Good morning, everyone. As we have a quorum, I declare the meeting open. On behalf of my colleagues on the board, I'm pleased to welcome you to this year's Annual General Meeting. I'm Byron Grote and I'll be chairing today's meeting. I'll call on other members of the board to help answer your questions. Nothing is more important to us than your safety while you're here. Please spend a moment studying the fire escape routes shown on the screen. There are no scheduled fire alarm tests today. If the alarm is activated, please make your way to the nearest fire escape located either side of the event space. Please do not take your belongings with you. Leave the building and head for the fire assembly point behind the sports pitch at the rear of the Heart Building.
Marshals will direct you and will be on hand to provide any assistance that's required. Please do not use the lifts in the event of a fire alarm. If you're not able to manage the stairs, please use the evacuation intercom and assistance will be provided. Please can I remind you that photographs or recordings are not permitted to be made during the meeting. Please make sure that your phones are switched off or turned to silent. To those of you watching via our webcast live stream, thank you very much for joining us. The recorded webcast will be available to view for month following the conclusion of the meeting via the Tesco PLC website. I'd like to introduce my board colleagues here today.
From my right, Thierry Garnier, Caroline Silver, Lindsey Pownall, Alison Platt, our Group CFO, Imran Nawaz, our Group CEO, Ken Murphy, Company Secretary, Robert Welch, Stewart Gilliland, Karen Whitworth, Melissa Bethell, and Bertrand Bodson. There have been a few changes to the board since last year's AGM, which I'll talk you through. Last October, we welcomed Caroline Silver to the board as an independent Non-executive Director and member of the Audit Committee. Caroline has a wealth of experience across a number of commercial, financial, and governance roles. Lindsey Pownall will be retiring from the board at the conclusion of today's AGM and stepping down from her role as Chair of what is now called the Sustainability Committee, where she will be succeeded by Stewart Gilliland. Lindsey has made valuable, insightful contributions to the board over the past seven years and I wish her all the best for the future.
I'd like to thank her for the passion and dedication that she's shown in embedding sustainability across the group. As you well know, today, John Allan steps down from his role as chair of the board and as a director of Tesco PLC. John was appointed in 2015. His tenure as chair was due to end shortly. In light of this, a succession planning process was initiated at the start of the year. We expect this to conclude in the near future. Hope to be able to announce our new chair shortly. Following the conclusion of today's meetings, I will become interim chair of the board until a permanent chair is appointed. Recently, four allegations have been made in the media in relation to John's personal conduct. Three of these allegations were vigorously denied by John.
For the other, John Allan unreservedly apologized for the comment he made to a CBI member of staff. One of the allegations related to the Tesco AGM in 2022. In response, Tesco immediately instigated an extensive review of this allegation. While the review did not identify any evidence in relation to the allegation at the AGM last year, the board has a responsibility to act in the best interest of the company. These allegations risk becoming a distraction to Tesco. The board is completely committed to supporting a culture where colleagues are respected and feel able to speak up about any concerns. Our review of the allegation made against John Allan involved an internal communication to colleagues, which invited them to come forward if they had any concerns regarding any conduct issues, and specifically at the Tesco 2022 AGM.
Although I know some of you may have questions about the allegations raised against John, I hope you appreciate that it would not be appropriate for us to comment or speculate further on these matters. Now to turn to the business of the day, which is, of course, an opportunity for you to consider the group's performance and to ask questions and vote. I'm sure many of you will have questions to ask the board. To make sure that we deal with as many questions as possible, we've once again invited you to register your questions at the question registration desk before the start of the meeting, and I know many of you have done that. If you've already registered a question and made yourself known to the steward, you should be seated in an area behind one of the two question points.
At the appropriate moment during the meeting, you'll be asked by a steward to go to a question point to ask your question. If you've not registered a question, but decide during the course of the meeting that you'd like to ask one, please approach one of the stewards near the question points, and they'll be able to assist you. One final point. If you have a question about an individual experience in a store or a customer matter, please could I ask you to speak with our colleagues on the customer service desk after the meeting? They'll be happy to help. Thank you. We're here today to vote on the resolution set out in the notice of meeting. Before we go to that, I'd like to share with you my own thoughts about the business over the past year.
