Good morning and welcome to our 2021-2022 Preliminary Results Presentation. Thank you everyone for joining us today. First, I want to take a moment to speak about the dreadful events in Ukraine and the huge impact this is having in so many ways. All of us at Sainsbury's stand in absolute solidarity with the people of Ukraine. Working with our charity partner, Comic Relief, we have already donated over GBP 2 million to support the humanitarian effort, in addition to raising GBP 6 million for Red Nose Day this March. We will continue to do all we can to bring all our support and our help to this humanitarian crisis. Now I'm gonna make a brief introduction covering the progress we've made against the priorities and metrics we set out as part of our three-year plan.
Kevin will cover the financial highlights, and then I'll go into more detail on our strategic priorities and delivery one year into our plan, and what we're expecting as we look to the year ahead. To begin with a brief reflection on the last year. It's been another year of unprecedented change for our industry, our customers, our colleagues, and our suppliers. Our response to this has been exceptional, and we enter this next year a stronger, more agile, and more capable business. Fundamental to everything we've done and everything we've achieved has been that we have consistently put customers and colleagues first, and we've listened really hard to what they wanted and needed every step of the way. Customers have trusted us above all others to help them shop safely. From day one, we prioritized those who needed to shop online with a big increase in capacity.
We also, of course, fully supported our colleagues throughout when they needed to be absent or self-isolate and through all the challenges our people faced each and every day. Everything we have achieved has only been possible through the outstanding effort and teamwork of everyone working across Sainsbury's. All of our people, our entire team have done the most brilliant job, and I can't thank each of my colleagues enough for their unwavering commitment and resilience throughout. We have recognized and rewarded our people with additional thank you payments, and we've prioritized investment in colleague pay. We were the first of the major supermarkets to commit to paying the living wage for all retail colleagues, and we brought forward our annual pay review announcement as soon as the cost of living crisis really started to hit in January.
We've also stepped up our efforts to ensure that as much surplus food as possible goes to those who need it most. We have made a big difference here and in turn delivered substantial reductions in food waste. Whatever the industry impact and scale of challenge over the last two years, we've also really seen what becomes possible through trusted partnership and collaboration working across food supply chains. We've leveraged our strong supplier relationships and our scale, working closely with our suppliers and supporting them as much as we can. In turn, our suppliers have really supported us to improve availability and deliver for our customers as we've navigated some of the most significant labor and supply chain challenges. This determined and relentless commitment to do the right thing for our customers, colleagues, and suppliers has shown through in our customer satisfaction and strong volume market share performance.
Customers have responded to the focused, improved value we're delivering to the faster pace of product innovation, to the changes we're making to our stores, and to the great customer service delivered day in, day out by all of our people. If you look to our volume performance over the last two years, we've performed ahead of all the other big box grocers and broadly in line with the total market. Now, these were the priorities we set out in November 2020, with the key value creation pillars of Food First, Brands that Deliver, and Save to Invest, underpinned by being connected to our customers and delivering our integrated Plan for Better. Looking at how we've performed over the first year in delivering against that strategy, you'll be familiar with these eight key metrics we set out in November 2020.
These are how we are judging our performance internally, and as I committed then, we will always share the latest data with you every time we report. Looking at each of the measures and how we've performed in turn. As I've said, we've seen a real shift in our market share trajectory from where we have been previously. We've outperformed all the other big box grocers and performed broadly in line with the total market against a pre-COVID base. On customer satisfaction, we've maintained a consistent lead versus our competitors across our supermarkets and convenience stores. However, you'll notice that we've scored ourselves amber here, and that's because whilst we're pleased with our strong relative progress, we believe we can do better. We're setting our sights on further opening up our lead.
Online, we have improved the trend over the second half, but we are not yet where we want to be, and so more work to do here. To be at our best for customers, we know we can only achieve this with the most engaged, happy colleagues. We've put a lot of our focus and leadership into this, and as a result, colleague engagement has seen an encouraging improvement through what have been some of the most challenging times and against a strong base. Momentum is building in our Plan for Better as we fully integrate sustainability objectives within our strategy with good progress against our carbon Scope 1 and 2 and food waste targets. We have much more to deliver, especially on plastic and Scope 3 emissions. With a fast developing pipeline and strong plans, we expect to make progress in the year ahead.
