Okay. We'll just kick off, but do feel free to bring a coffee in as you sit down, and let me just start by saying a massive welcome to you for being here. Our first Capital Markets Day in six years. We all know how busy agendas are, and to give us this time is really appreciated. For those of you that don't know me, my name is Dalton Philips. I'm the CEO. I joined Greencore in 2022, and my background is almost exclusively in food, and in fact, I was CEO of Morrisons some years ago, so I got to see firsthand Greencore up close. Let me just point to the agenda there that we've got up on the screen. Look, the first part of this morning is all around the core business, and we see real opportunities to materially improve the business beyond the core.
So we're going to spend the first part of this morning on Greencore today, where we're at, and the opportunities to grow. Then we're going to have a Q&A session, and then after that, we're going to get you on your feet, and we've got a series of different workshops, four workshops that we'll be taking you around. Then we'll have more time for Q&A. We'll come back here then for a session before lunch where we'll talk sustainability, we'll talk growth and expansion, and then Catherine will give you some thoughts on the financial trajectory of the business. In total, we've got about 30 of our senior leadership team here today, so there'll be loads of opportunity to interact with them, grab them, ask them your questions, and of course, as I said, we'll have opportunity for sort of main plenary questions. Then we'll break for lunch.
Hope that as many of you can stay for lunch as possible. We have a number of our chefs here, and trust me, you won't be short of eating. You'll be filled with some fantastic food, and everything you're eating today is, of course, made by Greencore. So look, let me pause there, and I'm going to hand you over to our Chairman, Leslie, who might just say a few words to kick the session off today. If you're at the back and you want a seat, just squeeze in. There's lots of seats still here, okay?
Thank you. Thank you, Dalton. So as Dalton said, I'm Leslie Van de Walle. I'm the Chairman of the Board of Greencore. Like Dalton, I joined at the end of 2022. And at that time, shareholders were asking me all the same question, "Why did you join Greencore?" And my answer was honest and truthful, which was, number one, food manufacturing has always been my love, and I love this industry, and therefore it was a great opportunity for me to come to my first love. The second reason is I've known Greencore for a long time as a competitor, as a peer, as a customer sometimes, and I've always thought this was a great company. But in 2022, when I joined with Dalton, it was clear that the company had lost its way.
I'd made, with hindsight, some mistakes during the pandemic, but also it was very clear to me and Dalton that there was a clear path to going back to our previous profitability, the famous 106. Now, obviously, two years later, we're very much on our way to doing that, and shareholders are asking me another question. They're saying the share price has tripled, so should I stay invested? My answer is very clear also. I think there are three reasons why investors should remain invested in the company. One, we're not finished with the job. There's still a lot of opportunities to improve the business in terms of operations, where on the Lee and Steve, you will see there is much more to come. Also, as we improve our systems, which are very outdated, we'll be able to find new efficiencies and cost opportunities.
Thirdly, as we've now pruned our portfolio and shed the loss-making businesses, Andy and his team will be able to focus on growth. You will see that there is growth with our existing customers through our innovation skills, our new channels, but also our excellent service levels. So lots of opportunities organically. Also, as we become the best operator in food manufacturing in the UK, we'll become the natural owners for many, many businesses in the UK for sure, and perhaps internationally. And therefore, with our strengthened balance sheet, our great customer service and experience, we will be able, within a very, obviously, very disciplined financial, to be able to make M&A and create value by being the natural owners and best owners of many businesses in the UK and internationally. So why should we be invested?
This is only the beginning, in my view, of Greencore's success stories, and hopefully, at the end of the day, when you see all the presentation, you will share my confidence and optimism about the company. Thank you again for attending. It's great to see so many people interested in our story, and I'll hand over to Dalton.
Thank you, Leslie. So let's get into it. And look, there are four objectives today. Number one, to showcase the strength and depth of our management team, and as I said, you'll meet over 30 of them today. The second is to bring to life the opportunity to strengthen the core business. If you've been following us for a while, we call that Horizon Two, and to take us beyond historic levels of profitability. The third is to share our thinking on the opportunities to grow beyond the core, Horizon Three, and then fourthly, to set out the medium-term financial targets. So let's get into it. And I'll start by going back to 2022 when I joined the business, and several things struck me when I joined. The first was I could see there was really good people.
The second, that we make really good products, and I obviously knew that from my time at Morrisons. And then the third was the deep customer relationships that we have. And in many cases, the customers see us as an extension of their business. That being said, the business was in a really difficult place. It was post-COVID, and it was facing a mountain of inflation. There was massive P&L pressure, and you might remember that year we made, well, in 2021, we made GBP 39 million. There was huge integration pains going on across the business as we were moving from a business unit structure, five business units to one functional structure. We were lacking operating discipline, the operating disciplines that I would have expected in a business of this scale.
There was underinvestment in the infrastructure, and tasks were, and in many cases still are, being done on paper. In fact, one of our largest sites was operating lotus notes and floppy disks back in 2022. Then finally, there was real ambiguity about where the business was heading. We set out a plan. We called it the Horizon Strategy. There are three parts to that. The first was Horizon 1, to stabilize the business. Horizon 2 was to start rebuilding profitability and returns, and this was the famous GBP 106 million that Leslie referenced. The third horizon was to explore new growth opportunities. That brings us to today.
So we achieved Horizon 1 in 2023, and last year we made real strides towards Horizon 2 by materially increasing both the ROIC and the operating profit and actually other metrics that you can see on the right-hand side of that slide. And we started to build the foundation towards Horizon 3. And so today I see a very different Greencore. We still have good people, we still make great products, we still have deep customer relationships, but also we're starting to deliver on our financial goals. And that functional model is bringing real benefits, and one that I hear often from our customers is the single more strategic relationship that we bring to them. You'll see today the new commercial and operating excellence programs that we have in place, and there's a real rigor and discipline today in how we manage our business.
We began a big investment in our infrastructure, the Making Business Easier program that we started last year, and we're making real progress on our strategic framework and our ambition. So I'd like to talk to you about that strategic framework. When we developed this, we went back to our roots. Those of you that have been following us for some years will have heard of the Greencore Way. Essentially, we took the best of the Greencore Way and we combined it with our Horizon Strategy. Let me orient you to this page because this is essentially the bedrock of what we're going to be discussing today. In the top left, you see our purpose. To the right of that, you see our ambition. I'll go through these in a moment.
And then the middle part, strengthen our core, that's Horizon 2, and to the right of that, grow and expand Horizon 3. And that all sits on the foundation, the Greencore Way of Winning. So let me talk about our purpose: Making everyday taste better. It's really the essence of why we're here. It's uniting to us as a colleague base of about 14,000 people, and each word has been chosen for a specific reason. So the making is absolutely a call to action. It's the nature of our business. We're manufacturers. We make things. Every day is the everyday nature of the operations. This is a 24/7 business, 365 days of the year. But the everyday also calls to the positive difference we want to bring to everyday lives. Taste, well, look, I hope you've seen a lot of taste already.
I mean, taste is about making great food that people absolutely love. And then better is all around the commitment to continuous improvement, never being complacent. And I really don't want to lose the everyday nature of our business. And actually, this slide, I think, is one of the most fun slides that we have in our organization, and it never ceases to impress me, the scale and complexity of what we do every day. So every day we manage unique customer relations, customer recipes, over 3,000 for our customers. Every day we evaluate new product concepts over a thousand a year. Every day we have just-in-time procurement capabilities and over 1,800 separate ingredients deliveries a week from over 250 UK and global suppliers. And every day we do 1,200 product quality checks. That's 9,000 a week. That's nearly 500,000 a year.
We have incredible technical capabilities, and every day we produce 3.3 million products that are on customer shelves, often only hours later. And every day we do 10,000 convenience store deliveries to every postcode in the UK And that means that over 50% of UK consumers get to eat a Greencore product every month. And so this slide, the reason why it's such a great slide is it illustrates both the complexity and the seamless integration of our daily operations. And that would be incredibly difficult for anybody else to replicate. And what's not on this slide is that every day we deliver at about 99% service levels into our customer. So let me go back to this framework and our ambition. Our ambition to be good is only good. It's not good enough. We strive for much, much more.
You'll see it from the 30 people you speak to today. We want to lead the way in convenience food, and leading means leading where we play. So we want to be number one in the categories we play in. And if we're not number one, to be number two. We want to grow. We want to be seen as a company to follow, and we want to be seen as a business that does business the right way. So let me turn back to the base of this strategic framework. And everything we do and the opportunity that's ahead of us sits on this base. This is the pillars of our organization, and I'll talk you through some of these key pillars. There's five of them that we're going to highlight, and you're going to see that throughout this morning's presentations. The first is lasting partnerships.
That's about building deep, enduring partnerships that are focused on the long term. About 50% of our volume is on secure long-term agreements. We work with all the top UK retailers, and we're in constant dialogue with them. Constant dialogue means every single day we're talking to them. Great food is about high-quality, tasty, safe, affordable food. You'll have tasted some of that this morning. We have such broad capabilities where we can make this great food. So sandwiches, sushi, salads, burgers, breakfast pots, poke bowls, ready meals, ambient sauces, salads. I could go on. We make so many different products. We have such broad capabilities. To do that, to make really great food, you need to have world-class food innovation. You'll meet many of our chefs today. There's over 30 years of Michelin-star experience amongst our chef population.
Andy has a team of over 100 people who just focus on food innovation. That's probably why we're able to win so many awards. The third pillar is all around delivery excellence. This is about being the most efficient supplier to our customers. There are many parts of this. You'll hear Lee talk about it today, but you'll also hear us talk about technology, which is an absolute enabler to this delivery excellence. We've had historic underinvestment. That's why we launched our Making Business Easier transformation program to address the outdated infrastructure we have in the business, to streamline processes, and to improve the quality of our data. The fourth area that underpins our business is sustainable choices, and that is embedding sustainability into the decision-making we make so that what's good for the planet can be good for Greencore.
You'll hear Fran talk about this later, but three key focus areas: responsible sourcing and human rights in our supply chain, Making with Care, so we've got net-zero operations, and then thirdly, Feeding with Pride, so that's all around healthy and sustainable diets and sustainable packaging, and of course, underpinning all of this is people, and look, it's a real cliché. Many companies say, "Oh, people are our greatest assets," but they really are our greatest asset. They're the people that make 3.3 million products every day, and after raw materials and packaging, it's our second largest cost base, so hence our absolute focus on engagement and productivity, and we want a workforce that's empowered, that's ambitious, that's diverse, and that's responsible in their work.
The team will talk to you about this today, but you'll hear four themes, and you're going to hear it right across the organization, this functional model that is driving significant benefits and much more than we originally anticipated. You'll hear a lot of talk around retention, this war on talent at all levels, and we've improved our voluntary retention by 6%. You'll hear us talk about driving engagement at all levels. Now, our engagement's good at 81%. That's 2% above the UK norm, but we never want to ease up on that. Then finally, enabling technologies. Again, this theme going through today, but enabling technologies in the people space to help us manage our people in a more effective way. So those strong foundations, they allow us to strengthen and unlock further value in our core. This is what Leslie was talking about earlier.
Let me talk about our core business. Firstly, I'd say our core business operates in attractive and growing markets. Convenience food has real tailwinds. If you think about it, the grocery market's growing at about 3.3%. Convenience food is growing at 4%, and the food-to-go market is growing at 5.6%. There are four tailwinds you'll be familiar with them, but there is momentum in private label in the market. It's growing 70 basis points ahead of branded products in the last five years. There's momentum in convenience store growth, 1,100 stores to be opened in the next five years, fueling further convenience food demand. There's momentum in premium alternatives. We talk about premiumization. Premium ready meals, for example, has grown 19% in the last four years. There's momentum in consumers seeking healthier alternatives.
Nearly half of all consumers say they want healthier products for a variety of reasons. And that drives premiumization, and it attracts new customers into our categories. So that's firstly. There's momentum in the, there's tailwinds in this market. But the second is, and much more important for us, is that there's a lot of self-help that we can take control of. And in the last two years, we've step-changed three key areas. We're going to go into this in some detail today. Now, look, there's much more to go after. But on our portfolio management, or you might think of it as the category returns lens, we've had a relentless focus on that, and ROIC's improved by 310 basis points since 2022. Six categories back then had negative ROIC. By the end of this year, none of them will. So you're going to hear about that today.
The second is commercial excellence. So Andy was courageous. He stepped away from a whole series of low-returning contracts. He resigned over GBP 200 million worth of volume, and that freed up 15% of our capacity to sell accretively. And so the team has been building the capabilities to enable us to sell that capacity and to grow profitably. You're going to hear a lot about the insight-driven work that goes on behind the scenes. You're going to hear a lot about the product development engine that the team has built, and you're going to hear a lot about the procurement excellence model that underpins it. And then if I turn to operating excellence, and Lee has put together such an impressive excellence agenda, delivered over 843 projects last year, many focused on network optimization, standardization, labor, and rates.
Some of them really big, some of them really small, all of them delivering pound notes into our P&L. And of course, there's a huge opportunity in automation. Some of our sites, and many of you have been in them, are heavily automated, but others are incredibly manual. And there's a real unlock here, given that over GBP 300 million a year is spent on direct labor. And then, of course, underpinning all of this is the central cost base, something that Catherine is relentless on. We've done a lot. There's a lot more to do. But I think the bottom line is that through these interventions, we know that there is a significant opportunity to drive the core beyond historic levels of performance. So let me now talk about the opportunities to grow and expand beyond the core, what we call Horizon 3.
