You know, before we get started, you may have noticed I, I'm going to apologize upfront. I'm kind of limping around here. I have, unfortunately, torn a couple of tendons in my leg and have to go for surgery. If I look like I'm wincing or shifting uncomfortably, it is not your questions, I promise you. I wouldn't have missed this for the world. I first came to the Storehouse in 2002, actually. I came well before I was at Diageo. I came as a tourist, a kind of brand fan. I was engaged over a pint of Guinness. I go way back here. I do want to welcome you. For those of you who are with us here in person, welcome to Dublin, the home of Guinness.
For those of you on the webcast, it's great to have you with us this afternoon. We're excited to share with you more today on Guinness, and we have an experienced group of presenters with us to do this, reinforcing our commitment to this incredible brand, which is an important and growing part of our portfolio. While the focus of today is clearly our iconic Guinness brand, I will also share our thoughts on the industry and the current backdrop, which I think is important context, particularly given the quarterly trading update shared yesterday. You will also have the opportunity to ask questions throughout the day. First, our cautionary statements. Let me start by sharing five key messages we hope to leave you with today. First, as a reminder, Diageo is a market leader with a strong portfolio of category-leading brands.
Second, while the current environment is tough, we remain of the view this pressure is largely macroeconomic-driven, and we continue to believe in the attractive long-term fundamentals of our industry and in our ability to outperform the market. Importantly, our portfolio is well positioned in premium spirits and beer, and we see a significant opportunity ahead in both spirits and Guinness, our focus today. Third, Guinness is an iconic brand in our portfolio and one where we have successfully evolved our strategy to drive higher growth, particularly through recruitment. We will share with you today how we've done this. Importantly, our fourth message is the belief that we have that Guinness has a strong runway for continued growth, recruiting new consumers, leveraging digital, and driving innovation, including the significant opportunity we have with Guinness Zero Zero.
Finally, but importantly, I want to leave you with an appreciation that Diageo is evolving as a company. We're moving at speed to focus on what we can manage and control, which is more important than ever in the current volatile environment. You will have seen we announced yesterday with our trading update the introduction of our Accelerate Program. This program will ensure Diageo emerges stronger and more agile as the market recovers. Nik is going to talk to this later. Before I talk more to Guinness, I'd like to start by sharing my current thoughts on our business and the sector backdrop. I imagine a number of you will recognize this slide. At Diageo, we are proud of our portfolio of brands that play a role in a broad range of consumer occasions and continue to recruit new consumers globally.
We have $13 billion brands, including Guinness, and we are the number three player in TBA and number one in international spirits, where we are one and a half times larger than our next international spirits competitor. Our brands are culturally relevant, connecting and engaging with consumers, and we do this at scale across our markets. Today, we will take you through how we're doing this with our third largest brand, Guinness. Our footprint is global and diversified, with an attractive balance of stability with our developed markets and also growth from our emerging markets, which make up approximately 60% and 40% of our net sales, respectively. We will share with you how we are leveraging our footprint to grow Guinness through several varied route-to-market models. Moving to the broader industry environment, I'd like to share a slide we first showed at Cagney earlier this year.
Although the current macro has become a little more uncertain, with consumers becoming more cautious in the last few months, our view on the sector has not changed. What we are continuing to see is near-term pressure, largely macroeconomic-driven, and this is continuing to adversely impact spirits. Longer term, we continue to believe that spirits remain an attractive sector with a long runway for growth, where we expect to continue to gain TBA share. Let me take you through this in a bit more detail. No doubt, the current industry backdrop is tough, arguably more than in prior cycles, but there are clear headwinds outside our control impacting consumer confidence and spending power. The uncertainty for consumers has increased since we last reported our half-one results in February.
This is most pronounced in our largest market, the U.S., where, although we've been seeing real-term wage growth since 2022, it's still below the long-term trend. In the meantime, high levels of inflation continue to translate into consumers getting a lot less for their money. As you can see on this slide, U.S. consumers are currently, on average, spending around 22% more for 8% less than what they would have got four years ago. We are seeing that come through in lower volumes for the industry. Given this pressure, understandably, the consumer is a little more cautious, and the pace of recovery remains uncertain. Additionally, the threat that potential tariffs might cause outages and/or price increases is also weighing both on consumer sentiment and confidence, which makes our immediate focus on managing what we can control even more critical than ever.
We recognize the time for industry recovery may be longer, but it also provides an opportunity for Diageo to emerge stronger and more agile as a company. As I've consistently said, longer term, we continue to believe spirits has an attractive runway for growth, supported by favorable fundamentals, with the spirits trajectory in recent years more positive than the rest of TBA, reflecting that it has continued to take share from beer and wine, a trend we expect to continue. In particular, I'd like to quickly cover off some thoughts on Gen Z, where there's a lot of largely negative commentary on the read-through from this generation for the market. First, it's forecast to be the largest generation ever, underpinning future growth and the TBA market, and forecast to become the only generation ever to reach 2 billion people with associated spending power.
Also, it's worth highlighting that we are seeing increased female participation in per capita consumption in key growth markets such as India and China. This is an area where we think spirits can play to its strength of versatility. Additionally, you'll hear today about how we've done a great job of recruiting women to Guinness and can leverage learnings from this across the portfolio. This younger LPA plus group has a higher household spirits penetration than the average for the total drinking population across our key markets, including in the U.S., reflecting they're coming into spirits earlier. Importantly, in the U.S., they also spend a similar proportion of their annual expenditure on alcohol as other generations. We would expect their absolute spend to rise over time, not necessarily drinking more, but premiumizing and drinking better.
Finally, let me share again what we are doing to address moderation, or what we call mindful consumption. What I have said in the past is that this is potentially the biggest potential disruptor of our industry, but it is also one of our greatest opportunities as the market leader in the fast-growing non-alcohol spirits category. We have also recognized our responsibility to educate consumers to make informed choices, making it clear when alcohol consumption is not appropriate and providing transparent health information about alcohol misuse. While at Diageo, we believe in celebrating life every day, everywhere, we have drinks for every occasion, including some more suited to mindful consumption. Our insights tell us that in occasions where others may be drinking alcohol, some consumers want to enjoy a non-alcoholic drink, yet still want to feel part of the occasion.
Non-alcoholic spirits and beer have a role here and can source volume from outside spirits, in particular from beer and soft drinks. Interestingly, in the U.S., 93% of non-alc buyers also purchase alcohol with a higher total basket spend. We are building non-alcoholic brands, including Seedlip, which grew value in the U.S. double digits since launch, and the newly acquired Ritual, the number one non-alc spirit brand in the U.S., which provides spirit alternatives perfect for mixing. Of course, we also have Guinness Zero Zero, which has a clear role that we will share with you today. Launched first in GB and Ireland, and then rolled out into the U.S., it is recruiting new, younger LPA+ consumers to the brand with an exciting opportunity to accelerate growth and expand into more markets. With that, it's a good segue to why we're here in Dublin.
Guinness is a great example of our growth ambition in action and successfully driving outperformance. Today, the team will share how its success is the culmination of innovating to respond to existing and emerging consumer trends and applying our world-class brand building, our enablers, and dial-up behaviors. Beer was 16% of Diageo net sales in 2024, with Guinness the largest brand in our beer business and almost two-thirds of our beer NSV. Guinness is also our third largest brand after Johnnie Walker and Smirnoff. How Guinness is performing plays a key role in our performance. On a three-year basis, the Guinness CAGR was circa 15%, nearly double the rate of total beer and ahead of all price segments.
Guinness Zero Zero, which you will hear a lot about today, has grown at a tremendous rate since launch, but arguably we are only really getting started on what it can do with plenty of reasons to be excited going forward. Notably, Guinness sits in two important growing segments in beer. In all of its major markets, excluding Ireland, Guinness sits in premium beer, a segment outperforming the broader category. With Guinness Zero Zero, we have a strong role to play in the high-growth non-alcoholic segment. Guinness also fits with the changing consumer trends, with consumers looking for exploration and more differentiated and flavorful experiences, something that has benefited the brand. The brand's relentless focus on quality has been important with consumers comfortable paying a premium for this great experience. What is exciting to me is that despite our success today, we still only have a small value share.
There is a significant opportunity for further growth. Guinness holds an important place in our portfolio and is rightfully a key part of our strategy to recruit and premiumize consumers. Guinness is a brand differentiated from other beers and one we have grown by applying our proven Diageo brand building strategy. You will hear a lot today on how we have driven that growth by successfully recruiting new consumers across demographics and also across occasions. Not only has this made a significant contribution to our top-line growth, it also adds value to our overall portfolio, as Nik will talk to you later. Let me also take a moment to remind you of some of the brand's incredible heritage. In 1759, Arthur Guinness had the foresight to sign a 9,000-year lease at St. James's Gate.
James's Gate, which, if you do the math, we are only 266 years on from that. Arthur set the precedent early for some of the elements of Guinness that are still key today, from exporting to countries around the world, from Dublin with West Indies Porter in 1801 to the harp and signature that you see on our packs and marketing today that still signify our commitment to quality. Guinness has an incredible track record of innovation, in particular leveraging technology to improve quality and access to new occasions. You see here an ad for the widget, a step change which enabled the at-home serve to be great quality. It remains a significant focus today with dispense and liquid innovation, including Microdraft and, of course, Guinness Zero Zero. I'd be remiss to not mention the Guinness Storehouse, the amazing building we're in today.
If it were a market, it would be the seventh largest Guinness market, and it is important in keeping Guinness exciting and vibrant, top of mind for consumers. Finally, our advertising is also something we're justifiably very proud of, from our first-ever newspaper ad published in the U.K. in 1929 to the instantly recognizable Gilroy ads that ran from the 1930s, epic TV ads that maybe a few of you might remember and that have evolved today to the culturally relevant digital-focused work you will have likely seen, and we will take you through later. It is not surprising, given its extensive legacy and strong marketing, that Guinness is today well recognized as a highly distinctive brand. Kantar rank it highly both within beer and within the broader consumer set more broadly, specifically for its distinctiveness.
Our own tracking data also shows that across our key markets, Guinness scores more highly than our competitors for this distinctiveness, defined as a trendsetter in the category, unique and not easily switched with the competitor. From F2019 to F2024, in most major markets, Guinness has grown household penetration more than the beer category, recruiting about 4 million new drinkers globally in the same period. Additionally, the team's been able to track Guinness volume growth back to 1840, which also shows impressive growth over time. While there have been periodic setbacks from significant scale events, you can see the continued upward trajectory. Today, we are number one beer share in our top two markets as a result of the success of our strategy over the last five years. We have recruited new consumers at scale, setting us up well for the future.
What's really important is that within that broader recruitment, we have increased penetration amongst younger consumers as well as with female drinkers. The majority of Guinness drinkers are now younger LPA plus than they historically would have been. In GB, in the last year, we have recruited LPA plus consumers more than any other major beer brand. This is true beyond our three largest markets, with Guinness Smooth and innovation in Africa helping recruit younger, more female consumers, with penetration strongest amongst LPA under 24-year-olds. Today, we will share more insight on how we did this. As you know, Diageo continually monitors consumer trends and insights. I reminded you earlier of Diageo's growth strategy, which shared the key trends which we are focused on, leading and shaping, including with food, luxury, and convenience.
I also told you that Guinness plays well into this and addresses a number of key consumer trend categories. Selecting a couple to talk to, moderation, where consumers are increasingly seeking balance and wellness, including consuming alcohol in more mindful ways. Beer has led the non-alc revolution, shifting behaviors around more inclusive socializing and raising expectations of quality non-alc without compromise. Guinness Zero Zero is a strong participant. In exploration, consumers seeking authenticity and craft across different categories and looking for brands with interesting and diverse provenance stories, rich histories, clear and transparent values, and responsible action. Guinness again delivers against all of these attributes. By leveraging how Guinness can play into these trends, we have been able to drive recruitment, also amplified by an evolution in our brand strategy over a number of years.
Over the last few years, we've made some deliberate choices to evolve how we build and recruit with Guinness. From 2015, we recognized the need to evolve our scale global marketing approach. Post-COVID, we saw this really delivering growth, outperforming the category. Grainne will walk you through why and how we made this change, but our participation in culture at scale and our powerful innovation is really key to this success. More recently, we've made some active changes to our route to market strategy, and you'll hear more from Dayalan on this later, something we accelerated in 2022 and that we firmly believe will contribute to both the top and bottom line. Recent strong examples in Africa include Guinness Nigeria and Cameroon, and Dayalan will take you through our broader global approach in more detail. I'm confident that we have more runway for growth.
We are experts in building premium brands, and our skills from global spirits brands such as Johnnie Walker and Don Julio are also just as relevant for Guinness. More specifically, the same capabilities and tools are used across the entire portfolio. Grainne will talk you through our Diageo way of brand building and specifically how our approach to brand building has underpinned what we have been doing with Guinness. I'm also going to spend a bit of time on our global cultural partnership with the Premier League and on Guinness Zero Zero, where I believe our ability to elevate brands at scale is a competitive advantage. Guinness is the official beer of the Premier League and Guinness Zero Zero, the official non-alcoholic beer, a sponsorship we entered into last year, providing an opportunity where we can do what we do best with our brands, activate globally at scale.
The Premier League isn't just football; it's truly a global occasion. It's the most popular football league in the world, aired in over 150 countries, enjoyed by 2.1 billion viewers, with over 300 games per season and running for 10 months out of the year. Millions of fans come together every week in stadiums, pubs, and homes, connecting over their love of the game. Guinness taps into the passion, connecting the beautiful game and the beautiful beer, also supporting pubs and retail outlets to help create fun and engaging fan experiences, driving traffic. Nuno has some really great examples to share on this later with what we've done in GB.
Since making our debut in August, already our Premier League activations are providing access to new occasions across more countries, and we are seeing this drive commercial and consumer excitement and ultimately recruitment with increased brand visibility and share on match days. We are only getting started with the opportunity to accelerate Guinness growth further through the Premier League. As I discussed earlier, we have always recognized our responsibility to educate consumers to make informed choices. Diageo has promoted responsible drinking since our formation in 1997, over 25 years ago. Guinness has an even longer history of promoting moderation, as you can see in this quote from 1973, an ad from the 1980s show. In 2019, Guinness won a prestigious Cannes Gold Lion Award for its moderation campaign entitled Guinness Clear, which, through a TV ad, social post, celebrity, and influencer endorsement, turned ordering water into a positive bar call.
More recently, consumers' desire for more balanced and mindful drinking has fueled the demand for non-alc propositions without compromise. Guinness Zero Zero, made by our expert brewers to the same quality as Guinness Draught, is going from strength to strength. We've also invited our GMs from some of our largest Guinness markets and also our Head of Beer from the U.S., Barry, Nuno, and Laura, to take you through three case studies today. While some of the themes are consistent, you can really see how they are applying and being creative with them to drive market-specific growth with room to grow further from here. To give you some context on the size of these markets, Ireland, GB, and U.S. respectively deliver around 60% of our global Guinness NSV, and so are meaningful in understanding the Guinness story.
There are a number of exciting opportunities the team are going to talk about today, and all of these will contribute to the future growth potential for Guinness. There is a great runway for growth, including recruiting a broader consumer base, particularly Premier League, to access more occasions, and of course, the significant opportunity to take Guinness Zero Zero global. Nik will come back and share color on these opportunities later, as well as talking about more on the Accelerate Program we announced yesterday. This takes me to our agenda. As you can see on the slide here, note you will have ample opportunity to ask questions. After the presentations, for those of you with us in person today, Mark Sands, our Global Head of Innovation, and his team will showcase our innovation capabilities over drinks before we move to Gravity for dinner.
With that, I would like to start by welcoming Grainne Wafer to the stage. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you, Deborah. I am delighted to be spending time with you talking about Guinness here in Dublin, my hometown. Excuse me, I lead our marketing global brand teams across Guinness, vodka, including Smirnoff, and liqueurs, including Baileys, also made here in Ireland. These are scale brands with similar characteristics and footprints, so I have a great opportunity to apply learnings across them. I have been with Diageo for almost 28 years, but my love for Guinness actually predates that, as my father had a pub right here at the gates of the historic St. James's Gate Brewery here in Dublin. I grew up with that smell of roasted barley in the air, and I almost feel that Guinness is part of my DNA.
Today, I'm going to talk you through the details of how we have built and how we will continue to build the Guinness brand. We have an amazing history with Guinness, but we are never complacent. I'll set the context for our success before explaining our strategy and our growth drivers in more detail. You will then hear from Barry, Nuno, and Laura on how they have successfully implemented this approach in their markets. Diageo brand building is an established strength across our portfolio. We regularly refresh our training on the Diageo way of brand building and view our employees as 30,000 brand builders. Pride for our brands and their heritage is a massive part of Diageo employees' pride in what we do.
It is often mentioned by those newer to the company as something really unique and special, and perhaps that is something maybe worth asking Nik about later. Now, core to our brand building approach is building meaningful, distinctive, and salient brands. That is simply marketing language for consumers knowing and liking what each brand stands for, thinking that it is relevant for them, and ensuring that the brand is top of mind in key occasions, and then that they can find our brands distinctively from alternatives. This needs to be consistently executed everywhere that consumers see our brands to ensure that they are front of mind and are brands that consumers think about. That is known as mental availability. Then that they can easily buy our brands in the stores or bars whenever they want to at the right price, format, and for the right occasions.
That is physical availability. Now, that's important because brands that are meaningful, distinctive, and salient have more opportunities to premiumize, to generate consumer excitement and engagement, and to drive higher consumer demand through recruitment and growth. Guinness, over many years, has really exemplified this model of brand building. Deborah talked to you about our brand heritage and the many memorable and distinctive ads from Guinness over the years. We have a highly distinctive product and a long-established commitment to making sure that every pint of Guinness is of the highest quality, perfect physical availability. This legacy has built mental availability for Guinness in an almost unprecedented way, delivering distinctive meaning with consumers and building an iconic brand.
We have a track record of cutting-edge innovation across both liquid and format, staying salient and relevant to changing consumer occasions, from Guinness Draught, which was introduced back in 1959, to the widget in 1988, which enabled a perfect pour of Guinness from a can every time. Historically, our approach to brand building was really heroed by epic TV ads such as the Surfer ad that you see on screen from 1999, an amazing, memorable TV ad, beautifully made, an epic single story, and voted by many to be one of the greatest ads of all time. That approach certainly got people talking, and it stayed in the collective memory, building mental availability and helping Guinness to have meaning and be known and loved all over the world. The broader consumer context has not stood still, and we needed to evolve with this.
While we have stayed consistent to these fundamentals, what they mean to consumers has changed over time. We have had to evolve to ensure that Guinness is just as relevant today as it has been, and also to ensure that this remains the case for the future so the brand continues to grow. Now, from about 2015, as Deborah showed earlier, it became clear to us that we needed to make a change in how we built meaning, salience, and distinctivity across both mental and physical touchpoints in order to recruit and grow. The media that people primarily were watching or reading was changing and shifting from heavily TV and print to digital and social platforms. That represented new ground for Guinness because it was a brand that was built on decades of epic broadcast advertising.