Kevin will go through our detailed financials shortly. At a headline level, starting with profit growth, we have clearly had the benefit of a grocery demand tailwind over the last two years. Key to profit delivery has also been our program to take structural costs out of our business, and we've delivered an 83 basis points reduction in cost of sales versus the base in 2019-2020. This means that after year one of our plan, we are on track. Clearly this target has become more demanding given current levels of cost inflation. Hence, we've marked ourselves amber here. On the remaining financial metrics, the key outputs of this strong profit performance and our disciplined approach to capital spending are a strong retail free cash flow and higher returns on capital employed.
Now to drive our momentum, we've made significant investments over the last year where we said we would. In improving value for customers, in bringing new products to customers across food and general merchandise, in technology which has delivered personalized value and better service to customers and helped us to reduce cost, in the new store openings which are performing ahead of our expectations, and as I've said, we've ensured that we continue to reward our colleagues well and ahead of competitors. We have also fully supported the communities where we trade. Looking to the year ahead, we face a particularly challenging set of conditions, but we believe we are in a strong position and well- prepared for the headwinds we expect to face. We're very focused on delivering against our strategy for the long term and on further building our momentum in each of these areas.
We have a strong plan to deliver for both customers and shareholders. We're seeing continued good momentum in the grocery business on value, innovation, and service, and we're very clear how we can build further on this. We've also got a strong program of investment going into our stores, and we are well progressed with our year two cost saving delivery as we work to realize the 200 basis point reduction over the life of the plan. We have reset the operating margin for the general merchandise and clothing business through cost and margin transformation, and we are now focused on driving improvement across the GM product ranges and the customer proposition. We are well progressed in developing these plans for the next two to three years with the first phase of the changes we're making starting to deliver benefits later this year.
On Plan for Better, we're really moving forward and very focused on fully integrating our customer, commercial, and sustainability objectives. I'll now pass over to Kevin to take you through the financials.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you, Simon. As Simon said, I will now cover the financial highlights for the 52 weeks to the 5th of March. I'm going to start with sales. As at interims, you will see that in a number of areas through the presentation we have given comparisons versus two years ago as well as the prior year in order to provide context against the 2019-2020 base year uninterrupted by COVID. Starting with grocery, sales were broadly flat year-on-year and up 7.6% over two years, driven by sustained COVID-19 driven demand with increased in-home consumption, particularly through the first half of the year and, as Simon said, a strong volume market share performance ahead of competitors.
General merchandise sales were down year-on-year in both Argos and Sainsbury's as we annualized very strong lockdown- driven comparatives, particularly in categories relating to home working and entertainment. Sales were also down on two years, reflecting availability challenges in key product areas and our focus on profitable sales, including a reduction in promotional activity and a strategic decision to exit less profitable categories such as entertainment in Sainsbury's. Clothing sales grew reflecting weak comparatives, and we were also up 3% versus two years ago, despite significantly reduced promotional activity. In total, retail sales excluding fuel were down 2.6% year-on-year and up 4.6% versus the pre-COVID year to March 2020. Including the impact of fuel sales, which were up strongly versus a very weak 2021 year, headline full year sales growth was 3.4%.
Retail operating profits were up 7% against the 2019-2020 base, driven by cost savings, higher grocery and fuel sales, and more profitable general merchandise and clothing sales, partly offset by investment in the core grocery offer. Financial services made a profit of GBP 38 million in the year, with the main difference year-over-year being the absence of the COVID-related bad debt provisions charge that we took in the prior year. Alongside the benefit of lower interest costs, this drives UPBT of GBP 730 million, an increase on a two-year basis of 25% and more than doubling year-on-year. This profit benefited from increased sales driven by the extended pandemic.
At a statutory pre-tax level, we reported a profit of GBP 854 million as we booked GBP 182 million of income primarily relating to the settlement of legal disputes as described at the interims, which more than offset restructuring charges which in turn were materially lower than in the prior year. Free cash flow was strong despite a predicted working capital unwind following exceptional inflows last year. Average annual free cash flow over the last three years of GBP 633 million exceeded our guidance of at least GBP 500 million per year. We delivered a strong reduction in non-lease net debt of nearly GBP 500 million, driven in part by the conversion of GBP 240 million pounds of the convertible bond to equity.