We think about it across three axes. We think about channel, category, and country, and then across two further dimensions, organic and inorganic. If I talk about organic, there are new channels. There are people who eat our categories, sandwiches, for example, but we're not serving them. If you think about the food service market or the food-to-go, oh, sorry, the direct-to-consumer market. The UK food-to-go market is worth GBP 25 billion. We're looking at those channels where we can leverage our scale. We're also looking at new categories. The convenience food market is worth about GBP 50 billion, and there are large attractive categories where we don't currently play. We, again, can leverage our customer relationships to expand into these. Then, of course, there are new countries. In the medium term, there is the opportunity to take the Greencore Way of Winning to adjacent countries.
And look, an obvious example would be Ireland, given the similar market dynamics. But look, over time, we could see the potential in the EU of leveraging our model in some of the underdeveloped categories and markets there. And of course, there are inorganic opportunities, and we would do this in a very disciplined way. And we'll talk to you this morning in more detail about how we think about that. But look, essentially, there are three lenses. Firstly, evaluating the strategic fit of any target. Does that target have structural growth in its category? Can we win in that category? The second is considering the target's impact on our ESG profile. So can we improve it? And then thirdly, the target's impact on our group returns profile. Will it be accretive?
So look, for the right opportunity, we're confident in our ability to deliver significant value through the implementation of the Greencore Way of Winning. So if I bring it back to this framework, I really want you today to see the same opportunity that we see in Horizon 2 and 3. There's just an incredible opportunity. And if we look to the financial output of this integrated strategy, as we progress, absent of any material M&A, we'll be targeting the following medium-term targets in our core business. So ROIC, that's going to take primacy. That's our North Star, and we'll be targeting at least 15%. Revenue growth, we'll be targeting 3%-5%. But look, we're not going to be slaves to this number. If Andy comes back with a contract that we don't want to renew because the commercials aren't there, we're going to let it go.
We're not going to be slaves to it. But in general, we'll be targeting 3-5. In operating profit, it'll be 7% and above. In cash conversion, at least 55%, and leverage between 1-1.5 times, but clearly with some flexibility for the right M&A to increase that, assuming there is a clear line of sight to a fast level of deleveraging. So let me close by summarizing how we see the thesis of our investment case. Number one, we operate a robust—we have a robust core business that provides a strong platform for growth. Robust because the convenience food market is growing and it has structural tailwinds. Robust because we're in a leading position in some very attractive markets. Robust because we have deep, long-term, and secure partnerships with the top UK retailers. Robust because we have outstanding food innovation capabilities that drive stickiness and growth.
And robust because we operate at scale with a level of complexity that would be very hard to replicate. Secondly, there's significant further upside in our core business, and you're going to hear that this morning in some detail. Thirdly, we've got a strong balance sheet, and we're about to become very cash-generative. Fourthly, there are significant opportunities for us to expand beyond the core. And finally, and critically to me, is this strong management team who are delivering, who've got a track record of delivery, and you'll meet so many of them today. So look, in closing, this is a really great business, and we're only just getting going. So with that, let me hand you over to Nigel, and he'll talk to you about what we do to drive returns in our portfolios.
Thanks, Dalton. Very good morning to everybody. My name is Nigel Smith, and I lead strategy for Greencore. I joined the group in 2017, and I've held a variety of roles since then. I joined the executive team in 2021 to lead our then transformation program, Better Greencore. I now have responsibility for corporate strategy, business planning, and M&A. Before I get into the presentation proper, I did just want to amplify something that Dalton touched on in terms of how the group has changed over the last few years. If I think about my own experience, I'm now entering my eighth year as part of Greencore. I can say hand on heart that we are in the best shape that certainly I've ever seen us. We're a team, and I don't just mean the people that you're going to speak to today.
I mean the people right across Greencore. We're a team with real ambition, with clarity on where we're going, with proper depth of expertise in what needs to be done to make us a better business. And frankly, it's a team that's now enjoying and starting to reap the benefits of really delivering on what we say we're going to deliver and enjoying that momentum. So what does that mean in practice? Well, I was going to bring this to life with really three topics this morning. The first was some brief background on the group for those who are newer to Greencore. Secondly, I'll then spend the bulk of the time on our ongoing work to improve returns across our portfolio. And then finally, I'll briefly introduce our Making Business Easier program that you're going to hear about throughout the day.
If I start with the first of those points, I think it's fair to say that most consumers in the UK probably wouldn't recognize Greencore by name, but we actually have an enormous relevance to what the UK eats. And Dalton touched on this stat a little earlier on, but I think it's worth dwelling on. The net effect of the product categories that we produce in on the left-hand side of this chart, combined with the retail customer set that we serve on the right-hand side of this chart, means that half the UK population eats a Greencore product each and every month. We manufacture about 1.2 billion units across the categories that are listed on this slide, 3,000 SKUs, and we serve each and every major retailer in the country.
Our heartland, as many of you will know, is in private label, but we do also have a series of branded co-manufacturing relationships with the kinds of players that you see listed on this slide, and then supporting these commercial relationships is a really high-quality network of manufacturing and distribution assets, as well as nearly 14,000 people up and down the country who keep the group ticking each and every day. We operate 22 different production units across 16 locations in the UK, and we also have a distribution arm, our direct-to-store network that you'll hear about through the day, operating over 450 vans, making 10,000 deliveries to every postcode area in the country.
Andy and Lee will add more color on the commercial and operational footprint, but what I really wanted to do now is to switch gear and to talk a little bit more about the product portfolio that we have, and in particular, how we've been managing each part of our portfolio through the explicit lens of returns on capital. Those of you who follow Greencore for some time will know that over the last couple of years, we've seen Group return on invested capital step forward by over 300 basis points. And this started back in FY22 when we took the conscious decision to do a more granular type of analysis on the capital that was deployed in each category and the returns that we were getting on that capital category by category.
What we found was there was really a number of our categories that were generating low or even negative returns. So off the back of that, we set really clear targets for improvement. We mobilized cross-functional teams and tasked them with developing and delivering improvement plans. You see what that has meant in practice on this slide. On the left-hand side, there's an indication of the returns profile of each category today versus where it stood two years ago. Just to help with the definitions here, red was negative returns or effectively loss-making when fully allocated. Yellow indicates positive returns below our threshold of covering our cost of capital, and then green is above that cost of capital hurdle rate. You can see on the slide here that back in FY22, almost every category was problematic in some way.
Whereas now, we've eradicated losses across the portfolio, and you can see that our four biggest categories covering 84% of our revenue are on track to be above our threshold this year. But we're not done yet. And you can see that there are several areas where returns are not yet where we need them to be. And so in each of those categories, we have clear plans in place for further improvement, and we now performance manage each and every part of the business against the targets that we've set each on a monthly basis. Just to bring that to life with a couple of examples, one where we've achieved our threshold and one where we're still on the way. In salads back in 2019, we acquired a business called Freshtime, and we put it together with our existing salad plant in Spalding.
Within six months of making that acquisition, COVID hit us, and those businesses were particularly badly bruised both commercially and operationally. Hence the net negative return. Over the last couple of years, we have brought the full weight of that Greencore Way of Winning that Dalton referenced earlier on. We've delivered really significant operational efficiency. We've radically simplified the product portfolio and actually exited a business line in prepared vegetables altogether. And as a result of that, we've created capacity for growth in newer, higher-margin formats and relationships. And then an impact of that has been to lift the returns in that part of the business by 10 percentage points, even on lower volumes.
As we look forward from here, thanks to those operational and commercial excellence programs, we've created between 10% and 20% of our capacity to be able to go and sell, and we've got really clear line of sight of specific opportunities that we want to deploy that capacity against. If I then talk a little bit about our Yorkshire puddings business, we've gone through a similar improvement process. We've simplified the product portfolio, which has in turn enabled us to drive increased margin, even on a reduced number of SKUs. We've improved operational efficiency with increased throughput, and we've also used our product innovation muscle to develop and then ultimately win further premium beef-dripping Yorkshire pudding product with multiple customers.
So, as you can see on the slide, we're still not yet where we want to be in this category, but we've got a really strong plan in place. We're focused on going and selling the capacity that we've created, and we're feeling good about the future. The final topic that I'll touch on is our Making Business Easier program, or MBE, which you'll hear a lot about through the day. We launched MBE back in 2022 in recognition, really, of the fact that as we've grown up over time, we've never really fully integrated from a process and system and data point of view. The net impact of that has been quite a disparate landscape of systems and technologies. We're really clear that addressing that imbalance and that lack of integration is going to really transform the efficiency that we're able to deliver from the business.
You'll see on this page that we've structured it across three pillars, broadly following three steps in the Greencore value chain. The first is around Insight to Strategy, basically financial forecasting and business planning processes. The second is on Concept to Launch, which is really all about our product development muscle. And then third, we Plan to Deliver is really about that core operational aspect of making and delivering product to customers every day. I'm going to briefly introduce the first of those pillars, and then Andy and Lee will pick up number two and three a little later on. And so that first Insight to Strategy pillar is really all about having the right foundations for performance management, financial forecasting, and business planning processes. And so it's about reducing all the manual effort that goes in today to getting really decent business performance data and insight to drive decision-making.
Now, there's actually 15 different discrete initiatives in this pillar, but I'm just going to bring to life one specific example, which is what we call the standard chart of accounts. And so historically, we've actually not had a standardized format for recording management accounts across the group. We've had different ways of allocating different cost lines in different parts of the business or different methodologies for thinking about allocation of invested capital. And the net impact of that is that in order for us to do the kind of granular returns-based analysis that has driven the impact that I shared a couple of slides ago, it required loads of manual Excel workaround type of activity if we were going to be able to compare apples with apples.
That initiative, that standardized chart of accounts initiative, is going to eradicate literally hundreds of hours of workaround type work to make it much more efficient to get accurate and timely, insightful information. So if I just summarize then on the three things you've heard from me so far, the first is that we just have phenomenal breadth and quality of commercial and operational presence, and you're going to hear more about that throughout the day. Secondly, we're really proud of the work that we've done in enhancing our returns across the portfolio, but there's a lot more to do. And as Dalton said, we're really just getting going. And then thirdly, our Making Business Easier program is going to be a huge enabler for us over the next couple of years. And again, you'll hear plenty about that through the day.
I'm now going to hand to Andy, who's going to talk us through the commercial excellence model. Thank you, Nigel, and good morning. I'm Andy Parton. I'm the Chief Commercial Officer. Just by way of introduction, I've been at Greencore 10 years. I joined from Aldi, where I spent six years. Prior to that, I was at PepsiCo. So in total, this year, I've been lucky enough to do 25 years in this industry. I've got extensive experience off the back of that across own label, brands, and retail. And I'm pleased today to have the chance to introduce our fantastic commercial team at Greencore. So let me start with that, and let me introduce you to the team, how we go about business, and what we do. So you've heard that we went from five business units to one group structure.
That meant I had to take five separate commercial teams and turn it into one. And what we've done is build a very clear model and a very clear structure around that. On the left of this slide, the model, and like all good models, the simpler you keep it, the more effective it is. This really encapsulates what my team do: create the right insight to build the right plans, go and sell them, and buy what you need to execute those plans. And I've put in place a commercial structure behind that that puts in place really clear accountabilities against each one and really great capability. Customers now benefit from that single leader for all parts of their business with Greencore, not five separate businesses engaging with them. As you can see on the right-hand side, around that leader, we build cross-functional teams.
Now, this is critical in own label. You need those cross-functional engagements. That's how you really understand the breadth of the customer agenda and take advantage of all the opportunities that there are. When you do own label, it's really important to understand our customers' commercial teams are critical, but so are their development teams, so are their technical teams, so are their supply chain teams. Just one good example of that, I mentioned technical on the right-hand side. With that embedded and that trusted by our customers, our technical teams will now do training for our customers, for example, on hygiene or forthcoming regulations. I can say genuinely that we've got the best talent in the industry in own label. And as Dalton said, we're engaging every single day with our customers. So what is it that we do?
On a page, my team are all about the four following things: how we grow, how we bring the right insight and process, how we develop fantastic food through that culinary excellence, and then our procurement model to buy what we need. And it makes a real difference to the P&L. We pull the levers of volume, price, mix, and cost. My team aren't doing one of those four things. We're not doing the right thing, but it's working. Last year, for example, our like-for-like revenue grew 3.4%, and our gross margin improved by 350 basis points. It's a really good indicator that we're doing the right things and that my team are working really well with Lee's team because we're clearly converting that volume if we're driving our gross margin. And it's because of this model we have something really unique that we bring to our customers.
On the right-hand side, if I just summarize, these things are really powerful. As I say, I've been on the retail side of things. This is really not easy to do or replicate. 99% service levels, industry-leading technical and safety standards, proprietary product and technical innovation, that nationwide distribution business that I'll talk more about, the insight capabilities that we bring to drive growth. We're compliant with all of our customers' technical requirements in the supply chain, and we do this in a really competitive cost way. And the beauty of all of this is we supply categories that are really attractive to our customers. Consumers want to buy more of them. You can encourage consumption. It's above average margin for our customers. It turns really quickly, which generates cash. These are hero categories for our customers that are strategically important to them.
Dalton touched on this, but we've got ourselves into a very good position with our customer relationships. Over 70% of our relationships, we're selling four or more of our categories to that customer. We have really good security in terms of length of contract, and we've developed very embedded joint ways of working through partnership models in 75% of our customers. They're really important because it helps us manage our costs. We've talked about how well we have been in terms of picking the right growth and being disciplined about what we do, focusing on both top and bottom line, and that's going to be the case. We've talked about the business we've stepped away from, and we've put real process discipline behind this. We have hurdle rates for all of our categories and all of our potential new contracts and product development as well.
