Good morning, everyone. I get to interrupt great conversation again. I'm gonna get a reputation for that, I think. But first and foremost, I want to welcome you to Brown-Forman, Old Forester Distillery here at 117 West Main Street. For those of you that I have not met, and for those of you on the webcast, I am Sue Perram, Director of Investor Relations. I've been with Brown-Forman for about 15 years now, but prior to that, I was actually sitting in your seats, and let me tell you, the view is a little different up here. I liked it out there. I want to welcome you to Louisville, which is our hometown and has been since 1870.
There's a lot of history here, and I know the scenery behind me almost looks fake, but I guarantee you, if you go and knock on the wall, it's pretty solid brick. I know a lot of you have traveled far and wide to come here, and Louisville isn't exactly the easiest place to get to, so thank you for doing so. We've got people here from Melbourne, from Amsterdam, from London, and we've got 17 states represented, all the way from New York to California and then from Wisconsin all the way down to Florida and everywhere in between. So thank you all for joining us today, and thank you to those on the webcast that are also joining us virtually. So, as I mentioned, we are in 117 West Main Street.
This is actually where Old Forester occupied offices from 1900 to 1919. We all know what happened then. So we found some other offices after that, but I hope that after being at Woodford last night, standing here in this place today, and then for the tours this afternoon, as you go to see our cooperage and then also our campus, which is also celebrating actually 100 years, that you get a sense of the history and why when you hear us talk about decades and generations and the resilience of this company, you begin to understand why. So we are gonna hold a Q&A session after all of the presentations, so you'll have an opportunity to ask whatever burning questions are on your mind.
But I know there is one, one question right now that everybody wants to know: How do you say Louisville? So here, I want you to practice with me. Put your tongue at the top of your mouth and say, Lou-uh-ville. Louisville. We'll do it one more time. Louisville. There, you're all official. You're all official Louisvillians. All right, I have a few things to cover before we begin. First is, safety protocol, so I get all the exciting stuff. We take, safety very seriously for our employees, for our guests, and for the contractors that are here with us today. So a couple of things. If there is a reason to evacuate the building, you will hear an audible alarm, you will see strobe lights. Run, panic! No, calmly, we will find the stairwells. Don't take the elevators. We will exit the building.
There is a park at the corner of First and Washington. That will be our meeting spot. If there's a reason for us to have to shelter in place, it'll look sunny outside, but you never know in Louisville, the weather can change like that. We get two seasons, sometimes in the same day. If we have to shelter in place, same thing, we'll work our way down the stairs, but into the sub-basement here. We'll gather outside of the employee break room, and we will shelter there until we are told to return. So those are our safety protocols. In any situation, yeah, please, you can look to us if you have any questions. So next, my favorite, the standard investor relations greeting. I should have this, like, tattooed on my arm. Today's investor presentation contains forward-looking statements based on our current expectations.
Numerous risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated or projected. Many of the factors that will determine future results are beyond the company's ability to control or predict, and so you should not place any undue reliance on any of these forward-looking statements. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements, whether due to new information or future events otherwise. We've listed a number of the risk factors that you now see behind me that you should consider in conjunction with our forward-looking statements. Our significant risk factors are also described in our public filings, our 10-Ks and our 10-Qs. We also will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures today.
These measures and a reconciliation of the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and the reasons that management believes that they are useful information to investors regarding the company's financial results are contained in the investor presentation. All of that. Later this morning, we're gonna have a little fun with some trivia, so be sure to have your cell phones ready and available to play along for some fabulous prizes. We hope that you get a lot out of our presentations today. I know our management team is very excited to share our story with you, as well as to add additional insights into our long-term ambitions, as well as addressing your questions. So with that, I am going to run through our agenda.
Lawson Whiting is going to set the stage today with the introduction of our Make It a Double ambition. Matias Bentel will then kick off our discussion about American whiskey, and he will share the important role that Jack Daniel's is going to play in helping us achieve that ambition. Jeremy Shepherd will then provide insights into our American whiskey ambition and share more about Woodford Reserve and Old Forester, and how they will further strengthen our position as a global leader in American whiskey. Thomas Hinrichs is then going to share more about our tequila portfolio and our tequila brands, and how Brown-Forman is well positioned to seize the opportunity in a very, very attractive category.
Marshall Farrer is then going to walk us through our bold thinking and our approach to winning with our emerging brands and our RTD portfolio, and then we'll have some trivia fun. We'll then hear from Tim Nall, Matthew Hamel, Kirsten Hawley, and Crystal Peterson, who will discuss our commitments to the environment, to our consumers, to our employees, and then also to our communities. Leanne Cunningham will share her thoughts on the shape of our P&L and achieving our Make It a Double ambition. And then finally, Campbell Brown will close out the presentations with his perspective on the evolution of governance, family, and Brown-Forman to deliver the next generation of growth. We'll then bring all the presenters up together for Q&A.
A PDF version of the slides that you will be seeing here today, which include the presenters' biographies. They will be found on the Brown-Forman website on our investor relations page under Events and Presentations. So with all of that, it's my great pleasure to turn things over to Lawson Whiting, President and CEO of Brown-Forman.
All right. Well, thank you, Sue, and good morning, everyone. It's great to be up here again. I enjoyed talking to so many of you last night. It was such a beautiful atmosphere. It was a beautiful night to be out there. I know that there were a few horses running around as we were pulling up in our car, which is always good. You got to catch that at the right time. But springtime in that part of the world or in that part of Kentucky is something quite spectacular. Now, we're here today, very different. So we own two big whiskey distilleries. Well, we own more than that, but in Kentucky, we've got two big whiskey distilleries that you can visit.
That one, obviously being bringing in the authentic, the countryside, the everything, a lot of horse things, the Derby, everything that Woodford Reserve is about in the ultra-premium space. It's a little different here at Old Forester, and I thought I would open with just a bit of a story about how this building almost wasn't. So Sue talked about how it was our headquarters 100 years ago, but about 10 or 12 years ago, we bought this property again, and we're going to build this big distillery.
And I remember it was July of 2015, and I was coming back from Chicago, and I was going over the I-65 bridge, so right over the river here, and I look over in downtown, and there is flames and smoke as high, as far as you can see, and it was a giant, you know, it was a giant fire and had no idea what it was or where it was, but that was too bad. Kind of made my way home. I don't live all that far from here, and Campbell called me first, and then my phone literally just lighting up with, "You got to come downtown, the building's on fire." And we got down here and looked, and it was completely destroyed. I mean, there was
Thankfully, we had not really started much of the construction process yet, but it was burned other than these bricks, which as Sue said, they're real. These are the original part of the building, but just about everything else was destroyed. But look, that was 2015, so what? Nine years later, look what we have now. We have one of the best properties, I think, in the whiskey business. It has been an important factor in the Old Forester brand, which you're going to see some things on later, but it's been a tremendous turnaround of a brand, and really been a nice growth driver over the last few years. So a couple of things before I dive into this a little bit. I wanted to introduce Yiannis Pafilis, who is our new President of Europe. He's taking over for Marshall.
He's been with Brown-Forman for a long time, but I hope you all get a chance to introduce yourselves and talk to him. And then Mike Carr is our new general counsel. So we announced that very recently, taking over from Matthew Hamel, who's retiring at the end of the fiscal year. So he's only got, what, another six weeks to go, something like that. So look, today we're going to try to show you a lot of things around Brown-Forman and our portfolio and our strategies, and why we have the confidence that we can continue to grow into the future. And I think I'm really excited that you get to hear from the management team. It's not just Leanne and I doing all the talking today, and that makes my life a little bit easier, too.
But before we talk about the future and the portfolio and a lot of that stuff, I thought I'd do a quick and sort of fun run through history here a little bit. 'Cause Brown-Forman, as you know, it's been 154 years. This is the last 100. But starting back in the 1920s and 1930s, you would, that's Prohibition at the beginning, the Great Depression, and then ultimately, Brown-Forman going public back in 1933. Tough years, though. Obviously, those would have been skinny years as Prohibition was so difficult. 1950s, 1960s, life got a little bit easier. Early Times, you may not know, at that time, was the largest spirits brand in the United States. We just sold that a couple of years ago, as it had shrunk from its old self.
But that brand provided the cash flow that ultimately allowed us to buy Jack Daniel's in 1956. Fast forward a little bit. In the 1980s, spreading the risk, those were not good times for spirits. It was a good decade or so where spirits was declining, beer was taking share from spirits, and that hadn't happened in 30 years, but it was happening back then in the 1980s. Brown-Forman diversified into Lenox and Dansk and Gorham and a bunch of, quite honestly, bad businesses. It took us a little while to get out, but we did get out. In the 1990s, surging ahead, that's when the spirits started to really take off again. After the excise tax increase of 1991, the industry kind of bottomed out and then really started to accelerate. Those were years we were buying into the wine businesses.
That seemed to be the primary acquisition mode back then, of buying a lot of wines that, quite honestly, weren't great businesses either. $10 bottles of wine is a tough, tough way to make a living. Fast forward from 2000 to 2010, all the acquisitions, the creation of Diageo, the sale of Absolut, and Grey Goose, and Patrón, and how many other brands? Herradura. Lots of change back then, and then it sort of stopped. There hasn't been those big transformational deals, or not, at least not at the same pace that we were doing back then. 2010 to 2020 has all been about reshaping the portfolio, getting us in the right businesses.
We called it Building Forever, but it's, it's about building, remaking the company, remaking the portfolio so that we can stretch and go forward. And ultimately, you know, we've got something you're gonna hear a lot about around here. It's called Nothing Better in the Market. We believe now that we have the portfolio, we have the organizational structure, we have the people, where we can be nothing better in the market and be one of the best beverage alcohol companies in the world. So when we say that, this, for anybody that's been following Brown-Forman for a while, this chart you will be familiar with, but the portfolio, geography, people, and investment, and then you've got the supporting cast around that with alcohol responsibility and diversity. You're gonna hear from today on all of this.
But this has been our platform, our strategic pillars, that we used for a long time. But we were trying to think of. This was a couple of years ago, think of something to, I call it a rallying cry for our employees. So what can we do with our employees to focus them, to get them excited about the future, to get everybody behind something? And it's just, it's not all that, It's not complicated at all. In fact, great rallying cries are rarely complicated, but it is something that has worked so well for our company in the last couple of years. And that's called Make It a Double. So that's gonna be the theme of the rest of the day. We are trying to double our operating income.
It started a couple of years ago, but the goal was to lay out an ambition, and we've gone to team, brand teams, and geographies, and lots of production teams, making sure that we are organized, and we've got the pillars in place to be able to double the size of this company, you know, by 2032. Now, to do that, the how: double, triple, bolder, better. That's another line that we use quite often around here. It rolls off the tongue pretty easy. But what we mean by that is going through our portfolio, American whiskey, we wanna double the size of our American whiskey business by 2032.
And we have worked hard to make sure we've got, as I said, we've got the supply to be able to do it, but we've also got the tools and the investment levels and the work structure to be able to deliver upon that. You're gonna hear more about that here in just a few minutes. Triple Tequila. Sorry, my clicker's stuck. Triple Tequila, which, you know, tequila is a much smaller business for us than American whiskey is, but it is important. It is sizable still. We've made a lot of changes to the tequila business over the last few years to make it more profitable, to get our returns up. And we think we've got it in a good place now, and you're gonna hear more about that from Thomas in just a little bit. Bolder on Emerging Brands.
This, we've spent a lot of time talking about these in the last couple of years 'cause it's been new, but how do we have the structure to get Gin Mare and Diplomático, in particular, and the Scotches, how do we make sure that they are set up for success? It's a very different business than some of what we've been doing before, and, we're getting into higher price points, but we wanna be leaders in these categories, and we think we've bought some great brands, and Marshall's gonna talk through that. We're also gonna talk a little bit about RTDs today. Obviously, that's been a big story of the last year, too. We continue to have the Jack & Coke rollout.