I'll ask our Chief Executive Ken Murphy to share some reflections about our performance and the progress we're making in delivering our strategy and purpose. Last year was another challenging one, which saw us to continue to navigate supply chain issues and changes in shoppers' behavior as we emerged from the pandemic. We also stepped up support to customers, colleagues, suppliers, and communities through the ongoing cost of living challenges, doing all that we can to keep the weekly shop not just affordable, but also healthy and sustainable, while delivering great quality and convenience. Tesco colleagues have risen to meet every challenge, and I'd like to take the opportunity to thank them for another year of incredibly hard work and dedication.
We've made sure that their commitment has been recognized by rewarding three pay rises over the past year to U.K. store colleagues, which represents our biggest ever investment in pay. We continue to focus on embedding our purpose in all that we do, serving our customers, communities, and planet a little better every day. Our purpose guides every Tesco colleague in how they conduct our business, from the shop floor to the boardroom. More than ever, we're doing everything we can to support our customers. For more than a year inflation has put pressure on our customers' budgets, our colleagues, our suppliers, and our own operations. Customers are facing the highest levels of food inflation for decades, and we must do everything we can to help them by staying focused on the cost of the weekly shop.
As well as repositioning our value offering so that we're the most competitive we've ever been, we've also made sure that Clubcard remains the best supermarket loyalty scheme. We've helped customers to spend less and ensured that wherever and however they shop with us, they can rely on Tesco for consistent value. At Tesco we know it's our job to help people and communities through these challenges by keeping the weekly shop reliably affordable, but also by doing our bit as a supportive employer and partner to suppliers and local communities. Tesco has a unique place in our communities and will continue to use our position to support them.
Ken will talk in more detail about some of these initiatives. A particular highlight was our community grants initiative, which last year celebrated the milestone of GBP 100 million awarded in community grants to more than 50,000 local projects. This year, Tesco will award another GBP 5 million to local projects to support our communities, and especially schools, to give pupils a healthy start, and through Golden Grants, we'll give an additional funding to 200 schools and community projects. We've also been making every effort to embed key environmental, social, and governance issues into the fabric of how we do business. Management are now financially incentivized as part of their remuneration to deliver against ESG targets, including gender and ethnicity representation, carbon reduction, and food waste reduction in our own operations.
As part of our ongoing commitment to return cash to shareholders, we announced a final dividend of GBP 0.0705, which will be paid to shareholders on the 23rd of June. Combined with our half year dividend of GBP 0.0385 that makes the full year dividend of GBP 0.0 109 , which is in line with last year's. We also announced in April that we are extending our share buyback program, which we see as a critical driver of shareholder returns, buying back another GBP 750 million worth of shares by April 2024. I'd like to reiterate my thanks to the management team and all colleagues for the hard work and commitment that they've extended over the past year.
It's been another challenging year. The resilience that we've developed over the last few years gives us a sustainable competitive advantage, and we've emerged a stronger and more agile business. Guided by our purpose and strategic priorities, we are heading into a future of sustainable growth. With that, I'll hand over to Ken. Ken?
Thank you very much, Byron. Welcome, everyone, to the Heart Building. This is a building specially designed to be the home of our innovation and learning. I think it's particularly fitting that we should have our AGM here today, and it's a beautiful day, so I'm particularly impressed that you took the time to join us on this sunny Friday. I'd like to start, by the way, by just adding my personal thanks to Lindsey on behalf of all the Tesco colleagues, for the brilliant work she did leading our CSR committee. Our commitment to sustainability as a company is huge. We like to think of ourselves as leaders in the industry on sustainability, not only in the U.K., but actually globally.
I think I can point to a number of occasions when Tesco has really led out on the sustainability agenda. You can take it from me that we will continue to do so in the future as we head for our very ambitious targets on net zero, both from Scope 1 and from Scope 3. We can count on Stewart as our new Sustainability Chair to support and to drive us in that agenda. Today, I'm gonna talk to you about three different things. Obviously, a review of the year just gone in terms of our performance and some of the key metrics relating to that and how we've looked after our stakeholders on the journey. The second thing I'm going to talk about is just to update you on our first quarter trading, which we updated the market on this morning.
Last but not least, to talk to you about how we bring our purpose to life as a business. As Byron said serving our customers, communities, and the planet a little better every day. Let's start off with the overview of the financial performance. I think by any measure, given the circumstances, the environment that we're working in, this has been a strong performance, and as a consequence, increasingly we're starting to see the agility at which our people respond to the challenges, and the ability to withstand the various shocks and continue to deliver a fantastic shopping trip for our customers, have become a real source of competitive advantage and of personal pride for me to be part of such a great team.