So we know what good growth is. And we see real opportunities for growth moving forward. And let me explain why. Just to explain this slide and what you see, these are the categories that we serve our seven largest customers. So categories down the left, customers across the right. This is 80% of our revenue. Two messages to take away from this slide. First of all, you can see that we have a really good balance in our business. We have a broad set of customers across a broad number of categories. So we're not too reliant on any one combination. But the other message to take from this slide is there's green, but there's white spaces as well. Selling more of what you already do to existing customers is clearly the most effective way to drive value-accretive growth.
In a world that's getting more regulated and challenging, retailers want to double down with a smaller number of key strategic partners, such as Greencore. Also, our customers' plans are conducive to growth. It's back to that point I made around these are good categories for our customers. Just two examples. Our M&S relationship. We are classed as one of only six fortress sites. That basically means we're a dedicated supplier with real capability and joint ambition between both parties to do more and fully utilize the capabilities and capacities that we have at Northampton, and M&S are a market leader in food on the move, and they have incredibly exciting plans to do more, and then Aldi. We have built over the years a fantastic food-to-go business with Aldi, and as you'll be aware, we've now moved into a new category, which is ready meals.
A great example of filling in those white spaces. It's going really, really well. We're ahead of expectations. Sales are 14% up on the previous offer because of the work we've done to improve quality and improve choice. There is significant opportunity for further growth. Also, on the right-hand side, day parts and formats. Lots more to go for here. Breakfast and hot food. You'll have sampled many of our great products this morning for breakfast. Breakfast has seen a 50% increase in occasions in the last four years. We've been busy getting after that opportunity. We sell GBP 60 million of breakfast products, but a lot more to go for, both in terms of our capability and what our customers want to do. Hot food, another example. 40% of food on the move is consumed hot.
Over the last few months, we've started a new trial with Greggs. Greggs need no introduction, market leader in food on the move. But we are now in their stores with a hot lunchtime offer that is going incredibly well and will be rolling out later on in the year. So just the start of a fantastic relationship. We work very closely with people like Shell and BP. Hot food is core to their proposition. And all of our big retail customers want to do more in hot food on the move. So there's many, many exciting plans and projects in the pipeline. We've talked about direct-to-store. Let me just bring that to life in terms of what that means for me and my team and how we can use it and sell it. It's a fantastic capability to partner with our manufacturing capability. What is it?
We've got a fleet of 400 little vans, and they are perfect for getting into small retail locations. Think petrol stations, coffee shops, small convenience stores. Big HGVs' simply can't get into these locations. We focus on single unit pick rather than delivering big bulky cases more suitable for supermarkets. That means you can customize the order. That gives you better range choice. It helps availability. It reduces waste. It reduces labor in store for that customer. So you've got this virtuous circle of driving growth in the right way for us and our customer. In addition to the products we make, because we're already going to the location, we can add other products as well, such as fruit pots. So we're solving problems for our customers. We've moved as well from that being a cost center to its own P&L.
We've renegotiated commercial terms so we get commercial value for this offer, recognizing how important it is, and we are starting to see the benefits of that, as you saw on Nigel's slide. It drives real growth as well. You'll be aware, as they've moved into convenience this year, they've now got 500 stores under Asda Express. Within 12 weeks, we took that on as a direct-to-store contract. We've got over 5% growth with Asda. Dalton talked about some of the tailwinds, so just to recap on this slide, those four things that we see really helping us with growth: the relevance of private label. It resonates with the UK consumer. All of our big customers are heavily invested in private label. It really enhances their brand. The convenience expansion. It's really exciting. We've got over 1,100 stores in the pipeline, all with our big customers.
Some of you may recall that a previous expansion of convenience stores was a real kicker for Greencore growth in the 2010s. It's happening again. We're perfectly positioned to take advantage of this. 40% of what we already do goes through convenience stores, and it brings back into play direct-to-store. Shopper mobility is back. 83% of people are now back in the office once a week. That's even higher than it was in 2020. Premiumization. This is a fantastic trend for us because it's a chance to develop margin-accretive products. What we're illustrating in the middle of that slide is a Meal Deal example. Now, 65% of sandwiches are sold on Meal Deal. They're very famous that they're so important to the consumer in this country. Gone are the days of just one all-inclusive Meal Deal.
This example shows you now that there can be three tiers to a Meal Deal: an everyday offer, a premium, and even an ultra-premium product offer. And you're going to see this later on from our food teams. But the great opportunity for us in this is it's the sandwich that changes. It's the sandwich that you can develop and premiumize. The snack and the drink stays the same. And then healthy and sustainable diets. Dalton touched on this. Consumers are looking for healthier options, and we are fantastically placed against this trend. 70% of what we already do are classed as healthy products. If you think about our products, just logically, salads, sushi, sandwiches. And our production capabilities are perfect for doing more of this. We are experts in assembling fresh, low-process food that looks and tastes fantastic. And the value that we add to customers.
This point I made around bringing the right insight to the table to put in place the right plans. We invest significantly in all the right data. We spend GBP 3 million-GBP 4 million a year on this, and it delivers real hard benefits. In the pack on the right-hand side of this are many examples of where we have improved our customers' performance. Very few own-label suppliers achieve the engagement model that I talk about, which is that relationship management of an own-label supplier married with the activation capability of a brand. You're going to see a lot from our food teams today. Just to simplify what we mean by food and how we commercialize this, two big types of food development we do: redevelopment. This is about taking a current product, making it better, selling more. Perfect example, Tesco Finest lasagna. We redeveloped the product, made it better.
Sales have gone up 17%. That is Tesco's number one finest ready meal product, and we're proud to supply it, and then innovation, bringing new products to market. Over 400 last year, adding real value to our business. As I say, over lunch and over a breakout, you're going to meet the team, and you're going to see these examples come to life, and it's that food skill that we've talked about. I am incredibly proud to lead this team and have this capability. We are basically an extension of our customer, and this is market-leading capability. As I say, Michelin-star restaurant experience. All of our chefs are restaurant-trained. Remember, we're in added-value food categories, okay? So you need this food expertise, and it drives the rewards and recognitions that we're seeing. In terms of Making Business Easier, I'm leading Concept to Launch.
As Nigel mentioned, this is how we take ideas all the way through to market. I'd like to say we're good at what we do now, and we are, and it's a credit to the team. But this program is going to step change commercial. We're going to have better systems. We're going to have better data. We're going to put in place a system where gone are the disparate systems and processes that my team have to replicate effort in. We're going to have one source of the truth, better real-time data, better decision-making off the back of it. So this is incredibly exciting for the team. And then finally, in terms of our commercial excellence model, our procurement excellence model, we have scale, which is a critical enabler. We procure over GBP 1 billion worth of ingredients and packaging, and the team have over 80 years' experience.
We buy about half of our products in the UK, about half of it abroad, and we deeply understand our supply chains. We put boots on the ground. We visited 16 countries last year through 46 different visits. And on the right-hand side, you'll see that it works. The gray line is a benchmark of domestic and international food inflation. Green line is Greencore's. So you can see that we've been buying better than the market. Buying well drives competitiveness and enduring margin. And in our deep customer partnerships, it creates benefit for both us and our customers. If we're lowering costs for both parties, we're increasing joint margin. That's what drives these long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships, and that is critical in own label. Now you're going to hear directly from our customers. As Dalton mentioned, we're in constant dialogue with our customers each and every day.
The videos are taken from excerpts of customer videos from the past 18 months, when customers have visited sites, and then Dalton has shared that as part of our internal colleague video. You'll hear what they think about Greencore and our partnership.
Look, it's really impressive. Great to see the team in action here. Now, we refer to this factory, Dalton, as one of our fortress factories. In my view, it's the best sandwich factory there is in the world. To see it firsthand was great. I know to run a factory like this is really hard because the volume is enormous, and that intensity of focus on quality day in, day out, every hour, every colleague takes a lot of work. I'm really grateful for what we've seen today.
First of all, I came here to say hello to my friend Dalton and say a big thank you to all of you for the great work and the great job that you do for Morrisons, but more especially for all our customers in our stores. We are very happy in our relationship together, and I'm looking forward to developing our relationship. So again, thank you for the effort. Thank you for the quality. Thank you for the good price to our customers.
I had the chance to meet some of you just walking around in the factory here at Warrington today. Thank you very much for everything you do to serve our customers, creating delicious products that we are really proud of. That's why customers come to us. They come to us because we serve people from low affluence all of the way to people who are looking for a treat and an indulgence occasion. And we try to make the best product for them, working with the best entrepreneurs and innovators, food companies in the market to bring those products to customers. Our partners thinking about it in that same way as we go on this journey to build an even bigger business off the back of product. That's the way that we're going to make it happen.
I've been to a lot of sites, and I think this is in my top, I'll say one, because Dalton, you're very close to me, but it was an amazing visit. It really was. I think the number one ask that I normally have is to say, "We need every single case that we order delivered on time." And so for us, we have great products. We can buy them at great costs. We sell them at excellent value. But if we don't have the products in our stores, then it doesn't work for us. So we need every product on time and in full.
That's our focus.
Really pleased and proud to partner with Greencore. It's been an amazing relationship so far, going from strength to strength. As I said at the beginning, really good afternoon today talking about 2025, 2026, and beyond, and how we put all of that together. So really, when we're in the best partnerships, you don't know which business you're in because you're solving problems together for the customer.
I've worked in the food sector for 20 years in supermarkets, and this is one of the best sites I've been to in my career. I'm delighted by having a partnership with Greencore. I think the way you've supported us has been fantastic. You've got great quality products. You've got passionate people, and you've got an incredible service level. I mean, what a combination of assets. Let's do more together, and let's get on.
So I really hope those videos have brought to life what I've been talking about, and as I say, the opportunity you're going to have today to taste our food as well, so to summarise, hopefully what you've seen from that is that we've really built an effective go-to-market model, that one Greencore structure is really working for us.
We've built secure long-term partnerships, over half of it in long-term contracts, and we're fantastically positioned for future growth. We've created capacity to sell, and hopefully you've taken confidence from the amount of different opportunities we've got to sell more to existing customers, but also develop into those new day parts as well, backed by our customers' mutual desire to do that. We've got fantastic food expertise, and we're really focusing on improving our commercial processes, and making business easier will really benefit the commercial team. And that's all underpinned by a fantastic procurement capability that allows us to outperform the market. Thanks for your time. I'm going to hand over to Lee.
Thank you, Andy. Good morning. My name is Lee Finney, and I'm now in my third year as our Chief Operating Officer.
My background is leading global operations and supply chains, largely for branded multinational businesses, food and beverage primarily, both overseas and here in the UK. I'm delighted to share today our approach to driving operational excellence in Greencore. We've made a strong start, but I'm particularly excited about the size of the opportunity ahead of us operationally and as a business. I'm going to cover three key topics today. So firstly, our customer proposition, building on the capabilities that Dalton and Andy have celebrated in their sections. Secondly, how do we identify cost opportunities within our business? And thirdly, how do we use Greencore's new operational excellence framework to attack these opportunities and to drive the P&L? Working very closely in partnership with Andy and the commercial functions, the operations group delivers a compelling customer proposition that is extremely difficult to replicate.
With over 400 product launches delivered seamlessly each year, we have industry-leading technical capabilities. Our subject matter experts, our SMEs, bring specialist knowledge and insights to our customers and suppliers ranging from bread to eggs, cereals, protein, and dairy. We continue to drive towards our ambition of zero serious injuries, reducing our reportable accidents last year by over 31%. Our 16 manufacturing sites and logistic depots all have either an A or double A grade BRC Certification, and our standards of food hygiene, so essential in a high-risk chilled supply chain, are exemplary. We manage the complexity of producing over 3,000 SKUs, mostly daily fresh, made day one for day two in store, with world-class service levels.
And our group logistics function delivers over 400 million units annually in all weathers to every postcode in the country, including being trusted with alarm codes and key access to replenish stores during the night as our customers are sleeping. This is a safe, dependable, and agile operational model that customers deeply value. Our cost opportunity model uses a forensic diagnostic on the left side of the slide to identify inefficiency and waste in all of its components. This may take the form of food waste, suboptimized labor, line stoppages affecting equipment efficiency, delays in changeover times, or underutilized backhaul in logistics, among many other examples of inefficiencies and waste. This generates a pool of improvement opportunity, which we attack using our operational excellence model on the right-hand side of this slide. It's a simple model, but when executed well, can be a source of real competitive advantage.
In this schematic, we start with our total delivered costs on the left-hand side, and we back out non-addressable costs, which are largely fixed costs in the medium term. Our diagnostic then identified 30% of these addressable costs as a cost opportunity pool. Since fiscal 2023, we've been successfully attacking this pool to drive P&L benefit. To demonstrate this for a specific key performance indicator or KPI, you can see the example here of water consumption through a tray wash, a process that's similar across multiple sites in our business. Given the decentralized nature of Greencore previously, there are variable approaches and performance standards. In this example, we calculate the potential savings from all plants improving to the level of the best internally, and we call these our Lighthouse sites, and then we set a further stretch target based on benchmarking externally or an internal challenge for improvement.
The sum of all of these reductions forms the cost opportunity pool for this specific KPI. In this case, the cost associated with water supply or extraction, water treatment, heating the water, and the effluent plant running costs. We will have exactly this approach for every KPI in our business. We call this our management control and reporting system, or our MCRS. This is an example as well of how operational excellence dovetails with sustainability to benefit not just the P&L, but also the planet. We're now focusing on five transformational levers, which I'll explain in the following slides. These levers are operational excellence pillars, automation, network optimization, overhead reduction, and project MBE, making business easier. Over the last two years, we've been building the foundational enablers on the right-hand side of the slide to enable the journey ahead.