We delivered our net debt reduction target a year ahead of schedule, even if we exclude the impact of the convertible, reducing net debt by nearly GBP 1.4 billion over three years against a target of GBP 950 million over four years. Two-year growth in underlying earnings per share of 28% is ahead of UPBT growth due to a lower underlying tax rate. This is also reflected in the proposed full-year dividend payment of GBP 0.131 per share. This is the highest dividend per share we have paid since 2015, in line with our 1.9x cover policy, and hence fully reflecting the very strong earnings performance. Last year, we maintained the full year dividend per share despite lower earnings, choosing to protect shareholders from the downside impact of COVID.
This waterfall summarizes the UPBT movement versus the pre-COVID year to March 2020. Behind the headline GBP 63 million improvement in the retail profit, there are a number of moving parts, some of which I will refer to later, but which include around GBP 50 million-GBP 60 million of headwind from an unusually low level of variable compensation in 2019-2020, and the reinvestment of cost savings and higher general merchandise profits into the core grocery offer. Lower interest costs reflect the material progress we have made on paying down debt over the last three years, as well as lower IFRS 16 lease interest due to new leases being written on lower interest rates. This waterfall shows the drivers behind the improvements in retail operating margin versus 2019-2020.
As you know, we are targeting a 200 basis point reduction in our retail SG&A to sales ratio by March 2024, and have made very good progress towards this, with an 83 basis points improvement delivered versus the 2019-2020 base. The 73 basis point decrease in the second bar is made up of a few elements. First is the normalization of variable pay versus lower levels in 2019-2020 that are referred to on the last slide. This accounts for most of the decline. Second is the movement in gross margin, which at a net level accounts for a very small element of the movement. There were a number of moving parts within the mix.
Food gross margins were lower as we invested in prices to drive volume in line with our Food First strategy, and this was partially offset by higher contributions from fuel and from higher general merchandise and clothing margins. As I said, we are pleased with the 83 basis points operating cost to sales reduction delivered so far as we work to deliver the 200 basis points targeted for March 2024. As Simon said, this has become more difficult in recent months with a much higher level of base cost inflation this year than we would have anticipated when we set out the plan. We continue to see material cost reduction opportunities, and Simon will cover some of the key programs behind this later on.
We remain in a very strong position relative to our competitors through the strength of our cost saving programs and the level of savings available that are unique to us. Looking now to financial services two-year profit movement. The two big areas of headwinds come from lower travel money and ATM activity and lower lending, albeit with the impact of lower lending having some significant offset from reduced funding costs. We have also made good headway on simplifying the business to reduce cost. In the year, the P&L benefited from the release of GBP 12 million of COVID provisions as we flagged at the interims. This led to an underlying profit of GBP 38 million after a loss of GBP 21 million last year. You can see on the right-hand side that we are starting to see a return to growth in unsecured lending, along with some recovery from travel money.
This supports our view that we expect to grow financial services profits in the year ahead. We also announced today that the bank has declared and paid its first ever dividend of GBP 50 million to the group, marking a significant milestone in the strategic plan. Going back now to the group P&L. In order to provide a clear view of our underlying performance, as usual, we exclude P&L items which by virtue of their size or nature, do not reflect the group's underlying performance. These are outlined on this slide. Note that the prior year results have been restated to reflect the removal of business rates from the onerous property contract provisions. Restructuring costs were significantly lower this year than last, when restructuring and impairments reflected the announcement of our Food First strategy.
Our guidance for total restructuring charges for the three years to March 2024 is unchanged at GBP 900 million-GBP 1 billion, except for the roughly GBP 40 million relating to onerous rates, which will now be recognized in future years when paid. To date, we've incurred GBP 640 million of these charges. More than offsetting this, we booked income from settling legal disputes, two of these relating to overcharges from payment card processing fees. We've now received all the cash in relation to these settlements, receiving GBP 93 million in the financial year. GBP 76 million of the net GBP 55 million gain noted in property finance and acquisition adjustments related to an unrealized gain on forward purchases of wind generated power.
This was another period of strong underlying cash generation despite the unwind of roughly half of the exceptional working capital inflows seen in the prior year, partially offset by the receipt of nearly GBP 100 million from the settlement of the legal disputes. The waterfall in the next slide shows the movement in net debt more clearly. We generate a free cash flow of GBP 503 million. With the dividend payments of GBP 238 million offset by the conversion to equity of GBP 240 million of the convertible bond, we reduce net debt excluding lease liabilities by around GBP 500 million from GBP 640 million at year-end 2021 to only GBP 141 million by the year-end 2021-2022. In the year, lease liabilities increased by nearly GBP 800 million.
