Morning, everybody, and welcome to this year's full year results announcement. That's for the year that ended on the thirtieth of March, this year. So same format as always. I'll just give us a bit of an overview of how we've been doing, then Duncan will take us through the numbers, and I'll come back and take us through progress against the five pillars of our five pillar growth strategy. So to kick off, look, I'm really pleased to say that we've had a super year, so turnover was up 15.1% at GBP 1.123 billion, and then, in our U.K. business, we continued to take market share, so 29 basis points of share gain during the year.
Trading profit, ahead of expectations, up 14%, so broadly in line with revenue growth and adjusted PBT at GBP 158 million, exactly in line with revenue growth. Adjusted EPS, that's up 6.4%, and that's obviously taking into account the new higher rates of taxation, and then I think really interesting is net debt to EBITDA is now down to 1.2x. That is our lowest ever leverage, and is, of course, now below our 1.5x target. So given the, you know, given the strength of performance in cash generation, the board are proposing a 20% increase in the dividend. That's obviously 3x EPS growth.
T hen, just as a bit of a reminder, of course, we already announced the suspension of those pension deficit payments, and Duncan will talk about that in a little while, but that does save us GBP 33 million of cash in the current financial year, and then the other thing that's, I'll come back to later, is that, what we also saw in the fourth quarter of the year, exactly as we expected, we saw a transition from value-led growth into volume-led growth. So we sort of came out of the quarter with some volume growth, which cast forward into this year.
So as well as that strong financial performance, we've made progress on all five pillars of the growth strategy, and I'll come back to this in more detail later, but just quickly to walk through them. So U.K. branded revenue growth was up 13.6%, so very healthy indeed. We invested GBP 33 million back into our manufacturing operations, and that obviously makes us more efficient, improves margins, and helps us manufacture the new products we bring to market. Our new category expansions are going really well indeed, so we had 72% growth from those new categories, and then the international business grew double-digit again, so up 12%, at constant currency, and then the fifth pillar, the inorganic opportunities. During the year, we continued to grow The Spice Tailor.
Again, I'll talk about that in more detail later, but we also acquired FUEL 10K. So you can see good progress, I think, across all of the five pillars. Now, the other thing I just wanted to do was just put the numbers in a bit of context of the journey we've been on over the last five or six years, and if you start over on the top left there, that's a pretty consistent strong top-line growth. You've got that bit of a peak from the pandemic, of course, in the middle, but that's a 6.4% CAGR revenue growth.
T hen if you look at trading profit over the same period, again, a nice, strong trajectory and trading profit actually going just slightly ahead, of, of revenue growth at 6.9% on a five-year CAGR basis. Adjusted PBT is even stronger, of course, 12.3%, five-year CAGR, and that's, of course, because it benefits from the reduction in interest that we pay, and that's because we've obviously got a lot less debt than we had in 2018, 2019, and that debt was refinanced at a much better rate. Which I suppose brings me on to, to net debt, which has fallen from 3.2x net debt to EBITDA down to that 1.16 that we're reporting today.
So it's not just one year of good performance. There's a nice sort of track record there as well, and we've also continued to make good progress against our emission lifecycle plans. These are our ESG targets. There'll be a lot more detail on this in the annual report in a couple of weeks or so because it's quite a big topic, but just to pull out a few of the highlights, remember, we have three pillars: product, planet, and people.
On the product side, we've been working really hard to make our portfolio healthier, and I'm pleased to say now that 44% of the products in our range have an additional health benefit, so that might be it's one of your five a day, or it might be that it's got fiber in it or something like that, as well as being of higher nutritional standard, and higher nutritional standard means less than 4 on the government nutrient profiling model, i.e., it's not classified as HFSS.
Y ou can see that that 19% statistic at the bottom is, is saying that those, that those healthier products are growing faster than our core, so they're becoming a bigger part of the, bigger part of the portfolio, and that's partly, due to growth, but it's also because we're, reworking the recipes on some of our product ranges and also the things we bring to market. We're working really hard to make sure that they start off, in a good place, in the first place. On the planet pillar, a 14% reduction on our Scope 1 and 2 emissions, that's actually now, brings us slightly ahead, of our trajectory towards our 2030 targets and net zero.
O ne of the things we've started to do now is to put solar panels onto the roofs of our factories, because obviously they're quite big footprints, and you can get quite a lot of solar panels on them. So we've done that first at our Stoke bakery, and that's up and running, and we're working on other factories that we can do that on when we get the right permissions and things through. As a reminder, on the people pillar, we now have 46% of our management colleagues are female, and then our long-term charity partner, FareShare, we donated through FareShare, almost 1 million meals to those in food poverty. So really good progress against the 2030 goals that we set ourselves.
With that, I'll hand over to Duncan, who can take us through the numbers.
Thanks, Alex. Good morning, everyone. I'm going to spend the next few minutes talking through the financial summary of the twelve months ending March 2024, and as Alex said, it has been a good year. Total revenue up 15.1%, and again, the branded part of our business, which is the key growth driver, is up 13.5%, so that's really strong growth. I think good to see growth across both Grocery and the Sweet Treats business. Non-branded revenue throughout the course of this year, we've seen increases, you know, reasonably strong increases, although it's a much smaller part of the business, through pricing, so we're covering the input cost inflation we've seen across the non-branded business and also some new contract benefits, particularly in Sweet Treats. So moving down to divisional contributions.
So you can see margins, margins moving forward. I mean, we do have a, I guess, financial strategy of moving forward our growth margins. How do we do that? We do that through supply chain efficiency. We can see the benefits of our CapEx, our increased CapEx in here, and obviously, we do that so we can fund investment in the brands. You can see, you know, some cost savings going in there and moving margin forward, even after having spent a bit more consumer marketing. So that takes divisional contribution to 254 million. Group and corporate costs are up 26%. That's for three reasons. So the first one is, you may remember we had a fairly chunky credit, so the best part of GBP 4 million in last year. That was a one-off insurance recovery.