New Mix, which gets a lot less airtime, but I don't know if you all realize it's a 12 million case brand now down in Mexico. It is huge, and it has been, quite honestly, a bit of a pleasant surprise for us, I think, over the last decade, building that up to be as big of a business it is. And then better. We can't do all these things if we're not better in everything that we want to do. And we're, we are focused on these things. You're gonna hear from the four friends of mine here. They're gonna talk through what the elements are of how we do better, but we know we need to be better for our people, for our culture, for our environment, our brands, our investors.
It all works together, that secret sauce that we're trying to develop, and, we're gonna show you how we're gonna do that. And lastly, just. Look, these are lofty ambitions. You all are gonna go back and do the math, I'm sure, and try to figure out how can they deliver upon these. It is, you know, these are, It's not, it's a stretch, but it's not an unattainable stretch at all. It's actually relatively close to the guidance that we've given to you all for the long term. So, we're excited about it. We think we've got the brands, we think we've got the people, and we're ready to get after it. So, Making It a Double is something that literally has got. You will see the signs if you walk around Brown-Forman, they're everywhere.
We've got people focused on it, and I believe we're gonna do, we're gonna do it. So with that, I'm gonna leave it to the rest of the team to come up here and talk to you all today. I hope you find it interesting, and I think you'll have a great day. So thanks. And we'll leave.
Well, good morning. Hello, everyone. It was very nice meeting you, many of you last night, and again this morning. I enjoyed all the conversations. For those of you who haven't met me or don't know me yet, my name is Matias Bentel. I've been at Brown-Forman for about 15 years, a little over that, and over that time, I had the pleasure of doing several marketing and also general management roles, and I serve now as Chief Brands Officer. I've been doing that since January of 2020. And in that, in that role, I have the pleasure of overseeing our entire portfolio and the global marketing function. But today, I'm here to talk to you about our plans to grow our American whiskey business and, more specifically, about Jack Daniel's.
And American whiskey is key to Brown-Forman. Lawson said it, we all know it, but Brown-Forman is key to American whiskey as well, not just because of the history, but also because of the relevance that we play in this industry. In fact, according to IWSR, Brown-Forman's RSV, retail sales value, in 2022 in American whiskey, was larger than the next four competitors combined. So it is a big business for us, and we are a big player in this business. But it is really impossible to talk about American whiskey without discussing Jack Daniel's. By far, by far, the leading brand in this dynamic category and the brand that's driving the global expansion of American whiskey everywhere. So, b ut Jack Daniel's is more than just a whiskey brand, and it, it actually transcends the spirits category.
According to Interbrand, for example, brand Jack Daniel's is one of the best global brands in 2023. In fact, it's the highest-ranked spirits brand in this list and has been there for about eight years. And we like using and showing this slide, also internally, because for us, it sets the benchmark. When we think about Jack Daniel's brand building, these are the brands we look up to, and these are our benchmarks, and our standards. So, it's very important for us to remain on this list, and we work very hard to keep Jack Daniel's healthy and vibrant so that it, it occupies this prestigious, space in Interbrand's ranking. Now, if we look closer to our industry, according to IWSR, the Jack Daniel's trademark was the second-largest contributor to RSV growth between 2017 and 2020.
That's a really important point to make because we have seen younger or newer brands grow way faster, in categories that are also growing faster, over the last couple of years. So to see an almost 160-year-old brand, with the size and scale, of Jack Daniel's, perform at this level, and it's really, really remarkable, and we take great pride on it. So a really important player in our industry. And one of the reasons Jack Daniel's has been so successful is because of the breadth of its portfolio. So centered at the core, Old No. 7, Jack Daniel's expanding family, serves multiple occasions and price points. So it can range from casual meals, high-energy moments, and mixed drinks to much more elevated experiences like taste to savor, discernment, gifting, and collecting.
Jack Daniel's products extend from about $3 per unit on our RTD portfolio to over $100, and maybe even more if you look into the secondary market, so ranging from accessibility to exclusivity. Now, this day is all about the future, about our vision for the next 10 years. But before we go into that for Jack Daniel's, I'd like to take a little bit of a look at the history, all the way back to 1956 when Brown-Forman acquired this brand. So this brand has seen a sustained trajectory of growth over the last couple of decades, ever since then. And we see that that was not only driven by Black Label but also by the expanding family.
Now, one point I wanted to make here, because many of you have seen this slide in pre-previous versions of investor presentations, but one point I wanted to make is how resilient this brand has been. It's been extremely resilient and able to withstand global disruptive events, and here are just a few ones, that, you know, that we can highlight. You know, starting with the decline of American whiskey in the 1970s, until its resurgence later. You know, from recessions, tax increases, market crashes, and more lately, tariffs and COVID. This brand has always come back and get back into growth trajectory. The other point I wanted to make is how consistent that growth has been.
So if we look at different periods of time and longer periods of time, we can see that both Black Label and the family of brands have been extremely consistent in delivering sustained growth. That's also very important for us as we also think about the long term for Jack Daniel's. We also strongly believe that Jack Daniel's has a clear runway for future growth. Our long-term vision for Jack Daniel's is that it will be the most iconic and most valuable premium spirits brand globally, measured by IWSR. To achieve that ambition, we have four strategic priorities. First is to accelerate the geographic expansion while protecting key markets. Second is to recruit the next generation of legal drinking age consumers. Legal drinking age is LDA, so you'll hear a lot about LDA, while retaining core consumers.
Number three is to capture the super premium plus opportunity, and finally, number four is to expand occasions and accessibility with flavors and RTDs. So let's get into that. So first, we're gonna talk about geographic expansions and why we think Jack Daniel's is really well positioned to capture the global growth of American whiskey. And I promise this is the only more analytical slide I'll share today, so we'll be building a 2-by-2. I love them. So on the vertical axis, we're showing U.S. whiskey as a percentage of total whiskey, right? Very simple. And then on the horizontal axis, we're showing Jack Daniel's share of U.S. whiskey. And then we'll, you know, we'll plot all the countries onto this grid, and we can see four distinct quadrants.
The box number at the top right of each quadrant represents the retail sales value pool in each respective quadrant. So on the top of the chart, obviously, you see the countries where U.S. whiskey is well developed, and starting from the left, with the U.S., obviously, not surprising. And Jack Daniel's holds a dominant position in American whiskey in the U.S. market, but it's our most competitive market. And then, as you move to the right, on the top quadrant, you start seeing countries like Australia, Germany, Poland, and the U.K., some of our most developed and core markets, where Jack Daniel's has even a more dominant position in terms of market share. Now, you move to the bottom of the chart, obviously, starting from the left, you see countries where U.S.
Whiskey is less developed, and countries like Japan, which is a big whiskey market, where we have just announced our own distribution to accelerate growth and gain share. But perhaps the most important and attractive quadrant here is, as we think about the future, the bottom right quadrant. So these are all the tens of countries where U.S. whiskey is really less developed, and Jack Daniel's has a dominant position on it. And this is where we see a significant opportunity for future growth. If you calculate the RSV value in this quadrant, that's about $28 billion in retail sales value. So here's where most of our emerging markets are, and here's where we believe Jack Daniel's is well positioned to lead the category growth and capture this opportunity.
One reason we know that is because we look to markets like Germany, like the U.K., like Poland, and those countries provide a blueprint and give us confidence that this is achievable in the long term. The next strategic priority is to recruit the next generation of LDA drinkers. When it comes to consumer appeal and brand health, Jack Daniel's is really in a position of strength. In metrics like awareness, penetration, and consideration, Jack Daniel's is typically the number one or number two brand across most key markets and most key demographics. It's a very well known brand, a very loved brand, very admired brand, with a large, loyal consumer base. But that's not enough, and recruiting the next generation of LDA drinkers is fundamental to achieve our growth ambitions.
Like any generation before this one, the Generation Z, or legal drinking age Generation Z, is quite unique in many ways. Through consumer research, we know that Jack Daniel's and what the brand stands for, that's authenticity, independence, and good times, resonates at really deep levels with this, with this group, with this generation. The key insight that we got from this research is that this generation rejects the labels that society wants to impose on them, and they want to make their own labels as they seek to build their own identities, right? That insight is at the core of our current global campaign that's called Make Your Own Labels. This campaign has been rolled out internationally in many markets and has been adapted to many markets around the world.
This is an example from Japan. Because that insight, you know, that consumers want to make their own labels, is truly universal, and it applies everywhere, and that's the strength of Jack Daniel's. It's a universal truth. So another way we connect with this new generation is obviously to meet them where they live, which is no surprise, the digital world. Since 2019, we have more than tripled our investments in digital media, which now account for over 65% of our total media spend. We also leverage data and AI to customize and create content at scale. We have the ability to customize content, taking into account different audiences, channels, moments in time, and combinations of those to optimize.
So in this particular example that I'm showing here, this specific combination of the bottle placement, the serve, the copy, the award badge, and the black background has proven to perform better than other versions. Actually, almost 50% better in effectiveness of the content, delivering almost 70% in media savings because better performing content, you know, is actually driving media savings as well. So this is game-changing for the way we think about marketing effectiveness, and we are now scaling up this capability across all our key markets. Finally, another way we connect with this generation is by connecting with their passion points.
and examples like our partnership with McLaren in Formula 1, which is one of the fast-growing sports in the world, or our continued influence in music, are really, really important elements of our brand building model. Now, I've said many times recruiting the next generation is very important, but at the same time, we need to retain our core consumers. They are very important as well, and we continue to invest in ways of connecting with this core consumer in our core markets.
I'm going to show you our latest campaign that we rolled out just for the U.S. market, and was specifically developed for that. The campaign is called Guitar Face, and it captures all the raw emotions of living fully in the moment through the lens of classic rock, which is back to the core of Jack Daniel's DNA. It has been one of our best performing campaigns in the U.S. so far, and we keep rolling it out across markets, but very, very excited about it. So let's take a look at it.
How can you not love this campaign? I mean, it's one of my favorite. So our third strategic priority is to capture the super premium opportunity, and we know that compared to some of our competitors, we have significant headroom to grow in this, in this segment. So I couldn't be more excited about how our portfolio looks today, and, and, and thanks to our amazing whiskey makers, Jack Daniel's has really transformed itself in the super premium whiskey space. Through limited editions and now more permanent expressions, like the highly awarded Bonded Series or our Aged Series, Jack Daniel's has re-established its credibility in the super premium world. And now, key influencers and journalists and whiskey experts and aficionados not only recognize this, but also line up to get their hands and spend hundreds of dollars behind some of these really coveted products.
So we are confident that our current and future super premium portfolio will unlock significant growth for Jack Daniel's in the future. Finally, our fourth strategic priority is to make new friends and new occasions with flavors and RTDs. Combined, flavors and RTDs represent about 30% of Jack Daniel's business, according to IWSR. I won't go in depth into RTDs because Marshall's gonna cover that later. But let me give you a few insights on why flavors matter so much. So they play a key role in recruiting new consumers into the Jack Daniel's trademark. In fact, about 60% of flavor triers are new to Jack Daniel's, but only 18% of them become Tennessee whiskey drinkers, so most of them remain flavors drinkers. That's really important.
Flavours also expand and diversify the consumer base for the trademark because they skew a little younger, more female, which is more important, and appeal to more multicultural consumers in the U.S., which is also very, very important. And finally, they are allow to the trademark to play in new occasions like casual get-togethers or refreshment or with food. So these are examples from the U.S., but we have seen these trends play out in other key markets for flavors like the U.K., France, or Brazil. So to summarize, despite the recent short-term headwinds that we see in our industry, we believe Jack Daniel's has significant runway for growth, and really confident on achieving our long-term ambitions.