The way consumers socialized was changing, and we were seeing an increase in moderating consumption, premiumization of the category, and increased at-home drinking moments, as well as new occasions, especially out of home and bars, for example, at sports or music event venues. The cultural mood was also shifting, and our dark, heavy, masculine perceptions no longer served us, particularly as we needed to recruit a broader and more diverse audience. The touchpoints of physical and mental availability were merging, with consumers now looking to their phone for inspiration when they're in store or purchasing from a website or just when out and about. Put simply, the world was changing to be much more fluid and dynamic, as was the marketplace, where we were also competing against the rise of craft and European premium lager. We made a deliberate choice.
We moved away from only focusing on major TV ads and significantly increased our social and digital content, partnering with our communities and with our influencers to make advertising that was relevant for them. We moved from perfection and prescription, you can only drink Guinness in a certain way, to breaking some of the rules that we had previously held, opening up the product to a new audience of consumers. We moved from a single occasion brand, typically drunk by a certain demographic in a very specific place at a very specific time, to having broader appeal and inviting experiences everywhere. We recognize that in this connected world, consumers expect these brand touchpoints to be consistent and connected from advertising to cultural moments and even to the quality of the product itself. We executed these shifts across Guinness while staying true to the Diageo brand building model.
Importantly, we will continue to adjust and flex to changes and consumer trends and behaviors to make sure that the brand is as relevant and strong tomorrow as it is today. Let me take you through how this works in practice and what it means. You can see here the global pillars that form the basis of our brand activation worldwide and which connect Guinness with a new generation of consumers in today's context. The fundamentals of how we have built Guinness and indeed all our Diageo brands over decades that I talked about earlier remains the same: a brand with heritage, highly distinctive, with quality at the heart, and a brand that has powerful meaning for consumers, that's relevant in culture and salient in changing consumer occasions and media landscape. How we do it involves a deliberate move to a more connected consumer experience.
The strong brand success is the direct outcome of this intentional strategic shift. We believe there are compelling reasons why this should continue. Our activities or our growth drivers are all focused on building meaning, salience, and distinctivity to engage and recruit more consumers across both mental and physical availability, while we also ensure that we remain a premium brand. Of course, this is underpinned by excellence in digital and our use of data. Precision placement of media and our utilization of Diageo tools such as Catalyst and Sensor ensure that our marketing spend is allocated to where it delivers best returns. We also leverage scale, culturally relevant growth drivers such as sports, and that enables us to work much more efficiently because we are able to adapt and share assets and resources and ensure that Guinness shows up consistently across the world.
You will hear from Nuno, Barry, and Laura as to how this is activated across our markets and how we deliver that global consistency, but with the local flexibility. A great example of that is Lovely Day for a Guinness, a campaign that all three markets have activated uniquely to their local market dynamics while still being instantly recognizable. First, let me talk you through a few of these actions in practice. We have a vibrant Guinness community around the world that are very passionate about the brand and very active in social media. We have tapped into that to develop inclusive marketing, embedding Guinness in culture in a relevant way. We use social listening to identify emerging themes from our community, and we collaborate with those influencers, or as we like to call them, Ginflowencers.
We sometimes take inspiration from what we hear, and we shape that into ads, as you'll see from Nuno's presentation. Other times, we work directly with partners. For example, we teamed up recently with the fashion designer J.W. Anderson, and we saw Guinness appear then on his catwalk and then later for sale. Sometimes we ask creators to take the lead, for example, inviting consumers to design our beer mats. One scale example that we noticed was our younger and female drinkers in GB were being much more playful with their pints and then sharing that on social media. We saw an opportunity to demonstrate quality by creating and sharing these distinctive ownable rituals. The image on the slide here shows the tilt test, and that is a ritual that consumers shared on social media.
With the result in the last year, 2023 to 2024, sharing of Guinness rituals on social media has more than doubled at no cost to Diageo. By working with consumers to both create and share, we've made quality fun, and we've seen an uptick in quality perceptions amongst key LPA 34-year-old consumers as a result. Another very important consumer passion point is sport. Guinness and sport have shared values of communion and camaraderie. Enjoying a pint of Guinness while supporting your team is an established occasion. It is not surprising that Guinness has a long association with sport. For over 80 years, Guinness has been one of rugby's biggest supporters, championing both the players and the fans. That culminated in the signing of the title sponsorship of the Men's Six Nation Championship in 2019.
Whilst locally, we also participate in the Irish Gaelic Games, in soccer in Africa and Asia, and in college football at the American kind in the U.S.. We have built strong capabilities and deep experience in how we activate both at the sporting events themselves, in bars and at viewing centers, and in building association and awareness through media and match day presence. We also fully leverage those opportunities. For example, at the Six Nations Games in the U.K., we lead out with Guinness 0.0 on match days, and we use that as a great opportunity to raise awareness, but also to encourage consumers to try it. We have also used sport to make Guinness a more inclusive brand for everyone, and now we sponsor both the men's and the women's tournaments in Six Nations rugby.
We recently partnered with the sports footwear brand IDA to design a rugby boot specifically for women, which was a world first. This year, we also worked with key TV channels in both GB and Ireland to bring live audio descriptions to the Six Nations Championship, making live rugby accessible to more people at home for the first time ever. Nuno will talk more about that later. Last year, we joined forces with the Premier League, which has really supercharged our sports activation, and it matches our scale and our footprint, providing a significant platform to extend Guinness brand reach around the world. The opportunity for recruitment and growth from this partnership is significant, as Deborah has shared, with the Premier League enjoyed by 2.1 billion viewers in 150 markets. As Deborah said earlier, Guinness is an iconic brand.
Its meaning and place in culture means that it transcends beer and indeed total beverage alcohol. When brands gain that type of status, there are distinct elements that are instantly recognizable: intellectual property. For Guinness, this includes the harp, Arthur's signature, the font, and the liquid, of course, the iconic black and white. Actively managing this equity is both profitable, but can also take the Guinness brand to places where the Guinness beer cannot go logistically. That builds greater salience and connectivity with our consumers. The apparel example on the slide here demonstrates how this works, from limited edition influencer partnerships through to scale quality T-shirts widely and consistently available at retail. This approach reinforces and embeds us further into culture through supporting our other cultural activation pillars such as sports.
The Guinness Storehouse is leading the charge on bringing the full Guinness experience to life for more people. Those of you who have spent the morning here in Dublin with us have seen in real life the high value, highly personalized, and deeply immersive brand experience. We're able to build a direct personal relationship with visitors that we then sustain over time in different channels. In 2023, the Guinness Storehouse, the home of Guinness, achieved its most prestigious accolade to date by being crowned the world's leading tourist attraction at the World Travel Awards in Dubai, and that's often known as the Tourism Oscars. It triumphed over global iconic landmarks such as the Great Wall of China to claim that top honor. In addition, the Storehouse has evolved to be community first, representing and celebrating the very best of modern Irish culture.
Importantly, our post-visit research shows that visitors increase their view of the quality, the taste, and their affinity for Guinness. This is even more emphasized amongst LPA Plus females, which is a really important recruitment group. Now, having been to the Storehouse, visitors were more likely to want to talk about it with friends, and brand penetration increased significantly, almost doubling well after the visit. While the Storehouse is the home of Guinness, we also have brand homes in the U.S.. In December, we are excited to open our Open Gate Brewery in Covent Garden in London, which you can see here in the bottom right image. Our distinctive product is rooted in the quality of the beer, and we take this very seriously. In fact, the quality of our serve has long been almost an obsession for Guinness.
Our first ever newspaper ad back in 1929 called out our superior quality. We ensure that every touchpoint with Guinness is a quality one, both from grain to gate in the production process, as Ewan will talk to later, or from gate to glass in bars and at home. In the on-trade, we know that for us, more so than for our peers, a quality served Guinness is something that will bring consumers back to a pub, reinforcing the importance of us working with our customers to help ensure a consistent quality Guinness. We have a Guinness Quality Index that provides a detailed guide for teams on working with the on-trade on every aspect of the delivery of a quality pint of Guinness, and a robust mystery shopper program that checks glassware, temperature, pour, and the back bar.
Of course, in this seamless connected consumer world, the Guinness community of today are quick to share on social media when they have experienced a good or a bad pint, and that is key to our reputation for quality. We sell branded glassware on the Guinness web store. Last year, sales were nearly $1.5 million, up 80% on the previous year. Guinness glass now is simply a cool item to own. We've learned that our drinkers and our communities are interested in knowing more about quality. Our marketing includes communication on that. Whether it is through rituals on social media or how-to videos or through innovative activations such as the Stoutie, hugely engaging for consumers as it enables them to personalize their pint, often with an image, often their face. As you will hear, innovation has been key in delivering a premium quality experience.
I'll now talk a little bit more about that. Guinness has delivered strong growth, but we have the opportunity to take that even further, extending and premiumizing the Guinness distinctive experience through unlocking breakthrough innovation. As I said at the start, Guinness has a strong track record of successful innovation such as Guinness Draught and the Widget. Our ongoing ambition is for best-in-class innovation led by our technology capabilities to bring Guinness to more people more often in premium formats, serves, and liquid experiences. Microdraft unlocks new on-trade distribution around the world for bars and restaurants that are unable to have a draught beer setup, but want to be able to serve a perfect pint of Guinness to their customers. It also supports our rollout of Guinness 0.0, with around a third of its volume being 0.0.
Night Research was born from the extreme lengths our drinkers were going to to get a great pint of Guinness when the pubs were closed during COVID and puts the craft of draft into consumers' hands at home. Validated and accelerated by social listening, this gave us a day-one audience of super fans to launch alongside and build traction with right from the start. Deborah talked about the success and the production expansion of Guinness 0.0 and how it is key for Guinness in providing a moderation choice and reaching Gen Z. We're excited about the future opportunity that this has for growth and further rollout. We know that Guinness 0.0 also provides real benefits to our on-trade customers and is a traffic generator, with 65% of consumers in GB agreeing that the availability of Guinness 0.0 specifically would influence their choice of venue.
Finally, Guinness Smooth is recruiting younger LPA Plus and female drinkers through an easily accessible taste profile and contemporary positioning. We have launched first in key African markets and with opportunities to go beyond to new geographies. Beyond innovation, we also work to extend our physical presence in different channels, seasons, and formats. You will hear from Barry about our Lovely Day for a Guinness platform, which increased consumption into the summer. From Nuno as to how we have extended our activation to reflect the sports sponsorship calendar. From Laura, how we are building distribution in key on-trade and convenience channels in the U.S.. Across all of our Guinness marketing, and in fact, across the Diageo portfolio, we are committed to continually improving our marketing effectiveness and measuring returns on our A&P. I am proud that Guinness leads the pack in long-term returns from A&P.
Measured over a two to three-year timespan, long-term ROI captures the profit impact from brand-building investment, and it reflects the strength of the growth drivers I've just talked through. We also have a very strong short-term ROI, second only to Baileys. In fact, we have grown our short-term ROI over the last three years by an impressive 51%. By delivering on both, we are building both short-term sales and a long-term healthy, strong brand. A particular example you will hear more about from Barry, as it was led out of Ireland, is our use of data to ensure that our media is placed in the locations where there's highest potential returns from consumer spend. We have seen that prove out in terms of driving footfall and, of course, contribute to the effectiveness of our media buying.
Across Diageo, we use AI in our in-house virtual studio, and we can rapidly change assets to show different packs, languages, and fulfill multiple different regulatory requirements. We employed some of these tools to deliver a fast rollout of advertising materials for the Premier League and save cost. On average, across Diageo, we save 40% per asset adapted through using AI. That agility also frees up time for our marketing teams to focus on delivering great creative grounded in consumer insight. Creative excellence and innovation are, as you've seen, fundamental to what makes Guinness an iconic, strong brand. Our brand marketing capability is something we are particularly proud of at Diageo and where we believe we have competitive advantage. It's great to have external recognition for our work on Guinness.
In the last few years, highlights include winning a Cannes Gold Lion for the Guinness Clear moderation work that Deborah talked to earlier, four Red Dot Industry Awards for the strength of our dispense innovation, Brand of the Year for Marketing Week, importantly voted on by both consumers and the industry, and most recently, two IPA Effectiveness Awards, including the prestigious President's Prize for Next Generation Brand Building. These recent awards recognize what we have achieved with Guinness, evolving with the context of today to recruit new consumers. Our current strong performance is the outcome of this intentional strategic shift and our ability to adjust with agility to the consumer environment while still remaining recognizably Guinness.
However, we do see opportunities to do more with our strategy and to call out just three: recruiting a broader range of consumers by showing up in their places and spaces, more occasions, more seasons, more geographies. Guinness 0.0 has incredible momentum, and it is just beginning to make inroads in the U.S. and is not yet available in many Guinness markets. Finally, the further potential of scaling and building with the Premier League partnership globally. This four-year partnership only started less than a year ago. We will continue to evolve our brand building as the consumer environment changes, building Guinness as an iconic brand and recruiting consumers, but ensuring that we do it in a way that is relevant for consumer trends, behavior, and engagement.
I have shared today how we have evolved marketing of Guinness while staying true to the fundamentals of the brand and indeed to the Diageo way of brand building, remaining meaningful in culture, committed to our product distinctivity and quality, and remaining salient and innovating into new occasions. The growth drivers I have talked to work together across the strategy, efficiently reinforcing each other and underpinned by data and digital. We are smart about our approach to A&P, and this will continue to be a focus for us. Finally, we are excited about the continued opportunity and potential for growth. I would now like to welcome Barry, Nuno, and Laura to the stage to share with you how they are driving Guinness growth and recruitment in their markets.
Good afternoon, everybody. I am Barry O'Sullivan, the Managing Director of Diageo Ireland.
You know, people often tell me that I have the coolest job in Ireland. After four years in the role, I can safely say that I at least agree. Here in Diageo Ireland, we take immense pride in being the custodians of the iconic Guinness brand and are equally proud to have played a leading role in the transformation of that brand that has delivered eight consecutive halves of double-digit growth. Today, I'm going to talk to you about how we have transformed Guinness in its home market, becoming the number one beer brand in Ireland. First, let me share the numbers, I guess, on the beer market over here in Ireland. It is a $2.7 billion market, predominantly beer-led at 50% of TBA. The market's quite concentrated. The top five brands holding a 61 share.
Pubs are a significant role in the market, contributing a strong on-trade presence of 56%. Over the past four years, the beer market has grown by 3.5% in value, with premium beer growth ahead of this again. While Ireland is, in fact, the only standard beer market for Guinness, as Deborah mentioned earlier, recent innovations such as NitroSurge has positioned at a much more premium price point, plus 20% versus regular Guinness Draught and can. Finally, the non-alcoholic beer market is around 2% of total beer. Now, in my time at Diageo Ireland, we have delivered double-digit growth for the last three years and are now the leading beer brand in Ireland, with one in every three pints sold in the on-trade being a Guinness. We are growing ahead of the competition.
Our consumer base has shifted from being significantly older than the category to now being driven by LPA Plus 35-year-olds. We have overtaken the competition on key equity measures like brand love, salience, particularly amongst younger LPA Plus consumers. Guinness's move to the number one position in Ireland was fueled by three strategic initiatives. First, we reimagined Guinness's iconic heritage for a new generation to reach more consumers in more occasions. One standout, as Grainne mentioned, is the Lovely Day for Guinness campaign, where we positioned Guinness as the perfect summer drink right at the heart of the Irish summer. This campaign aimed to recruit new consumers and become the top beer brand during the summer, overtaking lager. As part of this investment, we made sure that Guinness showed up powerfully in Irish culture in a way that is relevant for the modern Irish consumer.
As part of this activation, we've stepped up engagement with music sponsorships, driving increased brand visibility, activation, and recruitment, an initiative that is more advanced and specific to Ireland. Secondly, our Guinness business here is built on our direct relationships with our nearly 10,000 on-trade customers. We leverage the strength of these direct relationships to drive outperformance in the on-trade by being the best partner in the industry through bold initiatives, strategic partnerships, and meaningful innovation. The strength of our relationships with the on-trade enhances and supports many of the activations and investments I'm going to talk to you about today. Thirdly, we have launched Guinness innovations at scale in Ireland to recruit in new formats, new occasions, establishing ourselves as pioneers and a test market for exciting innovations, which can then be taken to other markets around the world.
We were the first market to introduce Draft Guinness 0.0, and through this, are shaping the future of moderation and driving recruitment. We were also the first market to launch Guinness NitroSurge, enabling the perfect pint at home, now enjoyed in an incredible one in four Irish households at a premium price point. One of the most inspiring things about Guinness, as I'm sure you've seen on your visit today and yesterday, is its rich history. Embracing this legacy, we went back to the Guinness archives, and we reimagined iconic campaigns from the past, giving them new meaning and relevance. They've been brought to life in playful and creative ways that resonate with Irish consumers. We challenged the perception of Guinness as a winter drink with the Lovely Day for Guinness campaign. I'll speak more on this shortly.
We also introduced My Goodness, My Guinness with Guinness 0.0 to highlight the quality credentials of the liquid. We revived the Dancing Man, now as a Dancing Kahn for Guinness Night Research to premiumize in the off trade. Here at Diageo Ireland, we're proud to have developed the Lovely Day for Guinness campaign. Historically, Guinness struggled in summer months, losing market share to lager competitors. Some of this, to be fair, was self-inflicted. Our marketing efforts and investments were seasonal. We did not prioritize visibility and outdoor spaces like beer gardens. There was a preconceived notion that Guinness was a drink for winter. We set out to challenge this. Our goal was to take Guinness out of the snug and put it right at the heart of Irish summer. We brought the campaign alive through music, experiences, and through culture.
We secured partnerships with live music agencies to ensure Guinness was the most visible beer brand in the summer and making Guinness the drink of choice for a new generation of consumers. Right here at the Storehouse, we hosted our first open-air gig behind these famous gates. The gig sold out in just 11 minutes, generating the highest traffic ever to the Storehouse website. This year, it will be even bigger. For those of you in the room, you may have seen preparations be made earlier today to set up the stage. We are opening our gates this weekend for three days with amazing acts, including contemporary Irish music band Fontaines D.C., who are hot in Irish culture right now. Beyond music, we place culture at the heart of what we do.
We've partnered with local artists, including Fatty Burke, the Irish illustrator, to create cool new icons for Guinness in summer. I have to say, I wore one of her jackets, a black bomber jacket with a beautiful print on the back, and I can tell you, at one of these festivals, in fact, the one you can see on the left-hand side of your screen, I can't tell you how many times people stopped me to ask me where they could get one, much to the amusement of my daughter, who was with me at the time. This campaign has been hugely successful. We transformed our weakest and quietest period into our biggest recruiting vehicle. Summer now has more Guinness drinkers than Christmas. For Guinness, that's just incredible. We have the number one in market share, moving up from number three, surpassing a key competitor's lager.