We've got inflation in there, as you'd probably expect. So that's both across people costs and also certain of our contracts, and again, you know, we are here to grow the business. We're here to invest in the business, to make things work better, automate things, and make things more efficiently. I might have mentioned this before, but we've got an ongoing project to improve our factory supply chain planning system. So that's a really compelling payback project, actually, but we see the benefits elsewhere in the P&L. We just see the chunk of costs sitting in group and corporate. So where does that leave us? So trading profit, GBP 180 million. That's up 14%. So you can see trading profit margin's pretty much in line with prior year.
Adjusted PBT is up even more strongly at 15.1% and adjusted earnings per share. So we've got a reminder, we've got an increase in tax rates, so we use a notional rate of tax for our EPS, and, you know, the corporation tax rate is 25% this year versus 19% last year. So adjusted EPS is up 6.4%, and as Alex has mentioned, really pleased to be proposing another 20% increase, which I think is, by my math, that's more than 3x earnings to 1.728p. So groceries once again are sort of growth driver and a growth engine. So you can see both total revenue and branded revenue up over 16.5%. I think really good to see all our major brands in growth.
Alex will talk shortly about how a combination of new product development and expanding into new categories has helped Ambrosia become the group's fourth GBP 100 million brand. Nissin continues to do well. We'll talk a bit about that shortly as well, but Nissin products growth of over 30% as well within these numbers, and obviously, this reflects the benefit of the international business growth as well. Non-branded revenue, again, as I've just touched upon, we've got price increases in there. Volumes from our Charnwood business are down in the year. You may have seen that we announced the closure of that site, so a difficult decision to close the site, and we'll be exiting that during the first half of this year.
Through divisional contributions, you can see margins pretty much, pretty much in line with prior year, again, having moved toward margin and using that to, to outweigh our brand investment, which is what we're trying to do here, and then Sweet Treats. So I guess Sweet Treats had a bit of a difficult year last year. We had some unscheduled maintenance at one of our Cadbury's production lines, and at the beginning of this year, we talked about and expecting an improvement in Sweet Treats performance and profitability, and also that being more weighted towards the second half of this year. You might remember, you might remember, at half one, we branded sales were slightly down. I think here you can see branded sales for the year are up 4.2%. So H2 has been strong.
I think branded revenue's been up just under 11%, and in the fourth quarter, up about 5%. So really good to see, I guess, the recovery playing out as we expected. Non-branded revenue, again, we've got contract wins in there and some pricing. Again, I think with non-branded, branded revenue, both in Sweet Treats and in Grocery, I'd expect we pretty much cycled through both the elements of pricing and also the cycling of when we won the contract. So I'd expect that to be a much sort of normal level going forward, and as you'd expect, the higher branded revenue, the more volumes going through the site and better manufacturing performance compared to last year, all leveraging through the P&L quite nicely.
So you can see divisional contribution is up nearly 25% and margins up about 130 basis points compared with prior year. Alex has mentioned, we've reached our lowest ever leverage, which is great to see at 1.2 x. Now, I guess, how have we got there? We started the year at 1.5 x. Obviously, you know, EBITDA and profit, and turning that into cash has really helped. In terms of the other components, so working capital, we've invested a bit into working capital over the last couple of years. That's mainly due to higher values of stock, because the ingredients and materials we're buying that go into that stock are obviously more expensive.
We've seen that dissipate a bit during the year, so we've got an improved working capital performance year on year, and you can see from a guidance perspective, we're expecting that to normalize as we go into this year. So we're guiding to broadly neutral for working capital. CapEx, we'll touch on shortly about some examples of what, how we spent it during the year, but we've increased it from GBP 20 million to GBP 33 million. That's in line with guidance, and I think just underpins, again, the level of opportunities we've got, and I think reflecting that, we're planning to spend between GBP 40 million-GBP 45 million this year. Pensions are GBP 39 million. We know it's been a fairly significant use of our cash over many years with a suspension, which I'll talk about shortly, coming through.
We'll be limited to just paying admin costs and government levies next year, so that's going to be more like GBP 5-6 million, and then we're structuring a GBP 14 million. That's largely related to the cost of closure of our Knighton site that we've talked about. There's also some M&A fees in there as well. Again, we'll be much lower, we'll be much lower this year, around GBP 5 million. Half of that is just the tail end of closing Knighton, and getting out the site, and about half of that is related to the closure of our Charnwood site. So where does that leave us? So net debt of GBP 236 million, that's nearly, nearly GBP 40 million down year-on-year, and that's after having spent GBP 30 million acquiring FUEL10K.
So I talked a bit about pensions, and you can see here, it's clearly, you know, it's been important that we've supported the pension scheme, but it has, you know, consumed sort of GBP 40 million of cash over the last few years. We've talked about progress since the merger we did about 4 years ago. A couple of months ago, that culminated in agreeing with the trustees to suspend pension contributions. So effectively, the GBP 33 million of cash that we were due to spend this year, we will be no longer putting into the scheme. Why is that? I think it really is just great continued performance. I think the trustees have done a fantastic job since they got their arms around all 3 of the big U.K. schemes in terms of, you know, managing risk, changing investment strategy.
So a combination of hedging and while driving decent asset returns, I think it really just shows the sort of strength that the pension schemes are in. That takes us to the valuation, which is next end of next March. Obviously, I can't really sit here and predict exactly what's going to happen, but, you know, we need to see where we get to there, but I think sitting here today, based on what we know, we wouldn't expect contributions to restart at that date, and looking a bit further ahead, you know, we still talked about full de-risking of the scheme. What do I mean by that? It's effectively making sure that we lock in our financial position of the scheme. Could be through a buy-in transaction.