We have had to build the financial diagnostics capability that I have just outlined. We've transitioned from five business units to a decentralized functional structure and built a culture of one Greencore as opposed to decentralized islands of autonomy with 16 different ways of working. We're implementing a disciplined suite of KPIs and performance metrics, our MCRS, as I've just explained, which allows us to track progress daily, weekly, and on a monthly basis. We're building eight centers of excellence to drive thought leadership and best practice across Greencore. We're identifying those plants that have expertise or potential to become lighthouses, where we pilot best practices before rapidly deploying them across our network. And finally, we have built a new CapEx system and project management capability to execute CapEx effectively to drive high returns on investment.
To provide a little more context on the operational excellence pillars, we show the pillars which would typically be included in an operational excellence framework, similar to what I would have deployed or led in the global branded businesses you see referenced here. This pillar-based maturity model is highly utilized in great businesses, but requires strong discipline to implement it and embed it in our DNA. Focusing initially on manufacturing and supply chain excellence, these pillars each contain the tools, the metrics, and the best practices that are deployed across the business in a consistent way. An example is shown here of the DMAIC tool in the focused improvement pillar, which trains our teams to define the problem, measure the loss, analyze the root cause of the problem, improve the problem, and then control the process going forward.
As you can see from the green boxes, we're in the early days of rolling out this framework, providing a lot of future opportunity both in Greencore and also in applying these playbooks to future M&A. We're building a Greencore operational excellence model that will drive M&A synergy when we need to deploy it. And our early adoption has delivered very strong results. Under new leadership, the new group operational excellence function has over 120 years of experience, driving several hundred improvement projects per year. Two examples are seen here. In the first, we removed 25 FTE headcount due to a new planning methodology in one chilled ready meal plant, saving GBP 750,000. And in the second, we removed 24 tons of cheese waste following automation, saving another GBP 125,000.
At the enterprise level, you can see that the sum of these site projects increased units per labor hour from 95 to 100 and reduced waste by 83 basis points. We track every operational project weekly in detail to ensure they're driving the P&L benefit that we expect. Our previous wave of automation delivered some very strong results, which Steve Switzer, our Group Manufacturing and Engineering Director, will present in more detail during the breakout sessions. You can see some images here from video content that Steve will share. We now have a zero-touch sandwich line and a state-of-the-art automated chilled ready meal plant, for example. But the remaining opportunity to deploy advanced robotics is significant as technology improves, costs reduce, and applications broaden to replicate the dexterity of the human hand.
The cost of direct labor is, in our businesses, approximately GBP 300 million, and it continues to provide inflationary headwinds. So we're now embarking upon phase two of our automation strategy. We've established a new center of excellence and have begun to build a new ecosystem of partners. We've allocated a CapEx envelope to drive automation P&L benefits in the medium term. And Steve will bring these opportunities to life for you later. Our multi-site network allows us to drive synergies and efficiencies, which we are now exploiting in the new functional model. In the top example, we are step-changing the performance of the chilled ready meals plants by optimizing Warrington, Wisbech, and Kiveton as one network. As we unlock capacity through operational excellence, Andy and I work to fill that capacity with very targeted, profitable volume, supporting customers' growth and innovation ambitions.
In the second example, we have created a three-plant counter-seasonal cluster, which allows us to optimize labor and overheads across the full year and internally source ingredients between those facilities that we previously bought from third parties. In the third example, we have created a group logistics function that looks at the entirety of materials movements across the total Greencore network, consolidating inbound deliveries, optimizing warehousing, and creating hubs to avoid duplication that existed across our old business units. And this schematic illustrates our ambition to keep our total delivered costs flat. Deploying our operational excellence levers to offset inflation, as shown on the left, TDC flat requires an enterprise mindset, working closely with commercial, food development, and procurement teams and customers to drive structural efficiency through the value chain.
On the right, you'll see an example of how we have analyzed the indirect labor in each site by function to identify where we have the leanest structures. We can then standardize organizational design blueprints to reduce FTE headcount. Phase one of this program is now live, and project MBE will allow further streamlining of overheads going forwards as we standardize processes and invest in new systems. And underpinning our aspirations is project MBE, with Nigel and Andy having shared their respective work streams. I'm the executive sponsor of the Plant to Deliver work stream, which aims to transform our inefficient legacy IT platforms and spreadsheets into a suite of industry-leading tools. This will further improve our data integrity, our integrated business planning capabilities, provide real-time insights for online decision-making, enhance quality, and drive a low-cost operating model.
We now have several process work streams live, including an end-to-end planning tool, which looks seamlessly from the customer to the production line schedule, a manufacturing materials performance tool, which we will demonstrate later in the MBE breakout, a workforce planning optimization solution in design, and procurement enablement. For example, we have just recently launched an automated robotic negotiating tool. Today, we are demonstrating to you, hopefully, how we are delivering strong improvements today, whilst in parallel, building a winning business built on world-class platforms for the future. All of which means there is much more opportunity to go after. You can see here that we have delivered the fiscal 2023 and the fiscal 2024 plans. We have strong momentum through early fiscal 2025, and the initial 30% cost opportunity pool that I defined for you earlier will be extracted fully.
However, this initial diagnostic focused primarily on conversion cost within the as-is network. The opportunity resulting from automation, network optimization, project MBE, among other things, are within the next cost opportunity pool. Once these costs are removed, we then repeat the cycle to continually define the next layer of opportunities to keep our total delivered costs flat over time. This will require the more advanced operational excellence capabilities that we are now building. So, in summary, we have a compelling customer proposition operationally that is incredibly difficult to replicate. We are building a forensic diagnostic approach to target inefficiency and waste and applying very well-utilized and proven tools to attack the cost opportunities within the business. We have assembled a strong team to do that.
We are benefiting from the new functional model, driving a One Greencore culture, and there are large opportunities ahead as we drive the big transformational levers I've presented to you today. This will also ready us for M&A integration and synergy extraction. Project MBE will transform our processes and our systems landscape, enabling a low-cost operating model that will, in my view, drive fierce competitive advantage. Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Lee. Good to have Lee, Andy, and Nigel share with us some of their thoughts. They're going to join me now on stage, and we're going to go into the first of, we've got a whole series of different Q&As today. But what I wanted to do now was just do a Q&A, if it's okay with you, specifically around what you've heard today in terms of portfolio or commercial or operational excellence. And then later on, we're going to be talking more about the financials. But if we want to keep it to that, that would be helpful. Got some of my colleagues holding up mics. If you do have a question, raise your hand and then maybe tell us who you are because we can pick it up on the transcript.
Thanks. Morning. Patrick Higgins from Goodbody. Just one question for me. I guess one of the things that struck me through that initial presentation is just how much capacity you guys have unlocked already. What does that look like across your kind of top two or three categories? And how important will filling that capacity be to achieving the margin targets that you've outlined today? And I guess, would you need incremental capacity to deliver against the kind of midterm kind of growth ambition as well?
Yeah, thanks, Patrick. And look, I'll certainly turn to you, Lee. And you may have a view as well, Andy. But this focus that Lee's brought onto sort of OEE and just driving out capacity, it's the best returning capacity you'll ever get your hands on. So, Lee, do you want to give some thoughts on that?
Yeah. So if you look across our total business, we've got, as we say, about 15% surplus capacity. It differs in different parts of the portfolio, but on average, we've got certainly room for growth over the next couple of years. And in specific portfolio areas where we believe there are exciting opportunities. So, for example, we touched on, Andy touched on earlier, Northampton and the potential for us to grow further with M&S, which, of course, is very profitable growth for both parties.
I feel comfortable that we've got the capacity in place for this next phase of growth. My challenge, always, is to unlock the next tranche of capacity through operational excellence. And then Andy and I are very focused on how we, in a reasonably forensic way, target the right profitable volume for that capacity we create. We've got a pipeline of opportunities where we're going after operational efficiency and sales prospective development at the same time.
And we've looked 15% unlock, and you've seen our revenue targets of three to five. We've absolutely got the capacity for the next period of time, and then we'll go after more of it. But you've got to go and sell us.
Yeah. I mean, I think it was a very thorough answer. As I say, I can see a clear line of sight to the opportunity that we've got. It marries up very well with the capacity. And just to add to a point we've made in both our presentations, we have a very good business planning process in place now, enabled by the new structure. So being able to match the right opportunities to the right capacity to get to the right financial outcomes.
Great. Good morning. Karel Zoete from Kepler Cheuvreux. I have two questions. The first one is on the slide with the ROICs. There's still a couple of areas where you went from red to yellow. But in your biggest categories, you're now green everywhere or soon. Is there a general reason why some of these categories are still yellow? Could it be an area of scale, size of the category, investments, or at least there's a bottom-up story to any of them? And the other question is on the last presentation with regards to planning and demand forecasting, obviously an area where a lot of things are happening. How are you connected with the systems of your core clients nowadays using their data and their insights? Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Karel. So I'll come to you on the ROIC, and then maybe you want to pick up how you connect into the systems. Or actually, both of you can talk about that.
Yeah. Thanks, Karel. So I think there's some commonality and some difference. You made an observation that actually our largest categories are those that we've transitioned to green, and there is a link there. I think the scale that we have in those categories does help in our ability to drive a return.
And also, if we're a little self-critical over history, it's also been a question of relative and respective focus. And that's why the analysis and the assessment that I referred to and the ability of really granularly assessing returns at each part of the portfolio kind of unlocked some hidden gems. In terms of going forward, there is potential right across the portfolio, be they green or amber, by pulling on the kind of levers that we've talked about, be it now going and selling the capacity that we've created, be it improving the operational efficiency in the way that Lee has talked about, or managing the cost base pretty tightly.
And Karel, in terms of linking in, we would love it, by the way, if all our customers operated on one system. Unfortunately, they operate on multiple different systems, so we have to plug in in all cases.
Yeah. We see a proliferation of systems on the customer side, from RELEX to Blue Yonder. Actually, there's some investment going into that space at the moment with many customers. We're not seeing a standardization, unfortunately. It would be great if we could, but they're typically choosing tools that they think are best for their business models. I'd love to say that we were seamlessly connected into all of those. We're not today. Actually, a big benefit of Project MBE is for us to implement a new planning suite end-to-end that dovetails better with customer. Today, it's largely manual. Today, we would have interns working with their demand teams, and we would work with them in collaboration, collaborative planning and forecasting, but not seamlessly from a technology point of view. There would be lots of manual workarounds and processes that we would want to streamline going forwards.
But we do a good job of it. Our service levels are high. We engage strongly with the customer. Our demand management capabilities are strong, but we can do it much more efficiently.
Yeah. I mean, I'll just add to that. I mean, despite some of the technology differences, we really do a good job of using customer data. Two examples. Lee mentioned how we think about demand management. We have some great colleagues who we actually implant into our customers, and they're then working with that customer data. And if I think about food on the move as an example, our customers really benefit from that extra analytics because you can almost see food on the move as a bit of a store within a store in some of the supermarkets.
It has a slightly different trading pattern, time of day, day of week, and real benefits come from this. The colleague in question and the customer in question did a load of analysis, for example, about stores that were near football grounds, and every second week, there's this massive uplift on a Saturday. That opportunity was being missed. We've put in place the right analytics now, put that into the system. We're now benefiting from that opportunity, so there's real gold in this, and then also category data as well. Many of our customers will share their data so we can understand what's selling, make better ranging decisions. That drives better availability. That helps your demand planning, so we are very well embedded in our customers, but to Lee's point, opportunities to connect the systems, I'm sure, in the future.
Thanks, Karel. Damian? Thank you.
Damian McNeela from Deutsche Numis. A few from me, please. Firstly. And I've been warned. Okay. Two from me then. No problem. Okay. Firstly, on portfolio shape, you've indicated sort of you're aiming to grow at sort of 3%-5%. Should we expect the general shape of the portfolio to remain the same, or would we expect a greater skew to perhaps some of the lower growth areas that you operate in, given that guidance? First question. And then secondly, I guess I asked the margin question. Is the pace of growth towards that sort of target of 7% equal? Sort of I think the slide, page 66, looked like the incremental blocks were similar, but whether that was just indicative or whether it's actually back-end loaded, if you could clarify that, Lee, please.
Thanks very much, Damien. I'll come back to the margin question in a moment. In terms of the portfolio shape, do you want to pick that up?
Yeah. I mean, this is as much organic as anything. And we're not sharing specific guidance on individual category growth rates, as Lee outlined. We've freed up capacity reasonably well across the portfolio, and we'll take, over the life of the plan, opportunistic both new business and growth opportunities. There's slightly different growth profiles across the categories, but not massively such that we'd see a massive skew over the life of our plan.
And we're very happy with all our current categories, as Nigel pointed out earlier. In terms of margin, we're going to get more into margin later because I want Catherine to sort of lay out, Damian, how it flows. It's certainly not hockey stick, and it's evenly distributed, if you think, between what Lee's got to do, what Andy's got to do, and what we've got to kind of do centrally in terms of a third, a third, a third. But it flows through. But why don't we come back to it after Catherine's set her stall out if that's okay?
Great. Thank you. Matthew Abraham from Berenberg. First question is just in reference to your earlier comments about the EU being potentially a market of interest for you. You actually said that your model would be potentially well-suited to that market. Just wondering what you think the key reasons are that the model is well-suited. And then the second question is just in reference to robotics investment, some interesting elements of the investment phase there. Just wondering where you think robotics can get to as a proportion of your total capacity and over what time period that occurs.
Yeah. Look, Andy, I might throw it to you in terms of the EU. But when we visit the EU, we continue to be underwhelmed by the product that's on offer there. And yet, I continue to be surprised by how much space M&S are actually dedicating. If you go into any of the French convenience stores now, they're giving at least two bays to sandwiches as you come in, and all the sandwiches are on 28-day MAP packaging. I mean, the quality's just not there. So I certainly think our consumer insight, our manufacturing capabilities, this way of winning and the procurement expertise that we have is a major step forward.