Over the past two summers, we have recruited over 1.1 million Guinness drinkers, including a record number of female consumers, and Guinness is now the number one recruiting beer brand for 18-35-year-olds. This campaign demonstrates how we can take on a new occasion, another category of beer, and turn it on its head, opening Guinness up to new occasions with new consumers while staying true to the brand's heritage. I can tell you, we are just getting started. In recent years, we have taken a significant step forward on how we support the on-trade through bold initiatives, strategic partnerships, and meaningful innovation. The Lovely Day for Guinness campaign that I just talked to was supported by bold commercial execution across beer gardens in Ireland, ensuring that Guinness was showing up at the center of the Irish summer, the beer garden.
We've invested over $10 million post-COVID on driving external visibility for Guinness in the on-trade. We also launched the Guinness Live and Rising platform to celebrate Irish pubs nationwide with a series of pop-up events featuring live music, food, and sports. Emerging from COVID, our goal was to reignite excitement in the on-trade and bring unforgettable experiences to consumers. We kicked off with the Guinness first right here at the Storehouse again. Dermot Kennedy, one of Ireland's most popular artists, performed right here on the rooftop of Guinness Storehouse. Things only Guinness can do, right? This was followed by gigs in our very own Gravity Bar and surprise pop-ups in pubs across Dublin.
Today, Live and Rising allows us to create immersive experiences in pubs across Ireland, heroing local talent for music, art, food, and sport, and celebrating the new culture makers bubbling up in rural and urban communities across Ireland. Guinness 0.0 has also played a pivotal role in our entree partnerships, revitalizing pubs that sit at the heart of Irish communities. I'll speak more about this shortly. All of these initiatives and investments are grounded in a deep understanding of our customers. When I joined Diageo, we ran an extensive survey across the entree to capture their voice for the first time. We mapped out the customer journey to both deeply understand their needs and to ensure we are serving them in the best possible way. This brought a depth of understanding of the relationships, enabling us to deliver much of this powerful execution that we've just spoken to.
In addition, our sports sponsorships have also strengthened our on-trade relationships. The Six Nations continues to bring energy and excitement to pubs, and our Premier League sponsorship opens up even more opportunity with 2 million Premier League fans in Ireland. However, Nuno will speak more about this as his team have done a fantastic job bringing this to life in the home of football. Now, moving to digital, Diageo Ireland has driven and supported Guinness growth by embracing a digital-first and customer-centric culture, becoming an even better partner to do business with. Precision marketing is where we leverage data and technology to deliver highly targeted, personalized campaigns, reaching the right people with the right message at the right time. This isn't just about brand visibility. It's about driving real results for us and for our customers, as you can see on this slide.
Our geo-targeting campaign addresses a key challenge for Guinness: staying top of mind near the point of consumption. The strategy is grounded in insight. We know that one in four consumers check a venue's social media before visiting. One in three decide what they'll drink in advance. This campaign is currently running at scale across Ireland, and we have started to use AI to analyze locations where we know we can drive results. Ireland was the first market to launch this campaign with Guinness as our flagship brand, helping to reduce non-working spend. These learnings are now being applied across other markets in Europe. In recent years, Diageo Ireland has also established and introduced our own advertising channel through the use of more than 2,000 digital screens in the on-trade.
These screens function as our version of retail media, if you like, showcasing our brands while also giving outlets their own space to promote their events, menus, and announcements. They are managed remotely. We adapt their visuals based off various data signals, including day of the week, time of the day, weather, season, and other major events. This ensures that Guinness is the most visible beer brand in the outlet. We were the first Diageo market to launch this initiative, and owing to a quick rollout, we now lead the sector in Ireland with the highest number of displays. Now, in Ireland, we also take pride in pioneering the development of Guinness 0.0 on draft. We knew we had a great product in a can, but we also knew that taking it into the pub and delivering beautiful pints of Guinness 0.0 on draft would be a game changer.
We were the first market to launch, and our amazing quality and technical team have just done a fantastic job to evolve the liquid and support the rollout to now more than 2,000 pubs while ensuring great tasting Guinness 0.0 every time. The launch was supported by the viral Singing Pints campaign mentioned earlier, created here in Ireland, and a great example of what we call conscious create. Created with less than 10% of a typical budget, it achieved remarkable region impact. We also took over pubs across the country, renaming them with 0.0 branding to drive awareness and choice on St. Patrick's Day. The results, well, they speak for themselves.
Here in Dublin, where our distribution footprint is strongest, Guinness 0.0 is now the number one non-alcoholic beer in the on-trade, and our rate of sale on average is three and a half times greater than our nearest competitor. We are truly shaping the future of moderation, and Draft Guinness 0.0 is a cornerstone of that transformation. Its mass availability is a true game changer. Now, Guinness NitroSurge has also been exceptionally successful here in Ireland, with an incredible one in four households now owning one. We launched it at scale in 2021 across the country, amplifying the launch through impactful advertising and strong retail partnerships. This innovation has elevated the at-home occasion for consumers while also driving incremental value to our customers. A shopping basket that includes a Guinness NitroSurge is worth more than double the average groery basket.
The cans, as I mentioned earlier, carry a premium of 20% to the recommended selling price of a regular Guinness Draught can. Looking ahead, we are excited to build on this momentum with our pipeline of innovation, which I cannot share with you right now, but I can tell you I have seen it. I have had a sneaky peek, and it is really cool. It is even better than what I have just shared with you now. Finally, here in the home of Guinness, we are proud of our heritage, progress, and transformation, and we are confident there is much, much more to come. What can you take away from Ireland as you look at our business globally? We have demonstrated how to win in summer, the largest beer occasion in the year.
We have proven growth drivers through our partnership in live music and sport across Six Nations and Premier League, and we are only just getting started. We have demonstrated how to win in non-alc, the fastest-growing market segment, by delivering beautiful Guinness 0.0 on draft at scale with a vision that everywhere there is a Guinness pouring on draft, we will have Guinness 0.0 pouring as well. We have demonstrated how to premiumize through innovation, gaining a 20% price premium while enhancing the at-home experience from one in four households in Ireland to just think how many around the world. Finally, we have demonstrated how we can use digital and AI to deliver a step change in our A&P effectiveness. The Irish team has shown that the playbook works, and now we're excited by the potential to scale those learnings to a global audience. Thank you for your time, and I will now hand over to Nuno Teles.
Thank you, Barry. Thank you so much. Good afternoon and welcome again to St. James's. Thank you, Barry, for showing us. We have been learning so much from the last 200 years of great work in Ireland. I'm excited to say that Ireland is no longer alone, as Guinness now is the number one beer in GB as well, something that gives me a lot of pleasure. For the ones that do not know me, I'm Nuno Telles. I've spent the last three years as the Managing Director of the GB business after previously leading the U.S. beer business for four years. Prior to that, I spent many years at Heineken working in several markets globally.
Soon, I will move on to run Diageo's Mexican business and will hand over the GB business to Barry. Barry, you will love the GB business. I'm extraordinarily proud of how we have reshaped the GB business over the last several years, including how we have elevated Guinness to be the number one beer in the market. Today, I would like to tell you more about what we have done. First, let me share a bit of background on the GB market. GB is a $20 billion beer market with roughly 23 million beer drinkers and growing. Beer has a strong on-trade presence in the market with around 42,000 pubs. Beer share of TBA is about 40%, which has declined slightly since 2019, despite premium beer growing ahead of the market at nearly 7%. The beer market is quite consolidated with the largest five brewers at around 60% share.
At the brand level, it is less consolidated with the largest five brands at around 25% share. Non-alc beer only holds a 2% share, yet continues to grow at a rapid pace. Moving on to our accomplishments in the market, Guinness has grown at a CAGR of 12% over the fiscal 2019 to 2024, against a backdrop where total beer has grown only 1% over the same period. We have more than doubled our NSV over that time as we have established ourselves as the number one beer in the market, including number one in the on-trade with a share of 17.5%. We also have the number one non-alc beer by value, Guinness 0.0, which launched late 2020.
We are the number one in terms of brand strength as measured by Kantar brand guidance that has just now been released, having improved from number four back in 2023, a huge gain. We are now the number one beer in the increasingly important sports viewing occasion as well. As I said earlier, Guinness was not only and never as a number one beer in GB. It's been a long way to get here, and today, I would like to take you on that journey. We would attribute the brand's success to three key areas. First, winning in the on-trade. Second, recruiting new consumers. And third, expanding into new occasions. Let's start with winning in the on-trade. Our journey began with targeted on-trade investments made during the COVID pandemic. We also invested in Raise the Bar.
We helped our key partners in the on-trade with investment to help them reopen and serve customers post-COVID. We have continued to implement a consistent strategy, working together with the on-trade customers. The second area was to recruit new consumers through inclusive marketing combined with leveraging culture. We have recruited new consumers, including women and younger drinkers. We have extended activation across the country to drive improved performance nationwide. The third area was to expand into new occasions. We have expanded the reason to drink Guinness to year-round through authentic sports partnership, including the Six Nations and more recently, Premier League. Grainne took you through how we have used sports to broaden recruitment, and Deborah shared the way we can truly activate them at scale. I will share how we have specifically made this work in GB. Additionally, Guinness 0.0 has also helped us expand occasions by addressing moderation.
Let's go deeper into the journey that Guinness has been in GB. The road to our record recent market share truly began back in the dark days of COVID. As I'm sure you can remember, it was a difficult time for our on-trade customers, with lockdown meaning that consumers could not meet for a pint of Guinness in pubs. During that time, we took the decision to invest for the future, doing the right thing to support the business. We spent GBP 30 million through our Raise the Bar initiative, supporting over 15,000 customers as they prepared for reopening following lockdown. We worked together with the on-trade customers to create socially distanced outdoor spaces, complying with regulations, as well as driving increased Guinness visibility.
We also bought back and sold Guinness stock from them to ensure fresh quality beer with Guinness, which is key to the brand, but also to support pubs financially during this difficult period. On top of Raise the Bar, we were prepared with influencer collaborations, sport partnerships, and exciting innovations like Guinness 0.0 to engage and activate with consumers, all with a clear objective to help drive interest, footfall, and traffic into the on-trade. All of this, of course, was combined with some great marketing campaigns, taking us from 9.3% share in 2022 to 11.5% in 2023, 13.7% in 2024, and finally, the record share of 17.5% in 2025. While those activities laid the foundation, of course, that was just five years ago. While the Raise the Bar initiative provided a great foundation, it did not stop there.
We have heavily focused on working together with on-premise customers to increase brand engagement and activation using social media as a platform to extend brand reach and to reinforce our continued commitment to provide superior quality pints. A great example of a pub-led partnership is the Devonshire in London, which has served over 1 million pints of Guinness since it opened back in 2023. Pubs like the Devonshire are creating rituals around drinking Guinness in the on-trade that consumers can directly engage and identify with, all amplified through social media. These pubs are not the only example of largely Guinness-dedicated accounts that are embracing our rituals and playing with them in their own unique way. There are an increasing number of U.K.-based fan accounts engaged in activities like judging your pint, taking a photo before your first sip, waiting for the settle.
All of these and more have been embraced by our fans, significantly amplifying the Guinness brand message and making Guinness more inclusive for everyone. These activities have driven Guinness to be the number one talked beer in GB with 60% talkability share. Those activities are only possible through our ability to drive desirability by ensuring a consistent and superior quality pint in the on-trade outlets wherever Guinness is served. Internally, we have a saying that sales and marketing sell the first pint, but quality sells the rest. That is what makes our internal team ensuring quality so, so important. We transferred our quality team back in-house in 2024, and our investment in them has also underpinned this focus. You can see here great social media examples of how Guinness is not just consumed; it is celebrated. People do not just drink it. They share it.
They talk about it and make it part of the moment. Through inclusive marketing and campaigns that Grainne shared with you earlier, we are recruiting new consumers, including women and younger generations, using compelling marketing that is more inviting for everyone. By doing this, we have added 1 million consumers to the brand over the last year, an increase of 30%. Importantly, we have done this while staying true to our brand heritage and quality. We did not change the product and move away from our proven growth drivers. We drove extensive earned media coverage for the brand with initiatives like the Labrum partnership, where we partner with British label Labrum, paying homage to those who immigrated from Sierra Leone and Western Africa. We have put inclusivity at the heart of what we do, including some of our sports sponsorships.
For example, as Grainne mentioned, we recently created the Never Settle boot, the first soft ground rugby boot engineered specifically for women. We also have our ITV partnership with audio descriptive commentary to blind and vision impaired communities engaging with sport. This was launched during our last Six Nations Championship during two matches and was the first time ever this technology was used in the U.K. broadcast sport, bringing to life the match by including a level of visual detail of the action and the surrounding stadium atmosphere far beyond the standard broadcast commentary. Another way that we are growing the brand is through expanding to all year-round occasions, recruiting consumers through both summer occasions and watching sport. Last summer, we launched our own Lovely Day for Guinness. This campaign was driven by media all year round, including campaigns outside of St.
Patrick's Day and utilizing 360-degree marketing support by social and digital content. Through this approach, we became the number one beer during summer in the on-trade in 2024, up from being the number four in 2023. It was not only in the on-trade. In the off-trade, we moved into the top 10 for summer months, a more than 50 basis points share gain compared with the prior year. This trend started in the summer of 2023 when we increased the number of pints sold by 10% from 2022. Sports viewing shows another way we have moved to put more pints in hands year-round, further driving frequency and penetration with football and rugby seasons covering nearly three quarters of the year. Beer consumption while enjoying sports is an important beer occasion in GB, and it is one of the few occasions bringing new consumers to the on-trade.
Two in five Guinness consumers in GB visit the on-trade to watch live sports. While Guinness has become omnipresent in rugby through the sponsorship of Six Nations, more recently, we have expanded our presence in sport to the Premier League with the addition of the stadium's penetration of the self-pouring vending machine. The sponsorship of Six Nations has been a great growth driver and provided extensive opportunities for brand activation. The Premier League takes our sports sponsorship to the next level with a global audience and a longer season of 38 weeks. Today, Guinness is the number one most consumed beer in the football occasion, having moved up from number three. We also increased brand activation across the country, reducing the dependency on a more limited number of regions and attracting new consumers.
A more recent example is Brighton and Kent, where we have seen our share increase to 24%. There is a clear overlap between the opportunity in sports and pub partnerships that I spoke to you earlier. I invited Dave McCall, the CEO of Stonegate Pub Company, which is the largest pub company in the U.K. with 4,500 pubs, to share his reflections on how partnering with Guinness for sports viewing occasion has been important to his business. Here you can see some examples of local activations for the Premier League during this season. These activations help build cultural connections with consumers, create an increased sense of belonging in key regions across the country, and elevate the on-trade experience. Finally, an example of how we are expanding recruitment is through the off-trade, addressing at-home and moderation occasions and launching relevant innovation.
Let me start with Guinness 0.0, the number one non-alc beer in GB, as well as the fastest growing with a close to 30% share. The four-pack variant was so popular in GB when it launched that it quickly became the number one non-alc beer SKU in the market. Better yet, it is vastly incremental to Guinness, with 77% of shoppers new to the brand. We also prioritize Guinness 0.0 visibility into all our sports sponsorships. The second example is NitroSurge, another successful innovation for us and one that delivers new excitement as well as ensuring great quality into the important at-home occasion. NitroSurge was the number one best-selling beer, wine, and spirits trademark in Amazon Europe when the device was launched back in 2023.
However, with fewer than one in 50 households in GB owning a device compared to one in four you heard from Barry, there's plenty of opportunity to go after. Finally, embracing innovative price-pack architecture solutions, we have been able to increase the accessibility of the brand and reach all consumers for all occasions. NitroSurge 10-pack is a great example of that, having driven incremental sales. A credit to the entire GB team on the massive success of Guinness in the market over the past several years and something that I am, you know, very proud of being part. The truth is, though, there is still plenty of headroom for growth, and I'm convinced the best is yet to come, and I would like to explain why.
First, despite being the number one beer in the market, penetration for Guinness is still low at about 20%, with only 4.5 million Guinness drinkers in a market of 23 million beer drinkers. We still have plenty of consumers to go after. Also, despite the positive momentum in recruitment in recent years, that number is even lower for female beer drinkers, with less than 10% of female beer drinkers drinking Guinness. Second, there is still significant upside for Guinness 0.0, especially in the on-trade. While Guinness Draught has approximately 84,000 tap handles in on-trade outlets in GB, Guinness 0.0 has only six. As the number one beer addressing moderation, there is significant potential here. Third, and finally, there is further opportunity to recruit through sport, with our sponsorship of the Premier League having only started last year and, as such, only really getting started.
Three very good reasons why we all should believe the best is yet to come. Finally, I would like to end sharing something we are very excited about. We are looking forward to the opening of the Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Covent Garden later this year. We are privileged to be here today in the Storehouse, and I hope that you can already sense the excitement and connection that this brings consumers and brand together. London clearly will look to bring some of this magic of Guinness to life. We expect continued recruitment that this location will bring to nearly 500,000 expected annual visitors.
Through this brand home in central London, we will first strengthen our position as number one beer in the country and second, elevate the sports viewing occasion and particularly the Premier League sponsorship, exploring cultural collaborations and partnerships to bring football culture to life in store. I'm sure Barry will invite you all to visit the brewery, and I hope you will invite me when I come back from Mexico. With this, I will hand over to Laura.
Thank you. Good afternoon. I am delighted to represent the United States and share the final market presentation with you. My name is Laura Merritt, and I am the North American President of Diageo Beer Company and our Convenience business, meaning my remit spans all of our fast-moving consumer goods products in the United States, agnostic of whether the base is beer or spirits.
I joined Diageo two years ago after a career primarily in food CPG on brands like Kind Snacks and Kettle Brand Potato Chips. These roles were the perfect precursor to this job because if you take out kegs, 95% of my business runs through retail, and I have strong relationships across the major U.S. retailers. Just like you're not allowed to have favorite children, I'm not allowed to have favorite brands. If I did, it would be Guinness. This is an extremely exciting moment for Guinness in the United States. You see it on social media, and you see it in the streets. While Guinness is certainly a global icon, in the United States, we're a smaller player with significant runway for growth in a very large beer category. I am so proud to be able to represent what we've done to get here and share where we're going.
Today, like my peers, I will take you through our market landscape, what's driven our success in a highly competitive beer market, and what we're doing today to accelerate our growth in the future. The U.S. is a vastly different market than those we've discussed so far today. It's much bigger and much more diverse. Remember, Texas is larger than Spain, and Florida is larger than Portugal, and our country encompasses as much diversity. We have nearly 100 million LPA beer drinkers in the United States who in 2023 spent $68 billion on beer. That's well over three times the size of the GB market. Consumer behavior is also very different, with considerably more consumption happening at home and on the go than in the on-trade when compared to most European markets.