S till, you know, we still think, you know, just over two years to get that done will be sensible, but I think the way, I guess, the way I think about the scheme at the moment is we are already running very low levels of risk. We'll continue to reduce that further over the next 12 or 18 months. We've got a good investment strategy, and we're generating some returns, and we're not paying any cash into the scheme now. So actually, our view ourselves is pretty well progressed down that de-risking journey, even sitting here today. So clearly, without any pension contributions this year, we've got a bit more cash to put to work, and we've talked about before having no shortage of opportunities to invest in the business.
We know we've got, whether it's automation, whether it's energy efficiency, whether it's line renewal, investing in our sites, remains a great source and a home for high returning capital projects. We know from an M&A perspective, we've done a couple of deals. Both are returning ahead of plan. Obviously, FUEL10K is early days, but progress has been good, and Spice Tailor is performing, performing extremely well. Alex will talk a bit about, I guess, our overall approach and a reminder of that shortly, but you know, we are fussy. We apply strict commercial and financial hurdles. That will very much continue to be the case. It may be that the M&A gets a bit bigger over time, but I think we need to wait and see.
We could easily, easily do another bolt-on if we, if we find one that we find appropriate. So I think very much, very much see good opportunity there. I think really pleased. We've talked about paying a progressive dividend. I think really pleased to be announcing, proposing our third successive, 20% increase today, in line with what we said, and we're saying here that we'll continue to grow ahead of earnings going forward. So leverage target, it won't escape you, that we're, we're actually below our leverage target sitting here today, and it may be that we go even further below it, until we can find a, find a use for, for, for some of the capital.
I think the way to probably think about it is we will, we will oscillate, you know, a bit below in line, a bit above, depending, probably depending on, on the M&A opportunities that come along, but I'd still view as 1.5x as a good medium-term target in terms of how we're thinking. Right, that's all for me. I will hand back to Alex.
Thanks, Duncan. What I'd just like to do is just walk us through progress against the five pillars of the growth strategy over the last year. Just as a reminder, you know, what the strategy does is it says, well, basically, if our core skill set is in building brands and growing brands in a sustainable and profitable way, if we take that capability and spread it more broadly than just our core brands in our U.K. core categories, then in principle, we can generate more growth, we can generate more value and build a bigger business. So obviously, starting on the left, having said that, the central gravity of the business at the moment is very much in our core categories in the U.K., and therefore, continuing to make that grow and nurture that is very important.
T hen pillars three, four, and five are really saying, well, what are the other places that we could play? So taking our brands into new categories within the U.K., where historically we've not generated revenue before, so that's all incremental white space, building the business overseas, and then obviously, as Duncan talked about, buying brands that we can then bring into the business and grow. Pillar two is, I call it a facilitation strategy. In a sense, it's that investment back into the supply chain. So taking some of that cash, investing it back into the ability to make new products, and also in making ourselves more efficient, and that efficiency obviously flows through to margins, which helps fund the investment behind the brands. So that's the.
The strategy is working really well for us, and we're continuing to pursue it really aggressively, and let's just look at how that's played out through the year. It's founded, of course, in this what we call the branded growth model. So this is how we build our brands and make them grow consistently over time. The top left really points to the fact that in the U.K., we start from a really great, strong position, don't we? Because we've got really well-known brands. They're known by pretty much everybody in the U.K. They're in almost everybody's cupboard at home. In fact, most households will have more than one of them in the cupboard at any one time, and there's a lot of warm affection for the brands.
When we talk to consumers, there's a really nice emotional proximity, to, to the brands, which is a really great start point, but as I've said many times, that doesn't give you any growth. That just gives you somewhere to start, and the way you get growth are through the other things that you do. One of the things we know is that the long-term health and growth of FMCG brands tends to correlate really strongly to new product development. So constantly bringing to market new products that serve consumers' changing needs is a way in which you lock in that long-term growth, and so that's why, that's, that's core to what we do, and that's why we put so much focus on new product development, and we base that on what I consider to be a really in-depth understanding of consumer trends.
So we spend a lot of time understanding how people are shopping, how they're cooking, how they're eating at home, and how that's changing over time. Because as we know, if we can understand those things, we can bring new products which fit with those changes and therefore get great traction with consumers, and then we've got those really strong brands, of course, but we need to keep nurturing them, keep building them, so we invest in marketing and advertising campaigns which build the brands. It keeps the awareness high, it keeps them contemporary and relevant for consumers, and a lot of what we do with our media investment, with our advertising investment is really about building emotional connections, emotional bonds with consumers.
T hen finally, the fourth part of the model, but very importantly, is the way in which we try to build strategic partnerships with our key retailers. We know that that delivers outstanding in-store execution, but if we work with them together on building category growth, mutual category growth for both of us, we will tend to benefit disproportionately, and the reason for that is, of course, that we've got usually the biggest brands in the category, so if we grow the category together, we'll tend to get the biggest benefit from it. So it's a really well-proven model. It's what we've been running for a number of years now. It's not dissimilar at all to some of the big multinational branded manufacturers either.
But it, as I say, it works really well for us, and it's a classic case of the total model is greater than the sum of the parts, and if we look at how that's played out on our U.K. brands over the last six years, on the left-hand side, that is the revenue trend from our U.K. brands, and you can see, you know, consistent strong growth with that blip in the middle that I mentioned earlier, when everyone was eating at home, because of the pandemic. If we look at our grocery brands and look at their market share, you know, we've consistently increased market share year after year after year, and that's through 200 basis points of market share gain in our grocery brands over the last three years.
So over the last year, we continued to work on those key five consumer trends that I've talked about before, with health and nutrition, again, being the most important, and we brought a whole series of brands to market, a whole series of new products under our brands to market during the year. There's just a couple of examples here. So Ambrosia Deluxe is based on that fourth trend, which is indulgence, and we know what consumers are telling us is, "Look, I'm trying to be healthy, but when I do want to be indulgent, it's got to be worth it, so make it worth my while, please." T his is Ambrosia having a deluxe version of its custard and rice puddings.