In the year, lease liabilities increased by nearly GBP 800 million. During the year, we served notice to purchase 21 stores at the end of the leases from two investment vehicles which contain 26 stores known as Highbury and Dragon, in which we hold a 49% interest. As a result of this decision, we have recognized a substantial increase in our lease obligation based on the estimated value of these properties. By doing this, we are able to retain a small number of the stores as freeholds and sell and lease back the majority on lease terms that we want. Between now and the financial year 2024, as the leases expire, we will decide which of these stores we will retain or sell and lease back. The adverse net debt movement we've seen this year will reduce once all the transactions are fully complete.
This slide shows the strength of our free cash flow generation over the last five years, generating GBP 2.8 billion of free cash flow, of which roughly 60% has gone towards repaying debt and deleveraging to strengthen the balance sheet and improve our financial flexibility. Over GBP 1.1 billion or 40% has been paid as dividends to shareholders over this period, more than 20% of our current market capitalization. This is equated to paying out just over 50% of net earnings. The conversion of profit to free cash flow each year has strengthened over time as we've taken action by lowering pension contributions, lowering interest costs, and stopping capital injections into the bank. Leverage is now at 3.1x , and we have very limited non-lease debt.
In that context, I would like to share our updated priorities for capital allocation over the medium term, given that less cash will need to be allocated to debt reduction going forward. First, we will invest in the business to support and accelerate our strategy with CapEx remaining in the range of GBP 700 million-GBP 750 million each year. We reiterate our guidance of generating retail free cash flow of at least GBP 500 million per year. Second, we will use some of this free cash flow to deleverage further, targeting a solid investment-grade balance sheet consistent with target leverage of net debt to EBITDA of 3x-2.4x. This will provide us with a degree of financial flexibility that we think is appropriate.
Third, we are focusing on returning a higher proportion of underlying profit to shareholders in the first instance through the ordinary dividend, where we will increase the dividend payout ratio from around 53% of underlying earnings to around 60%. We will then selectively invest in projects such as lease buy-ins where commercially interesting opportunities exist. Finally, we expect leverage to move below 3x over time, particularly as the impact of the leverage of the Highbury and Dragon transactions drop away. Once we are comfortably in our target range, we expect to be able to return more cash to shareholders through share buybacks or higher dividends. In summary, we're reporting a strong performance for the year, benefiting from sustained COVID-driven grocery demand and the investments we have made in the food offer driving our volume market share performance.
This, together with strong cost-saving progress, particularly at Argos, has led to UPBT growth of 25% over the 2019-2020 base year. Underlying free cash generation was above expectation, and we have delivered our net debt reduction targets ahead of schedule. We are therefore able to start returning more of our profits to shareholders. It is a difficult backdrop for the year ahead, with plenty of uncertainties through the supply chain, cost inflation, and cost of living increases for consumers. Hence, we are expecting underlying profits in the range of GBP 630 million-GBP 690 million, significantly ahead of the GBP 586 million reported in 2019-2020, but lower than the elevated level of GBP 730 million reported in the financial year 2021-2022.
We know the structural changes we've made to the business, the momentum we've got, and the strong plans we have to continue this pace of change over the next two years put us in a very strong position relative to our competitors. Thank you very much for your time. I'll now hand you back to Simon to take you through our operational highlights and progress against our strategic priorities.
Thank you, Kevin. Let's now turn to our strategic priorities. By now, you'll be very familiar with these priorities, which we set out in November 2020, alongside our plan to transform this business over the three years to March 2024. We're now one year in. This plan is all about putting food back at the heart of Sainsbury's, and we're delivering on that. As you've seen, we're delivering through progress against all the priorities, with our other brands delivering better profitability, while our cost savings are allowing us to invest back into value to an extent that others can't match. Let's turn to Food First. The result of our focus back on food has been a grocery volume performance ahead of our key competitors over both one and two years. Importantly, we've seen strong performances relative to the market in both stores and online.