Jack Daniel's remains one of the most iconic trademarks in the world, with solid brand health and long-term performance track record, with a robust portfolio that expands across multiple occasions, price points, and geographies, engaging a new generation of LDA drinkers while retaining core consumers. So with that, I'll leave it to Jeremy Shepherd, who's gonna talk about Woodford Reserve and Old Forester. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Matias. Yeah, this is on. Hello, everyone. I had a chance, I think, to meet most of you last night. For those that I did not meet, my name is Jeremy Shepherd, as Matias says, and I am responsible for our business in U.S. and Canada. I have been with Brown-Forman for 18+ years, and like Matias, I have been lucky to work across multiple functions and multiple geographies, all over Canada, all over the U.S. Most recently, I spent some time in Europe, and I've been back in this role, it'll be two years in June, this upcoming June.
So, I also consider myself to be the lucky member of the executive leadership team today, because I have the chance to present two of our crown jewels in our portfolio, and that's Woodford Reserve and Old Forester. Of course, you all, or most of you anyways, had a chance to be at Woodford yesterday. You had a chance to hear from Chris Morris, so I feel like a lot of my work has been done on the Woodford Reserve front. And then, of course, I'm standing here, in our, ultra-modern, Old Forester facility, and I know many of you are gonna see Old Forester, later today. So, before I get into our ambitions on Woodford Reserve specifically, I wanted to share a short video.
This project has been a labor of love for everyone involved, a love of this place, a love of history, and the love of making superb whiskey.
Woodford is seen as more than a bourbon.
We are now recognized as the number one super premium American whiskey in the world. The gold standard of Kentucky Straight Bourbon whiskey. Innovation and, you know, a forward-looking philosophy was what defined Woodford from the beginning. It'll be a top five brand in volume and value in the super premium spirits world globally, sooner rather than later.
It's just very humbling, really, when you think about this small building and how that translates into more than 1 million cases of bourbon that goes across the world.
The Woodford Reserve story is a story of growth from our, as Chris Morris said yesterday, from our humble beginnings in 1996 to our position today as the number one super premium American whiskey. We have enjoyed a long runway, 26+ years of double-digit growth. In fact, our CAGR over that time frame is over 32%, according to IWSR. The story of Woodford Reserve is also a story of innovation and premiumization. And as Chris said yesterday, with our Double Oaked expression, we developed a new category for the bourbon business at a higher price point. And then, of course, with all of this recognition and all the success, we've had a lot of trade recognition, a lot of in-industry recognition.
Most recently, in 2023, both Woodford Reserve Distiller's Select and Woodford Reserve Double Oaked won double gold medal at the World Spirits Competition that just finished here this past fiscal year. As the brand has grown in size and scale and prominence, especially here in the United States, it's allowed us to get involved in some really interesting partnerships and really, really fun alliances. Yesterday, Lawson talked a little bit about Kentucky Derby. I'll get into that in a little bit later. But of course, we also have a really interesting partnership with Baccarat, Williams-Sonoma, and we're doing some design competitions with New York Fashion Week, among just a few of the partnership and alliances that we have with the brand.
So although we've had incredible success up to this point with Woodford Reserve, we're actually even more excited about the future growth of this brand for a couple of reasons. One, as you all know, super premium spirits have led growth and are forecasted to lead growth for full-proof spirits in the future. And within that, super premium American whiskeys are projected to grow even faster, so the category trends are our friend with these brands. Second, the global consumer trend around premiumization, we believe, plays really well into our pricing, our positioning, and our Woodford Reserve story. In fact, here in the United States, we recently ran a study, or a consumer study, and within that study, consumers told us that when they're in an account and they see Woodford Reserve, they know that they're in the premium plus section of that account.
So Woodford has become, in the United States, a signpost, a signpost brand for the whiskey business. And fourth, the U.S. is predominant- or Woodford Reserve is a predominantly, right now, the largest market for Woodford Reserve. We do about 85% of our business in the U.S., and so we think the runway for growth from a globalization perspective, which I'll talk about, is very, very long. And then lastly, and probably most importantly, as a company, Brown-Forman has quite a bit of experience taking a predominantly U.S. whiskey and globalizing it internationally, as you would have just seen with Matias' presentation on Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey. So as Matias mentioned, our ambition is to double our American whiskey business, and Woodford Reserve plays a critical role in that ambition.
And in terms of how we look at future growth for this brand, I thought I would share it, within our Brown-Forman strategic framework that Lawson referenced at the beginning of the presentations, and look at it from a portfolio, a geography, an investment, and a people lens. For the purposes of today, I will focus on portfolio, geography, and investment. You had a chance, obviously, to meet Chris Morris yesterday, and hopefully you had a chance to interact with a lot of our Woodford Reserve folks at the distillery last night. First, from a portfolio perspective, this is the Woodford Reserve family of brands, as we call it. And I've talked a little bit already, and you learned a lot about Distiller's Select and Double Oak last night and yesterday at the distillery.
But we've also expanded the portfolio to include new grain recipes, and you can see our malt, wheat, and rye expressions there. We've also expanded to include a craft, innovation, and luxury line as well. Our grain recipes help with presence and prominence in our more established bourbon markets, and our craft and innovation help us experiment with grain recipes and different wood finishes. And you can see here, that's the Woodford Reserve Distillery Series, which is only available at the distillery. Our Woodford Reserve Master's Collection in the middle, which comes out every year in a different format, and then our luxurious Baccarat expression of Woodford Reserve, which is also available for sale.
Fun fact, Double Oaked was our first Woodford Reserve Master's Collection offering, and as Chris said yesterday, it did so well, we made it a regular offering across the portfolio. Before I leave the portfolio side of the, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about price leadership. Since the inception of the brand in 1996, Woodford has been a price leader within the bourbon category, and our ambition and our intention is to continue to be a price leader as we move forward. Geographic expansion. As I mentioned, our largest and most important market and the bulk of Woodford's business today is in the United States, with roughly about 85% of the business. Even in the United States, however, we believe there's still quite a runway for growth.
There's lots of distribution opportunities outside sort of the traditional bourbon belt, so we're excited about continuing to grow Woodford across the U.S.. From a global perspective, our friends at the Global Travel Retail team have done an excellent job in starting our globalization journey, and they are currently our second biggest business unit, introducing Woodford Reserve to consumers across major cities across the world. And then, our other divisions, our European division and our Emerging International division, Woodford Reserve is an important part of their emerging brands program. And for those of you to recall, the emerging brands program at Brown-Forman is a small, dedicated group of people and resources that focus on a smaller subset of our brands to bring them, bring them to life in across the United States and the world.
Marshall's gonna talk a little bit more about the Emerging Brands group, but the important thing to remember as you think about globalization for Woodford, Woodford Reserve is a primary or an important component of that Emerging Brands group all across the world, whether you're in Asia, whether you're in France, Germany, or the U.K., for example. From an investment perspective, we're investing more behind the consumer than we ever have with our world-class Spectacle for the Senses campaign. The creative is both liquid and bottle focused, ensuring that our packaging, craftsmanship, and flavor profile are ingrained in the minds of consumers all across the consumer touchpoints. From a consumer touchpoint perspective, media, we're investing, as you would imagine, heavily behind social, digital, and broad reach media. From a partnership perspective, we are the presenting sponsor of the Kentucky Derby.
Just to give you a little bit of statistics, last year during the Derby, just the weekend of Derby, through the work we did with NBC and the advertising that we conducted and the on-site activations and the live feeds on NBC, we reached over 200 million impressions. And we expect those impressions to be even bigger the upcoming May weekend, with the 150th running, and a very special Kentucky Derby coming up. As Chris, I think, did a really, really good job last night, occasions is a very important part of the bourbon business. And you can tell hopefully by last night that one of the occasions is food that we're focusing on with Woodford Reserve.
On a side note, that cheesecake last night, I was trying not to eat it, but it was really good. But also beyond food, fashion, and like I said, we've got a design competition that we're working on with the New York Fashion Week folks. But from an occasion perspective, I thought a fun one to share, and you would have seen it last night in our facility, is we have made a commemorative 150th Derby bottle, that'll be available for sale, right away, and we expect that to sell and sell very quickly.
And lastly, and not least, as the brand continues to grow and become more prominent, it is very important that we take the Spectacle for the Senses campaign, and we deliver it all the way through to the retail and point of purchase. And you can see there a picture of a larger Spectacle for the Senses display, and sort of a visual representation of what the displays will look like in larger bourbon markets. So, for example, here in Kentucky, for the upcoming Derby, that would be a sort of typical display that we'll be putting up to tell the world the story about Woodford Reserve. And here's the ad.
With over 200 flavor notes to discover, every sip of Woodford Reserve Bourbon is a Spectacle for the Senses.
So, you, as you can see there, a very flavor and packaging-focused ad, so hopefully executed from our perspective in a very premium way, and we're very excited about that campaign. So as you can tell from last night, and hopefully, as you can tell from, hearing me tonight, today, Woodford Reserve, we are very excited about the future growth opportunities for Woodford Reserve. From our humble beginnings in 1996 to our current position as the number one super premium whiskey in the world, we believe that the trends, and our opportunity for global expansion play in our favor, and that we will take our rightful spot as to be the, one of the top 10, super-premium spirits in the world, as we look to double our American whiskey and achieve our double our business ambition over the next 10 years.
Before I pass to my counterpart, Thomas, and who will talk about the tequilas, I wanted to take a couple of seconds to talk about Old Forester. You know, so first and foremost, I really do hope that everyone, or most of you are gonna have the chance to do the distillery tour after lunch. Believe me, the tour guides and the people that we employ here will do a much better job telling the story than I will. But as we are here in the facility, I thought it would be remiss if I didn't give you a couple of slides on Old Forester and some things to think about as you do the tour later this afternoon. So three key things from my perspective.
One, and was already mentioned earlier today, but Old Forester is actually the founding brand of Brown-Forman, and we're actually standing in the original location of our original offices over 100+ years ago today. Second, it's the first bottled bourbon, and they'll get into that detail over the tour. But this fact gives us incredible credibility with the trade and bourbon aficionados being the first bottled bourbon. And probably most importantly, Old Forester, sorry, is on a renaissance of growth. It's grown about 18% over the last 5 years, or high double digits is probably the better way to put it. And here is our portfolio. And when you think about Old Forester, I think the other thing to think about, it's been on a premiumization journey.
It's probably starting eight to 10 years ago, starting with our Core 86 and our 100 Proof expressions. We took our price up pretty significantly to pull it out of the standard pricing and move it up into premium pricing. We changed the packaging, and you can see the new packaging there. And then about five years ago, we launched our Whiskey Row Series, which gives us incredible credentials to tell the story and the history of not only Old Forester itself, but also of bourbon in Kentucky. And then about 2002, we have our Birthday Bourbon bottle, so Old Forester Birthday Bourbon. This product comes out once a year.
It sells out in minutes via lottery, and we have people lined up around the store to try to get it, and so it's been an exceptional addition to the portfolio. And then for those of you that are Hollywood fans, and hopefully you like the Statesman movies, we did a nice association with the Statesman folks, with our own Old Forester Statesman bottle. And then, of course, just like Woodford Reserve, we have distillery offerings as well. So with that, we are incredibly excited about the current state of our American whiskey business, but honestly, we are even more excited about the future growth and future potential of these brands.
As we look to the future, the categories are in our favour, the consumer trends are in our favour, and they're just wonderful product with authentic stories that taste very, very good. So with that, I'll pass it over to my counterpart, Thomas Hinrichs, who will talk to you about tequilas. Thank you.
Good morning, everybody. Very nice to see you again, and I truly enjoyed last night's dinner, and be able to get to know some of you a bit better. My name is Thomas Hinrichs, and I am with the company the exact number of years than what Woodford, when we brought Woodford to market. As I was reminded yesterday by Chris, so in 1996, I joined.