But actually, interestingly, these score less than 4 on the government nutrition profiling model, so they're not classified as HFSS, even though they're creamier than our core custard range. The custard we launched a couple of years ago, it did really well. Last year, we launched rice as well. These now represent 7% of the Ambrosia core business. Last year, they grew at 155%, and we're supporting that now with out-of-home media as well as in-store support. Another good example, also on the indulgence trend, is Mr. Kipling's Best Ever Mince Pies. I don't know if you saw these over Christmas.
So, this was really our chefs sort of getting right, right down to to basics and say, "What would it be if you could build a perfect mince pie?" W orking really closely with consumers to go, "Okay, what would it look like? What would the pastry be like? What shape would it be? How big would it be? What would the fruit be like?" C onstructing something which is as close to perfect as we could possibly get. I mean, if you look online, the consumer reviews are outstanding. They're nearly all five stars, and this contributed to Mr Kipling share growth in mince pies versus year ago.
I think I was probably one of the main drivers of that personally, actually, 'cause they are really, really good, are good, although I don't think I fit into the fact that it attracted a younger demographic, and then what we've done on the right-hand side, of course, is we continued to invest in the brands. That's, say, very much part of our model. We had seven of our major brands on TV, including supporting that Best Restaurant in Town campaign, and of course, we also use digital, and we use more and more out-of-home as well, particularly to drive awareness of the new products, and then I said in-store execution was really important, so we've continued to drive that. Some great stats over on the left-hand side there.
We actually managed to get more products into more stores, this year or last year than we did the year before. In fact, if you think about all the products we've got across all the stores, huge number, and that improved by 1.2%, so, really, really great performance. It was particularly strong in the second half of the year after the main retailers had done their annual range reviews, and we just got more products into those ranges, and then getting that visibility, those big displays, the gondola ends, also very important. Actually, our grocery brands had 34% more off-shelf exposure last year than in the prior year, and that was already off a pretty, pretty high base.
T hat includes things like the example here, the brands partnering up with movie franchises and gaming franchises. So this was Batchelors partnering up with the launch of the Aquaman movie. There's an on-pack offer where consumers can win prizes, and then from a retailer point of view, you get these enormous displays in store, and I can tell you, the amount of volume you move off those displays is really quite impressive. Another really nice example comes out of our partnership with FareShare, and this is a promotion. We ran it the year before last, but it worked so well, we ran it again last year, and it's called Win a Dinner, Give a Dinner.
The idea is there's an on-pack promotion across a number of our brands, and you can win a shopping voucher to essentially cook a meal for your family, but if you win, you also simultaneously win the same for somebody in food poverty via the FareShare charity. Then working closely with retailers, it means we're able to get displays like this. So this is an entire gondola end in Tesco with just Premier Foods brands on it. So you've got Bisto, Paxo, Sharwood's, Loyd Grossman, and Ambrosia, all the brands participating in that promotion, all on a gondola end at the same time. So, you know, absolutely fantastic exposure for the brands and drives a lot of incremental volume.
I also thought it'd be worth mentioning, just how strong our, our Nissin partnership is, which just continues to go from strength to strength. On the left-hand side, you've got the revenue we generate from sale of Nissin-branded products in the U.K., and, you know, it started in 2019, very, very, very small piece of business, low single digit millions, and then you look at that trajectory, we're almost getting to GBP 40 million of turnover with Nissin in the last year. That is a 54% 5-year CAGR, which is not something I don't think I've ever seen before, and we now have a 68% market share of the authentic noodle category in the U.K.. So really, just tremendous trajectory.
Driven, initially by Soba, the Soba pot noodles, and then we extended out into the, block or bag noodles, which is this product here, and we've also launched Nissin's Cup Noodle, which is their, global, brand, and then also, it's not included in those numbers, but also as a reminder that Nissin make for us our Batchelors, noodle pots as well, using their, you know, incredible noodle wizardry. They're, really, really what they don't know about noodles is not worth knowing, but there's more to come. So we will bring- we'll take over the distribution of their authentic Demae Ramen product this year, and that'll happen later on in the year, and we believe there's opportunity there to extend that out into more retailers, just, just like we did with Soba.
W e're working closely with Nissin now on other things that we might bring to market. So I was out in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago with our Chief Marketing Officer, working with the team at Nissin, looking at all the things that they make, and I can say we ate a lot over those few days, trying all the different things that we could possibly bring into the U.K.. So a great relationship, and it just keeps going from strength to strength, and then obviously, a quick word on inflation.
On the left-hand side, you've got the ONS inflation for food and non-alcoholic beverages, and you can see that huge spike that was sort of peaked around this time a year ago, and the way that's fallen back down to something starting to approach normality. What I find interesting is what's happened during the last year to our volume and price dynamics, so as they contribute to our growth. So the sort of lighter green colored line is price. So we started the year with, compared to the year-ago base, we've got two big price increases in those numbers, so that was driving a lot of value.
A s I said, we obviously were losing some volume because of price elasticity, but the volume loss was a lot less than we expected, particularly on the grocery side of the business, and as we went through the year, you can see we start to lap some of the pricing, so therefore, the price element starts to fall, and the volume trend improves. I always said that quarter four was going to be a transitionary quarter, and you can absolutely see that. We went into the quarter with higher value per unit, and actually a little bit less on volume, and we exited the quarter with volume-driven growth at a slightly lower price per unit because, of course, we sharpened some of our promotional prices.