And what's interesting is we do hear retailers on the continent coming over here, looking at what's going on, scratching their heads why they can't do it over there. It's definitely not in the short term. We're not about to open a factory in Europe anytime soon. But I do think longer term, there are opportunities. I think when you take the Irish market, look, it's exactly the same market with similar customer base, similar taste, and similar retailers in place. But Andy, you've been looking at this closely.
Yeah. I think you've answered it well. Probably to add a bit of color to it, it won't have escaped your attention. Look, we do work with some very large customers who have a European presence. The discounters in the UK, these are European and international operations, and they're very interested in the capabilities that we have and how the convenience food market compares in the UK to Europe. So look, to Dalton's point, this is not necessarily in the short term, but there's definitely a conversation that has already started about how Greencore in the future could really be a partner, not just in the UK, but further afield for some of our large customers.
In terms of robotics, when we finish this Q&A, we're going to go into an actual workshop on robotics. We're really going to lay out the landscape of how far we can get. But I think there's a massive opportunity. It's probably better that you see where we see the art of the possible, and then we go from there, if that works for you guys. Another question? [Audio Distortion] . Okay. Gary.
Gary Martin here from Davy. Thanks for the presentation. It was really, really insightful. Just maybe two questions on my side. Dalton, you mentioned specifically at the beginning just around Horizon 3 objectives. And I think you'd kind of covered off that you'd kind of touched into areas including hot food. So it sounds like you're kind of making inroads into new categories and new channels already. But actually, it'd be good just to get a bit of a deeper dive just into Horizon 3 objectives and just areas of attack there. And then maybe sort of second one for Lee, just on slide 60, you'd covered off just the various pillars of the operational excellence program. I think maybe five have been actioned out of about 20. Just in terms of the remaining 15, is there decent overlap there?
And can that be quickly rolled out in the near term? Thanks.
Thanks, Gary. And look, I might go to you, Lee, on the different pillars. But just to stay on Horizon 3, if it's okay with you, we've got a whole section later on today. We're actually going to go into some detail in terms of category, channel, country. It's probably better if we go through that, if that's okay, Gary.
So in terms of the pillars? Yeah. Look, this is early days for us. So this is a new methodology. It's a new framework. We've never operated this way before in Greencore with this kind of structured pillar-based methodology. So they're not systems or frameworks that can be implemented overnight. They are a multi-year maturity improvement journey. But you can go after quick wins reasonably effectively. So you'll see the areas we've prioritized and the capabilities we want to quickly build are where we think we've got the fastest payback and the biggest opportunity to impact the P&L. So you'll see, for example, a focused improvement pillar which helps us diagnose where we've got losses and waste and inefficiency. We prioritize that pillar, and we're training people up on those tools.
There'll be some of the other pillars that we will bring in over the next year or two years or perhaps three years. I would say to implement the full framework could actually take us three to five. And then as a maturity process over many years, Toyota will have been implementing these models for half a century. Right? So they're never-ending. You can continuously improve. But I think the journey for us over the next three to five years is to implement the whole framework focusing on the things that benefit the P&L most impactfully earlier.
Okay. Okay. One more question, if that's okay. Clive.
Thank you. Clive Black from Shore Capital. Two, if I may. Is reducing seasonality part of your strategy? And secondly, when you do fill all your factories, would you prefer to build a new one or buy one? And if you were building a new one, how much would it cost in Britain?
So, Andy, I'll come to you in terms of seasonality and then in terms of capacity. We're not calling it out specifically today, Clive. We do have a positive weather bias, which means that we're in more warm weather bias categories. Obviously, the soup facility was at capacity the last few weeks. I think it's something we think about. But actually, when you think about the opportunity with where we are in ready meals, I mean, that picks up quite a bit of the slack in the winter months. But, Andy, over to you.
Yeah. I think if you think about the distinction between sort of Horizon 2, Horizon 3, if you think about the core business and the opportunity we still see there, to Dalton's point, not a huge sort of change of emphasis on seasonality. There's some stuff that we're doing within Horizon 2 that naturally helps it, I guess, in the sense of, to Dalton's point, the expansion of ready meals. The work we're doing on hot food, of course, is very much around more winter. So there'll be an element of that. We'll talk about Horizon 3 later and the criteria we're looking at around that. But I guess that's how I would summarize.
And in terms of capacity, look, I'll bring Lee in. But no plans to build anything greenfield at the moment. As I said, the opportunity to squeeze additional capacity out of a current network is still pretty material, and it's so heavily returning.
Yeah. No plans at the moment, Clive. And I would hesitate to give you a figure for how much these things cost because it depends on the footprint, the complexity of what you're doing in them, whether you're putting new technology and automation in there. It depends where they are. There's so many variables. So I'd hesitate to give a value on how much a greenfield facility would cost us should we choose to build one. Our focus at the moment is optimizing the capacity we've got, right? And we've got headroom to do that.
In parallel, I'm continually looking at network optimization opportunities and with a careful eye going forwards on the potential, as we do M&A, to look at further plant synergies and network optimization resulting from those new assets, and therefore trying to keep our powder a little dry because we could make decisions on a plant today that in the near term proves to be the wrong decision because we now haven't got the capacity to crunch, so there's a watching brief, but no plans for greenfield right now,
and I would just say in closing, Clive, we would never want to get complacent, but to replicate our network today as a new entrant coming in, I mean, throw a number, but you wouldn't get much for GBP 50 million for a plant. You really wouldn't, so that's how we see it. I'm going to pause there. We're going to stop for a coffee, and then we're going to go into our breakouts. So what we're going to, and there'll be more time for questions through the breakouts, and then there'll be more time later on when we're back here together. So let me just orientate you on what we're going to do now through to lunch. We've got three set pieces. Fran's going to come up in a moment and talk about our sustainability strategy.
Nigel's going to come back up then after Fran to talk about Horizon 3, so growth and expansion beyond the core. And then Catherine's going to finish it off by updating us on the medium-term financial target. Then we'll have another set piece of Q&A, and we'll go upstairs, meet the chefs, and try some of the delicious food that they've been preparing next door. With that, I'll hand you over to Fran.
Thank you, Dalton. Hi, everyone. I'm Fran Haycock, Group Head of Sustainability. I've been with Greencore seven years, half of which has been in the sustainability function. Prior to that, I held a variety of commercial and change management roles. As one of the UK's largest food manufacturing companies, we recognize our role in adopting and leading on sustainable business practices. Balancing the demands of the P&L, people, and the planet is challenging. That makes good business sense for Greencore and is also becoming more central to our customer relationships and their expectations of us as a long-term strategic partner. In the last two years, we have made significant progress.
We have built strong central governance and expertise, but with the accountability for delivery, moved firmly into the business under 10 plan owners, covering the breadth of our Better Future Plan. I'll now take you through some more detail about our approach, followed by a short video of our leaders bringing that to life. Our Better Future Plan is designed to ensure Greencore remains a strong leader in the food industry, shaped by our three strategic pillars: sourcing, making, and feeding, underpinned by our approach to social topics and our program foundations. Our Sourcing with Integrity pillar, led by Andy, our Chief Commercial Officer, works to ensure we source ingredients responsibly, such as soy and paper, meaning our buying protects the natural environment and the people who work within it. Our supplier partners play a critical role here.
Our procurement team are highly focused on step-changing our collaboration with our suppliers as part of a multi-year supplier engagement approach. Andy Parton, our Procurement Director, will talk more about his team's priorities shortly. Making with care, led by Lee, our Chief Operating Officer, reflects the focus on our own operations to minimize our environmental impact in parallel with supporting our P&L through using less energy, reducing our water usage, and minimizing and redirecting our food waste. Our plant general managers are accountable for delivery of these efficiency programs, and we have now begun to develop Net Zero transition plans, which will enable us to build a robust and long-term decarbonization pathway for the group. Feeding with Pride, again led by Andy, our Chief Commercial Officer, and Rachel, our Head of Innovation, focuses on the final product and its impact on consumer health and the planet.
We have a well-established agenda in sustainable packaging and a fast-evolving approach to healthy and sustainable diets. Our packaging, food development, and sales leads are responding well to both customer and consumer demand for innovation that is affordable, accessible, and most importantly, tastes great. Rachel will provide some specific examples of how we're leading on this in the video. People at the Core, led by Guy, our Chief People Officer, and Rick, our Head of Human Rights, encompasses social topics such as communities and human rights in our direct operations. I'm really proud of the strength of our human rights agenda. Our central resource is doing a fantastic job upskilling our site HR and manufacturing colleagues to ensure our sites and their people have the highest level of protection. People make a difference at Greencore, and our local communities are critically important to us.
As such, our community strategy has evolved beyond donating food surplus and now includes a heightened focus on both volunteering and food education. And finally, our foundations. These work streams are critical to ensure both the executive team and the Sustainability Committee of the board have confidence in the program management and its delivery. In risk, we have step-changed our embedding of sustainability into our risk management program with our enterprise risk model now including both potential climate impact to our UK property and our global supply chain. With embedding, we're working hard to build this into business DNA for the long term, upskilling from multiple levels of the business, from our executive team through to the shop floor, helping our top leaders and our frontline colleagues understand what it means for our business, for their roles, and how they can support our ambition and our target delivery.
Now onto our targets, which have been carefully selected as essential to ongoing business resilience and success. In sourcing, we've got a range of targets to support our ambition, and we're making steady progress to both our 2025 and 2030 goals while maintaining our ongoing KPIs such as responsibly sourced palm oil. Our work in this area will transform the supply chain for the better, build resilience, and help deepen our understanding, our existing customer relationships, many of whom share our ambition and also our targets. In making, we have three ambitious 2030 targets aligned to either a global or industry standard such as the Science Based Targets initiative. Our operations team are building good momentum behind these three areas, and we're now starting to see decarbonization, water, and food waste reduction pathways come to life as we join up sustainability, operational excellence, and our technology agendas.
An example of this is the tray wash that Lee mentioned earlier, in which operational excellence and sustainability have co-joined. Our KPIs in these areas have also been incorporated into our long-term incentive plans, which is bringing real focus to their tracking and their delivery, helping us to supercharge progress against these core manufacturing KPIs. In feeding, we've been at the forefront of the healthy and sustainable diets agenda, setting two health-related targets in 2023, which Rachel will elaborate on in the video. We will continue to invest in this topic as it develops so we're able to respond to new customer and consumer preferences as well as any new regulations. In packaging, we have three 2025 targets, which are aligned to the UK Plastics Pact ambition, and we're making good headway to deliver these in close partnership with both our customers and our suppliers.
The latest changes to Extended Producer Responsibility will have a big influence on how this agenda evolves, and we're staying close to our customers about their priorities. I do appreciate this as a high-level overview of our targets, so more information on our metrics and targets can be found in our Sustainability Report. To further bring our approach to life, you will now hear from three of our sustainability leaders talking about their progress and focuses for the coming year.
My name is Andy, and I'm the Group Procurement Director at Greencore. I've been with Greencore for 16 years, and as part of my role, I'm very closely linked into the sourcing with integrity pillar. We have a complex and global supply chain at Greencore. We source about half of our ingredients from outside the UK, and 92% of our emissions as a business are Scope 3, coming from the supply chain. So this is an important focus of our sustainability strategy. We're doing lots of work with our suppliers to understand and support their decarbonization efforts, and this will be a big focus for us in FY25 as we engage more closely with our top 10 suppliers to understand the steps that they're taking to reduce emissions in the products that we buy.
As a private label business, it's really important that we're joined up with our customers on scope three goals. For example, we buy a lot of animal protein, and we expect that we'll continue to do so for as long as this is what our customers and our consumers want in their products. However, we're committed to working closely with our suppliers to ensure that we're procuring ingredients which are naturally emissions-intensive, like beef, in a more sustainable way. Another big area of focus for my team in the sustainability space is supply chain security. We're putting a lot of work into securing the longevity of our inbound supply chains, ensuring that we have mitigation plans in place for climate events. To give an example, the impact of adverse weather can be particularly challenging for our produce procurements.
Last winter in the UK was very wet, which resulted in difficult growing conditions last summer, followed by extraordinary flooding in Spain centered around Valencia, where much of our winter produce is grown. In response, we are looking at two different work streams to secure our supply of produce. Firstly, what more crops can we grow hydroponically in the UK, meaning that the crops are grown in water rather than soil, supported by heated greenhouses and LED lighting? And secondly, how much more we grow in controlled environments, essentially greenhouses versus open fields? These kind of measures will give us additional protection in the event of flooding or natural disasters and also spread out our geographical exposure, meaning that we're not overly at risk from a single region or country experiencing a weather issue.
My name is Steve Switzer, and I'm a Group Manufacturing and Engineering Director, and I've been with Greencore for 10 years. I'm closely linked into the Making with Care pillar as we focus on reducing the environmental impact of our manufacturing. Our key KPIs here are Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions, water usage, and food waste. We've begun to make progress against each of these areas in FY24 and have set the foundation to really step-change our performance in order to achieve our 2040 net-zero ambition, as well as developing a multi-year roadmap to use less water and recycle more of what we do use. One big unlock for us this year was the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme, where we identified over 200 energy reduction ideas in our 16 sites through audits and team engagement.
A great example here would be the refrigeration upgrade in our Boston site, where we replaced an aged refrigeration plant, removed F-gases, and replaced with a state-of-the-art ammonia system, enabling significant carbon, energy, and water reductions. Whilst progressing our sustainability KPIs does mean spending capital, there is also a material benefit for the P&L. An example here would be food waste, an area where we've done a huge amount of work in FY24 and are currently tracking ahead of our scheduled target for 2030.