Today I'm the president of what we call the Emerging International Division, which is one of three, and for that, I was in Japan last week, where we had our exciting go live event, which is something that we do when we are getting ready to go live, which is on April 1st, which is a truly exciting moment for all of us to see our team come together, to get them oriented, to get them on the road, to sell our products in Japan, beginning of April. One of the large whiskey and RTD markets, I'm sure you are aware of that. So, but today, I'm here to talk about tequila, which is equally, maybe even more exciting, because the tequila world has changed so much.
I will bring this a little closer to you and would like to speak about our ambition in the space of tequila. Let me start with a little bit of broader context. The tequila category has been the fastest growing for a number of years. If I just go over the last five years, it's been growing by 18%. Globally, the U.S. is around the same number, and it's been forecasted to continue to grow double digits, which is, by the way, three times faster than TDS, looking back and looking forward. We are also very excited about the pricing dynamics, because over the last 10 years, a lot has happened to this category, and the premiumization of our portfolio, but the entire category, has been very notable.
The two price categories that are driving this growth are premium plus and ultra-premium, which is very exciting for all of us. It all comes, and it's a bit of a chicken and egg, the versatility of the tequila world has changed so much. There's so much more talk about it globally. Celebrities are picking up on it and are further propelling the awareness of tequila. At the same time, we see the ways of drinking, the drinking occasion, and all of this has changed tremendously and is leading to that, what we see today, the nice premiumization of the tequila world, and the many more consumer groups that we are finding enjoying tequila. By the way, margarita is still the number one brand call in the U.S. and in Mexico, and it's the number three brand call around the world.
So, but just wanted to counter that a little bit, that there's still all that still going on, which is nice to see. So the last point I'd like to make here is on the improving economics. In 2022, the kilo price of agave was in excess of 30 MXN. Today, we are down to 12-11 MXN for the same, which gives us a lot, a whole lot better economics, as you can imagine, and that is also helping to propel the investment and the, the category to further grow. Speaking about us, coming a little closer to Brown-Forman. We bought Casa Herradura in 2007. And by the way, when I think about Old Forester, the founding whiskey of Brown-Forman, and Casa Herradura, they both started their businesses at the, in the same year, 1870. Since then, craftsmanship, handmade,
Making tequilas and all that is going from harvesting to the production, to the bottling, all that still plays an incredibly important role to Casa Herradura and how we make our tequila in Mexico. Herradura is an exceptional liquid. I hope you had a chance to try it or to taste it. It has collected around 150 accolades over the years, which is phenomenal, and just shows our tequila-making credentials and qualities that we have there. And by the way, Herradura has been the inventor of Reposado 50 years ago, as a statement to see how innovative the Casa Herradura production place has always been. So with all of that, tequila has been a great addition to our portfolio. Speaking of the two brands and trademarks we have, Herradura and El Jimador.
Both are 100% agave products, of course, and are playing in the premium plus and in the ultra-premium segment, and have, of course, offerings in the place of Blanco, Reposado, Añejo, Añejo Ultra. In the case of El Jimador, we have entered the RTD space, and Herradura is, of course, going into the prestige and even higher price ranges with offerings we have. We feel confident about the portfolio we have and where we stand at the moment. That leads to our ambition. Within the Make It a Double horizon, which leads us, takes us to FY 2032, we want to triple. We want to triple the tequila business, and in the next couple of minutes, I will give you a couple of reasons why we think this is possible and how we want to do it.
Because, first of all, there's a lot of headroom in the space of tequila, and we have laid a great foundation with where we are today. And thirdly, here is, we have a roadmap that is very clear, that is very simple, that will take us to where we want to be, tripling our tequila business in this horizon. And let me start with the first one of the three. Premiumizing our portfolio has been a topic, and it has continued to be one, and will - we will continue to premiumize, in particular, El Jimador. Today, it sits comfortably in the premium plus segment, and this is not only a result of taking price and price, it's also the result of revenue growth management activities that have accompanied our frontline price increases. Creative.
Of course, we are living in the world of consumer creative imagination, and we have two world-class creative campaigns for both brands that are playing off our tradition, our quality, and are executed, of course, in a relevant way, depending where you are in the world and what trademark or what brand we are talking about. We are feeling very good about what we have, and we pay a lot of attention to finding the right ways, the right cues, doing a lot of research, and have the two campaigns that you may have heard about, Reserve for Everyone for El Jimador, and The Extraordinary Awaits for Herradura. Bottles and packaging cues are important, too. I think we all know this, and this applies to the premiumization journey of tequila as well.
And so what you see here is, the tequila bottles, our new bottle that we have, for El Jimador, that we are bringing to market in the next 12 months. So you get a little bit of a preview of that already here, which nicely reflects the continuous premiumization of El Jimador in how we carry and we bring the liquids to market. And lastly, innovation, product extensions, product evolution will continue to play an important role in the tequila space. Because what we have learned over the last couple of years is that we find many more occasions, many more consumers, that will enjoy tequila, and that will drive us further to experiment, to bring RTDs to other markets, to bring Cristalino expressions into more markets, and in the case of Herradura, of course, to really experiment with limited and with smaller and with high-end expressions.
So net-net, our portfolio will certainly further evolve over the years to come. Moving on to the geography and how that is going to look like. The U.S. will continue to be the core anchor market for tequila. The forecast is that we will continue to see this growth that we have seen to a slightly lower extent, but there are good chances, if the trajectory of the tequila category will continue, that tequila, in a couple of years' time, will be the largest high-proof category in the U.S. Larger than whiskey and larger than vodka. Think about that. We have a lot of headroom, we believe, given we have a relatively small market share, still, and we see a lot of possibilities in distribution and awareness building that we will focus on when it comes to the U.S.
When I think about Mexico, the homeland of tequila, we will continue our premiumization effort, and we are focusing on the next generation of tequila drinkers. We do want to capture them with what we do, and there's another new group coming, and we will always favour value over volume in this very competitive market space. Coming to the rest of the world, which is quite exciting, too, there's a lot of vibe wherever you go about tequila. Tequila becoming the next gin and this type stuff. So it's not showing yet in the total number of depletion, but it's coming. The vibes are out there, and we are well positioned and prepared. When I think about El Jimador, it's there.
We are already the number one 100% agave tequila in the U.K., in Australia and Colombia, which gives us hope that we will find many more markets over the course of the years. Where if you think about Jack Daniel's and Woodford, El Jimador is our way to enter the market, followed by Herradura, once the market and the way is paved a bit. So in the space of investment, the third pillar of our roadmap, just wanted to say and remind us, we have announced a $200 million investment last year into our production expansion. That is, of course, to support the global growth that we are expecting to triple our business. At the same time, which goes a little bit hand in hand, investments have gone into water, recycling, and treatment, which has to do with the increased output of production.
We have to do more along those lines, and so... which is a strategic investment and commitment into this category, into the, our belief, what we can do. At the same time, we'll continue to invest into our trademarks and brands, of course. We will continue, continue and consistently further invest there. We will invest into the creative side and the way we bring it to market, and we'll also, we'll always... The heritage, the authenticity, the craftsmanship, and when you think along those lines, that will always play a role for our great products and the way we produce them, we make them, because we think it's distinguishing us from many others. And of course, we will make it in a very relevant way with all the new consumer groups that we find around the world.
So to sum it all up, first of all, we know the category of tequila is very attractive, is very hot, heavy, and growing fast. We feel, we believe, we are confident we have the portfolio that's needed to, in order to capture and seize the opportunity and to play a role in it. We have shared with you, I've just shared with you the roadmap we have, which we feel very confident about, and we have teams around the world, in the U.S. and everywhere else, to go after it, which fills us with excitement. Because little by little, it's going there, and we are. With that, we would say we are on our way to triple our tequila business by FY 2032. With that, thank you very much. I was able, hopefully, to show some of the excitement here, and I'm happy to hand over to my colleague, Marshall Farrer.
Thank you, Thomas, and good morning, everyone. I'm Marshall Farrer, and I'm the Chief Strategic Growth Officer, and I've been with Brown-Forman for about 25 years, and I'm also a fifth-generation family member, and I'm joining you from London today, so. When we think about being bolder, we think about winning with our emerging brands and our RTDs. We believe that these parts of our portfolio are gonna help us achieve Make It a Double. They're also not only going to help unlock this portfolio, but we're going to diversify into new occasions and new geographies. The access that that's gonna bring us is gonna unlock a lot of opportunities. So I'll walk you through that a bit, but it's about expanding our capabilities in order to achieve success in these areas.
And so, first of all, you think about an emerging brand, and the concept here defines the life stage of a brand, not its end state. And so we look at these brands, and we figure out what do they need for success now? And so what we're doing in certain markets where we feel the priority is there, is that we are putting dedicated resources, in terms of our people, around them, and then we're also taking financial resources, our A&P, and we're circling around that for at least three years. And so I'll give you an example of how this is starting to play out. So, Old Forester, back in 2018, joined the U.S. Emerging Brands Organization. Sorry, let me.
When it joined there, it was 200,000 cases, and it came out of there just last year. We graduated it into our primary sales organization, and it is now at 500,000 cases, which is quite a remarkable growth over that period of time. In that same period, it became a top 15 American whiskey brand, and so the focus around the resources and the organization really began to pay off for that. Now, a brand's size or importance in a given market will vary. Tequila is one of those, where we treat it very central in Mexico and the U.S., but in most of the rest of the world, that's considered an emerging brand.
And so another great example of success in treating it that way is in the U.K., where now El Jimador accounts for every one in five serves of tequila in the on-premise. And so, yeah, quite a remarkable growth there. We've also aligned our RTD portfolio to the best brand market combinations. And so, New Mix, for example, in Mexico, where it has tremendous potential and continues to be a really big brand. But then we think even broader and globally when we look at our Jack Daniel's and Jack & Coke offering, and so we're targeting those opportunities, but it's all about the growth in the capabilities. So, as we get there, we've got a few ways that we're going to. Next slide, please.
That we're going, we're going to do that, and the first is by unlocking new occasions. So I'll talk to you about a few of those. One of which, a great example, is the aperitivo, and in Italy, specifically. The aperitivo occasion in Italy is worth about $5 billion. It also accounts for about a quarter of the drinking occasions in Italy, and we now have a very strong portfolio to take advantage of that, most notably through Gin Mare and the Mare Tonic, which is a primary drink to be enjoyed by Italians there, and one that we're broadening around the world. Also, celebrating, so I think Thomas made mention of the margarita and its importance. It's America's number one called cocktail, and it is, it is gaining relevance and call around the world.
El Jimador is proving to be the perfect tequila to access that celebrating occasion and to go into margaritas, and so we're unlocking that opportunity everywhere. And then our RTDs play in what we call the occasion of sharing with friends, and that's about bringing groups together in a more casual setting in order to share. And we have what is emerging to be a global leadership there with Jack Daniel's and Coke. So, also, though, by accessing new consumers, and so really quite interestingly, as we looked at the first year of bringing Jack & Coke to the market, we learned that 80% of those shoppers were new into the Jack Daniel's family of brands for that last year.
Meaning that 80% of those Jack & Coke consumers had not made a purchase in the Jack Daniel's family of brands in that past year. That is providing an enormous runway for us to introduce our trademark to either new or lapsed consumers. And then as we also look at our emerging brands, the two new categories that we've taken larger stakes in, which are gin and rum, 50% of those consumers don't consume whiskey. We now have the right brands to be able to reach those consumers, and we're quite excited about that. But we're also doing it at premium price points, and so, that is a big part of the journey, and I'll give you a couple of examples here.