Really, it's that exit rate out of the end of Q4 is what we expect to flow through into this financial year and is actually broadly what we're seeing as well. The other thing that might be useful is just looking at our U.K. branded business and looking at the three-year growth CAGRs split over 2017-2020 and 2021-2024. So during that inflationary period, we've got a three-year growth CAGR of about 5%, and in the periods before it, it's more like 3%, and it might also be helpful to remember that that 3%, we've said before, was broadly made up of about half volume and half price mix. You might find that helpful in terms of thinking forward.
Moving on to the second strategic pillar. So this is our infrastructure investment, and we love the, the virtuous cycle you get here. We invest some of the cash in our manufacturing operations. It improves our margins, and we invest some of that back into, to our brands, and that drives more, more growth and fuels, more brand growth and, and cash generation. We've still got a really great list of projects, that have got relatively short paybacks in that three, four year timeframe, so hence why we've, increased our capital investment, for, for the, for this, last year. A lot of focus is on, efficiency, as I say, and in particular, energy reduction.
Any reduction investment is great because given the cost of energy, we have relatively short payback periods and they're a great way of saving cost, but at the same time, we're also reducing our Scope 1 and 2 emissions. So we're meeting our obligations on our net zero roadmap. One little example through the year was we started replacing our air compressors. We use a lot of compressed air in some of our manufacturing processes. We've replaced six of the eight so far across a number of the sites, and the interesting thing here is the new technology is just so much more efficient that we use a lot less electricity, reduces our Scope 2 emissions.
Payback's less than three years, and what we've also now worked out what we can do is, because these things generate heat when they're working, we can flow water through them, and it comes out as hot water, which we can then use in the washrooms and things, which obviously, again, is saving you on Scope 2 and also on the heating costs. I talked about the solar panels on Stoke. Again, strong payback, less than four years. Essentially, it's free electricity from that point, and so reduces Scope 2, and we're working on the roofs across the rest of the sites as well to see what might be possible, and then this one on the right-hand side is a really nice example of investing in automation.
So this is phase two of the automation of our sponge puddings line, where we've automated the retorts. The retorts are where we cook the product at the end of the process. This was a very manual process before. So automating it has done two things. It's increased capacity, which is very helpful, but it's also significantly improved efficiency and made it a lot, a lot lower cost to produce. What we've done with some of that cost is we've been able to compete, be more competitive in our promotional pricing, and what that's done is it's actually led to a significant increase in volume. So sales of Mr. Kipling's sponge puddings last year increased by 26% and did so at a higher margin than the prior year.
So I think that's just a great example of where investment in automation can be a real win for us. Moving on to the third pillar, so this is our new categories, so still a fairly modest base, but really fantastic trajectory, 72% growth. You might remember last year we were very excited. Porridge was doing really well. We'd got to a 5% market share of what was already a double-digit growth segment of breakfast. Well, I'm pleased to say that we more than doubled our sales of porridge in the last year, and we've now got over a 10% share of that category.
In the first retailer we launched in, we've now got a 20% market share, which gives you a sort of an indication of the direction of travel, and we've actually now started to include that in our marketing, and so the image you see there is taken from the end of the Ambrosia TV ad, which we've now included porridge into. Ice cream sales were up 56%, particularly strong growth in H2, and that's actually now, we've taken that from just being in Iceland. You might remember that was an experiment originally just in Iceland, and that's now in Asda and Morrisons and doing really very well, actually, and we've got an extension, that's literally just come to market this year, to go into handheld ice creams with Angel Delight.
OXO Marinade's working really well, 92% growth. We've now got five flavors of that. It started off as an experiment in Asda. It's now in Asda, Ocado, Tesco, and we've just agreed it's going into Sainsbury's, so that continues to do very well, and one of the reasons we really like this is it helps to de-seasonalize OXO. So OXO tends to be used in meals that we make when the weather's cold, and this will tend to be used when the weather's hot on barbecues, so it just starts to balance the brand out a little bit, and also, Capers and Spice doing really well. It's now in all the major retailers and growing at 77%. The international business, as I said, grew by 12%. Ireland had a really cracking year, 17% growth.
When we bought The Spice Tailor, it was only present in one retailer in Ireland. We've now started to roll that out across the rest of the retailers, so Spice Tailor sales doubled in Ireland following that. Australia, we've got that strong market leadership position in cake, and I feel like I say this every year, but yet again, we had a record market share, a new record market share for cake in Australia and also now with a combination of Sharwood's and The Spice Tailor. We're the market leader in Indian sauces, too.
Now, that great performance in market, as I said earlier in the year, didn't translate through into turnover because of a reduction in stock levels on the water between the U.K. and Australia and then in warehousing in Australia, and bearing in mind that the retailer has title to the goods once they leave the dockside in the U.K.. Europe, Middle East and Africa, 28% growth, so another great performance and really, Sharwood's is our focus in that region, and that was all driven by incremental distribution. So we got 4,700 more distribution points, which helped drive that number.
Then similarly in the U.S., 35% growth, and that was driven by more distribution of Sharwood's and more distribution of Mr. Kipling, with Mr. Kipling now, up to 3,000 stores in the U.S, and actually, now we've started to roll The Spice Tailor out in the U.S. We've got agreement for 1,000 stores, initially of The Spice Tailor, and we'll continue to work on that, obviously. Which brings me neatly, actually, to The Spice Tailor, so the fifth pillar of the growth strategy. The Spice Tailor performed very well, good, strong double-digit sales growth, increased market share, and in fact, delivering returns ahead of our acquisition model, and this is playing out, you know, almost exactly as we expected, if not a little better, actually. So we expected we could get more distribution for The Spice Tailor in the U.K.
We felt as though it deserved that, and with our sales capabilities, we were able to secure that, particularly significant gains in Asda and Morrisons, and we've also been able to get much bigger and much more impactful displays in store as well, which we know helps drive trial by new consumers, as does our initial steps into brand advertising. So we've now got a digital TV advert, if you like, for the brand, which we're trialing in the U.K. and in Australia with a view to, if that's successful, then we might look to put it on mainstream TV. The logic there is, we know that The Spice Tailor has a really, really high repeat rate.