Alongside that, it hasn't distracted us from delivering against our longer term strategic priorities. I'll speak about those a little bit more later. Of course, through all of this, we work really hard to maintain balance in how we think about the business, making sure that we deliver for all of our stakeholders, our customers, through value and quality, our colleagues, through pay reward, working conditions, and the culture and environment they work in, our suppliers, and of course, our investors. Again, I'll speak about that a bit later. Looking at our full year results, you can see the headlines. You should already have them, of course, in the annual report. I'll run through them really quickly. It's important to point out that we had growth in all our business units. Every one of our business units contributed positively to the performance.
Booker actually being the star of the show with the strongest growth rate among all the business units, Ireland also doing very well and CE being the only one of the few businesses to deliver also positive profit growth year-on-year. It was really a team performance across all the businesses, with strong top-line sales growth of 5.1%, retail operating profits of GBP 2.487 million, which of course, was down 6.3% year-on-year. We had the strongest efficiency year we've ever had, nearly GBP 600 million of cost savings through efficiency.
You can do the math, that having grown top-line sales by 5% which is really strong by any retail metric, by having saved more money than we've ever saved, the fact that profits still went backwards is a testament to just how much we've invested in value and trying to shield consumers from the worst effects of inflation, while also making sure that we rewarded our hourly paid colleagues with a increase of about 15% over 12 months, done through the last 3 pay reviews. Notwithstanding that, we've delivered a fantastic free cash flow, which is really a testimony to the emphasis and the focus we have made as a business of being cash efficient. All of that has lent to a strong EPS of GBP 0.2185 and a full year dividend of GBP 0.109.
Of course, we've continued our share buyback program of GBP 750 million on top of the dividend. Through all of that of course we've managed to hold debt flat. As you can see, the last two years have represented a significant step up in free cash flow, this really has been all about a focus on cash, because that is really what drives the business. That's what allows us to invest in the business for the future. On the right-hand side, you can see what that has meant for shareholders. Consequentially, you're seeing a progressive improvement in the return on equity invested through a combination of a dividend and a share buyback. To give you a little bit more meat on the bones in terms of when we say delivering for our stakeholders, what does that mean?
I think the first is to say that we are at the most competitive we have ever been relative to the other players in the grocery market. It's the best price index we've ever had. Regardless of what you hear in the media. We are doing more on value now than we have ever done as a company. We can see that in not only our price indexes but also in the customer satisfaction scores that we're achieving. We're doing that without compromising on quality. Quite the reverse, actually. Over the last two years, we've invested significantly in product quality. You can see that through the Finest ranges that we've launched over the last two years and of the progress and the sales penetration we're achieving in our Finest ranges.
As I just mentioned, we made the biggest single year investment in colleague pay last year, and we have the most comprehensive and leading package of benefits and rewards for our colleagues, on top of that hourly rate. Of course, last year, we also increased the cap on the colleague discount by 50%. In terms of suppliers, we achieved the latest Advantage Report, number one for the 7th consecutive year. Some of you will be aware that the latest GCA rankings, we slipped a few notches down. I think that was literally 1% or 2% difference because not a lot separates the top six.
Over 95% of suppliers have said that we comply with the Grocery Code, so there is a strong sense of transparency, but clearly, conversations with suppliers have become more robust about making sure that we pass through the minimum possible cost to consumers because we understand just how difficult it is for families and for people in today's environment. That said, whenever we've seen any suppliers in difficulty, whether that be the milk producers last year, our pork producers, our egg producers, we have invested very significantly, immediately, to make sure that they continue to stay in business, continue to supply sustainably. Many of those suppliers, we operate open book contracts so they don't suffer. If costs go up, we absorb those costs, as those costs come down, we pass those savings through to the customer.
That's why, for example, we were able to lead out on reducing the price of milk, and we've also led out reducing the price of pasta and oil, and we've also been able to reduce the price of bread and butter. We will continue to pass through those savings as they become available, as we see commodity prices starting to tail off. Again, for shareholders, we've managed to hold the dividend flat, and we have maintained the share buyback, so delivering a very strong return for shareholders. Last but not least, by any means we're making great progress towards our 2035 target of being net zero in our own operations. This is a challenging target, but it's one which we as a company are fully committed to.
We are also in the process of finalizing our Scope 3 targets and working with the SBTi to really hone and refine that to make sure that we have targets that we all understand and can get after and can share, of course, with the entire supplier base, because Scope 3 is really all parts of the supply chain, so it's that bit more complex to enact. In terms of Quarter One trading we've had a strong start to the year. Sales overall of 8.2%, particularly strong sales in the U.K. of 9%, but strong again across the board, if you look at Ireland and Booker, both achieving good sales performance. Bit more challenging in Central Europe.