My name is Rachel, and I'm the Head of Innovation at Greencore. I joined the business around six months ago. My background is a wide range of development roles for various sectors in own-label manufacturing. I'm really focused on the Feeding with Pride pillar, specifically how we can use innovation to create products that are healthier for consumers and better for the planet. This is really important in terms of both quality and health. On the quality side, we see growth in premium tiers across our products, particularly prevalent in sandwiches and ready meals, and from a health perspective, we are seeing a shift from traditional calorie control and fat reduction to more positive nutrition and functional health.
71% of our products are already classified as healthier based on their nutrient profile and modeling score, which is calculated from a combination of macro and micronutrient data, fiber, and fruit and vegetable content. 55% of our products have no red traffic lights on pack. If we take the lunchtime occasion alongside sandwiches, we also produce soup, salads, sushi, and poke bowls, which all play a role in a move towards more healthy and sustainable diets. Therefore, it's a priority for us to keep working with our customers to both innovate and create great new products that are in line with consumer trends whilst continuously improving the health of our existing product portfolio without compromising on taste. The other piece, which is a really big focus in this pillar, is on sustainable packaging.
Almost all of our packaging is now reusable, recyclable, or compostable, and almost half of our plastic packaging comes from recycled materials. This is something which is really important to consumers when they think about sustainable eating and will continue to make strides in this area while also recognizing the increasing desire for more sustainably sourced ingredients.
Hope you found that insightful. Some great examples there of how our leaders are both taking ownership of delivery and delivering results into the business. To summarize, I'll wrap with three points. We must run and grow the business model sustainably. It influences what we do today and is shaping our decisions for tomorrow to unlock opportunity, mitigate risk, and build overall business resilience. Strong foundations are critical to program success. Embedding takes time, effort, and is continuous, but our colleagues are curious and motivated to work differently by evolving both their behaviors and their processes. Momentum, incredibly important to deliver our ambition. We have worked hard to build this. We're focused on showing our people that this agenda can work in harmony with business performance and ultimately enable it. Thank you. I'm now going to hand over to Nigel to take you through our growth plans.
Thank you, Fran, and hello again, everyone. So we've spent the morning trying to bring to life the potential that we see in the business that we have today. Andy described the really strong foundations that we've got for growth within our core. Lee shared the fact that we're really only scratching the surface of our operational excellence potential.
And then the breakout sessions and what Fran has just taken you through has hopefully put some flesh on the bones of some of the specific opportunities that we see in front of us. I won't steal Catherine's thunder for how that's all going to tie together financially, but suffice to say that we're confident that there really is very material value creation potential within this core business that we have in the years ahead. And so what I was going to do now was to talk a little bit about the opportunities that we see beyond the business that we have today.
Now, before I get into the specifics of where we grow next, I did want to touch firstly on how we think we can add value as we grow and indeed why we see ourselves as natural owners of a broader set of businesses than the business we have today. I'll call it six core strengths on this page, and we're going to keep returning to these over the next few slides. The first of these things is the fact that we serve every major UK retailer, and they're constantly asking us to do more with them. Secondly, and as you've heard throughout the day, we have enormous buying scale. We spend GBP 1 billion on raw materials and packaging, and as we grow, we get even more favorable terms on that spend.
Thirdly, and hopefully this has come to life as well, what we do is really hard to replicate. It's within the gift of anyone in this room to be able to make a sandwich, but actually, there's not a lot of people who can safely make up to two million sandwiches a day while redeveloping hundreds of recipes each and every year. And that technical and product development expertise is transferable right across the convenience food space. Related to that, we are experts at manufacturing convenience food efficiently, and the operational excellence methodology that Lee took you through is applicable not just to our current categories and our current sites, but again, right across the convenience food market. Fifthly, and as we touched on, we have space to grow. We've spoken about how we treat our capacity as a precious resource, and we're not afraid to resign on profitable business.
And the net impact of those portfolio interventions and indeed our overall efficiency agenda means that we have that 15% of available capacity that we referred to a little earlier. And then relatedly, we have that unique point-to-point distribution capability that also has room for growth. So these six levers then are really fundamental to our right to win when we think about our investment agenda, both organic and inorganic. And if there's one clear message to take away from this section, it's that we will only put shareholder capital to use where we can see that we have that clear right to win and that enablement for us to drive an attractive return on the capital that we would be putting to use.
So if I translate that into some specifics over the next couple of slides, the obvious question then is where we grow next or what we've historically referred to as Horizon 3. And I think it's important to anchor the answer to that question in the focus that we have today across channels, categories, and countries. From a channel perspective, as we now are all aware, our heartland is in retail private label. Our category footprint is largely focused on chilled food to go, and our country footprint means we're de facto a UK business. And so as we think about where we go next, really we're twin-tracking two routes. The first is the opportunities for consolidation within the markets that we operate today, and then secondly, opportunities to expand across each of the three C's that I referred to: new channels, new categories, and over time into new countries.
We see both organic growth and M&A playing a role in each of these areas in different ways. And if I start with consolidation, Andy has talked about the organic potential to fill in our white space gaps, in other words, selling more of our current products to current customers. And then if we think about the M&A lens through that, there is a reasonable, albeit reasonably finite universe of options there, and we'll explore those opportunistically as the potential to unlock synergy emerges. If I think about the second of those areas, though, and where I'll spend most of the time, is the three other axes that you see on this page: new channels, categories, and countries. And if I take each of those in turn, starting with new channels, we see a lot of opportunity here, both organically and supported by M&A.
And if I start at the top of this page with the coffee specialists, Andy referred a little bit to this earlier on with the strong relationships that we've built with the likes of Costa and Caffè Nero over the last couple of years, but we really do believe there's more that we can do in this channel. And the beauty of it is that we can largely do it through our current footprint. Andy also touched on opportunities within the travel sector, and I'd flag in particular the retailization of petrol forecourts. There's a number of our customers like Asda and M&S who are growing their own footprints here, and that gives us a tailwind to grow with them as they expand in this space.
If we then move a little further afield, we're weighing options in the direct-to-consumer channel, and we're not looking to compete directly here with the likes of HelloFresh or Deliveroo. But as these kind of on-demand services grow, we really do see potential for us to supply discrete, pre-made product solutions into players like those and supporting them as they scale. And then finally, in the area of food service, I'll bring this to life. We're not too far away from lunchtime here in this room and indeed up and down the UK And what's actually happening right now as people approach their lunchtime is that they're going to go out and they're going to buy pre-packed sandwiches and salads and sushi and soup, but Greencore aren't making those products.
And not only are we not making those products today, we're not even in the tender to win the right to make those products. And that's because consumers aren't buying them in the retail environment. They're buying them in offices, in canteens, in schools, in universities, or on planes and trains. And the reason why we're not present is that the commercial model and the relationship set that's required to win in those channels is very different to how we've operated historically. Instead of serving major retail multiples, it's serving the likes of Compass or Sodexo. And so while we've historically focused on retail without the muscle to service the food service channel, we think that if we can partner with one or more players in this space that brings the right commercial capability, that could be a powerful combination.
And that's where the six levers that I mentioned a little earlier on come into play. If I look across each one of the channels that I've just touched on, straight away, we can bring cost advantage from that procurement scale and model, buying exactly the same inputs to make the same products, but at greater scale and more efficiently. Our product and technical expertise is directly transferable by selling the same product into a different customer set. I mentioned earlier the available manufacturing capacity that we've created for growth, and the channels on this page in different ways provide opportunities for us to deploy that capacity on the ground. And also for a number of these channels, that point-to-point distribution capability is particularly relevant where customers don't have their own chilled supply chain. So that's a flavor of some of our thinking as it relates to new channels.
If I switch gear now and talk about opportunity within category expansion, you can see here on the slide that the retail convenience food market is worth well over GBP 50 billion, and the categories that we play in are worth just about 20% of that, or GBP 11 billion. Greencore, within those categories, only captures 20% of that 20%, or GBP 2 billion, so there's quite a lot of white space, and if we drill into the white space of that GBP 54 billion, it's made up of well over 100 categories, and Greencore doesn't play in 94 of those categories. You can then kind of filter that down for value and growth, and as you can see on the slide, there's over 30 categories which are of decent scale and which were growing faster than the overall grocery market over the last couple of years.
Now, I'm sorry to disappoint if you were expecting us to take a very explicit position on category X or category Y or Z, and we're not going to do that in this public forum. But what we are absolutely crystal clear on, and what I will share today, is how we think about organic growth and M&A in this space. And on the one hand, the closer in the adjacency, the more likely we are to expand organically. And we touched on some of this a little bit earlier in terms of how customers are already asking us to stretch the category footprint that we already have, whether it's moving from pure sushi into broader Asian snacking and poke bowls.
We touched on the food innovation breakout earlier on, some of these hybrid products that blend elements of salads and ready meals together, or the moves that we've been making in breakfast as we've started to scale up production in Bircher pots where we haven't historically had a scale of production, and all of these areas provide new growth, but using current capabilities and current factories and current available capacity. On the flip side of that, Clive asked a question earlier about greenfielding and the potential to build new factories. We'll be much less likely, to be honest, to scale up in a totally new category by building a greenfield factory, in particular if the supply and demand dynamics in that category are already in balance. That doesn't help us, and it doesn't help the overall value pool available.
What we do have an eye on is opportunities in decently sized growing categories where the current supply base offers opportunity for us to consolidate. That enables us to drive efficiency, to build scale advantage, and in doing so, drive synergy, just as we've done in sandwiches over the last number of years. If I link that back to the six levers I described and hopefully bring to life why we see ourselves as natural owners of a broader set of businesses, it really comes back to the levers I mentioned. It's about selling more to our current customers and so leveraging the retail relationships that we already have. It's about applying the procurement model and scale that we already have to drive even better input costs. It means applying the operational model that Lee touched on to any manufacturing operation that we may move into.
The final area that I'll touch on for potential growth is new countries. Now, as we kind of flagged a little bit earlier, going international is more of a medium-term ambition for us because our near-term focus is really on pursuing the breadth of opportunities in the UK that we've spent the morning talking about. However, we are clear that over the life of this plan, moving internationally does have the potential to provide an important third leg of the growth stool for us. And we think that our history in the UK provides some insight as to how that can look. If we take the 16-site footprint that we have here in the UK today, this was actually put together through nine discrete acquisitions over a 20-year period. And that platform that we created fueled the growth, particularly in food-to-go that we saw in recent years.
We scaled up and into those categories at a time that we were benefiting from a convenience store tailwind that Andy referenced earlier. We grew our market share organically by outcompeting and winning business organically, and then we further consolidated the position by infill M&A. So if we translate that blueprint from the UK and we look west onto the island of Ireland or south into continental Europe, we see there convenience food markets that are at an earlier stage of development, but in many cases outgrowing the UK. We see presence of product categories that we know and understand well, like food to go or ready meals or sauces, but we see a lack of market maturity and in particular supply base in those geographies, all of which points to opportunity for Greencore.
Now, to be crystal clear, any opportunity in geographic expansion, just as with category or channel expansion, will draw on what we already do well in the UK, and that's where, again, the value levers on the right-hand side come into play. Commercially, it's about pursuing pockets of opportunity that we see with existing customers who have a presence beyond the UK. That's probably most obvious in the island of Ireland, where you have the likes of Tesco, M&S, Aldi, Lidl, a number of the coffee and high street players, but also, to some extent, it's true in continental Europe, and this came up a little earlier in Q&A, where already one of our discounter customers is proactively kind of raising opportunities as to how we can explore together how we broaden our support to them with a potential physical presence in Europe.
International expansion also provides opportunity for us to leverage our product and technical expertise, but also our procurement scale. And indeed, 30% of that GBP 1 billion that we've referenced through the day is already spent with EU-based suppliers. And then finally, there's the direct transferability of our operational capabilities. We run some of the most efficient ready meal and salad plants in the world, and that operational know-how is relevant to countries where there is a clear appetite for that product set. So if that gives us a flavor of where we go next, I'm just going to conclude by touching on how we think about our approach to investment, which will be both disciplined and progressive.
Disciplined in the sense that any investment will be anchored in that right to win and the levers for value creation that I've touched on throughout, but also progressive in the sense that absent incredibly compelling individual value creation case, we'll progress through any one of these axes one at a time. In other words, as we think about channel expansion, we'll sell the same category in the same country as we play today. It's sandwiches into UK food service. It's salads into UK coffee specialists. Similarly, as we broaden our category footprint, it's in our current channel and country. It's leveraging those UK retail relationships to sell a broader product set. And then, as and when we eventually do move into new countries, we'll be biased to build a business in the channel and categories that we already know well.
We're clear that this progressive approach, in other words, growing and diversifying the group, but anchoring that growth in what we already do well today, that will help us de-risk the execution of any of that diversification. That brings us to the three lenses that you see on the right-hand side of how we assess M&A opportunities. We think about strategic fit, that bias to invest in structural growth, and for us to be able to demonstrably add value. We think about sustainability, not so much as setting a hard veto on where we can or can't invest, but we will be mindful of the impact of any acquisition on our sustainability agenda and indeed our ability to improve the sustainability trajectory of anything we buy. Then finally, and most importantly, the financial profile.
Any investment decision that we make will fundamentally be guided by our ability to drive a strong return from that investment, and that's not just theoretical, by the way. I can already cite specific examples where, over the last couple of months, we've engaged with intent and with seriousness in individual processes, but stepped away because the financial case simply wasn't strong enough, so to summarize, we've got a strong platform for growth. We see real potential to expand both organically and inorganically across new categories, channels, and countries. And we'll invest progressively and with discipline, with clear guide rails for how we assess our opportunities. I'm now going to hand over to Catherine, who'll take us through the medium-term financial model. Thank you.