The number of people who try it, who then go on to buy again and again, and it becomes part of their routine, is really as high as anything we've got in our portfolio. So if we can make more people aware of the brand, get more people to try it, then we'll build a bigger user base for the future, and while the commercial team have been doing all that, the chefs have been busy coming up with all sorts of new recipes, and you'll start to see those come to market over the next few months. So this year, in fact, one of the first there is a range of premium stir-fry sauces, which have just gone into market.
T hen from an overseas point of view, originally when we bought this, as I say, it was present in strength in the U.K. and Australia, but it had a little bit of presence in Ireland and Canada, but really quite small, and we've been able to expand that presence in Ireland, I've talked about, and in Canada, but we've now got to the point where we're in 10 markets, and we'll continue to push that out into more stores in those markets and indeed, probably more European markets as well. FUEL10K, obviously much earlier stage, fully integrated now into the business. Growth for the year was 30%, and that's obviously on a pro forma basis. Strong market share gains of 130 basis points.
Again, initial returns ahead of our internal acquisition model. So very happy with the way that's going, and what we've been able to do so far is talk to retailers about FUEL10K and Ambrosia porridge pots together, and we've been able to secure some really big, impactful displays like you see there, and we've already got some new products coming to market. On the left there, this is a high protein, 25-gram protein breakfast shake. This was something that was already in the FUEL10K team's pipeline, but we're now bringing to market, and then what we've got here is a range of nutritionally complete meals, either as a shake that you make up or as a rice-based product, and these are direct to consumer at this point.
This is something we were working on in Premier Foods, but having bought FUEL10K, that was a stronger brand name for us to put it under, so we've done it under FUEL10K, and that's literally just gone to market. I thought it might be worth a recap on what our M&A approach is. There's nothing I haven't said before here, but just to bring it all in one place. So look, we are, you know, our core skill set is in building brands, so anything we buy, we're looking to buy brands, and when we're looking for brands that we think have got strong potential, like the Spice Tailor and FUEL10K have, and brands which we believe that when we apply our branded growth model, will deliver disproportionately strong performance.
We're very choiceful, as you know, with what we're looking at. We're very fussy indeed, actually, and the two brands we've bought, well, neither of them were actually for sale. We'd identified them as things that we'd like to have in our portfolio and approached the owners. F rankly, we're looking all the time, so we're constantly looking for more brands that might be similar to FUEL10K or Spice Tailor. They might be a bit bigger, of course, because we could, we've got the capital to do that now, but we're also looking at international targets, because one of the things we could do here is buy a branded business in an overseas market and use that as a bridgehead by which then we can bring the Spice Tailor, FUEL10K, Mr. Kipling, et cetera, into market in an accelerated way, do that much quicker than we can do, just ourselves.
A s Duncan said, strong financial discipline will remain, a focus on ROIC, actually, and, as Duncan also said, you know, at the moment, we're obviously in a cash-building phase. When we find an acquisition, leverage will pop up a little bit, and then we'll generate cash and bring it back down, so you'll get this oscillation effect. So if I move on, just very briefly to talk about the current year. So as you would probably anticipate, we'll be driving all the pillars of the strategy. So, U.K. branded core, there's lots of new products coming to market. This is just a little snapshot of things that are happening right now. So extensions on the Spice Tailor, on Loyd Grossman.
Loyd Grossman actually moving into pesto, with a really high quality, genuine Italian-style pesto, which is slightly different from what you can get generally in the U.K. market. There's the Demae Ramen products from Nissin we talked about, and then some very, very indulgent and delicious, Mr. Kipling chocolate cakes there as well. In terms of infrastructure investment, we'll be investing in growth and efficiency. One of the growth investments we'll make is we're expanding capacity for the Ambrosia porridge pots. That does two things. It allows us to continue to support the growth that we're seeing in the U.K., and it opens the door to us to start selling it in some overseas markets as well. From an efficiency point of view, there's an awful lot going on.
The one example I've pulled out, because we're really pleased with this because it's a great example of innovation in process engineering as opposed to innovation in product, and this is our engineers came up with a completely new way to make icing at large scale, which significantly decreases energy utilization and so therefore saves us quite a lot of money, but also, of course, therefore reduces our Scope 2 emissions. In terms of new categories, you've got the extension of Angel Delight into handheld ice cream. So that's, you know, that picture there is a Angel Delight butterscotch flavor ice cream dipped in chocolate. What, what's not to like about that, really? T hen we'll continue to drive, of course, the porridge pots. So that's, you know, very much our lead horse in new categories.
T hen from an overseas perspective, Mr. Kipling, it's really about driving the sales of Mr. Kipling now in North America. We've got those 4,000 stores now across North America, so really driving volume sales through that. Continuing to build the leadership position in Australia, and driving hard the rollout into New Zealand. Sharwood's continues to be about distribution in Europe and distribution in North America, and the Spice Tailor, as you've seen, we've got 10 markets now, and we'll continue to push that forward with more European markets, and we'll build store count across those as well. So plenty, plenty going on, and where does that leave us? Look, I think in summary, it's been another really strong year for the business. It's ahead of expectations, including ours.
I think that return to volume growth in Q4 was really important and played out exactly as we expected it to. As well as the financial performance, of course, strong progress against all five of the strategic pillars, and what we'll see this year is that return to volume growth, as we saw in Q4, accompanied by that lower price per unit as we've sharpened some of those promotional pricing, and we'll continue to drive the five pillar growth strategy, leveraging of course, our brand building capabilities, and so, you know, based on what you've already just seen, we'd expect to make further progress this year, and our full year expectations are on track.