While the on-trade is a critical channel, Americans are more likely to consume beer at sporting events, at home, at the beach, or during backyard barbecues. Domestic and Mexican lagers dominate the highest share positions in the U.S., but there is a very long tail of brands which primarily consist of craft beers. In recent years, the industry has consolidated, with many of those craft brands either closing or being bought by the larger players. A full 81% of beer share is now owned by the five largest brewers. While beer was the original conveniently canned and bottled beverage, market competition has heated up dramatically with the popularity of other convenient offerings across the ready-to-drink space. There is significant overlap between beer and ready-to-drink, particularly in the evening relax and wind down occasion. The strength of ready-to-drink in the U.S.
has contributed to the slight decline of beer share of TBA over the last five years. Despite this tough economic environment, Guinness is thriving. Another key nuance of the U.S. market is the distributor landscape. Since Prohibition, the United States has been a three-tier system, which I'm sure most of you know well. We distribute Guinness through a fragmented market of many small to large-sized distributors across the U.S., which is completely separate from our spirits network. In the U.S., each of our 50 states is subject to its own unique distribution laws, and it often varies at the county level within a state. Interestingly, while distributors have either traditionally focused on malt or spirits, the growth of ready-to-drink is driving a convergence, with traditional beer distributors moving to play in spirits and vice versa. We have hundreds of distributors, and our relationships and partnerships with them are crucial.
Each distributor manages many suppliers, brands, and SKUs, so winning an outsized amount of attention from our distributors is key to our success. We partner with these distributors to execute our plans to grow our expanding portfolio of malt-based brands through field sales teams and third-party merchandisers and ambassadors. Not only are our distributors excited about Guinness's outperformance compared to the rest of the market in recent years, we are one of the few bright spots in their portfolios. Despite being a smaller fish in a vast pond and the headwinds facing beer, Guinness continues to accelerate in the U.S., and the team has a lot to be proud of. Guinness has outperformed the U.S. beer category with an almost 4% organic net sales CAGR between fiscal 2019 and fiscal 2024.
This growth came both from kegs in the on-trade and through our full product lineup in the off-trade, including Guinness Draught in a can and Guinness 0.0. In this highly competitive beer market, we have gained share, which has accelerated over the last 12 months to plus 14 basis points. Similar to Ireland and Great Britain, we have seen our strongest growth rates in the on-trade. Guinness is the fastest growing major beer brand in the on-trade in the last 12 weeks and the number one draft beer in major metropolitan areas like Boston and New York. We have also gained share in the off-trade in 48 of the last 52 weeks through April, according to Nielsen, as consumers enjoy us with meals, at sporting events, and on the beach. In particular, Guinness 0.0 has been a significant contributor to our success.
Though we are the ninth largest non-alc beer overall, we're the third fastest growing in the on-trade. Let us dive into what's been driving the U.S. success. What looks like a great moment is really great momentum, which we've been deliberately and methodically building. Today, I want to focus on three drivers of our success. The first is through world-class brand building. We actively created a space for Guinness in culture to attract younger, more diverse consumers and more health-conscious consumers, both through our own communication and through partnerships. We successfully launched integrated programs that marry partnerships with culture-driving content that has attracted new and diverse consumers. While I'm proud we are welcoming more diverse and younger consumers to our brand, it is also as important to highlight that we've maintained our commitment to consumers who've been with us for decades.
Even as we extend the umbrella to welcome new consumers to the brand, we never take our core consumer for granted. Our culture-driving campaigns are complemented by conversion-driving tools in store and in the on-trade. The U.S., more than other markets you've heard from today, spent years limited to Irish pubs and St. Patrick's Day, but we've actively expanded the brand into new occasions and channels. This includes year-round messaging and focused expansion into casual dining restaurants and convenience stores, and it is working. We've had big distribution wins in large restaurant chains like Yard House and in convenience stores like Casey's, where we just won Supplier of the Year for outstanding performance and partnership. It is more important than ever to be present in these channels where consumers are dining and shopping, especially with the huge growth in ready-to-drink offerings.
Finally, we've grown through innovation, including Guinness 0.0 and LTO packs, which have broadened appeal, driven display, and contributed to our ability to access new channels. Over the next few minutes, we'll dive deeper into each of these pillars. Dating back to the days of Gilroy, the iconic nature of Guinness has given it an outsized place in U.S. culture, and today is no different. Despite being 20th in market share, Guinness was the number three most searched-for beer in digital tracking data behind two of our larger beer competitors' main brands. We've continued to seed the brand in popular culture through partnerships in fashion, which Grainne mentioned earlier, including brands like J.W. Anderson, Lucky Brand, and Abercrombie. These partnerships have allowed the brand to grow penetration with younger and more diverse consumer cohorts, with penetration growing across Gen Z, millennials, Hispanics, and women.
Guinness is a brand Americans are proud to wear. Even famous musician Olivia Rodrigo wore a homemade Guinness tank top during her recent tour. This is a perfect example of our reputation as a culturally relevant brand. As we further penetrate culture, consumers are increasingly aware of our credentials as a lighter and lower-calorie beer. We're especially popular with health-conscious in-the-know consumers who are increasingly mindful of moderation. Americans spend more than any other country in the world on physical activity, and often Guinness is the beer of choice for fitness-minded consumers. Famously, at 125 calories, a serving of Guinness Draught has almost as few calories as most light lager beers. As such, we are sponsoring run clubs around the United States and advertising with on-the-go imagery. Beyond being undaunted by increasingly health-conscious consumers, we believe this works in Guinness's favor.
We are proud to communicate our liquid credentials, including the low calories contained in both Guinness 0 and Guinness Draught relative to other beer options in the market. We see a lot of potential growth coming from these important consumer segments. As mentioned, the United States was even more tied to St. Patrick's Day than other markets, but we have had tremendous success liberating the brand and expanding into new occasions across the entire year. Certainly, St. Patrick's Day remains a cornerstone event. We continue to dye the river green in Chicago. We are present in parades all over the country, and we annually ring in the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Of course, every day is a lovely day for a Guinness. Every season, rain or shine, while watching a football game or at the beach, sports occasions are critical for Guinness.
We did a tailgate tour celebrating in-stadium lots at sporting events across the country this past fall, visiting NFL and college tailgates in 12 cities. Our focus in the next fiscal year will be around soccer, which currently tallies 80 million fans in the U.S., where it is the fastest-growing sport among Gen Z. The U.S. will also be leveraging our Premier League sponsorship with custom content and experiences. With this approach, we have been able to sustain 28 consecutive weeks of share growth after St. Patrick's Day in 2024, increasing share every week over the summer between Labor Day and Memorial Day. With increased programming and support around the holidays, including our tiny pub activations and partnership with Levain Cookies, we were able to grow total brand volume over 23% last year, including 32% in the entree.
We're also expanding to new occasions and making Guinness more accessible through increased distribution in both the on-trade and off-trade. In the on-trade, we're expanding strategically beyond Irish pubs to other food occasions, including casual dining and sports bars. We're even highlighting this in our advertising. In our recent Jason Momoa commercial, for example, we highlighted Guinness in the on-trade, but outside the pub at a Japanese restaurant. When it comes to Premier League partnership, we are working with sports bars to attract soccer-loving consumers, creating engaging programs that attract both soccer fanatics and casual fans to watch the games in the on-trade. This strategy has been successful, as we've grown 14% in restaurants and 8% in sports bars so far this year.
We just recently secured a new national distribution agreement with Buffalo Wild Wings, which will bring Guinness to an additional 1,300 locations over the next year. In part due to this strategy, Guinness kegs, which are the largest Guinness variant on a volume basis and make up over a quarter of our NSV, saw shipment NSV nearly double since fiscal 2021. Our ability to expand has been successful in the off-trade, including with four-packs and eight-packs draft in a can offering. This spring, we will see our largest ever spring reset in retail with over 5,100 new points of distribution. This represents a 5% increase in our number of Guinness draft in cans off-premise accounts sold, including nearly doubling our presence in convenience stores. We have made further strides in the off-trade through fit-for-channel packs for the club channel with customers like Costco and BJ's.
In the U.S., we launched Guinness 0.0 in February 2022, a bit later than in Europe due to supply ramping up. Since then, it's become one of the fastest-growing variants in the portfolio, addressing consumers' desire to moderate. Gen Z and millennials are particularly excited about Guinness 0.0. Last fiscal year, Guinness 0.0's growth accounted for 50% of the brand's total growth in the U.S., and it's a largely incremental proposition, with only 2% of overlap between Guinness consumers and Guinness Draught in a can consumers. It increases our penetration and recruitment. In addition to new variants like Guinness 0.0, we're also innovating through packs, including culturally relevant LTO packs like Holiday and Sports, and fit-for-channel multi-packs such as the Guinness 0.0 eight-pack and the Irish Heritage pack.
I mentioned earlier how these packs are driving an impact in club stores, which are highly incremental given the lack of shopper overlap in other channels. We have come a long way and have the foundation, momentum, and plans to drive significantly more growth in the U.S. market. A cornerstone of those plans is our new Lovely Day for a Guinness campaign, which plays with the success of the classic Lovely Day tagline, but with a uniquely American perspective. Our campaign touches all 50 states and gives Lovely Day for a Guinness a new meaning for the next generation of LPA drinkers. It shares 50 beautiful, real Guinness stories of communion, from Chicago plumbers to Michigan ice fishermen, and from a brass band in Louisiana to roller skating dads of Pennsylvania. These beautiful, true stories capture the best of both the American spirit and the communion that Guinness inspires.
Early feedback on the ad has been positive, with market testing showing that it has resonated the most strongly with LPA plus younger beer drinkers, our target audience for expansion. One-third of these consumers expressed intent to purchase Guinness after viewing the ad. The campaign is just the foundation of our plans to capture further growth. In addition to Lovely Day content on social, digital, and streaming TV, we will have an LTO pack distributed nationally, inspired by the original Gilroy art and designed by Sebastian Curie from Los Angeles. Our summer programming includes a culture-leading partnership with Van Loen Ice Cream, experiential marketing and sampling events from Memorial Day to Labor Day. We will also have a prominent football footprint during the Premier League Summer Series, which are a series of exhibition matches played in Chicago, Atlanta, and New York at the end of July.
We will continue to focus on growing Guinness 0.0. Even with a strong growth trajectory, the brand is only 5% of total NSV for Guinness, so our growth opportunity is significant. Through further distribution of eight-packs and the launch of new future formats, we will grow 0.0 further. There is still ample opportunity to expand Guinness in the on-premise beyond traditional Irish pubs. We have further focus on penetrating casual dining outlets and sports bars through sports partnerships and communicating the brand's liquid credentials and quality. With that, I want to thank you for allowing me to share our journey with you. We are very excited about what lies ahead for Guinness in the United States.
Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you have enjoyed your Guinness flavor treats. My name is Dayalan Nayager, and I am Diageo's President of Europe and our Chief Commercial Officer.
I've been with Diageo for over 12 years, and I've worked across Great Britain, global travel, and most recently, Africa. Before joining Diageo, I've held leadership roles across various functions at Mars and Heinz. Today, I'm excited to talk to you about how we are strategically shaping our global distribution footprint to support the long-term sustainable growth of Guinness. We are evolving our route to consumer, and we are making strategic choices on the most efficient and effective distribution model by market. By using a variety of distribution models, we are expanding our footprint while ensuring we are scalable and responsive to the most compelling growth opportunities. Our partnership model is a key enabler to our growth. It allows us to accelerate growth in existing markets and to enter new markets while avoiding large CapEx that was once required. This delivers financial growth with discipline.
Ultimately, optimizing our global footprint is not just about efficiency. It is a fundamental lever for unlocking growth. It gives us the flexibility to scale, the discipline to invest wisely, and the confidence to drive Guinness forward. Before we dive into the various models, let's take a look at the broad breadth of our global Guinness portfolio. Our portfolio spans kegs, bottles, cans, and our latest innovation dispense systems, each playing a unique role in how we bring Guinness to life around the world. Guinness is a truly global brand, but what makes it remarkable is its deep local relevance. Whilst the Guinness name and visual identity resonate worldwide, we tailor our portfolio to meet our local consumer taste and preferences. The most striking example of this is the contrast between markets.
For example, in Africa, foreign extra stout, or Guinness FES, as it is referred to locally, is our largest format. Meanwhile, Guinness draught is our largest format in Europe and the U.S., where the smooth, creamy pour is synonymous with a brand experience. Now let's talk about how we distribute beautiful Guinness across the world. Ultimately, we have quite a simple route to consumer with two distinct models. The first is our finished goods model, which accounts for approximately 80% of our Guinness revenue. This is a highly integrated route to consumer, where we manage the majority of the supply chain directly. From the highly efficient and effective brewery at the epicenter of our Guinness network, St. James's Gate, we brew and ship finished goods to consumers around the world. This model serves many of our largest markets, including Great Britain, Ireland, and the U.S.
It is well-established and an efficient system built on relationships and resilient infrastructure. We also work with partners to distribute finished goods to many other markets. This approach allows us to tap into broader footprints and local expertise whilst extending our reach. Our second route to market involves local production under a license and extract model. In this model, partners brew Guinness locally using a unique Guinness flavor extract, also known as GFE. GFE is at the backbone of our asset-light model. It is a special ingredient that brings the magic of Guinness taste and quality to consumers around the world. In markets where we have the scale and infrastructure like EABL, we brew and distribute Guinness Foreign Extra Stout ourselves.
When an asset-light approach makes more sense, we collaborate with trusted local partners, and these partners leverage their deep local knowledge to reach a vast number of outlets. Although both models are vastly different, they enable us to consistently deliver quality and efficiency at scale. You will need to elaborate on this next. Now let's dive into our largest route to market, finished goods. You heard earlier from Barry, Nuno, and from Laura about the exciting growth we have seen in Ireland, Great Britain, and in the U.S. These three markets account for approximately 60% of our net sales value. Given the scale and the strategic importance, we have adopted a high-touch distribution model, managing most of the route to consumer ourselves.
Across all three markets, we have exceptional capabilities and long-standing relationships with customers, and we believe that this is the most efficient and effective way to manage our route to consumer. Now looking at our partnership models, we have two. The first is where we work with partners in leveraging their footprint to bring finished goods to the market, and the second is using GFE, the magic ingredient, to brew Guinness locally. We have established a broad world-class distribution network, which is individually tailored to each market. Our strong global network is made up of over 100 trusted partners. As you can see, in many cases, we work with the market-leading partners in each country, which gives Guinness the access to the broadest distribution. We believe this flexibility gives us a competitive advantage in driving Guinness growth.
Across both partnership models, our partners have superior distribution networks, allowing Guinness to expand in existing markets and to enter new potential markets. Crucially, both models are asset light for Diageo. This approach brings numerous advantages, including the enhanced flexibility and efficiency, and this significantly reduces risk. Most importantly, it requires minimal capital investment, far less than building a brewery, giving us access to greater capacity without the need to substantial upfront spend. Let's start with our first partnership model. This is where our route to consumer is built on the finished goods distribution and is mainly used in continental Europe. This model is highly effective for continental Europe, and through our partners, we gain access to extensive distribution in each market. Continental Europe represents around $100 million U.S.
dollars in annual sales, and currently, we are in 12,000 on-trade outlets, and I believe that Guinness has the opportunity to win in 200,000 on-trade outlets. As I come into my new role, I see enormous potential for us here. The second partnership model is where our partners brew and distribute Guinness locally. In my time in Africa, we have accelerated and actively optimized our footprint. We refer to this as our asset-light approach, and it is primarily used in Africa and Asia-Pacific. In Asia-Pacific, our approach is clear. We are highly choiceful in how we go to market because in a region this complex, precision matters. From historic Foreign Extra Stout markets in Southeast Asia to emerging draft strongholds, the region represents a mix of legacy and future potential through new draft partnerships.
We have recently optimized our route to consumer in mainland China, Australia, and in New Zealand. We have partnered with Lion in Australia and New Zealand, and with AB InBev in mainland China to produce Guinness Draught locally. This strengthens our relationships and signals a long-term commitment of our partners. Our partners believe in the potential of Guinness, and we believe in their ability to deliver growth. Looking at Africa, back in 2019, we have shared a strategy centered around using our beer route to consumer to drive growth of our premium spirits portfolio in Africa. This strategy resulted in us merging our beer and our spirits distribution models across the region, as we believe there was a potential to leverage synergies between the categories. As the African consumer and our understanding of that consumer has evolved, we have adapted our strategy to reflect these shifts.
Although beer and mainstream spirits can often coexist within the same distribution model, premium spirits needs a different approach. Operating a successful scale beer business is vastly different from what is required for a premium spirits business. Both these businesses have unique outlet universes, delivery frequencies, logistics networks, and require different sales capabilities. With the pace at which Africa is urbanizing, premium spirits have accelerated in key cities across the region. To capture this growth, we implemented a new route to consumer for premium spirits, which is independent from our beer route to consumer. With premium spirits now operating at an independent route to consumer, this gave us the opportunity to transition our beer route to consumer in many African markets to an asset-light operating model, aligning with partners who have the ability to manufacture and scale Guinness distribution locally.
Over the past three years, we have transitioned our beer businesses in Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, and the Seychelles to an asset-light model. As part of this, we have made strategic decisions to sell several of our brewing operations when the timing and the partnerships were right. Our goal has been to secure strong value and align with the trusted local partners who can fuel Guinness growth for the future. We have pursued this strategy with confidence because we believe it is the right way to unlock growth for Guinness across Africa, and I will share early results from Cameroon and Nigeria shortly. Our continued focus on financial discipline gives us the confidence to believe that these decisions are the right ones, not just for today, but for the long-term success of Guinness.
The benefits of our asset-light approach, combined with sharper management focus, fewer operational complexities, and rigorous capital allocation, give us great confidence that we are shaping the footprint of Africa that is fit for the future. I'd like to briefly share two examples of how our asset-light strategy in Africa has come into action. At the core of this approach is a focus on capital efficiency and allocation, and our ability to scale our brands in a way that delivers value to both the business and our shareholders. The first example is the sale of our Guinness Cameroon operations. We had an aging brewery with limited capacity that required significant capital investment.
We know that it is not profitable or efficient to ship beer more than 500 km from a brewery, and with just one brewery in Douala, it restricted our ability to distribute Guinness efficiently across Cameroon, which has a length of almost 1,700 km. We sold this operation to Castel, who already had five breweries in Cameroon. Castel has proven to be a great partner and helped us turn around a five-year CAGR volume decline of -3% per annum prior to the sale to now delivering growth of more than 5% by leveraging their broad manufacturing, distribution, and network. The second example is Guinness Nigeria. Before the sale, we operated two breweries in Nigeria, one in Lagos and one in Benin. Similar to Cameroon, we did not have the ability to distribute Guinness profitably across the country.
In contrast, a significant competitor had nine breweries, making it difficult for us to compete in a meaningful way. To drive Guinness growth in Nigeria, we needed to materially invest in CapEx. However, this would not have been the best use of Diageo's capital. Instead, we sold our 58% stake in Guinness Nigeria to Tolaram, one of the largest distributors in Nigeria with vast local knowledge after nearly 50 years of operating in the country. Early results show that Tolaram are proving to be an excellent partner. In the six months to December 2024, Guinness Nigeria delivered strong volume growth supported by Tolaram's distribution network. In our asset-light model, Diageo is the owner of the Guinness IP and continues to benefit from the upside potential, achieving margin accretion while reducing our exposure to FX volatility and macroeconomic uncertainty.