Thank you, Nigel. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Catherine Gubbins, and I am Greencore's CFO, having joined the organization exactly one year ago tomorrow.
Throughout the course of the day, you'll have heard a lot from the team about how we win our lasting partnerships, great food, delivery excellence, sustainable choices, and keeping our people at the core. What I hope to do over the next 15 minutes or so is give you some clarity on how we assess the financial performance of the business and also lay out a set of medium-term targets for the group. When we think about the potential for the group with respect to growth and financial performance over the medium term, we know that it will comprise the core operation that we are still very focused on today. But I think we've also made it clear to Nigel's session that we plan to grow and expand this business in a considered way, and that will obviously supplement our organic medium-term targets to create incremental returns for shareholders.
You will have heard today that we believe there is significant value creation potential left in the core business, and my focus is going to be on taking you through the financial targets for that core business. There are five key financial metrics that we use to drive our business, and I will take you through each of them in this session in a little bit more detail. Return on invested capital, which is the principal metric that we use to drive decision-making on a day-to-day basis. Revenue growth and our adjusted operating profit margin, clearly key indicators of the underlying financial performance of the business, and I'm going to bring together what Andy, Lee, and our team have shown you today to show you how we feel we will drive both of those metrics in the medium term.
I will then set out how we are thinking about cash conversion, leverage, and our plan for the allocation of capital. In order to better understand how we're thinking about our future financial performance, I think it is useful to set some context around the recent progress we have made across some of those key metrics, but also to be mindful of the drivers of the group's financial performance pre-pandemic. Like many organizations, the business was significantly impacted by COVID and the period of high inflation which followed. This significantly eroded profit and returns for this business, and to a large extent, the group that we have today has been changed as a result of that experience.
Bearing all that in mind, over the past three years, we have made strong progress on ROIC, operating margin, and our overall operating profit, and we have given you a lot of insight today into how we have delivered that. What I want to do now in this session is take you through what we feel this business can sustainably deliver in the medium term. As mentioned earlier, our return on invested capital is our North Star and is the KPI that we are most focused on. We have a well-invested manufacturing network that requires ongoing investment to guarantee service levels, and we feel that optimizing the timing, nature, and scale of the investment in that network and simultaneously extracting value through our excellence programs is a key driver of continued profitability and returns into the future.
Our plan is to achieve a ROIC of at least 15% in the medium term. This is above our weighted average cost of capital and above our 2019 level of 14.4%. When we think about revenue growth, our goal is to drive mid-single-digit revenue growth in the range of 3%-5% through a combination of volume, price, and mix. Our operating margin is another critical KPI, and we are confident that in the medium term, we can achieve and sustain an operating margin of 7% and above. Cash is a real focus for us as a business, and we are targeting a cash conversion rate of at least 55% for the medium term. Our long-term target leverage range will remain at 1 to 1.5 times.
We may choose, as has been referenced earlier, to go above this target when an opportunity to really create value arises, but we would only do so in circumstances where we have line of sight for leverage to drop to the target range in a timely manner. We feel that these are stretching targets for the core business for the medium term that will ultimately be supplemented incrementally by accretive M&A. So how do we plan to drive that revenue growth? I'd like to get into a little bit more detail on how we plan to drive the 3%-5% revenue growth over the medium term. When we think about volume, we plan to leverage the forecast market growth and other structural tailwinds that Andy took us through earlier, including the continued UK convenience store openings.
Andy also noted earlier that we don't currently serve every customer across every category, and we have a strong pipeline of potential business to pursue, building on our existing customer relationships. Thanks to the actions we have taken over the past two years, we also have over 15% of extra capacity to go and sell. We've heard a lot from the team today about innovation and the product capability and expertise we have. We work with our customers to create innovation that will critically drive incremental sales. And Amanda's update about the Kitchen Deli proposition for Sainsbury's in the breakout earlier is a perfect example of innovation driving additional volumes. On price and mix, we see several opportunities.
Premiumization has really become a market driver and differentiator that retailers are keen to leverage, and there are opportunities for us to use our deep understanding of the consumer to work with our customers to leverage premiumization across our different categories. Finally, we will work with our customers to drive inflation recovery. Even in a period of moderated inflation levels, we are assuming a pricing impact here. So just moving on to margin, there is a lot of focus on our operating margin, particularly in the context of understanding our historical performance. The group's operating margin peaked at 7.3% in 2019, and we recently closed 2024 with a margin of 5.4%. It is useful to have an understanding of some of the factors that have impacted our margin evolution over the past few years.
Starting with inflation, since 2021, the business has faced unprecedented inflation across raw materials and packaging and direct labor costs. We have seen National Living Wage increases driving an increase of over 35% in our direct labor cost pool since 2019, and our raw material cost base increased by more than GBP 200 million. We have worked hard to recover that inflation over the past couple of years through price, joint models with customers, and cost management. However, the scale of the inflation took some time to adjust to and engage with our customers on, and we have not recovered the margin on top of that inflation.
You will have seen today a lot of detail on how we deploy our operational and commercial excellence programs, and you can see how the team have been driving significant value into the business, helping us to recover 140 basis points of margin between 2023 and 2024 alone. What we haven't, however, been able to fully offset is the large amount of overhead inflation across our indirect payroll cost base and our non-payroll cost base. Actions were taken in 2022 and 2023 to partly address this through some headcount reduction measures, specifically in the management and support area. However, this hasn't been enough to offset the full magnitude of that inflation. In addition to significant increases across direct labor, we have also seen our indirect labor pool increase by over 30% since 2019 due to wage and certain headcount increases.
It is important to put into context that the business was operating in a different environment in 2019, and undoubtedly, the inflation being experienced across all categories in the past number of years requires a different level of focus on managing that cost base. One of my priorities is to ensure the cost base is right-sized for the future, and to that end, the executive team and I have focused on instilling a culture of cost management into the organization. We have improved how we monitor and report on costs, and that visibility and focus alone is already starting to deliver results. With that context in mind, we believe that there is an opportunity to further increase our adjusted operating margin sustainably to 7% and above, and this slide sets out the key components of that trajectory.
We are expecting low to mid-single-digit inflation in most of our cost categories over the coming years. The exception is labor costs, where the National Living Wage and National Insurance changes are impacting us significantly this year and are annualizing into next year, unfortunately. We are, however, focused on offsetting that inflation through our commercial engagement model, driving operational efficiency, having a laser-like focus on cost management, and driving underlying efficiency across all of our ways of working. Andy and Lee and the team have given us a lot of insight into our commercial and operational excellence pillars, and we are confident that we will drive margin accretion by continuously looking for ways to innovate to drive price and mix.
We will continue to buy well through our procurement excellence program, and we will improve the profitability of the production of existing and new volumes we deliver as we refine our operating model. Steve has shown us how we will stand up the next phase of our automation program, and we will challenge ourselves to optimize our network to drive synergies and standardize our processes, particularly labor and other work practices. I have spoken about our focus on embedding further cost-effectiveness measures, and a key enabler of our ability to do this is the investment that we are making in our Making Business Easier program. We know that this will start driving significant value through simplification and reduction of manual work throughout the entire business.
Cash conversion is a big focus for us, and I really feel we can move our cash conversion rate from its historic levels of sub 50% to 55% and over, and this is something I have been very focused on since joining. We see a few key contributors to getting there. One of the main areas I think that we can drive improvements is with our working capital efficiency and discipline. We see opportunities to drive working capital through optimizing our stock levels and other some proactive and targeted improvements to our AP and AR cycles, and we have steps in place to start delivering on that. I have previously highlighted that we have reached agreement with UK trustees in respect of a reduction of circa GBP 10 million in our annual UK pension funding, which is expected to kick in before September 2025.
This will be a key contributor to improving our cash position. We are expecting more normalized interest rates, which will be partially offset by exceptional cash flows relating to the MBE program. Dalton and Nigel have both referenced our Horizon 3 aspirations, and while I won't lay out detailed targets for potential M&A today, given that activity is dependent on the availability of targets and the attractiveness of those targets, I suppose I did want to touch on how we think about M&A from a financial perspective. As Nigel referenced, we are evaluating M&A through three key lenses: the strategic fit for the group, obviously ensuring it adheres to our sustainability targets, and financial discipline. Dalton and I have previously highlighted that improving return on invested capital is our key KPI.
When I consider the allocation of capital to any potential M&A, the key financial metric that we will be looking to deliver on is to ensure that acquisitions after synergies are accretive to the group's returns profile in the near term. The final area I'm going to take you through today is our capital allocation framework. So we are very focused on using our available cash in a way that is most accretive or value-creating for our shareholders, and we have the balance sheet optionality to consider how best to allocate that capital and really optimize that value. Let me take you through how we are thinking about prioritizing that capital. Investment in our organic growth is a priority.
Continuing to invest in strategic and maintenance CapEx to drive growth and profitability in our core business is key, and we want to spend circa GBP 50 million on capital investment per year for the coming years. We are keen to facilitate the delivery of automation and other critical projects that we have referenced today that we feel will unlock real value for the group, and we are focused on fast-tracking those. As most of you are aware, we recently reinstated a dividend of GBP 0.02 per share, which is the group's first dividend since 2019. Subject to the ongoing strong financial performance of the group, we will continue to provide for the payment of a progressive dividend annually. We see opportunity for value creation through inorganic growth, and we will seek to deploy capital on value-accretive M&A that is aligned to our strategic ambitions.
Where we find ourselves having excess cash, we would clearly look to return cash to shareholders periodically, provided that we continue to believe that buybacks are creating value for our shareholders. I would propose to give clarity to shareholders on our plans in this space at half-year and full-year results announcements. So to summarize our key messages today, we are prioritizing returns as our key financial metric and capital allocation decision-making tools. We have clear medium-term financial targets that we are committed to delivering on, and a very high-level summary again that is a mid-teens ROIC of 15% and over, mid-single-digit revenue growth of 3%-5%, delivering an adjusted operating profit margin sustainably of 7% and above, cash conversion reaching over 55%, and maintaining our leverage at 1 to 1.5 times.
We are satisfied that achieving these targets allied to a clear capital allocation framework will ensure that we continue to drive real value accretion for shareholders. Thank you very much. I'm going to hand back to Dalton.
Thanks, Catherine. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask some of my team colleagues to join me up here, and we'll just go into a Q&A session and post that, we'll go upstairs, meet the chefs, and get stuck into lunch. As I said earlier, the whole senior team is around, so if you want to speak to anybody specific, either do ask a question now or over lunch. There'll be lots of opportunities. Just Patrick, one sec. One member of the team that I haven't introduced because he hasn't spoken today is Damien, and I thought maybe I'd throw it to you to share your background.
Thanks, Dalton. That's what everyone wants. We were just missing a lawyer to fill everyone's day off. But no, thanks. Great to meet you all today. My name's Damien Moynagh. I'm the Group General Counsel and Company Secretary. Like Dalton and others, I've been here about; this is my third year. And the 10 years before this, I was a senior executive at a FTSE-listed global pharma services company and prior to that, a global PE-backed financial technology company. And for the 10 years before that, I was a corporate and M&A lawyer here in the City of London, New York, and Tokyo as well. So great to be here. Great to chat to a number of you earlier on today, and look forward to speaking to you again at the lunch.
Great. Thanks, Damien. So look, we'll open it up to questions, maybe limited to two questions per person. Just throw your hand up, and you've got a question at the back, and then we'll come up here. Gary.
Hi there. I'm Tanya from RBC. Just a question on your revenue growth target of 3%-5%. Can you put that in context of the underlying markets that you mentioned earlier this morning? They seem to be growing a bit faster than your target, which suggests this is more of an operational gearing story. And then just on pricing discussions, you've mentioned a few times that you're in discussions with customers. How are those going, and is there still room for price increases given the sort of unprecedented inflation from the last few years?
Yeah, great. Well, look, two great questions. And look, I'll bring you in, Andy. But I would say on the 3%-5%, when we look at the overall convenience food category, which is more representative of all our product categories, that's growing at 4%. So I think the 3%-5% sits nicely with that. But Andy, you live and breathe this and maybe pick up the customer relationship given NI pricing, etc.
Yeah. So just to build on the revenue growth, as Dalton said, the core convenience market 4%. We believe 3%-5% is an appropriate target. As I say, we believe there are opportunities to grow our existing business, and we're making good progress on that. And Aldi ready meals was a great example. And as I say, we've got two or three other conversations live as well. So that gives the context for the revenue target. In terms of pricing, look, a couple of points on that.
As I say, we've got good protection and models in place on 75% of our customers. There is clearly obvious inflation coming as well in April, as you mentioned, NI. Look, I won't get into specific customer conversations, but what I would say is that we've got a very good track record of being able to manage these conversations. And the conversations we're having are very pragmatic and very mature. Customers understand what's happening. And we're constantly working on not just price and mix as well. So how we put the pricing through, but how we think about offsetting it with our customers as well. So conversations are progressing well and confident.
Patrick.
Hey, thank you. Morning or afternoon even. Patrick Higgins from Goodbody again. I guess just to add to that question, just around the labor inflation challenge, as you say, it's obviously a challenge for you guys, but also your retail customers. How do you balance your kind of ambitious margin targets against the challenges that your retailers are facing from a labor perspective and when you're negotiating price? And I guess the second incremental question around labor, obviously, it's a challenge that you guys have to manage, but how much of it is actually an unlock for you guys to win new business with your customers, whether it's on the retail or food service side?