W ith that, of course, continued strong cash generation, and given the suspension of the pension deficit contributions, it means we've got increased capital to allocate against things like CapEx and M&A and dividend. So, that's it from me, and we'd be very happy to take any questions.
I believe there's a roaming mic as well.
Oh, is there? Right.
Maybe question askers can wait for that. Thank you.
Charles Hall from Peel Hunt. Firstly, well done on an excellent set of figures. Can we then talk about some consumer trends in the U.K.? Obviously, we've had a couple of years of high inflation, and that's been the focus for both the food producers and the retailers. Are you seeing changes now in how consumers are thinking about price and product range? I think your cooking sauces have done particularly well because of a trend towards h ome eating. What are you seeing and thinking is going to happen over the year ahead, and how are you responding to it?
Well, I think in recent months it's been relatively stable. So we did see this move from people eating out and having takeaways a little bit less often, and of course, that brings it into cooking at home, which is obviously, you know, where our sweet spot is, and so that was a trend we've definitely seen over the last couple of years, but I think that's pretty stable now. We're not seeing any dramatic changes in consumer habits at the moment.
S econdly, in North America, can you just give an update on the product range you've got in, Mr. Kipling and also, what you're now putting in, in Spice Tailor? W hat sort of sell-through now you're sort of lapping some of the trial areas, how's the sales building in the existing distribution locations?
Yeah, so the core range for Mr. Kipling is the initial slices range that we launched with, so four key flavors of slices. Although we now have started to do some seasonal products. So one of the things that you may know about the States is they're very good at celebrating different seasons at different times of the year. So, you know, we've got a Halloween range that will come later in the year. There's a Valentine's, you know, kind of pink cakes range, and so we're trying to key into some of those seasons, and this actually is quite interesting because that's one of the ways in which we originally built the Australian business. So the Australian business was built initially across a series of seasonal products that then became available as an all-year-round proposition.
So we'll continue to do that, and I think we've also now launched Cherry Bakewells into the U.S. as well. So it's important we don't get too carried away with the breadth of product range, because when a brand's in its early stage, you want to keep the velocities of the individual products, you know, how quickly they sell at a reasonably good level. What you don't want to do is fragment it too much, too quickly. So we've to sort of see how things go and just gradually expand the range. So that's basically where we are. Shelf rotations are good.
One of the things we'll be doing, focusing on over this next year, is how we use tailored, localized marketing programs in order to build those velocities. Because obviously, it's 4,000 stores, but it's 4,000 stores across the whole of North America, means it's pretty scattered, and so you've got to be very choiceful in your techniques that you use, in order to build it. Yeah, and then Spice Tailor, I'd say first 1,000 stores in the U.S., coming on stream. The range is obviously a shorter range, sort of 3-5 SKUs in most retailers, and one of the things we're doing is we're not being as focused on Indian as we are in the U.K.
We're using a broader East Asian range, because that's got broader appeal in that market, because obviously it's got a different history to the U.K. So that's, you know, the range as we roll out across different markets will be slightly different.
That's great. Thanks.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Clive Black from Shore Capital. Firstly, just in terms of plant investment, where does capacity increase feature in the next few years for you? Or put another way, what sort of capacity utilization are you looking at the moment in terms of spare space?
You know, broadly speaking, across the range, we don't have any significant, you know, glass ceilings on capacity, or at least not that's gonna cause us a, a p roblem in the near future. Obviously, porridge pots was slightly different because it was a new product. We were making that on some adapted existing kit, and it's just got so big, it needs its own. So that's the change there, but broadly speaking, we're not sitting here thinking that there's X lines that we've got to add into the business for capacity reasons. It's just not the case. Now, there may be lines we choose to replace to make them more efficient, but that's a different kind of decision.
Just, I've got three questions in total. Secondly, could you just say something about Cadbury's? It's a third-party relationship, but y ou just haven't really said much about that today.
Yeah, so, you know, Cadbury's continues to do well. It's, you know, obviously, we had that issue, a year ago, and we, you know, so the year-on-year performance has been very strong in the back half of the year, but, you know, a large part of that is because of that, year-on-year impact. We've got a number of new products, product ranges, particularly, seasonal, ranges around Easter and, and Christmas, in the works, and yeah, it's a good, it's a good, strong relationship we've got with the guys at Mondelez.
Then lastly, you talked about a more normal sales picture going forward in terms of inflation, a m I correct in saying, though, that you, you're looking at low level or disinflation y ear- on- year, with volume growth, and any deflation is your, is your own, if you get my drift, in terms of investing in promotions?
Yeah, that's absolutely the case. Yeah, and what we're doing there is, you know, one of the things you'll know is that we're quite analytical in how we look at these things. We've got a team that really works hard on the modeling of all this, and what we're doing now is we're trying to balance volume growth, value, and profit delivery in a new pricing environment. You know, historically, pre-inflation, it's something we knew and understood in great detail across all our brands. In fact, actually all the sub-ranges within the brands.
We had to recalibrate quite significantly during inflation because the point of equilibrium where you're optimizing your delivery changes quite dramatically, and then we've got to go through that process again now, because it looks very much from what we've done so far is that being slightly sharper on our promotional pricing, given we've got that space from a falling commodity basket, is allowing us to optimize that at a slightly higher volume at a slightly lower price.
Just to follow up on that then, the underlying case price, excluding p romotions is still creeping up. Is in terms of low-level inflation?
I'd say it's pretty flat, actually. Our underlying case price is flat.
James Edwardes Jones from RBC. Couple of questions. Why are you closing Charnwood? It seems like a decently profitable factory. You're taking an asset write down. Doesn't seem to make obvious financial sense, and so Duncan, getting into the weeds of the cash flow, there's a big increase in non-trading items, I think up to GBP 14.4 million or something. Can you just say what that was?
Sure. Do you want to take the first one, Alex?