Part of that is really the fact that we're lapping a very strong quarter last year in Central Europe because the Hungarian government injected a lot of stimulus into the market this time last year, and that is not there this year. Of course, Hungary has experienced one of the highest rates of inflation in Europe. Let me talk now briefly about probably the most important part of my job, which is delivering on our purpose. As Byron said earlier, and I repeated a moment ago, our purpose is to serve our customers, communities, and planet a little better every day. That is something which really drives the whole organization.
We are fully aware that we cannot build a sustainably healthy business that feeds the nation if we are not thinking about all aspects and all stakeholders. This is what this purpose is designed to do. If we start with customers, as I said, we are the most competitive we've ever been. This is showing up in our propositions. We have three main pillars of our value proposition. The first is that we have about 700 products mainly fresh products, so products that customers need every day to feed their families, that we peg to Aldi and say, "Look, you will not be disadvantaged on price.
If you shop with Tesco against the best and most competitive price in the market, we will match you toe for toe. On 1,000 or more of branded products that you can't get in a discounter, we'll say, "You know what? Don't worry about them either." We have a low price guarantee. That means that every day you come in, it'll be the lowest possible price in the market, and in fact, we've frozen the low price guarantee since October and we call it Low Everyday Prices. Then on top of that, we have built Clubcard Prices and that really is designed to take care of almost everything else. At any given moment, you have up to 7,000 products promoted through the Clubcard Price program. The combination of those three mechanisms, we think, is market-beating. It's the best in the market.
It's the only proposition that covers the entire range of what customers need but provides really sharp value that you would typically get in a very limited discounter, so it's the best of both worlds. In terms of our colleagues, you can see the progression has been pretty dramatic. From GBP 9 to almost GBP 11.02 over two years, so over 22% increase and 15% of that 22% has come in the last 12 months. We've really worked hard to make sure that our colleagues are rewarded fairly for the incredible work they do, that they are not disadvantaged through the cost of living crisis, and we've done a number of different things to help them manage this, the inflationary impacts that they're experiencing.
We've been rewarded by a great stable base of colleagues doing a brilliant job for customers day- in, day- out, and fantastic people to work with, I have to say. I talk briefly about the work we're doing to support our suppliers, and this is something that doesn't get a lot of airtime but is hugely important. Last year, our pig suppliers, you may or may not be aware of this, but there was a massive swine flu in China about three years ago. As a consequence, and China's by far the biggest consumer of pork in the world and so demand for pork surged, and British producers reacted to that demand, built up supply, and served the needs of the Chinese market.
Literally, that demand switched off sometime early last year, giving our pork producers a huge problem. We injected over GBP 30 million extra for our U.K. pig farmers to basically keep them in business and make sure that supply was continued. At the same time, we launched the I Love British brand to really make sure that customers understood just how passionate we are about farming in the U.K. how much we value the farming supply chain in the U.K., and how important we think it is to have a sustainable, reliable food system and more food produced in the U.K.
That was topped up and supplemented by over GBP 28 million invested in the U.K. egg sector because clearly, that has also been a sector that has seen a slow, but notable, reduction in capacity as the costs of feed and other things have soared. Of course as the market has migrated from cage to free-range hens, that has created a massive delta in cost. Similarly, over 20% higher paid for milk through the Tesco Sustainable Dairy Group. Very important, helping over 500 dairy farmers not only to sustain their business but allow them to do so in an environmentally friendlier way, higher welfare standards, and higher provenance standards. Then, of course, as I mentioned earlier, we achieved number one yet again in the Advantage Survey for the 7th year in the row.
From our own viewpoint, survey, we achieved a record 86.6 satisfaction rating, and we pay our smallest suppliers immediately. We make sure that anyone who operates on a week-by-week cash flow, they get paid by Tesco immediately if they are a small supplier, which is hugely important, in our view, in nurturing and helping small suppliers to grow. In terms of supporting our communities, this, for me, is one of the more important parts of why Tesco is where it is today. As I've said many times, people don't get too excited about the Tesco brand if you ask them about it generally. They only really come alive when you talk about Tesco local to them, their local colleagues that they interact with day- in, day- out.