So in our malts portfolio, we have a fantastic but very small brand called Glenglassaugh, and we recently sold one of those casks for a very healthy multimillion-dollar sum, and we have more of those opportunities ahead of us. In the Czech Republic, historically, a very strong Finlandia market for us. We obviously have divested Finlandia, but we more than replaced the lost brand profit with Diplomático, which has a very strong presence there, and has only strengthened that market and even allowed us to bring Slovakia in. And then RTDs. So without question, they provide a more accessible price point for consumers to come in and enter the franchise. However, they are priced at 2-3 times the average price of beer category out there, so they still offer a very, very premium opportunity out there.
I'll just add, I mean, look, we're in the right categories now. The portfolio reshaping work that we have done has really put us into the longer-term growth categories ahead. So we are in five of the six categories that are gonna be driving growth in super premium spirits going forward, and we have healthy positions in those categories. So we like where we are. You've heard about doubling American whiskey, a great, bold ambition, and you've just heard about tripling tequilas, which is also a bold ambition, but we're gonna do even more when it comes to the emerging brands, and we'll grow it more than three times the growth on these. So we're very excited there. And then with our RTDs, we will become the number one supplier for cocktails and long drinks globally.
So we're very much looking forward to that, and we're gonna be doing it through three different steps here. So first of all, we'll be reshaping the portfolio behind the capabilities. So these enhanced capabilities are vital, and for both RTDs and the emerging brands. And as we roll them out, we will gain even more momentum with them, and it'll open up the globe. So portfolio reshaping, premiumization continues to be global trend of significance, and it's one that we have aligned our portfolio to be best suited to be able to capture the momentum behind. Route to consumer.
So we are investing in our current route to consumers and our current distribution businesses to make them better, to be able to handle things like our emerging brands and our RTDs, and help us reach the right consumers on the right occasions. Then we're establishing world-class alliances, which I'll talk about a little bit more, and those are really unlocking new incremental growth opportunities for us. You step back about 10 years, Jack Daniel's, North America, very, very core to our strategy. We had a broader portfolio with several brands that weren't really driving a lot of growth, and we went about to go reshape that and to open up a lot more opportunities for us. I'll give you an example with Woodford Reserve.
So if you go back to 20 years ago, it was an emerging brand before we even had emerging brands division. We've grown that to the point now where it is one of only seven brands in the world with a retail price point greater than $25, selling over 1 million cases, joining one of its other stable mates in Jack Daniel's with that. And so that careful focus and planning behind it really led to some amazing growth. We've added the malts into the portfolio. We love this portfolio, a great addition, and we're really starting to unlock growth.
If you look at the work that our team out in Asia has done since the acquisition, back in fiscal 2017, they have grown the malts business more than six times, and we still have lots and lots of opportunity out there. We brought in Diplomático and Gin Mare, two fabulous super premium plus brands. Overnight, catapulting our European business from the number eight super premium plus supplier to the number five, dramatically enhancing many of our in-market capabilities. And then Jack & Coke, which has really evolved from being an RTD that allowed us to participate in select markets, to now being a global trademark that we think we can roll out anywhere around the world. So a big step change in those capabilities behind the portfolio.
Okay, so when it comes to the RTCs, want to first talk about our own distribution businesses. And so we have been furthering the capabilities that exist within those distribution companies, so we can be better at these segments of the business. And so with the emerging brands in the U.S., in the U.K., and Germany, specifically, the three highest priority markets for growth there, we have established emerging brands divisions within the sales force, and that accounts for about 150 dedicated personnel, and their job is to go in every day focused on the emerging brands, and they're walking in the front doors of many of these accounts.
We also ring-fence the brand investment for three years, and so we wanna make sure that at that critical formative stage, that these brands have what it takes, and we're not taking away from a plan. We're actually committing to a plan and seeing it through, and it's making a really strong difference. So, that's something we will keep up with. Now, own distributions. So we have been expanding that. You've been following the news on there, as we go, and a lot of the portfolio reshaping has enabled that. So, in Taiwan, for example, the malts acquisition brought GlenDronach, which has a very strong position in the Taiwanese market.
It is our largest brand today in Taiwan, and we were able to create an own distribution business on the back of that, which is gonna enable more growth for Woodford Reserve and Jack Daniel's as we go forward. I mentioned the Czech Republic earlier. Bringing in Diplomático to the portfolio took us from having 6% share of super premium spirits in that market to having 24%. So a dramatic change from a brand that has a big impact. But more than that, it also allowed us to bring in the neighboring market of Slovakia and leverage all the great capabilities in Czechia to another market right next door to take advantage of even more opportunity there.
Thomas had mentioned that in only a few days time, we will be hitting the streets of Tokyo with Brown-Forman Japan. This is one of Asia's most important and most premium spirits markets out there, and we are really excited about applying the focus behind our whole portfolio in Japan. Italy, the most recent news as well. So Gin Mare is the leading super premium gin in Italy. It has doubled our business in Italy by bringing it into the portfolio. And today, while we are spread across three different distributors, we will consolidate our portfolio behind Brown-Forman in Italy and take advantage of a very strong portfolio, including Jack Daniel's and Diplomático. And then leveraging these capabilities within our own RTDs.
Mexico, for example, we have an almost 12 million case RTD brand in New Mix, having just about 40% market share there, and there is still lots of untapped growth there. But we're able to use our own distribution there to take a really strong leadership position, and we will continue that. Another great market in Germany, which is also our own distribution company, Jack & Coke is the leading RTD there, and it has 16 market, 16% market share, which is more than three times that of the next competitor. And in the past year, we almost doubled the rate of sale behind that. So we have excellent capabilities in those markets.
Then one other market would be Australia, where yet again, Jack Daniel's has the number one RTD in the market behind our own distribution businesses. So these are examples where we can go out and win, and we have a lot more that we can bring behind those. World-class alliances, and simply put, Jack Daniel's plus Coca-Cola equals competitive advantage. Just over a year ago, we did not even sell any RTD in Japan, one of the largest RTD markets in the world. We simply didn't have access to the capabilities that were required. You fast-forward to today, it is our third largest market in the world for RTDs. We've accessed the capabilities, and by the end of 2025, we will have rolled out Jack & Coke in at least 42 markets globally. Scale.
The Red Army brings scale, specifically in markets where we don't have the scale and the capabilities to access. In the first year, for the 14 markets that we did go launch through the Coke system, we achieved a minimum of 75% weighted average distribution. These are very strong gains to be able to go, and when you think about the additional markets that we have to grow with, it will be very exciting. Halo effect. We are jointly investing behind the Jack & Coke trademark, and that is obviously growing it, but that has a halo on the Jack Daniel's trademark. We specifically think about emerging markets, where we can introduce a lot more customers at a more approachable price point, and we can drive a lot of in-store visibility to the Jack Daniel's trademark.
It has a halo on the brand, and we're excited about that. And then I would say optimization. So, without question, there are opportunities for innovation here, and we will be carefully assessing innovation as we go forward on the heels of tremendous capabilities that we've gone and established, but also, obviously, supply chain optimization. And there'll be work there where we can get better in that area. So, I also wanna point out that in the U.S., we have a totally different opportunity here, and we use Pabst Brewing Company as a partner. And that gives us access to more than two and a half times the accounts than we can legally access with Jack & Coke spirit-based product. So, it opens up a whole another world.
Different capabilities are required to succeed there, and therefore, we've established a partnership with a partner who has those capabilities. We have grown significantly from about 21% weighted average distribution to about 48% today since we started that partnership. It's been quite successful for us. Look, we have a reshaped portfolio. We have route-to-consumer capabilities that are expanding around the globe, and they're catering to our portfolios. Then we've gone, and we've established really powerful strategic alliances. These are gonna lead to bolder growth globally, and they're gonna help us access new consumers and occasions. The outcome is gonna be growing even faster with our emerging brands, and we're gonna end up being the number one supplier globally in long drinks and cocktails.
We're quite excited about the future. Thank you very much, and Sue, I think I'm gonna turn this over to you.
Thank you. All right, I promised you fabulous prizes. I have fabulous prizes. So get your phones out. Go to kahoot.it, or you can scan the QR code that you see up on there. And let's get ready to play. All right, we're getting some names showing up. Members of management, you may not play. Although, maybe I want you to play, see if you know the answers to these questions. All right. Give it another few seconds here. 10 seconds. Get yourself logged in. Ooh, here we go. All right, drum roll. First question, please. Ooh, was that really a drum roll? All right, what year did we become publicly traded? You get extra points for being fast. Ooh! All right, so 1870 was our founding, right? Correct answer was 1933. Who is up for our leaderboard? Ooh, we've got a couple.
All right, next question: Who was paying attention on the tour last night? What is the mash bill? For Woodford Reserve Distiller's Select, I hear fast fingers. Somebody was paying attention. Woo-hoo! Yes, 72% corn. All right, question number three. You haven't been on the cooperage tour yet, so this is a little unfair, but how many staves do those amazing coopers put together into a puzzle? They're not all the same shape nor size. They have to assemble them. How many are in a barrel? Yes, 31-33. Those are some pretty amazing coopers. You'll see them this afternoon. Ooh, we've got a change in the leaderboard. Tim, Chris, coming to the top. All right, here we go. Brown-Forman has offered products other than wine and spirits in our history. Which one have we not offered? That is right, disco balls.
Although Louisville is home to the disco ball. Omega Mirror Products makes disco balls still to this day. They made 90% back in the eighties, but still make them today. I think we also have the largest disco ball. All right, who's moving up? Woo! Chris, Howard, and Trey are on the platform. All right, this is our last question. The 150th Derby. How many mint juleps are we gonna serve over the two days of Oaks and Derby? Very nice. 120,000 mint juleps will be enjoyed. I hope each and every one of you get a chance to try one. Ah, yes. All right, here we go. Here is our platform. Lando, good job, good job. Howard, nice. And I don't even know who it is. Chris. All right. Oh, there's Chris! Awesome. All right, Chris, come on up.
You get your choice of fabulous prizes first. Mystery bags. And then Howard, for you. Oh, there you are. And then Chris, come on up. Yeah, you can't peek. Grab what looks the best. All right, Howard and Chris, thank you all very much for playing with that. Good job, everyone. Thank you. Hopefully, a little brain refreshment. I'm gonna now turn things over to Tim, Kirsten , Crystal, and Matt. Thank you.
We've got to spread out. So welcome, everyone. My name is Tim Nall. For those that I haven't met, I am the Global Supply Chain and Technology Officer for Brown-Forman, which means one thing in the next presentations is we will have absolutely no sizzle reels, because we are not the exciting group, we are the informative group. So we have lofty ambitions, double, triple, bolder, and now what we're going to discuss, better. So we understand, as Lawson spoke at the beginning, that you cannot achieve these lofty ambitions, these lofty long-term ambitions, without a very strong organization underneath you. Now, as a group of investors, you're able to assess the health of an organization using various means. You can have meetings like this, you can look at annual reports, you can look at proxy statements.
How do you really assess the health of an organization underneath the bottom line? We describe this work as living our Spirit of Commitment, so that we can make, market, and sell beverage alcohol for generations to come. Now, these have four pillars that I'm going to talk about today, or I'm going to talk about, one, our environment or our commitment to our natural resources. Matt is going to talk about our consumers and the importance of responsible consumption. Then we're going to move on to Kirsten, who is going to talk about our employees and how we maintain an inclusive work environment. And finally, with Crystal, who's going to discuss our communities and being good neighbors in everything that we do.
Now, we had a little bit of trivia, but one other piece of trivia is Brown-Forman has been on the environmental sustainability journey for a very long time. It really began in 1870, when George Garvin Brown first put Old Forester in a sealed glass bottle that could be reused. Now, when you consider this reuse or the modern term, recyclability, he was, in fact, the first distiller to promote environmental sustainability. We continue this work in two modern times with our commitment to our Chairman's Conference on Sustainability in 2004, and then the formation of the Corporate Responsibility and Environmental Performance Group in 2005. This led to our first set of public environmental sustainability goals in 2010, and then a revised set of environmental sustainability goals in 2013.