I'll take the first one, yeah.
Yeah.
So, I mean, Charnwood makes a non-branded, essentially commoditized ingredients. It makes you know, frozen pizza bases that get sold to you know, pizza restaurants and things. So it's really not on strategy for us at all, if you think about building consumer brands that sell through you know, sell through retailers. You know, historically, we've kept it because it's been a profitable business, but you know, the trajectory is very much a downward one.
So, the combination of the fact that this is going to get to a point relatively soon where it is not economically viable and it is off strategy and consuming an awful lot of management time, you know, means it's a difficult decision, but it's the right one to close it and shift that energy and investment and effort into the brands which we know we've had great success in driving.
I n terms of the restructuring cost, James, so this was largely a closure of the Knighton site, so we took the P&L charge in the previous financial year, and then the cash, which is, you know, mainly redundancy, has flowed through this year, but as I said, we're expecting going forward to be much smaller, probably about GBP 5 million, which includes Charnwood in the tail end of 2019.
Hi, I'm Matthew Webb from Investec. Can I start off by asking about market share trends? I mean, you, you set out the long-term picture of market share gains, which was, which is obviously the right way of looking at it, but I think in the fourth quarter in grocery, your value market share was give or take, flat. I just wondered how we should think about that. You know, is that in the context of the shift from, you know, price-led to volume-led growth? What does that then mean in terms of your expectations for the year to come? That's the first question.
Yeah, and it's a really good one, actually, because you're absolutely right. What happened with grocery in just at the back end of the quarter as we shifted to that volume-led growth is something we don't talk about very often, which is volume market share, and so what happened is we then started to take quite a considerable amount of volume market share, but that doesn't necessarily move your value share if you're doing it at a lower price. So I think that's going to be quite an important internal indicator for us this year, it's seeing how our volume share moves as well as just value share, because this is gonna be a volume growth phase for us this year.
Got it, and then, the second question, I think, last time I asked you, with reference to the U.S. rollout, whether you would be pausing at 2,000 stores, and you're obviously now at 3,000 stores. So obviously, the answer is.
The answer was no.
Yes, and I just want I suppose I'm really asking the same question again at 3,000. I mean, do we slow down there or do we keep going?
Well, we keep going, but I think, you know, we've also got to make sure that we are not just building distribution and moving on, because obviously we've then got to make sure we nurture the distribution we've got, make sure that the products drive value for the retailer and that we get growth. So, you know, there's a bit of a balance to be had here, I think rather than just bolting on more and more stores, we've got to make sure that we drive what we've got as well.
Okay, and then sorry, final question for Duncan, just on the pension. Now that you've got to the point where you're not making any cash contributions, I just wonder what else needs to be done before we get to the full resolution, 'cause it's still, you know, I think you've indicated end of FY 2026, so it's still a little way away, w hat are the sort of staging posts that we need to get past?
Yeah, probably a couple of main ones, Matthew. You know, it's a really good question. I think, first of all, we need the combined scheme to reach buyout, you know, to reach buyout surplus. We know we've had our surplus building on the RHM scheme, and clearly, the whole benefit of the merger was to use that surplus to help fund the deficit in the Premier Foods scheme. We are making great progress, and the suspension of deficit contributions probably shows the, I guess, the combined confidence on our side and the trustee side, but we aren't there yet. So we need the scheme to continue to build the surplus, get the asset returns, to get to a buyout threshold, if you like, when looking at all three of them. Getting closer, but not quite there.
T hen, as you probably appreciate, there's a load of stuff under the bonnet we need to do. We've been doing it for a number of years. We still need to do it, and that's all about maximizing value.
T hen sort of final, just final follow-up question on that. Is that then the point where you would no longer need to dividend match in terms of cash contribution?
Yeah, I think, look, we, that's one of the many topics we visit at every valuation, but I would, for now, I'd assume that at that point, that'll be when the dividend match falls away and the administration costs fall away, yeah.
Thanks very much.
Thanks. Darren Shirley, Shore Capital. Just a question on M&A. Thinking with the extra resource, does that change your thinking about the scale of M&A you're willing to do or the frequency of M&A?
I think it might change scale, in the sense that we can afford to, you know, do things that are a bit bigger, if that's what we find. I don't think it necessarily changes frequency because obviously, what you don't want to do is you don't want to be putting your core business at any sort of risk because you're focusing, you know, parts of management on integrating a new business.
You don't want that to be a distraction from driving your core. So you got to get the balance right in terms of frequency, but certainly, you know, yes, you know, we're in a position where we could afford to do bigger, if that's what we found.
In terms of frequency, then, what do you think the business would be comfortable absorbing?
To be honest, it's more a function of how often we can find something that's ticking all our boxes. As I said, we are very fussy, and we'll continue to be so, and it's, you know, difficult to find targets that are, as I say, ticking all the boxes for us. So, you know, they'll only come around, you know, every now and again.
Would you be willing to move into new categories, or do you think it's core, core, core?
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, the first question we ask is, is this a brand with lots of growth potential if we were to apply our brand of growth model? I f that's in a different category, it's in a different category. In fact, actually, to some extent, FUEL 10K wasn't entirely a new category to us, but we'd only got Ambrosia breakfast pots in, and Ambrosia porridge pots in breakfast. So essentially, you know, that's, that opens up breakfast for us, and if we found something that opened up another category for us, then, you know, then all the better.
I think just to build on that, Darren, I suppose, you know, when talking about that, it probably means in the sort of U.K., so sort of new category in a market we're in or we know well, or a new market with a category that we know well. It's sort of unlikely at this stage we'd do a brand-new category in a brand-new market that we don't understand.
That's a fair point. Any more? No. Okay, well, look, thanks very much, everybody. As I say, we've had another really good year, and I think we've got lots of exciting things to come for this year. So we'll see you at the half year.
Thanks all.