This is important as while the market has made a permanent shift to a higher digital participation, shopping habits are now continuing to normalize. In supermarkets, basket sizes are falling and transaction numbers rising. In grocery online, order numbers and basket size are both falling. We've seen some normalization across our convenience business, with total sales up nearly 9% over the last year as more urban city center and food on the move stores recover. This slide shows the significance of the sustained shift to digital trading, a lthough there was a lot of movement behind these averages given the phases of customer behavior through the year. For example, online grocery penetration is now closer to 15% than the average of 17% over the last year.
Customer satisfaction is a key point of differentiation for us, and so I'm delighted that customer satisfaction in our supermarkets has remained ahead of all our direct competitors, and is now moving back towards top position in online. More for us to do, as I said earlier, given we are setting the bar really high, but s trong and sustained momentum where it matters most in what we're delivering for our customers day in and day out. We all know availability is really important to customers, and I'm encouraged here too with how fast we recovered from the tough challenges in grocery supply chains through the middle of last year. We were agile and focused to drive through rapid improvement with great work from our teams and our suppliers. You can see the scale of improvement that followed into Christmas and quarter four.
Looking to some of the key customer service metrics versus the 2019-2020 base level, there are some clear standouts here. This was a direct consequence of staying close and relentlessly listening to our customers every day, and then investing in the areas that mattered most to them. I'm really proud too of what we delivered on value. Across Price Lock, the investment in key fresh items that matter most to customers, and Sainsbury's Quality Aldi Price Match, we've delivered a real shift in our value position over the last 18 months. We continue to build momentum and cut through on the key products which customers buy every week. Our latest phase of Sainsbury's Quality Aldi Price Match launched just last week with over 240 lines in total and 150 fresh products price matched to Aldi.
Now you can see the strength of our value focus here. We have consistently inflated less than others in the market. Customers have been noticing and are responding. You can see in the right-hand chart that we're gaining more spend from those customers who previously wouldn't have trusted our value across the whole basket. To be clear, we're not finished. We know we have more resources than many of our competitors to be able to continue to improve our relative value position at a time when value matters more than ever to our customers. It is clear the focus is working. We are driving more volume and more customers into Sainsbury's, and we intend to keep very focused in building on this momentum.
Product innovation is the lifeblood of any retail brand, and I'm delighted with our progress in launching the highest number of new products onto Sainsbury's shelves in many years. We delivered on our target to triple the amount of new product innovation, and this has driven the opportunity for trade up and the confidence for our customers to cook more creatively at home with our fantastic new Inspired to Cook range of ingredients and meal kits. We have also reformulated another 1,000 lines, improving quality, reducing salt, fat, or sugar content, or often changing packaging to reduce plastic. Taste the Difference continues to go from strength to strength, with growth of 15% over the last two years. We intend to go further in driving the clear trade-up opportunity and in leveraging the Taste the Difference brand over the year ahead.
It's not just about trade-up and quality either. We are helping everyone to eat better, providing advice, recipes, incentivization, and more choice in healthier and sustainable food. We're making strides on improving our welfare standards, and we are the first U.K. supermarket to offer 100% ASC-certified fresh Scottish salmon. We've increased food distribution through our partnership with Neighbourly. We are in the middle of a significant program of work to further improve our stores and the shopping experience, ensuring they better reflect the way that customers are shopping now. As you can see on this slide, we're upgrading our fresh food offer in hundreds of stores, transforming food service through partnerships, expanding our World Foods offer in more than half our supermarkets, and continuing to gain market share in beauty with the rollout of our new format.
We're also creating destination space for general merchandise and clothing, and improving customer service and efficiency with investments in checkout technology. Looking to the high fat, sugar, and salt regulations which come into place this year, we've taken advantage of this to bring innovation to our product displays, and we're very encouraged with the trials we've been running. This is a significant cost and operational undertaking in relaying our supermarkets to meet the new regulations, but we're on track to deliver this change, and we believe we can drive further advantage as we do so. This slide gives some impressions of the changes we're making and the results we're achieving across key parts of the shopping trip in produce, bakery, beauty, and world foods. We're encouraged by the sales response in the stores where we've launched, and we intend to drive these improvements out at pace across our supermarket estate.