While the Guinness route to consumer consists of multiple parts, it is strategic and executed in service of delivering quality Guinness to our consumers. I've seen this model come to life in my time in Africa, and I'm excited by the potential that it can unlock for Diageo. I'd like to summarize by leaving you with three key messages. First, by leveraging our range of distribution models, we built the flexibility to adapt quickly to market dynamics to maximize our reach in both mature and emerging markets. Secondly, our partnership model enables us to accelerate growth in existing markets with minimal capital investment. This enables us to use our resources efficiently and effectively. Lastly, our partnership model allows us to enter new markets faster by tapping into local expertise and established networks without the need for heavy upfront capital investment.
We are confident that we are optimizing our global footprint to not only sustain, but to accelerate Guinness's growth in the years ahead. Thank you for your time, and I'll now hand over to you.
Okay, good afternoon, everyone. I'm delighted to be with you today to share more about the Guinness supply chain footprint and how we're optimizing this for continued growth. I lead our global supply chain and procurement organization, and I also serve as Diageo's Chief Sustainability Officer. Now, I've been with Diageo for over 25 years, living and working across Europe, Latin America, Asia, and North America. Truly a global journey with an extraordinary company. Today, I'll provide context behind the significant expansion and performance improvement that you've seen during your site visit, which hopefully most of you here were able to enjoy earlier this morning.
To those of you online, I would encourage you to visit St. James's Gate next time you are in Dublin. Let me start by taking you through what I'm going to cover today. We are immensely proud of the efficient and resilient supply chain that is powering Guinness's success. Not only is our supply chain well invested in, but importantly, it's well positioned for future growth. Furthermore, sustainability is embedded in everything we do, and we're seeing the positive impact of this both today and in future risk mitigation, something critical for the business as we look to at least maintain margins over time. First, let me start with quality. A long defining hallmark of Guinness, our very first newspaper advertisement in the 1920s cited quality as the driving force behind the growth of the Guinness brewery. It's a principle that continues to guide us today.
As Grainne highlighted, our commitment to quality extends well beyond the gates of the brewery, although my focus and presentation will take you through grain to gate. We apply the same rigorous standards across every stage of production, with 284 quality checks on every batch of Guinness before it leaves the brewery and 23 taste tests on every brew. I also personally receive monthly updates tracking our League of Excellence, ensuring we remain aligned with the high-quality standards that we have set for our brands. This focus on quality is crucial as we collaborate with partners worldwide, as you heard from Dayalan, all of whom are held to the same quality standards that define Guinness and that we apply internally across our own production. One of Guinness's key competitive advantages and a powerful differentiator for consumers is that every pint of Guinness originates from right here in St.
James's Gate in Dublin. It is more than just a compelling brand story. It is also a cornerstone of our quality assurance and our operational efficiency. To briefly lay out our highly efficient supply chain model, brewing is centralized at St. James's Gate, where we bring together the finest Irish ingredients to create the unique liquid that is Guinness. For our export and Irish markets, we mainly keg here in Dublin, and packaging is then handled at our facilities in Belfast and Runcorn. This integrated setup streamlines the operations, enhances agility, and ensures a highly efficient and responsive supply chain. Our physical footprint is strategically optimized for logistics. Dublin, Belfast, and Runcorn are all located near major shipping ports and in close proximity to key suppliers, many of whom are local. This minimizes transportation costs, supports sustainability, and helps preserve the authenticity of our product.
From here, as Dayalan talked to, Guinness goes either directly to customers and distributors or is brewed through trusted third-party partnerships, often partners we have worked with for many, many years. This partner brewing model uses Guinness flavor extract from right here at St. James's Gate, and utilization at St. James's Gate has steadily increased over the years, driven by growing consumer demand for Guinness, with capacity utilization well over 90%. We continue to operate with high efficiency, maximizing our resources whilst maintaining the flexibility to be agile and respond to peak periods and unexpected surges in orders. As we near full utilization here at St. James's Gate, we are investing to expand our brewing capacity, and I'll walk you through the details of that expansion shortly. At Diageo, we are committed to delivering industry-leading performance.
This focus fuels continuous innovation and improvement, ensuring we are as productive and efficient as possible. This has been particularly important given the inflationary environment of the past five years. Like many consumer companies in the consumer goods sector, we face significant cost pressures in the years following COVID, with Guinness no exception to this. Since pre-COVID, back to 2019, our cost of goods rose at peak by over 40%, with significant increases in key inputs such as grain, energy, and packaging, as these external benchmarks show. To give some example of magnitude, combined, barley, energy, and aluminum are around 40% of cost of goods sold for Guinness. With the significant uplift you see on this slide, clearly this has been a strong headwind for us. In response, we are continually taking decisive steps to optimize our operations and protect our margins.
We have implemented robust commodity price risk management programs. This includes shifting spending strongly towards derivatives, buying to increase our flexibility to hedge forward. We have also worked to improve our hedging systems and tools, including implementing electronic trading, as well as longer horizons to manage future risk. Beyond commodity risk management, we have streamlined production processes and accelerated efficiency initiatives. Brewing remains centralized at St. James's Gate, whilst canning and bottling have been consolidated at our Belfast and Runcorn facilities. This operational structure has enabled a high utilization, low overhead model that maximizes production capacity. Combined, these actions not only reduce waste, but improve performance across the board, enabling us to broadly maintain Guinness gross margins at pre-COVID levels. Importantly, efficiency is not a one-off initiative. It's a core part of our culture, and it's ongoing. We continually seek ways to optimize capacity, minimize waste, and control costs.
This productivity-first mindset is deeply embedded in everything that we do. This approach and focus on manufacturing excellence has been key as we have worked hard to really sweat and care for our production assets on Guinness. As Deborah talked to earlier, we have delivered eight consecutive halves of double-digit growth on Guinness. Given this high growth, we have had to increase our capacity in Guinness production to meet the demand. We first actioned a series of smaller investments to both increase capacity and maximize efficiency here at St. James's Gate in the last three years. These investments included work to optimize our brewing streams and scale up our capacity on our stout filters and storage vessels, all key parts of the Guinness brewing process. Collectively, these investments have been around EUR 25 million.
In combination with our highly skilled brewers and operational teams, they have allowed us to increase capacity at St. James's Gate by around 8% over the last three years. We have also directed significant productivity efforts and capital investment toward our canning and bottling sites, including the consolidation of all of our bottling operations into our Runcorn facility, optimizing our warehousing network, and introducing automated smart warehousing. These collectively increased capacity by just over 25% at Belfast and Runcorn, at an efficient cost of around GBP 40 million. As you will know, customer demand for Guinness surged dramatically in the autumn last year. While we had planned for future growth, the sheer level of this incremental pressure on our supply chain meant we have had to be agile to meet the unprecedented Guinness demand. We flexed our priority markets and optimized output during our continuous 24/7 operations.
We keep a clear view of stock days forward cover in each market, which allows us to allocate stock appropriately, and we will continue to be agile to meet demand going forward. As you just saw, we have very deliberately invested to increase capacity alongside efficiency measures. We have also made some larger investments over the last few years to expand production capacity at scale. Specifically, we have replaced our outdated keg filling plant at St. James's Gate, completed expansion of our canning lines, and are now midway through scaling Guinness Zero Zero to capture the rising demand for alcohol-free Guinness. The quality of Guinness Zero Zero is exceptional. It is made by producing Guinness to our high production standards, then removing the alcohol. As you have heard from my colleagues, it is a significant growth opportunity for Diageo.
We have also invested in an entirely new location to manage future capacity. An important component of our future growth is Little Connell, our new 2 million hectoliter brewery in Ireland, which will increase brewing capacity by 25% and also has further potential for expansion on that site. As Little Connell ramps up production, it will take on brewing for our other beers, allowing St. James's Gate to focus solely on brewing Guinness. This will be a critical enabler for the next chapter of Guinness's growth. Little Connell will be a state-of-the-art facility featuring advanced water treatment and recovery technology, minimizing water usage in production. We expect it to be completed by summer next year. We are well placed for future growth, and looking ahead, we remain committed to investing to meet the future growth of Guinness.
Little Connell is a prime example of how we combine high performance with environmental responsibility. The facility will lead in energy efficiency and water conservation, utilizing technologies such as renewable heating plant, heat pumps, biogas boilers, and water recovery systems. Our approach to sustainability is broader than that. Our regenerative agriculture farming practices, collaborating with Irish farmers, are tailored to the local and specific needs of Irish barley production. Across our pilot project, we have tripled the cover crop seed that has been planted. By 2030, our aim is to use 30% less water per pint we brew and 40% less in water-stressed areas by using the best possible solutions to increase water circularity. Since fiscal 2019, we have already reduced our carbon emissions by over 20% at Guinness. This is a meaningful achievement and one that reflects the strategic investments we have made across our operations. At St.
James's Gate, we are working to accelerate to net zero carbon emissions for the site and transforming energy and water consumption with the aim to make it one of the most efficient breweries in the world by 2030. Our water consumption here at St. James's Gate has reduced by more than 50%, and there is more we can still do. We announced earlier this fiscal year planned investments of over EUR 100 million to move to net zero carbon emissions by 2030. Our carbon efforts also extend further. Shipping kegs has a relatively low carbon impact, given we're able to reuse kegs over and over again. We've also introduced zero-emission vehicles for our tankers and local delivery to the hospitality trade here in Dublin.
Outside Ireland, in markets where Guinness is distributed mainly in glass bottles, we're working to increase how often those glass bottles are reused, impacting both the environment, but also providing a significant cash benefit to Diageo. At Guinness, we're not just running a highly efficient business, we're doing it responsibly, and our sustainability efforts are not only real and measurable, but also fully aligned with long-term value creation. I drive our teams with a sustainability call to action on cost, cash, and carbon every day. In closing, we're proud of the efficient, resilient supply chain that is powering Guinness's success. Our investments today and in the future are bold, strategic, and designed to fuel sustainable growth and returns. Given investment today, we are well placed for future growth.
Additionally, sustainability is embedded in everything we do, and we're seeing the positive impact of this both today and in future risk mitigation, including across areas such as changing regulation on responsible packaging. With that, we will now move to a Q&A with myself, Dayalan, Grainne, Barry, Nuno, and Laura.
Thank you. Simon Hales from Citi. I've got a couple, please, if I can. Perhaps I can just start with margins. Can I just check you in that I heard you right? Gross margins are flat versus 2019, despite the COGS inflation that we've seen. If that is the case, can you just talk more generally about maybe where contribution margins have moved generally for Guinness over the last sort of five years? I suppose an addendum to that, is Guinness margin accretive to the European division as things stand?
My second question was more around the partnership and license model. I think you said 20% of NSV now coming from that side of the business. Obviously, a big chunk of that is the Nigerian and EABL business. If you look at the ex-bit of those businesses, either partnerships with AB InBev, Heineken, etc., can you talk about the performance of those businesses over the last sort of five or ten years? Maybe what the opportunity is, where the green space opportunities are or white space opportunities to see bigger growth in new markets?
Okay, I will take the first one on gross margin. You heard correctly on gross margin. Nik is going to cover this in a bit more. He has got a nice slide that illustrates it.
Essentially, we have managed during that period across a premium product to maintain margins that we're very proud of on a beer like Guinness. The asset-light model supports that. When you look at depreciation against NSV, depreciation per hectoliter, if you bench that against other major brewers, we stand in a very strong place with the right levels of investment. We are always very intentional to make sure that we're maximizing utilization in order to manage that kind of fixed cost base and the recoveries against it and take very deliberate and very intentional steps when it's time to then start to increase your capacity.
Quite a lot of that operational work that I talked with consolidating the bottling operations in Runcorn in England and having canning assets that were upgraded significantly on automation, cleaning times, lower manning, automation in the warehousing, we have done a lot of work to offset those inflationary cost pressures. In many ways, that is kind of long-term, very deliberate, intentional actions across the supply chain that have been coming together. It is not just reacting and what can we do. There is a very clear strategy, and we are working through that on a year-by-year basis, and we will continue to do so. Nik will talk more on margins later.
I will take the second question in terms of the performance. I covered Cameroon and Nigeria in terms of the performance of the recent performance we have seen.
I think if you look at historically, we've been partnering with Castel in Africa, I'll say more in the smaller markets across the patch, and we've seen strong growth. The reason why we partnered with Castel in Cameroon and now in Ghana is because of the work they've done across the patch for us. We're in more than 10 markets across Africa with them. Because of the growth that we have seen, what Castel has given us is confidence to go into some of the bigger markets. In terms of white space, there's definitely opportunities. If I look at Africa as a region, you know we've got a big business in East Africa. We've got Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, a South African operation. We've got opportunities in like Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana. DRC is a big opportunity in the middle.
It's a hard market to go after, but DRC is a big opportunity. You've got Côte d'Ivoire in the west, Senegal. There are lots of opportunities still to go after in terms of new markets. In terms of where we're partnering at the moment, it's working well for us.
I think I would just say as well, just on that margin question, in terms of Guinness context, margin versus Europe, we're not going to split it down by region. Nik will give you an overall view in terms of margin and what we've seen, but that's probably as much color as you're going to get from us, unfortunately.
Hey, everyone. Sanji Aujla from UBS. Two for me, please. One for Laura, just on Guinness in the U.S., can you give us a sense of how much of the business is in Irish pubs today and how you're working differently with distributors to really get penetration higher beyond that channel? One for Dayalan as well, just on the Guinness opportunity in Europe. I think you highlighted a potential to get to 200,000 on-trade outlets. Presumably, that's always been a big opportunity. What's changing to really get that number higher?
As mentioned, we have hundreds of distributors in the U.S., so it is incredibly critical that we cut through for them. We use a lot of different creative tactics to do that, but I will say that success begets success. In the case of this, we're one of the few bright spots in their portfolio right now. We're getting an outsized amount of attention because they want to win with what's winning. T hat is working really well for us. In terms of what is happening in our rebalance between pubs and the rest of our portfolio, I want to make sure people realize that we will always stick by our Irish pubs. This is very much an and. We are just looking at the opportunity that, as Guinness has increased in popularity, as we have even the velocities in retail to support it, we are getting those opportunities in chains like Buffalo Wild Wings, Yardhouse, Hooters, other things that we have not had at an at bat for prior, but we do today because of performance.
To your second question, if you look at continental Europe, it is a big beer market. A lot of the countries in continental Europe are big beer. You have Germany, you have Spain, large market opportunities.
If you look at what we've been doing as Diageo over the years and what we're doing now, we're actually looking at our route to consumer and to say, how do we optimize it? By optimizing our route to consumer and saying, okay, this is, we're going to go asset light in some markets, and in some markets, we're going to go with partners. The asset light change we're driving will actually give us more capacity within our total supply chain as well. We could better use the capacity that we create to actually go after some of the opportunities we see in continental Europe. If you look at us right now, you guys would have seen that we reached a point in December where we were at capacity on Guinness. We can't just ramp up distribution.
We have got to do it in time. The 200,000 outlets I spoke about in continental Europe is where we see an opportunity for us to win in. That is a multi-year journey. It is not going to happen at once. It will happen over a number of years.
Hi, two questions. One for you, and I guess one for Grainne. You and Dayalan just referred to the supply constraints leading up to Christmas in 2024. The new brewery comes on stream, I think, Q2 2026. You can assure volumes are up double digits. That seems to me you have got a bit of another tight squeeze coming in Christmas 2025. Just how are you addressing that?
Yeah, look, I am confident. Last year was, I mean, we saw more in December than we did in St. Patrick's Day at that time of year, right? It was an unprecedented level.
It was four and a half million pints that came through more during that period. There is no doubt that that was a big surge. The reality is that at that time of year, we are always generally managing the replenishment to make sure it is managed over such a long period of peak in line with that capacity piece. As we move forward, whilst I talked to 8% in the brewery from the work we have done with investments and performance improvements over the last three years, that is not just the capacity that we have created within the brewery. We have also done many things around about, you know, we were brewing for others before. We are doing much less of that. We are getting more capacity for Guinness, and we have got Little Connell coming on stream. I am confident that we have got enough Guinness capacity, and we have managed it well in relation to that growth.
That unprecedented spike, no doubt, gave us some replenishment to manage in the market and maybe give a little bit of brand fame as well.
We were talking about social media and just what an amazing wave of interest has been in social media. Does that give you a risk of an air pocket? If Guinness does become, ceases to be quite as popular on social media, that you could have an air pocket in this amazing growth you have generated?
Yeah, I think, Trevor, I would start by saying Guinness has always been really relevant and vibrant in culture. Actually now we have tools like social listening, digital and data tools that allow us to respond in much more agile, much faster real time to what we are seeing unfolding in social channels. You heard some of the fantastic stats on just how talkable Guinness is.
It is definitely clear that that sort of use of those digital tools is really helping us drive that and respond to it as well. I would also say that although that is a very important part of our plans and our shift, you know, some of our shifts to social and digital media have seen the increases in short-term ROI that I shared, like +51%. You know, very effective. It is not the only thing driving growth on Guinness right now. I think you have heard from all the presenters about how we are extending into new seasons, into new occasions. We have big properties like the Premier League only a year in. We have an incredible innovation pipeline that we are really only just getting going on. You are going to see more on that with Mark in the innovation showcase later.
I suppose in summary, although our social media is really important and it's something we will continue to drive and grow and use all of the digital and data tools at our disposal, there are many reasons for confidence, and I hope you've heard them expressed across the piece today.
Thank you, Philip Molloy from Amundi. Just a question on your pricing strategies. You have a very unique product in the sense that, you know, it is a beer, but it doesn't really compete head-to-head with any of your, any of the lagers. How do you think about pricing in the market, particularly as we, you know, sort of lap some of the, yeah, the cost increases that's led to, you know, the pricing surge of recent years?
I mean, we can take it if you want. Maybe myself and Dayalan will respond. First of all, I mean, Guinness is clearly like a really premium beer brand. It's highly distinctive. And distinctive brands have the highest pricing power. There's a direct link between distinctivity and an ability to have a premium brand. That certainly is a big part of our pricing strategy. As Nuno also shared, we are using all of our levers of price management in terms of SKU, in terms of offerings, in terms of ensuring through innovations like Barry shared, like NitroSurge, that we're maximizing our pricing power on the brand in a way that continues to build it in a premium way, but that also continues to invite consumers to enjoy it.
I don't know, Dayalan, if you have to add. I think that Grainne covers it really well for, like I'd say, our developed markets. I'll touch a bit on the developing markets, like in Africa. You know, we've got a clear pricing strategy where we've got to cover COGS increases. You've got to cover FX. You've got to cover volatility in the market around inflation. There are different dynamics which we play. Also, Guinness in Africa would be the most premium beer. We, you know, we've got a positioning for the brand to make sure that we keep it premium. We cover all of our cost inputs.
I would add that in the U.S., because we've been a smaller player, we have typically followed some of the larger players in the market. Right now we are running a test for all the reasons we've mentioned today, our premium position, our high quality, to see if we can command that higher price point. We're super conscious right now that the American consumer is under a lot of pressure. As Deborah mentioned, people are getting 8% less for 22% more right now. We're being cautious as we seek to make sure that we're accessible to as many consumers as possible.