Therefore, most of our charitable support, most of our community support goes to serve the communities around our local stores, and we look to make a big impact. Some of the numbers are truly staggering, and it gives you a sense of the impact Tesco has across the nation. Last year, we were able to donate over 52 million meals to our food charity partners. That's an incredible number, and it really was a combined effort of corporate donations, surplus food, and of course, our customers' generosity, which has been truly amazing through all of this, and that has been achieved through partnership with FareShare, the Trussell Trust and Olio. Our winter collection alone managed to collect 2.4 million meals in a very short space of time.
Since 2002, we've raised over GBP 37 million for Cancer Research UK. Since 2018, we've raised over GBP 25 million for our three main health charity partners. We've achieved donations of GBP 8.5 in over a year for Ukraine through the Red Cross. A great effort of combined between, again, corporate donations, also the incredible generosity of our customers. Byron alluded to it earlier, we have a nationwide community grant program. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of welcoming six children to the campus to talk about healthy starts, which really was. W.C. Fields, I think it was said, "Never work with children or animals because they'll outshine you," and that definitely was the case yesterday.
They were absolutely fantastic, really curious, really energetic, and asking me some really tough questions until Jordan from Diversity showed up, and then I was completely forgotten, and it was all about the dance routine after that. Stronger Starts is really all about giving children a better chance in life through making sure they get fed, so they learn better, and they get active, so they have more energy. And this is something I'm personally passionate about, and I know my colleagues are deeply passionate about. I think, as Byron said we have an ambition to put GBP 5 million behind that program this year, and then to go from there, and we're very excited about that.
As he also mentioned, community grants has actually delivered over GBP 100 million since its inception six years ago, and we were very privileged to welcome some of our recipients of the community grants, and also some of our community champions from the stores, to a parliamentary reception a couple of days ago, where we really celebrated the success of this program. We want to talk about how do we help customers stay healthy? It's right to say that the cost-of-living crisis has not been our friend. You can definitely see a trend of customers looking for more comfort eating through the cost-of-living crisis. We have worked really hard to kind of reverse that trend. As you know we have a commitment that 65% of what we sell will be healthy by 2025.
We're up edging towards 60% now, having been at 55% just a few years ago. We're making great progress, and we're doing that through a number of ways. The first is our Better Baskets initiative, and that's despite all the pressure on value, value, we have really taken time out of our kind of trading communications to talk about healthy baskets, to talk about healthier alternatives, and make sure they are affordable, so they can be accessed by everybody. A personal one that I'm pleased about is the fact that this year, in this year's barbecue range we launched an entire range of Finest vegetable meals that can either be a side or a main course, but they are entirely vegetable-based and fresh. We, of course, led the way also in plant-based.
The second thing we're doing is really trying to address some of the worst outcomes from the obesity crisis, diabetes being number one by a country mile. We've done a huge amount of work with Diabetes UK. We've trained every one of our pharmacists in kind of advanced, diabetic care. We, of course, have everything you need in the store to manage your condition and with the right diet and exercise, to try and reverse that condition. Last but not least, we've removed over 71 billion calories, over the last, I want to say, five or six years through reformulation, without compromising on quality and taste.
That is no mean feat, I can promise you, but is a testimony to the brilliant chefs that we have actually working just below us to make sure that we deliver the best quality food, but one that is increasingly more healthy for our customers. Of course, the work we are doing to achieve our targets of net zero by 2035. Firstly, of course, the work we are doing in our stores, and we are investing very heavily in that program. We have, and this is complete now, invested over GBP 1 billion in LED lighting. We are spending about GBP 400 million a year in refitting our stores.
The key benefit of that is it allows us to replace the refrigeration, dramatically reduces energy consumption, but also the type of emissions from that refrigeration are much more friendly to the Earth than the historical ones, that is making a massive difference. We, of course, are also on track to replace our fleet with electric vans for our grocery home delivery service, with more than 250 vans now on the road. We've managed to remove over 2 billion pieces of plastic from our U.K. business over the last 12 months. In summary, we've done, I believe, the very best we could do in this environment, supporting all of our stakeholders through a massive cost-of-living crisis. We have unwavering commitment to value, if anything, we have doubled down.
My assurance to you is we will not waver on our commitment to value. No matter how tough things get, we will find a way. We will continue to look for strong performance across all of our businesses, we'll do this and achieve this through a brilliant team effort. I'm very lucky to work with a very talented team at Tesco, who day in, day out, surprise me, delight me, and push and challenge me to make sure we're the best we can be as a business. Look, that's all I have to say for you today. Thank you very much for your time, with that, I think I will pass over. Thank you.