Now, this landscape, the environmental sustainability landscape, has changed over the years, particularly as climate change has occurred. Now, of the top 10 risks cited by the World Economic Forum Global Risk Report in 2023, bit of a mouthful, five of them are environmentally focused. We also recognize that the investor community has firmly signaled its expectations of transparency and disclosure. Because of this increased focus, we recognize the need for a larger commitment. And so in 2021, we announced Many Spirits, One Earth, that really restated our pillars and led to some more lofty ambitions within the realm of environmental sustainability. We have ambitions in 2030, 2040, and 2045. We are continuously working against these objectives and have several initiatives in place to ensure that we are always moving forward.
We recognize that our targets are ambitious, and we remain committed to them to help us make it a double for generations to come. Thank you. On to Matt.
Thanks, Tim. I'm Matthew Hamel. I'm General Counsel and Secretary of Brown-Forman for the last 16.5 years, and the next 6 weeks. Alcohol responsibility is one of our core strategic pillars, you see in this graphic, and it has been for years, long before the acronym ESG gained common currency. So we feel very proud to be a leader in this field. The question that we have to ask is why? Why would we put alcohol responsibility at the core when we're in the business of selling beverage alcohol? Well, specifically for that reason. It's important to us that every interaction with a drinking occasion that involves our brands is a pleasant one for everybody concerned, whether they're drinking or not.
An emphasis on alcohol responsibility helps to ensure that that will be the case. In a world where our industry is under scrutiny, and where safer drinking environment and culture is so important, and you read about the nail polish that women have to use to ensure that their drinks have not been spiked and all the rest, alcohol responsibility is absolutely critical. It's not only our consumers who care about this and whom we care about, our business partners care about it as well. Our employees consider it a very important part of our corporate culture and of their experience here.
Governments and NGOs, of course, have their eyes on us, and we want to, we want them to understand that we're leaders in this space, community organizations, et cetera, et cetera. It's the sort of a plank and a strategy that you really can't be without. It aligns with consumer trends. You've heard a lot about premiumization today. The more expensive the drink, the less of it you can buy. There's a growing low and no alcohol wave these days. There's a more general social focus on health and well-being. And it's well documented that Millennials and Gen Z drink less than their elders, and they're also more generally, socially, environmentally, and health conscious. And alcohol responsibility feeds into all of that.
This is also an important element in the, in the labor market, in the competition for talent. Prospective employees, we know this, we ask them, they tell us, love to see all of the things that we do around responsibility. We twin responsibility with, with rights. That's a, a general matter of first principles, and it's certainly the case in our industry as well. We have the right to sell the products that we sell. We defend them vigorously all over the world, and our initiative around responsibility is part of that defense, an important part in respect of WHO, other NGOs, attacks from the beer industry, claiming that they're healthier, et cetera. How do we execute against this? Well, our responsibility is part of our culture.
We have all kinds of plans and programs internally, including training out of the box that leaders can share with their teams around the world. And we do the same thing with our partners, our distributors, bartenders, major accounts, and all the rest, in order to ensure that alcohol responsibility is front of mind in every interaction with alcohol, with our products. Kirsten?
Thank you, Matt. Hello, everybody. My name is Kirsten Hawley. I'm the Chief People, Places, and Communications Officer at Brown-Forman. We do, like, long job titles here at times. I've been with the company for 27 years, and today I get to talk to you about our culture of inclusion. What's interesting is 65 years ago, Brown-Forman published its first ever company creed, and in this creed, we laid out a series of promises we make to a variety of stakeholders. That included employees. What you'll see on the slide here are the words of the promises we made to those, and continue to make to those, who choose to come build their careers here. You'll see that it says: The company promises to provide a good place to work, opportunities for recognition and reward, and a favorable climate for individual growth and development.
We still believe in this commitment today, because we believe a meaningful and inclusive workplace leads to better performance. We want to achieve three things when it comes to our employee commitments, and the first is we want to make sure Brown-Forman is attractive and welcoming to the very best people. And the very best people means it doesn't matter where you were born, where you are from, what you look like, or who you love. We believe today what Owsley Brown II said over 20 years ago, which was, "By better understanding each other, we better understand our consumers." And both our workplace and our consumers are an increasingly diverse group. So who are these people of Brown-Forman? We've got about 5,600 of us, 3,700 are in our salaried ranks. Any numbers I share from this point forward are about that salaried population.
We employ people all over the world, and roughly two-thirds of us work overseas in our international markets, and the remaining third work here in the United States. It is a reflection of the globalization of our company. We are well-balanced across gender, and when you look at our senior leadership roles, 40% of them are filled by women, 60% are filled by men. 80% of our population is white, 20% are people of color. The reason this matters is because representation is an indication that we welcome diverse points of view and perspectives, and we are welcoming to those individuals where they can belong and contribute. The other thing we want to do with our employees, in addition to being an attractive place to work, we want great people to come here and stay and build great careers.
People do stay here long enough to perform and contribute. Our global annual turnover is a mere 5%. Our new hires have best-in-class engagement scores, and our leaders are long-tenured. Long-tenured leadership matters because it's about stability, it is about depth of experience, it is about a talent pipeline. And lastly, we want to instill a strong sense of pride in brand Brown-Forman. People work harder when they are part of an organization they're proud of, and there's lots to be proud of when it comes to brand Brown-Forman. We have been recognized as a great place to work in multiple markets around the world. We've been recognized as one of the world's most ethical companies. The Wall Street Journal has said we are one of the best-managed companies, and we are also a great company for future leaders.
We are the place where you not only belong to something better, but you can then deliver nothing better, and as we achieve our Make It a Double ambition. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Crystal Peterson.
Thank you, Kirsten, and hello, everyone. I'm Crystal Peterson, and to add on to the long job title, I am Chief Inclusion and Global Community Relations Officer. I celebrated 12 years with Brown-Forman just last week, and today, I have the honor of sharing a little bit with you about what we do within our communities. And so in addition to the commitments we make to our environment, our consumers, our employees, we make commitments and investments to the communities where we live and work. And we do this through charitable contributions, both through the corporation and our Brown-Forman Foundation, which was established in 2018 to further enhance our legacy of charitable missions and philanthropic investments.
We work to ensure that we're doing our part to create a vibrant and thriving Louisville, and so we partner with mission-driven organizations that align with our key strategic focus areas, ensuring essential living standards, promoting responsible and sustainable living, and enriching the arts in Louisville. Now, we invest our resources across the Louisville community, with significant focus in the neighborhood that we have called home for 100 years, the California Neighborhood, and it's all about being a good neighbor. We also invest in education, as we believe that a quality education is a key to a successful life. In 2022, our Brown-Forman Foundation committed $50 million over a 10-year period to five organizations within our neighborhood, focused on education from early childhood to adult learning, from cradle to career.
We also know that giving goes beyond presenting a check, which is why we engage our employees through their time and talent to be active in the communities where they live and work through volunteer hours or nonprofit board service. Now, our hometown here in Louisville, Kentucky, is the focus of the majority of our efforts, but we also empower over 36 offices around the world to identify and prioritize local opportunities for community investment. Within the last year, we've had our employees volunteer over 13,000 hours to make a difference within our global communities. Our commitments to our environment, our consumers, our people, and our communities contribute to value creation and are fundamental to our business strategy of Bolder and Better.
By living a Spirit of Commitment, we believe we can responsibly achieve our Make It a Double ambition and ensure there's Nothing Better in the Market. Thank you from all of us, and I will turn it over to Leanne.
All right. Well, thank you, Crystal, and we are in the home stretch. So just we're gonna wrap this up here with myself and the last presenter. So my name is Leanne Cunningham, for those of you that I haven't had the opportunity to meet in person. I have been with Brown-Forman for 29 years, and July first—or July first, I will be in my role as Chief Financial Officer for three. So, it's great to be with you today, and my job is to bring everything that you've heard so far today into the shape of a P&L and then cover the last strategic pillar that we have, which is investment. So, what you'll hear from me today, we've been here for 154 years, so what I'm gonna say is gonna be very familiar.
It's gonna be very consistent, because our goals continue to be very much the same as they always have been. We have the opportunity to look at our business over very long horizons, based off of the support that we have from our long-term shareholders, who aren't focused on quarters or even fiscal years, but they're really focused on decades and generations. This affords us the benefit to invest in the momentum of our brands, to invest in our strategy, and to focus on developing and delivering the next generation of growth. With that, we'll jump into the top of our P&L with net sales. From a financial perspective, one of the most important things that we can do from a multigenerational company is to keep top-line consistent growth over a long period of time.
I think one thing you've found with Brown-Forman, and you can see in this slide, is we have been a consistent and reliable compounder of that top-line growth. It's done through the things that you've heard about today. It's done through our portfolio reshaping. It's been done through our geographic expansion. As you've heard from Matias and Jeremy and Marshall and Thomas, we believe we have the portfolio and we have the capabilities to achieve this going forward. So talking about our long-term growth algorithm from a top-line perspective, we continue to believe that in our home market, we can achieve the U.S., we can achieve mid-single-digit growth. For Developed International, a point or two higher than that, and for our international market, Emerging International markets, we would see significantly more points than that. This is one that we've been able to do.
We don't necessarily deliver that every year, like the year that we're having right now. But in fairness, if you look at FY 2023, that wasn't a really normal year for us either. Going to our gross margin. For those of you that have been following our story for a long period of time, there's been really two big stories here, which is input cost and tariffs on American EU and U.K. tariffs on American whiskey. So we've been on a journey, and to talk to you about where are we now, from an agave cost perspective, and Thomas mentioned this, we have been to the highest peak of agave costs that we have ever seen, which was 28-30 MXN per kilo.
We've now, it kind of started to fall, it stabilized, but now, in March, it was down to as low as MXN 11 per kilo, depending on the quality. So we continue to believe, we're not certain how much further it will fall and when it will fall, but what we do know is we're currently benefiting from how far it's already fallen, and that will come over a longer period of time as we work through our aging inventory and our finished goods inventory. Then for wood. You've heard, if you've been following our story, we have been actively managing for the last couple of years, changing our structure and our infrastructure that supports our supply chain, for the wood.
We've divested of our stave and heading mills, and we just announced that we are divesting of our cooperage in Trinity, Alabama, by creating partnerships with those that have focus in that area. So what we believe that does for us is creates efficiencies. We believe it's gonna deliver lower cost, and it will also help us focus on our capital allocation strategy as well. So in summary, Oh, let me go to, and what you've you've heard us say many, many times, is from a pricing, long-term pricing strategy, and you've heard us talk about our revenue growth management capabilities, we continue to believe that when you couple those together, that we should have low single digit year-over-year growth from the coupling of those capabilities. So all in all, what do we think is gonna happen with our gross margin trajectory?
We know we're gonna benefit from lower agave costs. We've had the removal of the EU and U.K. tariffs. We have been doing a lot of work to ensure the cost of our wood becomes lower than what it is right now, and we continue to believe that we have opportunities for pricing growth, even if we have to become more surgical in the years ahead. So, and this, again, this is what we've been investing in when you think about the shape of our P&L. We have been investing in revenue growth management and integrated business planning processes, strategies, and systems. You've heard us talk about we've been investing in more focus on connecting with our consumers as it relates to integrated marketing communications teams and team members focused on growing our emerging brands.
You've heard us talk about the investments that we've been making in route to consumers, which allows us to bring our broader portfolios to new markets around the world. And then just with Jack & Coke, you heard Marshall talk about, you know, this opportunity that brings two of the most iconic global brands together in the convenience format of a ready-to-drink, and we've always believed ready-to-drinks is a marketing tool for our full-strength portfolio, so we'll continue to believe that. We've done all of this work. If you step back and the teams got together as we were heading into the pandemic, you know, just into the pandemic, we thought: What do we need to do as a leadership team to envision the next generation of growth and its drivers?