Thanks very much. Lawrence Wyatt at Barclays. A couple for Dayalan, if that's okay. In terms of your European business, are there any other markets that you are particularly excited about? You think, you know, we appreciate that 60% of your business is coming from the three big markets, but are there any individual European countries you think could become a bit more of an exciting market for Guinness going forward? In addition, is there any reason why the Kenyan market benefits from being fully vertically integrated within Diageo? Is there any sort of scope to be able to do an asset-light model there?
Okay, I'll take your first question, Lauren. In terms of Europe, I think we have more opportunity in GB and Ireland, firstly. I think as Barry has shared in Ireland, the opportunity and Nuno in GB, you know, if we've got one in three pints in GB, the business will be significantly bigger. I do think there's opportunity for us to grow more share in the GB business. If I look at our share of our off-trade business in GB versus on-trade, we've got room to grow our off-trade business as well as all the take-home trade. There's opportunity in the two big engines. Continental Europe, we spoke about in terms of the opportunity in the on-trade and in the off-trade. I also see Turkey.
I see Turkey as an opportunity for us where it's a big beer business as well. There's opportunity in which, in time, you know, if the macros improve in Turkey, we could also scale that business. If I look at East Africa, Lawrence, to your question, you know, as the previous President for the region and as I'm handing over to Hina, I'll share some perspectives on East Africa. The macros in East Africa are very positive. If you look at the macroeconomic environment, it is positive. GDP is strong. You've got a young population coming into TBA. Penetration on alcohol is not that high as yet. You're getting room to grow penetration. Female penetration is low. There's all of the reasons to believe in East Africa.
If you look at our business in East Africa, we've got a scale beer business and we've got a big beer spirit business. We've recently separated our route to consumers in East Africa. We have a premium spirit route to consumer, which is under the EABL umbrella, but you have a beer business that runs separately. Both these businesses are accelerating and growing well. From a manufacturing footprint, we have a broad footprint across East Africa. We have eight brewing manufacturing sites. We've got four in Kenya, we've got three in Tanzania, and one in Uganda. We've got scale across the region. You know, it's a business which we've just increased our shares in. You know, we bought more share in it. We've got 65% share of East Africa now. We're happy with how the business is performing.
It's James Edward Jones from RBC. A couple of questions. First, for you, Grainne. You obviously cover Guinness, it isn't your only responsibility. You're following a well-established Diageo playbook and it's been enormously successful. Why do you think it isn't working so well in some of the other areas you're responsible for? Secondly, how does the asset light model work in practice? I know, are you still shipping out the concentrate to your partners and then they're incorporating it into beer and then you just pay a royalty? Could you perhaps say a little bit more about the mechanics almost of how that relationship works?
Yeah, okay. Do you want me to take the first category one first? Yes, I look after some of the other brands. I look after Baileys, Smirnoff, and actually our convenience business as well.
Across the board, I think what you're seeing is, you know, overall growth still, for example, in vodka at a total category level. We're seeing brands like Ketel One, primarily focused in the U.S., doing quite well, growing share behind a new campaign platform. Smirnoff, we are taking a lot of the learnings that you will have seen that I've talked about today into the Smirnoff model where we want to grow faster. We really want to focus on making Smirnoff a vibrant recruitment brand for Gen Z. That's when Smirnoff is at its best. Obviously, as part of that, we're taking some of the learnings that we have on social and digital from Guinness and we're applying those to Smirnoff.
We have recently, for example, just appointed the same social and digital agency that works on Guinness to be part of our team, our agency team for Smirnoff. We see lots of opportunities to take the synergies across the piece. Obviously, RTD is a big part of the Smirnoff story as well, with Smirnoff Ice being, you know, another billion-dollar brand for Diageo in its own right. Again, we have really, in the last, you know, sort of six months, eight months, as Deborah will have shared at CAGNY, really been focusing on driving our RTD performance. In the markets that we have selected to be first out of the pack, I am delighted to say that we are seeing really strong share performance on Smirnoff Ice as a result. Hopefully that gives you a flavor of how we are thinking about applying learnings.
Clearly, categories, you know, do have different sort of growth paths, et cetera, but we apply the same learnings and our approach across the world.
I may complement that if you look into GB, Smirnoff is the number one spirit brand in the market and Baileys is just 50% bigger than it was five years ago. I think those three brands that you mentioned are also great success cases in GB.
Maybe just it's a small example, but you know, in Ireland, vodka is also the largest spirit category and we've, in fact, very specifically applied many of the best practice learnings that I shared with you earlier this afternoon to that brand with very strong results and really turning around the performance both from a brand equity standpoint and a market share standpoint. Actually, it's a very good case study on that brand as well.
Yeah. If I look at the asset-light model, I think the best way to describe it is there's multiple pillars of the contracts which we have with our partners. We have a financial pillar, we have a performance pillar, and then a quality pillar. Under the financial pillar, we have GFE, which is the concentrate, which we sell to our partners. We have a licensing and royalty fee, which then we charge them for using the brand as they produce and sell locally in their markets. That is one pillar. On the performance pillar, we have metrics in the contract to make sure that we're growing Guinness share in the markets and the brand is performing as we expect in these countries. Then we have a quality pillar where we have clear quality metrics to make sure that the quality standards of Guinness is maintained.
So much so to Ewan's point, we actually have brews that from the market sent back into St. James's Gate where we do testing to make sure that the quality standards are met. We have Diageo local teams based in the markets, which actually partner with these partners to make sure from an activation and execution perspective in these countries, we are actually activating the brand at the same standard we would in a GB or an Ireland.
Thank you. It's Mitch Collett from Deutsche Bank. A couple of linked questions if I can. I've always thought Guinness is a brand that really works best in the on-trade. Clearly, the U.S. market is disproportionately weighted towards the off-trade. How much of a constraint on growth is that?
Do you have to work harder or differently to try and educate consumers to buy it in the off-trade given it's a roughly 80-20 split? I guess linked to that, is there a scale where you'd have to think about producing Guinness locally for the U.S. market? You currently ship it from Dublin. I guess that's not the most cost-efficient way to produce, probably not the best from an ESG perspective. I'm conscious there are other beer brands that are shipped from Europe and that's part of the branding. Could you ever reach a scale where you'd think about producing locally or an asset light model in the U.S.? Thank you.
I'll kick it over. Yeah, that sounds great. I actually don't see our split as a disadvantage at all. I think of it as an opportunity, particularly as you see consumers increasingly having activities that do not necessarily revolve around alcohol, but it is part of the activity, whether they are enjoying alcoholic Topgolf or they are taking it to a beach or a barbecue. The fact that we are so present in retail gives consumers an opportunity to pick up cases of Guinness and enjoy it on the go. That is actually a large part of why we are so dedicated to making sure that we are very present all year round. We are going to have those bright and vibrant, lovely day displays this summer. We will activate additional beer displays in the ice cream aisle next to Van Leeuwen. I actually think that for us it works quite well and in harmony with U.S. consumption patterns. Of course, the on-trade is wildly important, especially as an influencer channel.
That's where consumers have the opportunity to commune in a different way. For me, there's actually a very nice synergistic opportunity with both channels where we see big opportunity.
I might add a point as well. Actually, obviously during COVID when the pubs shut, we really had to double down and focus on building Guinness in the off-trade channel with a sort of scale, pace, agility that we had not really ever had to think about before. Out of that came things like the innovation Night Research, which I talked about earlier. You'll get to see and experience it later. Obviously, as Barry said, in one in four households in Ireland now, that has been a big driver of our off-trade share growth in Ireland alongside focusing on, you know, Guinness Draught at Home.
Because I think, you know, the opportunity has always been there, but actually COVID really inspired us to think about how we could access that opportunity, both with innovation, but actually also with learnings from Laura's market in the U.S. where, you know, traditionally it's been a big off-trade market. We took the learnings on execution capability, on how to build brilliant, you know, beer visibility. Laura, I think the beer visibility you generate in the U.S. is very inspiring for the other markets as well. Nuno, Barry, you might want to add a bit more
No, and indeed, just on the innovation point, I mean, our customers are very hungry for it as well, right? You've got to talk about higher price points, higher average basket size. This is like, it's frankly, it's gold, right? It's there, it's liquid gold.
I mean, compared to the rest of the category, they love it. They want more, you know, my big retail partners here in this market, you know, every one of them wants to be known as the home of Guinness, right? Because that's a key differentiator for them.
Yeah. On that piece, I'll give you a supply chain view on it. I'm conscious brand is part of a decision about whether you would ever localize anything. Certainly there are scenarios that have been looked at. That's not a new question. Your question had the right word in it around scale.
There is no, you would need multiple locations and be at a scale where you would have multiple either brewing partners or brewing locations because it's actually far more efficient to ship it by sea, both on carbon and cost, and distribute from the different regional distributions than it is to produce at one scale brewery and then try and get it around the U.S.. There is a tipping point that you would get to multiple partners that would be capitally intensive. We've got decisions to make about timings to do in the most efficient way and the choices that we've got across the business to do that. I would say if it was right for the market and the brand, there are solutions that are possible.
I've got one from online actually, so I want to take this one now. Andrea from BVA has asked, and that's one for Grainne and Dayalan. Firstly, can you talk about how the marketing support for Guinness works in your partnership markets and how do you ensure consistency of the brand positioning across the markets? The second one is just with the discussion in terms of route to consumer and partnerships, are there more markets where you don't have a partnership currently? I
I'll take the marketing one first. We work very closely with both our distributor partners and our brewing and production partners. In fact, we bring them to Dublin, to the home of Guinness, to the Guinness Storehouse where we run a masterclass in everything you need to know about Guinness from grain to glass, history, heritage. We really embed our partners in the Guinness family and we think of them as such.
On a more day-to-day basis, we work in what we call agile brand communities. That really enables us to quickly, you know, shift and lift work that is working in one market and apply it to another. Those third-party distributors and producers are represented in those agile brand communities as well. We produce assets, like for example from the Premier League, you saw the example there, where we are using tools like AI to be able to provide finished assets for those partners that meet the local, you know, regulatory requirements and language requirements. We can do that in a very cost-effective and efficient way.
Both in terms of, I suppose, you know, really embedding them in the Guinness brand, facilitating fast shift and lift of marketing that's working in other markets through the agile brand communities, and then using AI to provide, you know, finished assets that they can quickly deploy and efficiently deploy in their markets as well.
What I'd add to what Grainne said is also all of these campaigns that are created locally are signed off globally. It is consistent. There is no local creation and running without having it signed off globally. Our partners also co-invest in A&P. It is not just Diageo running the campaigns. The partners actually invest in the campaigns and the A&P as well. Sonia, in terms of the second question. With potential partnerships in other markets?
Yeah, I think there's, you know, you'll get markets where it's a complete white space where Diageo doesn't exist at all. Then there's markets where we probably distribute through a distributor where we ship finished goods. It sits in a warehouse and they distribute into the trade. You know, there's different, call it a timeline or a glide path. You know, you look at a market like Madagascar or right to win right now, it's very limited. It's a value market and we wouldn't see Guinness going in there. You see a market like DRC, you probably want to go into it with the distributor for now because not many partners are now putting capital into the DRC right now.
When we see that the timing is right and when you get the right partners in these markets with infrastructure and breweries and so forth, we can then look at flipping the model to say, well, we do not ship from Ireland finished goods and would it make more sense to go with the asset-light model and change the agreement and brew locally? I think there are different stages of this.
I think as well beyond Africa, there are further opportunities for geographical expansion. Recently we have just partnered with AB InBev, for example, in China, and Nik will talk to some opportunities there later as well. There are, you know, opportunities across the board for further expansion, and particularly when we have assets like the global, you know, scale and reach of something like the Premier League that allows us to switch that on pretty quickly.
I think that's why, Sonya, our route to consumer, being as agile and flexible as it is, gives us an advantage because we do not need a one size fits all for every market. Depending on where the market is on the journey, we could actually deploy the right route to consumer.
Olivier Nicolai, Goldman Sachs . Just two questions. Just to follow up on Africa, first of all, as the premium spirits continue to grow and reach critical mass in some countries like Tanzania or Kenya, would you seek a partner for beer and focus more on just premium spirits yourself? Just a second one on the, I guess one for Nuno, since you are going to move to Mexico, I think you were here very recently.
Can you talk about the opportunity you might see for Guinness in LATAM or in Mexico specifically, and perhaps by leveraging the Premier League sponsorship? Thank you.
If you look at premium spirits in Africa, you know, what we've seen is Africa is urbanizing very fast. We know that the cities in Africa have double the GDP rates in the countries. We know that there's more opportunities in the cities, and that's where premium spirits is going. Premium spirits are growing very fast in the cities. Like if you look at Tanzania as your example, we've seen the growth in Dar es Salaam. Dar es Salaam will be growing a lot faster than the total of Tanzania. What we have been doing is we looked at a model in East Africa. We call it Fahari.
The Fahari model or the project, what it basically does is it has a separate team focusing on the key cities across East Africa to grow premium spirits. It still sits under the EABL umbrella, but it is a separate team that is actually driving spirit growth. We have seen a massive acceleration in spirits.
Yeah, on the lack, I would say it is selective opportunities. I was, you know, by, as an example, this weekend I was just attending the Arsenal-Newcastle game with the biggest distributor in Latin America. You know, it is just on a targeted basis, but it is obviously a very good asset, the Premier League, not just for lack, but, you know, expanding the beer footprint globally, right? It is never mentioned the amount of fans that we have at the global level and the attachment with the Guinness brand.
Hi, it's Jonathan Cook from Border to Coast. This one's for Grainne. You talked about changing the marketing strategy, and it's clearly been very, very successful. I'd just like to understand still to what extent the change in marketing strategy involved an upweight in marketing spend as a percentage of A&P. You've obviously executed the spend fantastically well, but just in terms of driving this extra growth, is it just, or is it also because you've been spending more?
I think you would have heard before Deborah and Nik talk about our drive for really focusing investment on creating media scale reach. We have 55, 35, 10 as our ambition for our A&P shape. That has been something that we have really been driving hard on Guinness, ensuring that actually we're maximizing the investment on media, that through tools like Catalyst and Sensor, we're actually redirecting the media investment to the highest returning channels. For example, social and digital, as I said, has increased our ROI by 51%. It is really by actually changing the shape. When you do things like that, that generates investment to do things like the Premier League, for example. It is not about actually, you know, dramatically changing the shape of the absolute. It is more about reflecting, you know, some of those drives that we're putting in place across Diageo.
I think we'll take one more in the room and then we've got another couple of sessions, but there will be plenty more time to Q&A at the end. I would say to anyone online, if you want to submit questions, we can come back to it for the Q&A session later. Maybe if you're finished with Chris, pitcher, still over there.
Thank you. Chris Pitcher, from Rebel Atlantic. It's probably a question for Dayalan. In terms of understanding the sales and distribution synergies with the rest of the Diageo business, it seems with the spirits business in Africa, it's sort of been pulled apart. In the U.S., it's separate. In the big on-trade markets in the U.K., GB and Ireland, how important is the Guinness business to the spirits business? Are there any examples of how you can show a spirits brand has used Guinness to get into the on-trade successfully? One example, I think Rowan Co, the Irish whiskey, I would have thought with Guinness would have been a shoe-in, but in terms of distribution scale, can you talk about how useful it is for those businesses?
Yeah, I'll start off and then I think Nuno and Barry could join in as well. You know, if you look at GB, I think if you look at the route to consumer in GB, it runs differently. Your spirits route to consumer and your beer route to consumer of how the product goes into the market is different. When you're sitting with a Stonegate, as you've seen the CEO on the screen, you're having one conversation as total Diageo. When you're negotiating contracts, for example, pouring of your spirit contracts and your beer contracts, you're having one conversation. In those negotiations, having Guinness with you is very, very useful because the total scale of Diageo for a Stonegate is much broader than just if you're going with spirits alone. I'll say when you're in Ireland, it's probably even stronger having Guinness with the spirit portfolio when you're negotiating these key contracts. Barry and Nuno, you guys are close.
I would just complement, like, we have a 13% share of TBA in the GB market, right? When I'm in front of a Tesco, for instance, or, you know, a big on-premise group, it allows us to have a TBA approach and understanding consumers from all the different perspectives and how can we really maximize total beverage alcohol market share, tapping into the right occasions, the right motivations, the right consumer typologies, and with the right peg, with the right pricing, et cetera. It is really like an end-to-end view of the business that makes us actually have a better footprint of the market in GB, that is the case.
I would probably just add two things from an Irish perspective. First, just to be clear, because of the nature of our scale, we are a very big player. We are about 34% of TBA in Ireland. We would always negotiate separately beer and spirits, just to be really clear, never together. There is definitely no question. I spoke to the strength of the relationships that we have in the on-trade. There is no question that, you know, we have been right through COVID, you know, when the times were very, very challenging for the on-trade. You know, we were the company that best served our customers. We have really, you know, got a customer-centric approach in terms of our route to market.
There is no doubt in my mind that, you know, the service we provide, we are rewarded with the time, effort, and attention of our customers. At the end of the day, they are the brand ambassadors. They are the ones that, you know, you walk into the pub and you have not yet chosen your drink, and the bartender will suggest that the Guinness is pouring lovely today. Would you like a Guinness? We consider our customers to be brand ambassadors for us. Obviously, that is the nature of the relationship. There is no doubt that the quality of service that we provide, we receive back many, many times over in terms of ambassadorship for our brands.
Thank you very much. Thank you to our speakers for the Q&A session. Thank you. Hand over to Nik.
Thank you. I am thrilled to be here today. Yes, Chris, you asked me earlier, and I think several others in the room, I did try my first pint of Guinness at the Storehouse yesterday, but much anticipated moment. I had my son, who had been after me for about three weeks, saying, "Don't try it in front of all the investors. What if you don't like it?" Sonia came up to me yesterday, like very nervous around, "When are you going to try this?" More to come on that, including my facial expressions. I'll talk a little bit about my not the ones I'm not allowed to talk about, which is my accomplishments, but that might be over dinner in a different forum. With that, I'm going to turn over to talking a little bit around the normal cautionary statement that you have.
I'm going to talk a little bit about how Diageo beer has done, but then more importantly, how has Guinness done relative to that as well. From fiscal 2021 through 2024, Diageo beer achieved greater than 15% CAGR, adding about $900 million to NSV. All right. Now off this, Guinness clearly thrived, all right, and actually growing 21% CAGR for that period and contributing about 75% of that $900 million of growth. We've expanded the brand by 50%, which stems from all the strategic investments that you've heard us talk about, including the great job on marketing that Grainne and the team have done. I think it really also comes back to what Ewan was talking about. There's been a lot of investment in our quality commitment and then a lot really in terms of the breakthrough innovations with dispense and of course, Guinness 0.0, right?