Now, earlier this year, we announced the transformation of our in-store dining and food to-go offer following trials with Boparan and our existing relationship with Starbucks. This rollout will reduce our operating costs and bring a radical improvement in the quality and choice we can offer for customers. The full program will take us two to three years to implement, but will position us and our stores with dine-in, dark kitchen, and home delivery capabilities as food service demand and immediacy become even more important to customers over the next three to five years. Looking outside stores to our online business, we have inevitably seen a normalization of demand this year. Clearly demand remains at a far higher level than pre-pandemic. Broadly, we are still delivering twice the volume of online orders compared with two years ago and against the pre-COVID base.
We have gained significant market share, as you can see here. As this online participation continues to normalize, more customers are returning back into our stores. Looking at our online performance in more detail, importantly, we've sustained improvements in online profitability through better productivity with drop densities and item pick rates per hour above pre-pandemic levels. We're additionally very encouraged by the increase in more loyal delivery pass holders. In recent months, we've had a lot more questions about our convenience business in the light of the growth of on-demand delivery and some of the changed shopping habits as a result of the pandemic. I hope this chart gives some helpful context. Overall, it shows that sales through our convenience stores are down 1% on pre-pandemic levels, with sales having recovered by 9% over the last year.
Trade in less urban stores are significantly up on pre-pandemic levels, and in more urban, slightly up. Together, these account for just over 80% of our total convenience sales, while our smaller food on the move business is still heavily impacted. The chart on the left shows the scale and growth of our on-demand business. We think this is now probably the biggest on-demand grocery business in the U.K. Through the platforms of Chop Chop, Deliveroo, and Uber Eats. It is still very small in the context of the scale of our total convenience business. We are making really good progress with the second key pillar of our strategy, Brands that Deliver, with Nectar and the bank and our general merchandise and clothing business supporting the core food business and delivering sustainable returns. Nectar continues to grow.
More than 9 million digital collectors and more than 1 million customers are now benefiting from personalized Nectar Prices. At the moment, this is only available on SmartShop, where it has delivered a very noticeable uplift in value perceptions. Looking ahead, we'll be rolling out Nectar Prices across our other channels. As we said at our Nectar Deep Dive event last October, Nectar is not just delivering value for customers, it's delivering additional profit to the business, and we're running ahead of the plan that we set out, and digital media is the key contributor to this. We are pleased with progress to date and confident in our plans as we extend Nectar Prices and grow the number of digital Nectar users. Our Brands that Deliver objectives for general merchandise and clothing were to reduce cost to serve and improve profit delivery.
We're encouraged with progress, as you can see here, with structural cost reductions now flowing through the Argos transformation program and a better sales mix as we focus on more profitable categories and reduced promotional activity. On this slide, you can see the impacts of reduced promotional activity and category choices and of the focus on higher margin clothing and home and furniture ranges. Stepping back from the tough comparatives at Argos and looking at the two-year trend, we are seeing some signs of encouragement as availability continues to improve and we have better managed the way that availability is presented to our customers. Having said that, we're clearly heading into an environment where disposable income will be under more pressure than we've seen in some time, where product prices are more likely to be inflating, and where global supply chains will remain challenged.
We will offset some of these macro headwinds through continued delivery of Argos transformation savings, but we have reflected these uncertainties in our outlook for the year ahead. We hit a big milestone with Tu this year when the brand hit GBP 1 billion of sales for the first time, and we grew sales against a period last year when many competitors were closed. These are more profitable clothing sales, given the significant increase in full price sales participation. We've also sustained a big step up in the scale of our online clothing business that we saw last year, and we're benefiting from improved efficiency and profitability in this part of our clothing business. These are the objectives that we laid out for our financial services business in September 2019 pre-COVID.
We are making progress with all of them, having tightened the focus and scale of the business on providing financial services for Sainsbury's and Argos customers. In the short term, we're expecting another profit improvement this year. Perhaps the most important thing to note is that we've moved from an objective of the bank no longer seeking capital injections from the group to the bank paying its first dividend to the group of GBP 50 million, with the potential for more in the future. The bank continues to innovate in delivering financial services products for Sainsbury's and Argos customers.
As an example, I would call out the monthly payment plan now live at Argos, extending the appeal of credit to a wider audience versus the buy now, pay later product previously available. This is an important step for Argos in improving its proposition relative to other general merchandise retailers, and there are further phases of this launch to come, targeting high ticket areas such as furniture and consumer electronics. Turning to Save to Invest, our third key pillar, reducing structural operating costs to fuel investment in the core business. Kevin covered our progress in operating cost reduction earlier on. As a reminder, we've targeted a 200 basis point reduction in our operating cost to sales ratio by March 2024. It's a goal that requires fundamental changes to the way that we work, taking out structural costs that won't return.