If you even look back, our annual report from 2021, the title of it was Reimagining the Future, and for the last two years, this team has been doing just that. We've gone, and we've looked at what are the key enablers of growth that we need to do, how do we need to be changing our structure and our portfolio and growing our geographies, for all of it to equate to what you've heard today, which is to Make It a Double from our operating income perspective.
We believe that by doubling the net sales of our American whiskey portfolio, by doubling, or tripling the net sales of our tequila portfolio, growing even faster with our emerging brands and our RTDs, coupled with our gross margin expansion, the investments that we have been making that you've heard all of us talk about today, that we can double our operating income on a like-for-like basis by 2032. So, with the strong cash flows that we believe that we are going to generate as we double our operating income, this is what you're gonna. This will be very familiar with you, because Brown-Forman will continue to be a consistent and reliable compounder of growth, when we will continue to be the company that you know us to be, which is we are going to focus on maintaining a healthy balance sheet.
We are going to continue to be led by our capital allocation philosophy, which always has been our ballast that has guided our company, and that has helped us deliver the results that we have. So when we think about our capital deployment philosophy, many of you, I know, have heard it many, many times, and it'll be very familiar, but again, we believe it has driven top-tier growth. So you'll continue to see us invest in the company first and foremost. In the last 10 years, we've invested about $1.3 billion in our sites to make sure that we have the capacities that we need to meet the long-term consumer demand that we see in the future. Number two, we'll pay increasing dividends.
This is our 80th year of paying dividends and our 40th consecutive year of increasing our regular dividend, and we are really proud to be a part of the prestigious S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrat Index. Again, you've heard us say that before. It continues to be consistent. Third, we're gonna continue to opportunistically look for great brands that we believe in our hands can add value. You've heard all of us talk about today, in the last 10 years, we've been able to add brands that we believe are gonna be the foundation for the next generation of growth. Slane Irish Whiskey, The GlenDronach, Benriach, Glenglassaugh Single Malt Scotches. You heard about Fords Gin, you've heard about Gin Mare and Diplomático, and we believe those are brands that are gonna continue to drive that growth in the next generation.
Then finally, we're gonna look for opportunities, as we always do, to return cash to shareholders. In the last 10 years, we have returned $1.8 billion to our shareholders through the form of special cash dividends and $2.4 billion through share repurchases. So our philosophy has resulted in strong financial returns. Over the past decade, it's been 8%, returning a total of $7.4 billion to shareholders. Our ambitions continue to be the same. We continue to focus and work on having industry-leading ROIC to deliver top-tier shareholder returns. We believe that the strategic ambitions that we have shared with you today will continue to drive and deliver that, those, and deliver against those ambitions.
With the end of my remarks, you've heard from our team, our business strategy, our vision for the next 10 years, and while we believe there truly is nothing better in the market than Brown-Forman. With that, I would like to introduce to you our final speaker, our Chair of the Board, Mr. Campbell Brown.
Okay. Thank you, Leanne. Great to see everybody again. Wonderful getting to meet a lot of you last night. So I get to take us home, or at least to a very dynamic Q&A session. But really, it's kind of my privilege to share with you some perspective on how a 154-year-old relationship between a family and a company has been able to unlock growth, consistency, and opportunity. You know, we've talked about 1870, and there's a bit of an innovation story there, and how George Garvin Brown was able to bottle and provide the first bottled bourbon in America. And that sort of unlocked the beginning of a story.
And in 1933, we kind of waved goodbye to 13 years of horrendous Prohibition while extending our hand to the public and provided about 49% of what was a private company to the public, creating a relationship with all of you in some respects. And in 1956, my grandfather and Marshall's grandfather, along with their his brother, they rolled up their sleeves, they got in their car, they set a path south to Moore County, Tennessee, in Lynchburg, and successfully acquired Jack Daniel's, forever changing the trajectory of this company. And I would say, more importantly, even, a few months later, those brothers decided to issue a B share, which again, a two-for-one, anyone owning A shares at that time received two shares of B.
That unlocked the opportunity that today is reflected in what Matias shared earlier, one of the most valuable brands of any type around the world. I would say today, you've heard from a leadership team that I would characterize as the most stable in our industry. They have a collection of skills that extend far beyond function. They've spent years in this business, in many times different geographies, running different brands. That collection of leadership is what connects so intimately our family to the possibility and the future of what Brown-Forman has always delivered to all of its shareholders. An ability to unlock growth, growth in brands, growth in geography, growth in people, and growth in the prosperity of the communities in which we exist. The confidence that this has delivered, for over 150 years is what keeps us here.
It's what gives us so much economic benefit, as well as trust in what the future holds for Brown-Forman. I was with Thomas last week in Japan, where we were able to celebrate the coming route to market change that we're making. This is a market that we've existed in for 50 years, through partnerships with distributors, and we've been very successful there. It's 50 years later that we've now decided it's time to own our destiny in that market. I think that comes. It's a sense of the patience that we can bring to a conversation as long-term shareholders, where we believe that the time now is actually right, with the emergence of a Scotch portfolio and the decisions to buy brands like Gin Mare and Diplomático, which unlock opportunity that Marshall talked about for us in Italy.
These are the kinds of things, the relationships that have been forged because we have found ways to communicate. As our family has grown, we represent today, I think including spouses, well over 100 people. Our business is far more complicated today than it was when I started in 1994. Our responsibility to all of our shareholders continues to grow, and the expectations also continue to grow. This is totally appropriate when you've seen a company, decade after decade, deliver the consistency of results that we've been able to do. It's a story that doesn't exist in a silo. It's a story that has grown as a result of the investments that we've made in things like governance.
This picture, this collage up here, is a reflection of not just a family that's been involved in a company, but we've got members of our board of directors, we've got members of our fourth, fifth, and sixth generations. Today, we have our first sixth-generation employee at Brown-Forman. He started working with Marshall in the strategy and mergers and acquisition group. He's now part of the Jack Daniel's global financial team. We've got an incredible group of leader, leaders that you've heard from today, that participate with our family and our shareholders as well, certainly with the board, in areas where we get to connect and understand a little bit more about how the strategy will unlock future opportunity, generational opportunity, that will benefit all of our shareholders, not just a family that mostly calls Louisville, Kentucky, home. It's a fortunate story.
It's a story that I am, that we continue to be very, very proud to tell. And it gives us great pride to know that you are, and have shown, the confidence in us to be a part of our story. And we've bookmarked it in a phrase you've heard time and time again. You know, it's. We feel so strongly about it that we've put it on the label of our founding brand, Old Forester. It was first written down in 1870, and today, it's as true and as relevant as it was when George Garvin Brown first put it to paper. And we believe it's something that holds relevance for all of our stakeholders, not just a family, that there is nothing better in the market than Brown-Forman. I want to thank you all for taking the time to join us these last two days.
I'm really pleased to hear that you're gonna get to spend some time in this building and see our cooperage, one of the most fascinating production facilities that kind of exist today. If you haven't been to a cooperage, I'm glad you're wearing your appropriate footwear. It's really fantastic, and we're gonna have an opportunity to have another meal together, and very much looking forward to a dynamic and vibrant Q&A. So thank you, Lawson, to your team, to the gang here that made this AV come off. I think we're almost, geez, we're right on time. So thanks very much. Great to see you, and thank you again for joining us in Louisville, Kentucky.
Are we on? Thank you, Campbell. We're gonna take, like, two minutes, so don't leave the room, just to clear the stage so we can get our chairs up on stage, and then the ELT, along with Campbell. So Executive Leadership Team. Sorry, I'm trying not to use all the acronyms. Our executive leaders will sit up on stage. Hang on. Risk management is getting really nervous right now. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right. So, as everybody's getting seated, just a few quick housekeeping items before we get started. I will be moderating the Q&A. So please wait for you to raise your hand and wait to be called upon, and then wait for a microphone for those that are listening to the webcast.
Please also keep in mind that only business-appropriate questions are to be asked in this meeting. I'll also remind you that we just reported our third quarter year-to-date earnings two weeks ago, so you are well-versed in our responses to the current environment. I would encourage you to take the opportunity to ask questions about our presentations today, which have been focused on our longer term ambitions, and even more so of those that you normally don't get to have the opportunity to speak to. So Lawson, Leanne, and I would hope you feel pretty accessible, and see most of you at conferences or investor meetings. So I would encourage you to take the opportunity to talk to some of the other members of the executive leadership team. All right, so with that, let's get started.
Yeah, the holy smokes!
Thank you for the opportunity, Andrea Teixeira from JP Morgan. I was hoping to. First of all, thank you for the impressive presentation. So my question is on the ambition for 2032. So, I was hoping if you can break down, if my math is correct, you're calling to about 6%-7% CAGR over the next nine years on top line, and then double OI, now I found you. Double OI at by the end of the period. So I was just hoping if you can break down with the history of JD against the other brands.
I appreciate that you open up for geography, but thinking about the family of brands, you're implying that perhaps low single digits for JD and then Woodford Reserve growing probably double digits, and then emerging brands growing at a clip of 15%, if that makes sense. And then thinking about tequila tripling, year to date, you've done much less than that. I think year to date, you're down 3%. So if there is any addition to that commentary. Thank you.
Leanne, you're gonna kick that off?
Okay, so I'll get us started. You know, when you think about the level of transparency we, we shared with you in our ambition today, I think we, we probably will keep it at the level by which we shared it with you. What we can share with you is on doubling operating income. That'll be based off of what you can find in our FY 2023 annual report for the end of FY 2022. Along the way, like we usually do, we will be adjusting for foreign exchange, we will be adjusting for non-comparable events.
So even though along the way it might not be exactly visible to you where we are, you'll have kind of a mark, because this is all about motivating and inspiring our entire organization to be aligned towards a clear goal of what we're trying to achieve and how we're trying to achieve it with the double, triple, bolder, better. So more to come as we go along, but I would say, you know, when you think about our long-term growth algorithm, I talked about it from a top-line perspective as it related to geography, but then you also can go back and look at our long-term growth algorithm by brand. So I think, again, what I said is, we'll kind of continue to be who we are in the future based off of where we have been. So I don't know if any.
Sue, what do you think?
Yeah.
Fiscal 2022, that you can find in our annual report from an operating income perspective. Okay, next?
Hi, Rob Moskow from TD Cowen. I think this question is for Matias. The objective is to, or a big part of it, is to get younger consumers into the franchise, but they have a lot of choices for American whiskey, and I really love the advertising campaign. I'm not quite sure why I liked it so much. So maybe you can tell me why younger consumers view that as compelling. What do they tell you that Jack Daniel's means to them, and is it consistent with what, you know, older consumers view it to mean?
Sure, I'm okay to answer that.
You're okay to answer that.
Thank you.
But two things I'll say, Rob-
Thank you for that.
You must. Oh, sorry, Matias. I was gonna say-
Yeah.
Rob must be young at heart, and also-
We're all, we're all young at heart.
Yeah.
Yeah. Look, I mean, Jack Daniel's, as I said, is a brand that transcends whiskey and even spirits. I mean, a brand where, you know, with. Not a lot of brands have T-shirts that people wear by their own, right? So it really stands for much more than just whiskey or spirits. It's almost a lifestyle. It's, you know, and it signals independence and authenticity and going your own way. And those values, we believe, resonate with as much with the younger generations as much with the older generations. The way we express those might differ, you know, by age groups or by geographies, but at the deep core of what the Jack Daniel's brand stands for, it really resonates.
In this particular case, with this campaign, it's an act of balance to be able to do both. You know, to talk to the core consumer, maybe more through the choice of the track, you know, Back in Black by AC/DC. But if you were able to pick up some of the featured artists in that ad, you've got, you know, Kingfish or St. Vincent or Este Haim, right? And those are a little bit of Easter eggs for the younger generations, but honestly, I didn't know all of them when I was shooting that ad. But when we showed that ad to younger employees, they all picked it up.