Now Diageo is clearly a premium beer. The dynamics of beer and the growth areas in beer clearly continue to favor Guinness. Premium Plus is the engine of our beer growth, accounting for 19% volume and 20%-25% value globally. Growing at a clip at just over 5.5% as an in the category, clearly this aligns very well with our ambition to outperform premium value growth. Guinness is clearly a jewel in our portfolio, right? You have heard a lot about it through the day. We clearly have leading position in our top two markets of Guinness globally. We have talked about that and you have heard about that from both Nuno and from Barry. You can see clearly to some of your questions, there are great opportunities. We think about what more we can do across the globe, right?
Taking the U.S. as an example, we remain to date a relatively small player at number 20 in the U.S.. We have been gaining market share. We have accelerated plans for the U.S., as Laura talked about. Remember, there is clearly a lot more to go for. Laura just made a quick side bet commitment to me that she's going to get us to number 10, right? She said, "Just do not ask me for a timeline. I'm putting it down to the next three years." You know, put that into your models, guys. Let's see where we go from there. You know, funnily enough, I'm going to be joking with Nuno in a little bit as well, because he's going off to Mexico. There is absolutely nothing on that map for Latin America.
Quite honestly, we'll come back and talk about the opportunity there as well. Do keep in mind that this shows our value share, right? If this was a volume share view, you would see a higher proportion on share position when you think about those partner markets where we do sell concentrate, because that's just recorded in our NSV in a different way. I'm actually looking at how we should be thinking about reporting that volume as we go forward, because that's clearly Guinness volume that is being sold into those markets as well. It comes back very much to my mindset of being at Coca-Cola, where they report that volume from an angle of regardless of the partner model that they have. You now look at a question that was asked about the margins, right? Clearly, Guinness has a very attractive beer margin.
As Ewan said earlier, the Guinness expected gross margin for fiscal 2025 will now be back to the comparable levels at fiscal 2019, right? That is despite all the significant cost inflation that we have had to navigate since then. What you can see here is clearly that has been driven by a combination of pricing. Some might argue, do we have more opportunity as we look at that going forward? I think we talked a little bit about that. Clearly, there have been some favorable cost movements as well, but a lot of focus around efficiencies, right? The chart here shows the Guinness margin from St. James's Gate, which is over 125 basis points ahead of the margin for our other beers at Diageo, right?
There's further opportunity to improve that margin, but you can already see that's a significantly higher margin that we have versus the rest of our beer. Also, do keep in mind that the margin of Guinness made outside of St. James's Gate is also attractive relative to the non-Guinness Diageo beer. I would say pretty much at similar levels as well. You know, clearly it's a very attractive business, a great jewel in our portfolio, and one that we will continue to leverage for scale as we look forward. I think as the team has shared today, there's a lot more that we can do here and hope, you know, that the sessions today leave you with that sense of a lot more that we can achieve. Let me bring some of those back to life, okay?
When you look at GB, Guinness 0.0 just on six tap handles, all right? In Ireland, we've got a proven test ground for pioneering innovation and at premium points as well. We can definitely leverage some of that as we look globally as well. U.S., less than 1% share of the beer market, right? Number one on-trade beer in New York and Boston. Clearly a big opportunity to expand that beyond the Northeast Coast, right? When you look at the other markets, very concentrated to a limited number of markets with a range of shares varying from as low as 1% up to 34%, right? Also keep in mind in some of these other markets, again, not included in the NSV because we work off the royalty model, right?
There's higher volumes there that are not necessarily captured here, but clearly an opportunity to further grow those as well, right? I think, again, when you think about just the size of the opportunity, if we think about Guinness in the U.S., if it had just a quarter of the share of Guinness GB, that's an incremental $500 million in terms of NSV growth, right? Laura, it's not just about getting to number 10, it's about the size of the market as well, right? We'll build that into your models too. Clearly a lot to go for. Guinness 0.0, you know, clearly that's a big opportunity as we think about what we can do in this space as well.
When you look forward at the brewing capacity that's going to come on and the markets in which, you know, we clearly are playing in such a small way, including in a market like GB, right? We clearly have an opportunity to be able to grow that. Again, if Guinness 0.0 in the U.S., right, was the same size as what we have even in the U.K. today, that's another incremental $250 million, right? In terms of what we can do. I clearly believe we have a lot more to go for when you think about the fact that total, you know, non-alc, 85% of that is beer today. Now the broader non-alc value and profit pool is growing across beer and spirits, right?
Clearly I think we have a lot of opportunity to go after here when we think about, you know, the fact that it is only available in eight markets today: in Ireland, in GB, in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Eastern Europe, Korea, and MENA, right? Truly the only market where we have it at scale is in Ireland, right? In draft. Clearly a big opportunity as we look forward. This was a question I think that was asked by Simon again. I am revalidating that to make sure you see the size and scale of the opportunity. Clearly, you know, when you look at continental Europe and the fact that today we are only scratching the surface with being at 12,000 outlets.
You know, the outlet universe is huge at 1.4 million, but there's a lot of work that's been happening to really understand what is the size of the opportunity when we think about segmenting that market and segmenting that outlet universe and where we truly believe we have the opportunity to be able to serve a quality Guinness, right? Clearly that's about 200,000 outlets that we feel that we can get to. Again, when you think about the fact that we can just double the outlet universe from 12,000 to 24,000, and Dayalan talked about the fact that today that's about $100 million in NSV. Clearly, depending on the size and scale of the outlets you go to first, that's at least another $100 million that we can be looking at in terms of NSV, right?
So really pulling it together to talk to you about the size and scale of the opportunities that the team has laid out, and we're super excited about what we can continue to do there. You know, I think really when you look at it as we kind of wrap up towards the Guinness opportunities across our market and what gets us super excited about this is we clearly have an opportunity to outperform here. You know, key to access has been the brand building and the innovation, but that quality element is critically important as well. We do have world-class brewing capabilities, and clearly a lot more investment has gone there to bring a lot more capacity online soon. When we look at it from an angle of the runway for growth, clearly there's a lot more to go after, right?
We're super excited about that, super committed to it. I think you'll be hearing a lot more about what's to come, particularly when we think about what more we can do with the Premier League as well, all right? With that, I am actually going to close out on Guinness right now. This was me trying my first Guinness last night, not in front of you guys, but I have to say, I don't know, I had Dayalan, I had Grainne, I had Nuno, and I had Barry with us as well. I think my facial expressions were okay. I actually have to say I enjoyed my first Guinness. I am thrilled to potentially say that I'm a Guinness convert. Nuno, I also have another favorite brand, as you know, that comes from Mexico, which is Don Julio.
I actually thought in the spirit of you moving there, and I'm going to have two of my favorite brands now that I'm thinking about, we're going to put a challenge out to you as well for your plan around how you're going to expand Guinness into Mexico, right? I also want to leave a nice farewell gift from you to Barry, because I think you talked about all the reasons to believe for GB. Deborah and I just concurred very quickly that I think we're going to take your business plan up for the next three years as well, Barry, as you come in. That's your thank you, and that can be built into your models as well.
Anyway, on a more serious note, I think let's turn to how do we think about the rest of Diageo and what we've just obviously announced yesterday, which is now really is the time for us at Diageo to accelerate on all fronts, okay? Very importantly, you know, we really want to shift to a much more focus on cost and cash. I love the fact that our supply chain teams have been playing this role, but we're going to bring this in a lot more across the organization, at least for the shorter term, with a lot more financial rigor and discipline on a returns mindset as we truly look forward, you know, for us. I had shared this at CAGMI and at our interim results around our priorities for sustainable growth, right?
I am very pleased to say that this is not something that, you know, Deborah and I, or even just the executive team, are living by. I had the opportunity to talk to the senior leadership group team in March where I laid this out, and it has been very much embraced by about our top 130 leaders. More importantly, I see this cascading through the organization, right? I think one thing that has really impressed me as I have come into Diageo is how quick the culture is to adapt and adopt, and how quickly people are saying, okay, what do we need to do? How do we need to deliver? Help us move, you know, in the right frame to be able to move, to deliver against what we set out as our new objectives.
Very much, you know, the commitment is there, and I want to give you all the confidence on what we're trying to, you know, deliver is very much not just being led here, but actually going to be led by not just 130 top leaders, but being cascaded down. One of the things that Deborah and I will work on with the board as well is how do we look at that in relation to our metrics too, to ensure that we're driving the right behaviors, not just in terms of what we're focused on and what we measure, but how do we also drive that through incentives as well.
When you look here, I want to just walk you through each of these areas in a little more detail, again, to talk to you around the confidence of what we're trying to tackle, and importantly, how some of that initial work has already started unlocking value for us as we look forward. Growth is of paramount importance, all right? We clearly do believe in the attractiveness of the long-term fundamentals of the spirits business, right? We have the opportunity to lead the industry in the capabilities such as our pricing muscle, RGM, and we also need to focus on optimizing the work that we can do alongside RGM on our brand, price, pack, and channel architecture, right? We are going to come back to you a lot more on that in August and in the months to come thereafter.
If I really look at where I want to focus right now, I want to talk to you about the three components in particular that we're tackling immediately, right? Our commitment to drive operating leverage, maximize free cash flows while optimizing our returns, right? What we've done is launch our first phase of Accelerate. This is consistent with our strategic priorities and our focus on what we can manage and control today, right? The program sets out for clear near-term cash delivery targets and a disciplined approach to operational excellence and cost efficiency. It will strengthen Diageo by increasing our effectiveness, our agility, and our resilience, all right?
Clearly we're excited about what we need to launch here, and the first piece of that is really evolving to a little more of a, I shouldn't even say a little more, a lot more of an agile global operating model, right? We're in the midst of defining our operating framework, which will outline the principles and dictate our operating model choices, which is critical, right? This comes back to, you know, us being able to fully leverage as an organization our scale and drive clear end-to-end accountabilities, which will enable both simplification, but also clarity of ownership, right?
I think marketing has been a great example of where we've started embracing that, and I'm going to come back and talk about that, but we're looking at it end-to-end and looking at it in terms of what's the role within market, what's the role within what's happening at center, and what are the things that we can leverage from a scale perspective, but also looking at with these agile brand communities, and I'm going to talk a little bit more about that as well. One of the other areas as we look at this is how do we also get clear and prioritize our strategic longer-term capabilities that we need to build, right? One of those, for instance, is a broader partnership model that's going to, you know, help us fuel long-term growth.
Now, whether it is our partners that we have in terms of, you know, our key distributors across the U.S., or what we have in terms of our partners in terms of how we have been looking at our Guinness model and moving asset light, right? If we look at our partners when we think about our wholesalers and distributors across all these markets, you know, Deborah and I have come in from a world of, you know, having worked very closely with distributors and partners coming from the Coke and the Pepsi world, and I think there is a lot that we can do as we think about our capabilities that we need to develop and how we want to work with those partners for true win-win and allowing them to win that allows us to win in the work going forward.
We've started this work already over the last couple of months. It is going to encompass all areas of our business, and it will be enabled by tech and our digital systems, and we will have to make investments there as well. Now, this will clearly simplify our overhead structure, right? And our end-to-end ways of working, which applies to supply as well, right? Now, our supply chain has really been strengthened through intentional phases, I would say, over the last five years, and our global footprint optimization has led to a resilience mindset, but also one of anti-fragility, right?
Now, we will continue to look at all areas of productivity in supply to ensure optimized cost and continuity of supply, of course, which includes procurement meeting excellence and further digitization, production optimization, as well as the exciting Science Futures platform that Ewan is leading, and I had a chance to spend some time with the team in Scotland last week. Truly some groundbreaking stuff there as well that will help us put us ahead of the pack. Turning to trade spend optimization, and I know we talked a little bit about this yesterday. Over the past years, you know, we've been taking pricing, and our trade investment has grown as well. Unfortunately, it's been growing at a faster rate than our NSV, right?
We have a significant spend optimization opportunity across the spend, as well as as we look at the commercial ANP in totality in terms of what sits within that bucket of $3.6 billion on total ANP. Now, a substantial amount of the spend is in GB, Ireland, continental Europe, Australia, and global travel, and we've actually kicked off work because we were doing pockets of work across each of those areas, but we're now looking at it across those markets and North America in an integrated way in terms of our trade spend, our ANP in totality to be able to get more transparency of that spend, ensure we have sufficiency across ANP, and, you know, quite honestly, that that trade spend is working harder in terms of its dollars that are being put in and generating better returns.
I'll give you an example just to put this to life in terms of what we're already seeing. We've done some work in GB already, right? In GB's grocery channel, we have full visibility now of the ROI across 25,000 weekly promotional events, right? Over the last three years. We can see that circa 70% of those investments has generated a positive ROI, which is strong when compared to other categories. However, we have opportunities to improve our gross margin given circa 30% of those promotional investments have delivered a negative ROI. Within these, half of those investments resulted in both Diageo and our customer making negative gross margin, right?
Clearly, the power of the data and the visibility that we have and that we're going to continue to unlock as we look across those markets that I've just highlighted to you is what I would call very differentiated from what might have happened in the past, right? Once you have the data, the ability to act on that data and to drive change is going to be significant. Now, this is going to be a multi-year journey as well, right? We feel confident about the ability that we have a big opportunity to unlock that spend and either drop that to the bottom line and/or reinvest it, but linked much better to a pay-for-performance angle. Big opportunities as we look at that and we look forward, right?
The other piece that I would say that would be important that will be different, and this comes back to, again, how we want to think about incentives, right? Clearly, as we identify those and we think about what we can do and the unlock opportunity, that will need to be built into the targets as we move forward to ensure that they're being delivered and appropriately being incentivized for as well, right? Because we know that incentivization behavior and measurement does drive delivery. Now, you know, we've had a lot of discussion around the shape of our A&P spend, and I think it's going to be quite different when you think about that 55, 35, 10, depending on the market, all right?
Quite honestly, I think what we're focused on is to say, we've got a 90% bucket that we need to look at, but we can look at that once we've optimized what is today sitting at over 20%, and we can bring that down, right? Cristina and I have talked, and I said, listen, let's not get, you know, overcaught up on is it 10 or is it 12 or is it 13. One is about absolute level of spend because clearly there's inefficiency in what we're spending today in totality, right? There's an opportunity to bring that number down regardless and get much more for it. Quite honestly, if the development piece is actually coming out to 10 or 12 or 13, that doesn't really matter as long as we're spending it optimally, right?
This is where I think ensuring that we've got better allocation, cohesion, and efficiency to continue to maximize the returns whilst ensuring brand sufficiency, you know, I know Cristina would have killed me if I didn't say that because she's very focused on that, and I'm very focused on returns. We're coming together with sufficiency and a returns mindset to really make sure that we're sweating each of those dollars a lot more, right? Another good example over here is the fact that already with the work that the ABCs are doing, and I'm using GB again as an example, but GB is involved in seven of the 10 agile brand communities. What does that mean immediately, right?
If that work is being developed in conjunction with GB, in all that that was being done at a local level, that clearly eliminates that work and that spend and frees that up either again to drop to the bottom line and/or reinvest it, right? That is again one market in which I'm just giving you an example. There are numerous examples of that, and that split of what needs to happen at central and through those ABCs versus what needs to be happening locally can clearly unlock a lot of value in that 20% circa spend that we have as a total A&P bucket today. Moving to free cash flow and the consistency of that, right? I think we have a sizable opportunity here as we think about all the areas that we need to go after, right?
I've had the opportunity to work alongside Ewan and his team over the last couple of months and really get into understanding the whole investment that we make in maturing liquid, right? Now, we have a sizable maturing inventory balance, but that is a competitive advantage, right? Let's not lose sight of that. We need to use that, that liquid gold in absolutely the right way, including how we need to think about pricing opportunities and how we think about both our blends and our single malts when I talk about the biggest chunk of that being in Scotch, right? We have done various simulations and scenarios, and I think we have confidence that we can optimize the cash investment over the next three years, right?
We've run these in terms of how we need to look at distillation capacity across what is a complex network of 31 distilleries, and we believe that with measured reduction in our distillation capacity, without impacting our long-term supply and our growth ambitions, we clearly can unlock value over the next three years, all right? In terms of the amount of cash that is going in there without in any way impacting our long-term growth ambitions. We will continue to stay agile here and reassess our plans based on the demand recovery curves. In fact, Ewan and I have a six-month routine where we can continue to look at what we are actually pulling out and what is being bottled, what is being shipped, and what our balances are and what we need to look at as we go forward.
We truly do have a process already that we can use to test our agility and re-look at our assumptions as we go forward. On CapEx, over the past four years, I think Diageo has invested over $5.5 billion as we built out capacity increases across areas in Scotch, in Tequila, in Baijiu, in Little Connell that Ewan just highlighted, and of course in NAM capacity as well, right? Clearly, this provides us with a much more robust footprint going back to that point around the resilience and the anti-fragility. Going forward, we clearly have an ability to adjust our CapEx investment profile with sweating and caring for those assets a lot more, all right? Now, I had given out some estimates in terms of what we see that as NSV stand.
I will come back to you more in August as we think about our next three-year plan. In absolute dollar terms, what do we truly feel that we can look at for 2026 through 2028 as we look at this whole basis of the investments that have been made and investing and sweating and caring for those assets a lot more, all right? We are hyper-focused on deleveraging, but not deleveraging for the sake of deleveraging, deleveraging in the right way to be able to offer us a lot more flexibility as we go forward, right? I think Diageo has had a strong track record of active portfolio management and curating our portfolio, you know, rightfully so towards high-growth brands.
However, where appropriate and consistent with our long-term strategy, we are going to be more rigorous in pursuing disposals where it's in the best interest of both Diageo and our shareholders, all right? This means assets which are not strategic or core to our business will be disposed. I've had a lot of questions asked around, did I go off-script yesterday when I talked about substantial? No, I did not go off-script when I talked about substantial. I can also say to you, just to be clear, MH and Guinness, as we highlighted, are not for sale, and we're not talking about that today.
There are opportunities back to this point around non-core assets or non-strategically aligned assets as we think about our growth vectors going forward that we do have the opportunity to be able to unlock value from those that will allow for our deleveraging, our balance sheet. Like I said, these actions, you know, will provide us more flexibility over time to ensure that we're maximizing shareholder returns as well. Before I hand back to Deborah, just a few key messages that I think are important as we talk about accelerate because we have developed a number of different scenarios to be prepared for different macroeconomic and industry conditions, right? In each of those scenarios, we're still committed to delivering for 2026 at least that floor of $3 billion of free cash flow that we've guided to.
Our belief clearly is with all the vectors that we have to be able to pull and leverage on that will continue to grow not just on business performance, but as we look at elements of liquid, CapEx, you know, our A&P investments, et cetera. We are confident that we can deliver positive operating leverage through the work that we have done. We are also committed, like I said, to reducing our leverage ratio sustainably in the coming years. We have said that we will do that no later than fiscal 2028. I think we have got clear action plans and manage the levers that we have under our control to be able to do so. Finally, we do intend to return Diageo to be a top quartile TSR company. With that, I am going to hand back to Deborah for some closing reflections.