We've made bold decisions already, which have delivered 83 basis points of improvement versus the base in 2019-2020. Clearly, any absolute cost savings that we deliver are offset by cost inflation. Of course, our task is now harder than we would have anticipated 18, 12, or even six months ago. The cost environment has eaten some of the headroom we previously had. As a result, progress will be more back-end loaded. We do have strong plans in place, and we're very focused on delivery and execution in order to realize the 200 basis points target. Crucially, as Kevin said earlier, we know that we can continue to unlock savings that are unique to us, putting us in a strong position to offset cost inflation relative to our competitors.
Looking to some of the key areas of delivery, you will recognize some of these and others are new as we communicate changes internally. We're often asked how we will improve online profitability. There are two great examples here. Firstly, through productivity improvements in online operations such as picking and order routing. Secondly, by recognizing the changing role of the front end of the store as more sales go through the back door and adjusting the cost base to reflect this through investment in future front-end checkout technology, which additionally improves the customer experience. In June last year, we launched our Plan for Better commitment, setting out key targets within the three pillars of better for you, better for the planet, and better for everyone. We committed not only to setting bold targets, but being transparent in our reporting against them, as you can see on this slide.
As I look at the progress made in some of our priority areas, I am particularly encouraged by the improvement against our food waste reduction targets and against our trajectory to become net zero in our own operations by no later than 2035, a target which we accelerated from 2040 in November of last year. We continue to work towards our healthy and better for you sales target with a significant proportion of our value investment this year being on healthier products. It does, however, remain an ongoing journey to transition more of the basket into healthier choices. We recognize that we are facing into a greater challenge with our plastic reduction target. We're pleased to have rolled out our flexible plastic recycling scheme to all supermarket stores during the year, but we know there is still much more to do on recycling and packaging.
I wanted to pull out one key example of where we are using collective action across our industry to address a complex issue. During COP26, we signed the World Wildlife Fund Retailers' Commitment for Nature along with four other U.K. food retailers. One of the areas where we have committed to act together is on deforestation, i n support of our commitment to achieve 100% deforestation-free supply chains by 2025. As a group of retailers, we've asked key traders to sign up to the ambitions of The UK Soy Manifesto on how they are working to become deforestation-free. In taking bold action in our own supply chain, we've rolled out our deforestation-free soy roadmap on animal feed to all our key suppliers.
This work will dramatically reduce our carbon footprint across meat, fish, and poultry supply chains and will be a significant lever in achieving our Scope 3 target. I've talked about what we've achieved over the first year of our Food First plan, I think it's also important to reflect on how we are working to deliver this transformation. In looking back at what we've achieved, I think everything comes back to the commitments that we clearly made at the outset. Putting customers and colleagues first, moving at pace, and using our cost savings program and improve returns from our portfolio brands to invest back into the proposition. We are holding ourselves to account against the key metrics we set out to deliver, and we are consistently reporting against them. This is how we as a leadership team are committed to lead and deliver across Sainsbury's today.
In wrapping up, I wanted to return to some of the themes I started with. We're one year into a three-year transformation of our business, and we're delivering against that plan. We've got real momentum, and we've got that by focusing on the things that really matter to our customers and to our colleagues. We're taking cost out of the business where it's not needed, and we're investing it back into the areas that matter most to customers. Most obviously, we've transformed our position on value. We've been building real trust from customers in our value over the last 18 months, and this puts us in a strong place to weather the storm that customers now face.
We know it's really challenging for customers right now, and that's why we're going to be doing everything we can to support them, delivering the best value where it really matters in their shopping basket week in, week out. By no means does this make it easy given the pressures on our cost base, on the cost of living for consumers, and on discretionary spending, and w hile we still face considerable uncertainties on key parts of the supply chain. I hope we've also demonstrated that we're in a strong position to offset more of those cost pressures and put more back into the customer proposition than others. As a result, we're confident that we can maintain our momentum, and that confidence is reflected in our commitment to shareholders.
We've delivered strong cash flows, we've reduced leverage, and we're confident that we can continue to generate strong, sustainable cash flows. In turn, this means that we can now commit to returning a higher proportion of our underlying profits to shareholders. Thank you for your time and for listening this morning.