Sorry, can you just say that second part again?
How much of it is an unlock for you guys to win new business?
Okay. Well, look, Andy, I might send both your way. But I do want to make one point. We have this conversation with our customers. The reason why we're focusing on ROIC has primacy because ROIC is around having well-invested plants. When the weather changes, and I'm talking about when the weather changes from today, tomorrow, Lee's expected to turn that volume right up and still hit 99% service levels. The challenge with our customers needs to be much more about having well-invested sites. Moving out of this discussion around, is your margin too high or too low? No, we have to invest, and that's why we're giving that primacy. Do you want to give your thoughts on this?
Yeah. I mean, some context on pricing. Look, obviously, that's one lever. It's a key lever. Our customers understand that. To your point, they have cost pressures as well.
But I think a couple of points would be we've seen significant inflation in the last couple of years, and we've seen our added value convenience categories hold up really well to that inflation. Like I say, these are added value categories. We believe there's headroom for price and margin, and that's been demonstrated. And that helps facilitate some of those pricing discussions. And also, it's the other levers that we pull with our customers. So that commercial excellence program, yes, price is a key lever. We think about mix. We think about our input costs. Think about the breakout sessions. We talk about a lot of renovating existing products. Some of that is cost outwork as well. So we bring to bear all of those levers, and that is how we've been successfully growing our gross margin, even in a period of incredible inflation.
And then the second part of that question in terms of the football field, you're talking about opportunities.
Yeah. Again, given the inflation pressures that food service operators in particular are facing now with labor. Does that open up? And it's kind of to Nigel's point, in terms of your ability to manage that labor pressure is greater given your scale versus some of the food service operators. So where is the economies of scale to kind of pivot point where it becomes more beneficial to work alongside you guys on it?
It is an opportunity, and I think there's two parts to that. I think Nigel was referencing, actually, us moving into new customers. And look, to your point, we can replicate a lot of what they do. But equally, it's happening already within our existing customers. The announcements are in the public domain. You'll have seen some of our customers over the last few months talk about actually rolling back from cafes and in-store prepared areas. And as you can imagine, that's opening up a number of business development conversations for us about, to your point, we've got the scale. We've got the ability to produce fresh products that replicate products that have been made in store. So there's a great opportunity for us there to bring the best of us to complement our retailers.
Thanks, Patrick.
Hello, Charlie from HSBC. Could you sort of put in context what you're expecting food inflation to be versus your 3%-5%? Because there's numbers out there in the market, including ours, of sort of 1%-4%, which doesn't put your 3%-5% miles out of touch. To ask a straight-up question, what do you think your addressable market in Ireland would be for when you move in?
Well, Nigel, I'll let you come back on the addressable market, and you could come in on the food inflation. But I think in the round, when you're talking about materials, packaging, and labor, we met with a large retailer the other day who said a number north of 4%. So I think there's real concerns out there. You're obviously seeing a lot of movement in protein prices at the moment. You've got the NI, the NLW coming through. So I think it's going to be 3%+ , but you live and breathe us.
Yeah. But I probably wouldn't add anything to that. Certainly, at the moment, there's quite a lot of volatility in markets. Some are down, some are up. We're probably thinking 1%-2% points, but as you say, I think the environment is starting to strengthen a little bit when you include labor as well.
At the lower end, your revenue range is 3%. Potentially, comes in at 3%-4% in an unexpected volume break.
I don't think it plays through. It depends on the categories and the mix of products as well. That's why we've got that range.
Charlie, are you okay with that?
Yeah.
Okay. Nigel?
Yeah. In terms of addressable market, in rough terms, you're talking about a tenth of the size of the UK markets, depending on what you are addressing, so rather than kind of getting into individual categories, but whether it's sandwiches, salads, sushi, or otherwise, across the board, it's kind of as much population as anything else. You're talking about a tenth of the size. The implication of that is it's never going to be a leg of the same scale as our UK business, but it is an important opportunity to use as a test ground that internationalization potential that we outlined earlier on.
Clive?
Yeah. Thank you again. It's not a cheeky question, but what's your definition of medium term? Because over the years, we found that to be a very broad number, and when you get to the other end of a medium term and look back, of those C's, which will be the most important growth driver? Then, secondly, do you have an aspire dividend cover level? Thank you.
I'm going to throw that to you, Catherine, in terms of your definition or our definition of medium term.
We understand the broadly accepted definition of medium term to be three to five years. We are aligned with that, I think, is how I would put it.
Do you want to pick up the cover?
Y eah. Look, we don't have an aspired dividend cover. We started low. Our dividend cover is fairly high, and I think we've indicated that we plan to grow the dividend progressively over the next number of years. So I think it will hopefully grow in line with earnings growth over that period.
Look, I'll share some thoughts on whether it's category, channel, or country at the end of that sort of medium-term horizon. I think it could go either way between category and channel. I think there's some really large categories up there. Nigel showed north of 30 that are over GBP 200 million in size and growing over 7%. Then there's some really interesting channel work. So I think it could go either way for us. I think what we were trying to lay out today, Clive, is the opportunity. I mean, c-store, as we said, is probably a longer term. Do you want to hear about that? Sorry. Which way are you going? We're going this way first.
Great. Thank you. Matthew Abraham from Berenberg. Our first question does relate to the channels that you referenced. Just wondering if you can provide some color to the underlying economics and the margins of those channels. Is the story here that as you have a greater presence in those channels, there's a different margin to the group? And then second question relates to the categories this morning. You outlined categories that are generating ROIC ahead of the weighted cost of capital and those that aren't. In the way that we think about M&A, is it likely to be the case that the first moves are within the categories that are generating that ROIC ahead of WACC, or would you proceed with M&A activity in categories where there's yet to be ROIC ahead of the weighted cost of capital?
Right. Two super questions there. Actually, interesting enough, when we look at some of these channels, we're seeing businesses in there that have got significantly higher EBITDA margins than we've got today. Now, there's some specific reasons in cases, but actually, some of these channels can be very accretive. But.
Yeah. I mean, to add some color on that, it's quite varied across not just the individual channels that I talked about, but both pockets of activity within that and indeed individual players. But amplifying some of what Dalton said, it is possible because we can see it. We touched on food service a little bit earlier. There are players producing similar products to what we produce at higher margins than we're producing today, albeit at a smaller scale. And so there's something in that contrast that against direct-to- consumer where the kind of margin spread is very, very broad. And that's why I indicated we'll be thoughtful there in terms of what we might directly do versus who we might want to take on as a potential customer to ride that wave but without needing to put capital to use in the same way.
And then I think there was a piece around M&A within categories in the consolidation space and any bias. We don't start from any kind of principled or philosophical point that says M&A opportunities must come from X, Y, or Z category. We're driven by, Catherine used the word, north star of returns. So where there's infill M&A that's possible in one of those larger or higher-performing categories where we can drive decent returns, we'll do that. In some of the lower-returning categories where indeed perhaps industry structure is at the root cause of lower returns, we'd also be open to M&A there and indeed other ways of realizing value. So returns rather than category bent is the guiding principle.
Damian?
Sorry. Damian McNeela at Deutsche Numis. Can I just follow up just on what you just said there, Nigel? Because in the context of delivering that 15% ROIC, and you sort of indicated that five of your categories currently aren't delivering WACC. Will you need all five of those categories to be delivering above WACC to hit the 15%, or will there be an instance where you could have some divisions still not contributing above WACC? Okay. So that's that. But would you consider exiting those then over the medium term if you're not going to get WACC? I guess is the question.
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, they've all got different timelines and plans in place. Some are going to be in the near term. Some are further out. I think we've all agreed as a team, if they move off those tramlines and the trajectory they're on, there's a whole different conversation. And we've shown that with our soup business last year. It's not in our DNA to shut businesses. This team is prepared to shut businesses.
Okay. Thank you. And then the last one, just what does the M&A environment look like? Are you sort of vendor expectations too high? Lots of people willing to sell. Can you just give us an indication of what you're seeing in terms of targets, please?
Yeah. Look, Nigel lives and breathes. I think it was interesting from our side that we had just been out of the market, Damien, for so long. My first year, I don't think I got a single IM. And then we had to sort of literally call people and just say, "Hey, we're Greencore. We used to buy businesses. Now we're back in the market again." And obviously, the flows opened up. And look, it depends on the business in terms of the valuation, but.
Yeah. I think there's been some moderation of value expectations over the last couple of years with not just interest rates, but also kind of comps, including publicly listed comps. I think also the kind of inheritance tax changes that have flown through, or at least perspective changes there for businesses more at the family-owned end of the spectrum has also kind of led to some moderation. But equally, as we and others in our peer set have gained in value, any good negotiator on the other side of that table is also pointing to that performance as well.
Okay. Peter?
Hey. Peter Van Ruddenhouder . Just on the M&A multiples, how do they compare to your current multiple, and how does that factor into potential share buybacks?
Well, obviously, do you want to just take it?
Yeah. Look, I mean, I think thanks for the question, Peter. I think, look, as we set out in the capital allocation flow, we are absolutely open to looking for M&A opportunities that we feel are value accretive. I'll let Nigel talk about the multiples that we're actually seeing. From recollection, a lot of the ones that we're seeing are slightly higher than how we're currently valued ourselves. But I suppose from our perspective, we're open to potential M&A. That's where we're looking to allocate capital if it's generating returns. But shareholders, where we have excess cash, we will be doing buybacks. I think we're pretty clear on that, so.
Yeah. And look, on the multiple, we're just not prepared to overpay, Peter. And I can't tell you how many have I mean, we've got a great big funnel. We review it on a very regular basis. But I think there's so much opportunity in the core business today. You get asked if you could be playing schoolyard football and being distracted by M&A. The right opportunities will come our way. When they're right, it's because there is a strategic fit. It does fit with our environmental strategy. It is accretive to you as a shareholder. We ain't going to move otherwise.
Gary.
It's Gary Martin here from Davy. Maybe just one kind of multi-pronged one for me, just on that 15% additional capacity that's available. Would it be possible to maybe just get a bit more insight as to maybe the areas of the business where there is a degree of slack when it comes to line capacity? And maybe just as an additional kind of follow-on to that, is that slack more so centered around those areas of the business with sub-WACC, ROIC? And is it about kind of filling that capacity with a margin-accretive business? Is that the best way to think about it? Thanks.
That's right. Look, it's always going to be margin-accretive. We're just not going to go back to the old days. But Lee lives and breathes us.
Yeah. As I mentioned earlier, we're pretty forensic on how we look at capacity in the business. And Andy and I are always looking at how we can margin the business up. So we have a pipeline of opportunities against certain capital opportunities or certain capacity release opportunities. And we go and target that, always with the view that that will be margin-enhancing. And we run that cycle through our IBP process, our integrated business planning process, every month. Every month. As the rough-cut capacity plan changes, which it will do, it will ebb and flow for a number of reasons. We are continually adjusting our expectations of where we can hunt additional margin-accretive volume. So it's a very dynamic process, but it's always with the view that we're going to margin the business.
Well, I mean, for example, ready meals. We've still got capacity there. But as you saw, there's been just an incredible turnaround on our ready meals business. So yeah, we'll fill it, and we'll fill it accretively.
Okay. If there's no other questions, we will start to wrap up. So let me just share some thoughts with you as we sort of close and head towards being with the chefs. First, I just really want to thank you.
I think I speak for all my colleagues here and the other 20 or so people that you've met today. We're really grateful for you giving us this time. You've got busy agendas. We set out with the purpose of covering four areas with you today. So we wanted to highlight the strength and depth of our team. And you've definitely seen that today. We wanted to bring to life the opportunities for strengthening the core. And you'll have seen that today. We wanted to share our vision for growth and expansion beyond the core. And you'll definitely have seen that. And finally, we wanted to outline our medium-term financial targets. And Catherine has done that today. So that's what we set out to achieve. And I talked at the beginning this morning about what I accounted in 2022. I talked about where I see Greencore today.
Let me just sort of close out and tell you how I feel about Greencore today, which is a slightly different approach, and that's just to say I feel really, really privileged to be a part of this team, and I feel privileged because I get to work with really great people. You've met a lot of really good people today. This is a really good team. I really enjoy working with them, so I get to work with great people. I get to work in a business with a real sense of purpose and ambition. You've certainly heard that today, with a very detailed roadmap towards success, and we've absolutely shared that, our Greencore Way, our total blueprint to drive the business forward, with just multiple opportunities right across the business.
Look, I won't even go through them, but some of the examples we've seen today, maximizing returns in our categories, commercially leveraging that 15% capacity that's being unlocked, new product development, innovation, enhancing our OpEx through network standardization, next-gen automation. Look, that's just a short list. There's a much longer list. All of that before we consider the possibilities of expanding into new categories or channels or countries through organic or, in time, inorganic opportunities. Look, that all rolls up into quite a significant set of financial targets, ambitious and going way beyond anything that this business has gone to before. There's a whole ton of things to go at. We go at it with a level of confidence because we know that this team that you've met today, the 30-odd people, they've built momentum into this business. And momentum is so hard to get.
And when you get it and you've not had it before, you do not let it go. And that's why we run the business with such rigor and discipline, because we know you need to be on it 24/7. And it needs a sort of a relentless, ruthless approach to managing it, because otherwise, it'll slip from your fingers. So on behalf of this team, I really want to emphasize to you, we really feel like we're just getting started. The future holds incredible opportunities for this business, which we've shared with you today and which we will demonstrate to you over the coming period. So I'll wrap it at that. We'll go back upstairs again. We'll go into that great food room for lunch, opportunity to taste many of our products, to meet the chefs. And of course, we'll all be around for any further questions you might have.
I'll close it there. Thank you very much.