live and work. Our Learning for Life program provides free learning and career opportunities to those within the hospitality industry. We also ensure placement opportunities after training.
Across three major U.S. cities, we've had over 600 graduates with an 85% job placement rate up to 2019. Diageo CARES, or Community Activity and Relief Efforts, facilitates opportunities for our own people to give back to their communities across the U.S. and Canada, be it through volunteering hours, fundraising events, or set piece activities. A very recent September 2019 example is where we saw nearly 1,000 Diageo employees give back to communities through a series of projects and events across our North American business locations in one week. In summary, our performance in U.S. Spirits in fiscal 2019 demonstrated that our strategy is working and that we are making good progress toward our ambition. We are strengthening capability, tools, and analytic strength to drive advantaged routes to consumer for today and the future. We continue to focus on growth underpinned by investment in consumer insights and brand marketing.
Improving the performance of both vodka and rum remains a focus for medium and long-term turnaround. Our US Spirits midterm priority remains to deliver consistent and sustainable growth. Regarding recent tariff news, based on the published list in October, we do not expect a material impact at the Diageo Group level. Underpinning our performance is our continued focus on promoting positive drinking, sustainability, and inclusion and diversity. We recognize that they are integral to our ability to achieve our ambition and give us our license to operate, as well as ensuring we can continue to build the business for the benefit of all our stakeholders. I want to thank you all for listening, and I look forward to addressing any questions you have on our live Q&A at 8:00 A.M. Eastern Time or 1:00 P.M. GMT. The call details have been published earlier. Thanks again.