I can't run from you. Thanks, Nik. As Nik has shared, we are firmly focused on what we can manage and control. I hope his presentation shared the sense of urgency that we have. I look forward to sharing more on this when we come back in August. Before closing, let me also share a perspective. Nik kind of hinted at it, but on just how Diageo culture is evolving, firmly focused on emerging stronger as the market recovers and well-positioned to deliver sustainable, consistent performance while maximizing shareholder returns. You know, many aspects of Diageo culture are resilient and fueling performance, and in particular, the deep pride and engagement of our employees. Our most recent annual engagement survey, and it was just taken here in May, shows a 2 percentage point improvement in engagement versus last year, 7 percentage points above peer benchmarks.
You know, 18 months ago, I initiated a multi-year cultural change program across Diageo focused on driving greater speed and agility, an area where we know we needed to strengthen our culture and performance. As part of this, we changed one of our long-standing values to be better, to reflect a culture focused on continuous improvement and learning. We also launched four dial-up behaviors to reinforce the continuous improvement mindset: external curiosity, acting decisively, collaborating efficiently, and experimenting and learning. This multifaceted culture change program included clear leader accountability measured through organizational pulse surveys, capability building with over 550 culture change champions. Finally, we put those behaviors into practice into some of our most crucial areas of performance, modifying how we work. It started with marketing, and we've mentioned today this a lot, the agile brand communities.
This has enabled the work Nik just discussed about him and Christina on the AMP efficiency, but also we changed a lot of our cross-functional processes like innovation and integrated business planning, reinforcing one Diageo that collaborates efficiently. The Accelerate program and the evolution of our operating model is the next step in this journey to strengthen Diageo by increasing the speed, effectiveness, agility, and resilience. Across the board and at scale, we will simplify our ways of working with clear accountabilities to enable decisive action, adapt best practices driving effectiveness, fully leveraging data and digital, an area that we particularly have invested in over a number of years. As we move forward, we're looking at, as Nik mentioned, aligning incentives over the long and short term to ensure that they support this transformation.
More to come on Accelerate and our evolving culture as we move through the year. To close, as a reminder, Diageo is a market leader with a strong portfolio of category-leading brands. Whilst the current environment is tough, we view this pressure as largely macroeconomic-driven, and we continue to believe in the attractive long-term fundamentals of our industry and in our ability to outperform the market. Importantly, our portfolio is well-positioned in premium spirits and beer, and we see a significant opportunity ahead in both spirits and Guinness, which we have focused on today. Guinness is an iconic brand in our portfolio and one where we have successfully evolved our strategy to drive higher growth, particularly through recruitment. Importantly, we also believe we have a strong runway for continued growth, recruiting new consumers, leveraging digital and driving innovation, including the significant opportunity we have with Guinness 0.0.
As you have heard, we are moving at speed to focus on what we can manage and control, and I look forward to sharing more details on our Accelerate program in August. With that, I would like to open the floor for any questions that you might have for Nik and myself. Chris, you made a little bit of—
Chris Pitcher from Redburn Atlantic. Nik, just maybe using Nuno's new targets in Mexico as an example, you talk about operating leverage and operating margin, but you gave us the sort of the relative gross margin of Guinness. Should you not be thinking more to sort of incremental gross profit? Because would he be compromising his Mexican business's operating margin by putting more Guinness on a truck as opposed to Johnnie Walker? And is that mindset there, not focusing on the percentage margin? Thank you.
I would say to you, I've now been here nine months and we're slowly chipping away at what has been a margin percentage, for lack of a better word, I'm going to say obsession at Diageo, okay? Absolutely we're changing that and it's moving to gross profit dollars. One of the things I think that came up yesterday, and again, this is for the Remco to work through, but Deborah and I are clearly focused also on absolute dollar free cash flow as opposed to an OCC there as well. I think you'll hear more about that. You know, picking on Nuno, he seems to be the one being picked on today. About a month ago, we were chatting and he said, "Nik, you know, I think I have a big opportunity in Mexico." I said, this was before Guinness, right?
I said, "Tell me more." He said, "I've just come back from the market and I had just been there a month earlier." He did not know I had already spoken to the CFO and had dinner with him. We talked about the fact that we just were not playing in a huge amount of the profit pool in Mexico, in Tequila, with brands that we have that we could play and win in because it was going to be dilutive to our margin percentage in Mexico. I was hoping that what I had talked to the company about and then the CFO had played well back to Nuno and well done, Nuno had passed. He was actually talking about the fact that there are incremental dollars that we can go after.
Absolutely, I think Deborah and I are really trying to work on unlocking that. I'm going to embarrass Laura for a minute as well. Laura came in, so Deborah and I were in Miami. In all the best, you know, again, this goes back to, again, this was the culture and this is the way they were thinking. Laura came in and we were talking about RTDs and an opportunity to unlock growth in North America, which is one of our six pilot markets that we're looking at, right? In terms of how do we really think about where is our right to win, both in RTD and RTS, and what's held us back and what do we need to do as we think about investing in that going forward, right? She started up with a question. She might not remember this.
This was in November. She said, "So what gross profit margin do we want to achieve?" I said, "It's not about what gross profit margin we want to achieve. What's the accretive gross margin dollar pool that we can actually bring in that we're not playing in today?" The gross margin percentage is going to be the outcome of it. Now, if we're going into something new, which I think was also part of her question in all fairness, how do we look at a three-year plan when we think about not just the gross profit margin and the operating profit margin? Because, you know, depending on the size and scale of what we might be launching, we might be using a toll packer, right? Clearly that's going to be some dollars that we're giving away, right?
Clearly, until we get to the scale and size of what we want to do to bring that in-house, that might be the right choice. We will have to invest potentially incrementally in marketing and A&P as we want to launch that, right? I think we're slowly chipping away at that, but I think the big unlock in my mind always comes when your incentives and your measurements and your performance all get linked in the right way. That's what I think we're trying to achieve.
Hi Nik, hi Deborah. It's Mitch Collett from Deutsche here. One question that might be very quick and then one that's potentially a bit longer. Is there any chance you could tell us what you're targeting for the drop-through of the cost savings, or is that really a question that we should save for the summer? And then..
Save it for the summer.
Okay. One's quick. And then my second one, which is a bit longer, is on trade spend optimization. So would I be right to think that what you're looking at there is reducing the depth and frequency of your promotions? And if that's correct, how does that kind of fit with, you know, pressure on consumers, affordability, and I guess some of the, you know, pricing actions of some of your competitors in some of your bigger markets? And I guess I'm obviously thinking of the U.S. there. Thank you.
Yeah, I mean, I'll, you know, I'll take that one. I, you know, Laura mentioned this, that, you know, consumers are certainly under pressure in many of our markets. It is something that we do look at pricing consumer back and understanding that dynamic from the consumer back. That being said, I wouldn't necessarily assume it's all about just frequency and depth of these promotions. Actually, that's where I think our revenue growth management tools have gotten a lot better.
Because to be honest, that would have been probably something that in our tool maybe back in the day would have had, but I think we are clearly beyond that and looking at taking that much further so that we really look at, you know, Nik had mentioned it's not just trade spend, it's also some of the commercial A&P and really looking at, you know, call it our sufficiency through the line. All the investments that go in at different points, right? You have everything from customer trade terms all the way through. There's a lot there to unpack. What's critical, and that's why I think Nik wanted to pull out, we've got a few markets where we see the biggest opportunity. We're digging in there first, and we're also digging into, you know, and enhancing tools in there.
We will take the learnings from those and we can quickly scale that out as well. More to come on that, but I would not just think of it as kind of a depth and frequency thing.
Yeah, I'd just add to that to Deborah's point. I think firstly, let me just make sure when I talked about it, there's seven markets. It's North America, it's GB, it's Australia, it's Europe, it's GT. When I talk about Europe, it's obviously we've got several divisions within or regions within continental Europe. About 70% of the spend when we look at our trade spend and our total A&P comes from those markets. We're looking at it end to end. What I'd also add is with some of the tools that we've developed, and RGMX is one of the tools that we're working on, and GB and Germany are the two markets in which we're piloting today.
GB, that's why I was giving you some of those examples, because we've actually done the work with RGMX through that pilot on the total A&P bucket, and we're now expanding that into the trade spend area as well, right? Some of the examples that I gave you was around some of those promotions that might be around what's happening that's consumer facing, right? When you actually look at the trade spend piece, which is in your gross to net, right? That's a big opportunity because that's probably where we've had a large amount of growth as well ahead of our NSV. Now, unfortunately, a lot of that just becomes paper money or funny money, right? In some ways, actually, if you can just change your trade terms and conditions to net against that to make it simpler, right? And more transparent, the better it is.
Sometimes you do not want to do that because you want to look at your price listings as well and maintain that integrity. Where you do have an opportunity, a lot of that is actually not going to the consumer. It is not about the impact that it is going to have on the consumer promotion. It is actually what the customer is getting and how are we linking that to pay for performance with them, right? I think there is an opportunity to either reduce or link it more for pay for performance on that as well without impacting what you might be doing on the consumer facing stuff other than where it is just a negative gross margin return, right? Why would you be doing that? Why should the customer be doing that as well, right?
Why can't we put it more into some of those gross margin generating activities that are driving the volume through either promo, depth, or frequency, right? I think we should separate out what is truly customer and what's consumer facing as well.
I'm going to go to one online. From Robert Ottenstein, I've got one for Deborah. Can you give us an update on your U.S. route to market optimization work? Are you seeing green shoots?
Yeah, I think, and I think Sally had given some updates at, you know, at Cagne as well. Look, I think our route to market, you know, working with our distributor partners is going very, very well. I think, you know, feedback from distributors, we are seeing growth. I think Sally had used some examples of there in Florida. I think were her examples that she used at Cagne of just what has happened in that market post that implementation. We're still pretty early.
I mean, this is one thing I would say, you know, you're going to see green shoots on this just as you're getting in and you're going in and seeing more. We put more feet on the street in these cases. You are actually seeing people more face to face. It is also over time as well of really building out the portfolio, being able to respond quickly to what's happening in the market, being able to respond both competitively as well as take advantage of when you see something that's working. You know, I feel like I'm now repeating myself. When we see something that's working, being able to take that best practice and scale it quickly. I think that's one of the big opportunities that we have kind of as a company is just how frequently we do those types of things.
I would say that's some of the early learning, but you know, clearly in the markets that we have focused on, I'm not going to list a lot of those just because it's competitively sensitive. Where we have focused on it, we're definitely seeing, and you know, admittedly these things reinforce each other because we purposely picked markets where we saw opportunity, we've put people in, and then we've actually seen disproportionate returns from it from both a market, but as well as some key brands as well where we have focused that activity.
Maybe if I take one more from online as well, and then we'll come back to the room. From Ed Mundy, I've got two. The first one is for Nik. In your $3 billion free cash flow target, is there a bare minimum of EBIT growth that is required before taking into account benefits from CapEx, lower CapEx, working capital gains? A second one, and I'm going to throw it to, it's probably Grainne. Also, we have Cristina Diezhandino and Dana with us as well, our CMO. One for you that the two of you might want to have a think about. To what extent have the learnings from Guinness on driving cultural relevance and leveraging social media been actively shared across other brands in the portfolio? What brand could be the next Guinness? What brand could be the next Guinness?
Oh. Hopefully a few. I'll answer Ed's first question very quickly because he's going to have to wait until the summer till we lay that out. What I would say to Ed is remember what I put out there. We're looking at a variety of different scenarios in terms of how that recovery happens and the shape of it, both in terms of the industry and the macros. I think clearly what we're trying to do in any of those scenarios is make sure for 2026 we have that floor of $3 billion, right? I'm not going to get into how much is going to come from CapEx and what's coming from EBIT growth and what's coming from, you know, maturing liquid, but clearly we'll give you some more color for 2026.
The $3 billion is our floor under various scenarios regardless of how the industry and/or the macros perform. Grainne?
Yeah, I can take the first half of the cultural one maybe. Yes, we share the learnings very widely across Diageo. In fact, actually through programs like our Diageo way of brand building, we actually have a module that's specifically on how to build brands with excellence and with relevance in culture. Obviously Guinness and some of our other brands that also have delivered great culturally resonant work are front and central in that learning and training for all of our marketing staff and indeed for our marketing agencies who also go through that program. Cristina, I do not know if you want to add anything on that or go next.
I mean, look, Grainne just, I think in her presentation explained, I thought very well, the way in which we approach brand building, which of course has evolved. The principles that she has outlined for Guinness are applied across absolutely every brand at Diageo. You may see multiple examples if you think about it, Johnnie Walker, or if you think about the expansion of Don Julio in the rest of the world, how we are tapping into cultural relevance, even in aspects that you might think, you know, that might not be culturally relevant. For example, I'm going to just give you an example that comes to mind, but we used Día de los Muertos, which is of course a Mexican holiday, very important one for Don Julio. We expanded that holiday truly in the rest of the world.
As a global marketing leadership team, we awarded the best execution of Día de los Muertos to India because it was the market that really was able to take that way of portraying with the assets that were exactly the same as everywhere else and really create an engaging consumer moment that is remarkable. I am trying to illustrate the point, which is we apply those same principles across every single brand. You have heard from Deborah and Nik talk extensively now about our Agile brand communities. At the heart of that is a group of people who designs what are the growth drivers for each particular brand. Those growth drivers will be implemented across the entire world for which that brand matters. We are all making this operational. I am sure you are going to be seeing a lot more in this line of work.
I mean, I will add as a real compliment for Grainne and Cristina and the team. I mean, Guinness has really been our first, you know, we talk about these ABCs, but the reality is, is they're much newer in some of these other brands. I mean, Guinness in many ways has been doing this and been piloting it for a long time through work that we had in the beer board. I, you know, it is something that I would completely expect as we start to do more of this across more brands. I think there's big opportunity. You just mentioned Don Julio would be my, that would be my two cents that I would throw in to say what's the next Guinness? Because I do think from an Agile Brand Community, I think that that group is coming together as we're trying to take tequila around the world.
Thank you, Celine Pannuti, JPMorgan. My first question, coming back on the disposal comments. What has changed about the way you look at the portfolio? Obviously, there's been some disposal in the U.S., in India, where you guys are focusing more on premium. What is changing that would lead to more, bigger disposal? I'm thinking in an environment where many companies are trying to sell, where the environment's not great. Are you going to really maximize value? How do you think about dilutions of earnings when already we have, you know, you guys are concentrating cash? I think, you know, if you can look at the value creation equation from disposal and the idea behind it.
My second question to round up on Guinness and maybe, sorry, it's a repetitive question, but it feels like you have done an amazing job in where you were already big in Ireland, in GB. Your continental Europe is $100 million of sales. It feels like, you know, it's the moment to go bigger and stronger there. And you're not doing that. If you could reconcile what is missing there. Thank you.
Do you want to talk disposals first again or just give it?
Yeah, happy to talk Guinness first. I think Celine sent me a message yesterday, email, which I intentionally ignored. She said she's going to ask me the question now here. It's good it's in the forum that we can all talk about it. Listen, I can't really, it's difficult for me to talk about what's changed, right? Versus what, you know, as I've come in, I've been working alongside Deborah and the board and really just stepping back to look at our businesses and our assets and our portfolio and how that links up to our longer term vision and strategy when we think about premium spirits growth alongside what we want to do, where we want to play in broader value pools within spirits, as well as what we're doing with Guinness and our beer portfolio.
I think I would look at it from an angle around if that's our strategy and that's our focus, are there businesses or assets that do not necessarily give us synergies, right? With how we think about where we want to grow, right? Without saying more, I'd say that's the way we're looking at it, right? Clearly we see that as an opportunity as we think about our business and our assets as we look forward. You have a fair point around how do you then reconcile that from a value perspective? Because clearly it's not like those do not bring value and whether it's cash flows, EBITDA, et cetera, right?
I think it's marrying that up with how does that also look from an angle of not what it's delivering today, but what it could deliver in the future with what investments need to happen in some of those businesses that could be quite capital intensive as well, right? I think you've got to look at it in the whole equation of what's not just a value element in a given year, but what does it look like as you look at the next five to seven years as well, particularly when you want to look at growth in line with your strategy. That's the way we're looking at it and that's the way we've discussed it with the board. I think, yeah, dogs barking. I was going to say we have dogs barking. You agree with me with what I'm saying.
I mean, look, the only thing I would add to this is remember, I mean, Diageo over our history, we have had, you know, we have been active portfolio managers. I mean, when we got out of wine years ago, you know, we've, a lot of, there's competitors out there just now getting out of wine. You know, I think we've divested the tail brands you mentioned, the 19 and 19 in North America. A lot of these things have to do with time as well. Like the India example is a really good example of when we divested the popular price brands there. At a certain point in Diageo's history, that would not have been the right thing to do as we were building up that Indian business and then looking at where the Indian consumer was at and where we saw it going in the next 10 years.
So many of these things are a factor of time and what we're seeing in the industry, what do we think's going to, you know, happen over the next 10 years? What are we going to have to spend to really go after that opportunity versus maybe something else? What I would say when we talk about being, you know, rigorous, it is a matter of there's always choices because in many cases there's opportunity in many things, but there's maybe a bigger opportunity in one place versus another. I would just say, you know, over time all of these, it's important where you're at in time and where it's going. Your second question was on, I can't remember now. Guinness Europe and going after Guinness Europe. Do you want to handle that?
Dylan, we've got your target moving up. Yeah, $100 million right away.
Celine, what I'll say, it's still early days. You know, I'm six weeks in the role. I'll say we probably could share more in the summer. We are looking at continental Europe as to the point we made earlier. If I look at from a capacity perspective, could we double continental Europe today? No. When Little Connell comes on board and as we free up capacity within Guinness, we could actually grow. That's why I say it's a multi-year journey. We see massive opportunity in continental Europe, but it's the journey we've got to go on. We'll probably be able to bring more color to it when we talk to you in August.
Remember, this is about more than distribution. I mean, when you build Guinness, you want, you know, it is about through the line and what you need to do to really launch into a market and to do that well. You want fresh Guinness. You do not want to just put Guinness out there and not, you know, have Guinness moving at the speed that it needs to to have the best, freshest Guinness like you get here at Storehouse.
It will come down to, again, choices there because we're not going to have unlimited capacity to service all of it. I'll come back a little bit to also, I think, what hopefully you've got a color of, but the fact that there is probably more opportunity as we think about asset-light models as well, right? To be able to expand without necessarily that same level of investment. I think we look at it from both the angles of where would we prioritize in terms of where we would actually be, you know, selling finished product versus what might be also a good further build out of the partnership model.
Do you want to add anything? You want to add, Grainne?
I think the only thing I'd add is that. The only thing I'd add is I think before in continental Europe, we really only had one activation pillar, which was St. Patrick's Day, which was executed at real scale and with excellence through the line. Now with the Premier League, we actually have a scale activation partnership, which also makes when you have the right distribution partners in place, you know, with those right choices, you actually have that sort of playbook type model that I referenced earlier in terms of how we work at TPOs. So, you know, again, alongside the sort of commercial side of things, the marketing side of things also has opportunity there.
Great. I'm conscious of Debra standing, so I think we're going to wrap things there, but Debra and Nik and everyone else are around to take lots of questions this evening. To those online, I'd say thanks very much for joining us. This does conclude our webcast.