From recent research that we've done, probably four months into rolling out that campaign, actually, it's resonating really very well with younger LDA generations, really very well, as much as older ones. But it was a little bit of a surprise for us, and it's a pleasant surprise that it's doing so well. And I think it's just Jack Daniel's is a very known brand, and that's what people know about this brand, right? You know, music, rock music, independence, and living in the moment. I mean, those are things that people know about Jack Daniel's.
Thanks. Bill Chappell from Truist Securities. I wanna follow up a little bit more on the, on Jack Daniel's, and just, I remember 15 years ago, plus, coming here, and the thought was management and the company was very protective of the brand and the prestige of it. There was a hesitancy to go into flavors. There was a hesitancy to go into RTDs because you didn't wanna dilute the iconic nature of the brand. And, you know, the decision's been made, and to move to these areas and unlock a lot of growth, which it's been great for the company. But I guess, I wonder, is there a concern that it's not as iconic as it used to be? And it's a lot tougher to get that iconoclastic nature back.
And that's okay, 'cause Woodford can take the reins for the premium and the super premium and that prestige. Just help me understand, kind of from a company, how you look at that. 'Cause I guess, the worry from our side is that it's, Jack Daniel's is like Budweiser. It was once the king of beers, but then it got passed by everybody else with a different marketing or a different price point or something like that. So help me understand how you think about that as a company.
Sure. Thank you. I mean, that's one of the most important questions that we think about all the time. I mean, in this team, and across the whole company, because it is our largest brand, and we're like stewards of these iconic brands, we have to question, you know, ourselves every day. So I'll say, look, it is a very reasonable question. There's no data or evidence that points that there's been any equity dilution. In fact, we were just doing research on RTDs. Marshall shared some insights, but when we asked consumers how their perception of Tennessee whiskey had changed, knowing Jack & Coke RTDs is actually very positive to Black Label. We also see that through flavors as well.
So there's no data that tells you that, but of course, we'll, you know, we're always worrying about that. When we look at brand health metrics, in terms of awareness and consideration and consumer preference, Jack Daniel's is still at the number one or two in most markets across all demographics. And actually, if you go on younger LDA demographics, it's even stronger, which is very interesting. So, but we continue to push ourselves to establish Jack Daniel's credentials in the super premium whiskey segment as well, through, you know, Bonded and aged and some limited editions. That really has helped reestablish Jack Daniel's in the world of whiskey experts, and actually bring Jack Daniel's back to the world of craft whiskey.
I mean, Jack Daniel's has always been the ultimate craft whiskey. If you've ever been in Lynchburg, you can see that, right? But it was all about reminding consumers that it actually is. So through those expressions, we can tell those stories, and, and it's being recognized. I mean, Jack Daniel's has been back in the whiskey geek world for a number of years, and, and it's doing really well there.
So I hope that answers your question. I'm happy to talk about that, later, too.
Let me just add a kind of fun story just a little bit. I'd be willing to predict, I don't know if this obviously is a fact, but Jack Daniel's has more tattoos than any other brand in the world. A spirits brand in the world. And we had someone send in a picture the other day; there are actually now people that have a Jack & Coke tattoo. So it's still happening, and that's still happening with the younger generation.
Thanks, Peter Grom from UBS. So I kind of want to stick with the Jack Daniel's theme, but Marshall, you spoke to kind of the halo effect of Jack Daniel's from the Jack & Coke partnership. Obviously makes a lot of sense. Are there certain markets that you're now prioritizing where maybe the Coca-Cola Company has a stronger presence that you weren't focusing on previously? And then I guess, you know, I recognize it's really early days, but are there any metrics you can share around, you know, where you've seen the benefit to Jack Daniel's from the Jack & Coke partnership?
Yeah, thanks for the question, and I would say probably too early to be able to provide any specific data around, you know, how that is happening. But, but I will point out there, there are certain markets where, where we are seeing a lot of excitement, where we would've struggled to. And so if you look towards Asia, for example, Philippines had a phenomenal Jack & Coke launch. The Coca-Cola bottler there has incredible capabilities, and Jack Daniel's is a really well-regarded brand, but now it's thrust much more into, into the spotlight than it ever would've been with the consumers. So that would be one that, that we're very encouraged about.
Japan, another, where we're investing behind our own RTC, and we really lacked not playing in, you know, one of the largest categories in the world, which is Japanese RTD. So, really, really pleased about that one as well. When you think about untapped emerging markets like Africa, for example, for a consumer to go place their income into a purchase, a chilled, well-merchandised Jack & Coke at an approachable price point is a much easier way for them to trial Jack Daniel's than going into a liquor store, might be dark, might be dusty, and having to make that purchase on their own. So I think those are some examples that we'll be looking to over the next few years.
And then the halo comment also just referred to the fact that we have incremental investment as a result of the two companies coming together, that is brand expense that Jack Daniel's was not receiving before, the Jack & Coke innovation as well.
Thanks. Lauren Lieberman from Barclays. So I want to talk a little bit more about the owned route to market or route to consumer. So first was just a math or very simple question, is after Italy is done, what percentage of your route to consumer will you own globally? And then secondly, was just in markets where this has been established a bit longer, I'd be curious for examples of the learnings, sort of what you're able to do differently, whether it's consumer insights, whether it's relationship with retail, but sort of what functionally changes when you do own that route to consumer, and how you're able to leverage that going forward in terms of accelerating growth?
Happy to talk about that. I would think that after Italy, we will have 70% of our international business in our own hands, which is a little shy of what comp set is, so there's still a bit to go, and our ambition is also to grow that a bit further over the coming years. But that's sort of the majority of our business after now Japan and coming Italy will be in our. So that's, I'd say, the percent.
Yeah, we would struggle to find an example around the world historically, where working with a third-party distributor, we got execution beyond Jack Daniel's in any meaningful form. That we had some great success with Jack Daniel's, with a variety of third-party partners, but it never extended into the rest of our portfolio. And so own distribution gives us the ability to apply the focus to the parts of the portfolio beyond just Jack Daniel's, or even within the family of brands of Jack Daniel's that we want to see grow. And so that helps us out a lot. We can communicate much deeper messaging to the trade around the brand, so we can communicate deeper stories. We can take our marketing to another level. We have greater control over the marketing.
We establish relationships that are very, very important, and we are able to leverage those relationships in the brand building. Then we find that we have much greater control over our pricing power when we have our control over our distribution as well. When there's another layer in there, and they've got other priorities that they're trying to balance, they're not willing to go to the mat for Jack Daniel's pricing like we are. So I think that's a very important part of us driving value through own distribution as well.
I'll just add one little bit. We were talking about at my table yesterday, but I was in the U.K. when we moved to own distribution, and I think it's a good example. We moved to own distribution and had our sort of launch conference two weeks before COVID hit, and we were very worried at the time about what that meant. And in the end, it ended up being a blessing, because in addition to everything that Marshall said, it gave us control over the volatility of environment. So we were having direct conversations with retailers. As a company, what are they planning to do from an inventory perspective, or perspective? What are they planning to do in terms of promotional perspective? And without that, you know
And then tariffs hit, and then we were able to talk again directly to retailers and describe to them what our strategy was gonna be around tariffs. If we had a different model, we would have had less access, and I think less ability and control to be agile in that environment that hit us pretty fast within a twoyear period. So that's a sort of a real-world example.
Oh, thank you. Bryan Spillane from Bank of America. Thank you. First of all, this is a great lineup. It should, I was thinking dunking booth for a while, but anyway. So I wanted to ask about tequila, and maybe start, Lawson, with your perspective. You know, if you go back to the Herradura acquisition, you know, Brown-Forman was really at front of the game, right? In terms of seeing the opportunity in tequila. Herradura had some bumps at the beginning, right? I think there was, like, agave blight and inventory and all kinds of stuff. But if you were to grade, you know, what's happened with Herradura and your tequila portfolio, I guess, over the last 15 years versus what's happened in the market. I mean, you know, Casamigos comes out of nowhere, right?
Becomes whatever it is, number three, number four. So just kind of thinking about why, right, your brands, El Jimador and Herradura, haven't sort of done more in that, in that context. And then if we could tie into that now going forward, because it's such an important part of the, sort of the, the Make It a Double or a triple, I guess. Just what's gonna be different going forward versus maybe what I would kind of look at as maybe a missed opportunity in the past?
Well, look, certainly the category has exploded. Everyone knows that. You know, I think it did. We bought it in 2007, and it took probably too long for us to kind of get our feet under us. If you were back in that era, you were right, no one was. I mean, tequila business was not healthy. We had way too much supply. It was selling for, I don't know what the bottom was, MXN 3 or MXN 4 a kilo, something way down there. And then there's in business, I can't think of any other business where their raw cost goes from MXN 3 or 4 to MXN 30, and that was penalizing for everyone.
We took massive price increases along the way to try to make up for that, particularly in Mexico, where you know, El Jimador, in particular, was priced very low, and we have taken it rapidly up. Now, a grade on how we have done, or how, really, I think you're asking about Herradura for the most part in the United States. Yes, we have not kept up with the market share gains that really were driven by two brands over the last 3, 4, 5 years. You know, their model is a little bit different from ours. Casamigos is a very different model. It's been a brilliant move on their part. They've built up a huge brand. Congratulations to them. I mean, Herradura, you can't
I don't know the number now as of today, but I know I did the shareholder meeting last summer; that number sticks in my head. We were at 15% CAGR on sales growth over the previous five years. So it's not like the brand is, I mean, 15% is still pretty good. We would take that, and it, on the tripling, if you get 15% a year for the next eight or nine years, whatever it is, you're gonna get to the tripling, I think, pretty quickly. So, you know, we're building something that is very authentic. We've got one of the original brands in the industry. We've got to find a better way to get it in consumers' hands. We have a long way to go with distribution and a long way to go with awareness.
I can tell you it's one of the big priorities over the next couple of years, particularly for the U.S. market, to turn that trend around and get our fair share.
Hi, Nadine Sarwat from Bernstein. I have two interrelated questions, maybe the first for Lawson or Marshall. So M&A has been a pretty important part of the Brown-Forman slow, steady tinkering of the portfolio over the last few decades. So how do you think about M&A over the coming years? Any areas in particular that you're watching most closely that you think are white spaces? And then second question, related maybe for Campbell. You know, you spoke about decades generation, not quarters or years. I'd be curious to hear, looking back at the last few decades, can you point to a few examples where you feel that that very long-term outlook allowed Brown-Forman to take decisions that maybe some of your peers would not have been able to? Thank you.
Let me, I'll take the beginning, and then, Marshall, you can add on, onto the M&A conversation. Yeah, we've been quite active, you would have seen that in several presentations here, in reshaping the portfolio for the next generation. That was always the language we used. And, and, you know, to, to be honest or transparent, I think you all would do the math. I mean, we were selling off the Southern Comfort and Early Times and Canadian Mist at very low multiples and buying much better brands, but at much higher multiples, too. And that causes dilution. And, you know, we try to space these things out over time so that it doesn't get too dilutive, where essentially there's nothing left to sell really in our portfolio that, is particularly meaningful at this point. And so, I think we've got the portfolio we want.
There's really no categories left of major significance or global categories that we're not in. I mean, you could ask, you could talk about Cognac maybe or something like that, but that's a very challenging space and not one that we would not call that a very high priority. So for now, it's really about absorbing these two big ones we did in the last year. Doing two in a year is a, is a pretty big change from the sort of slower pattern that we had over all these years. Get them in, get them, you know, moving, get them in the right places, and, and then we'll take a look at some, some, maybe some new deals in the future. But I, we're, we're taking a bit of a pause on that.
Yeah, I mean, I would agree with that completely. And we are not targeting category white spaces, in. You know, we feel we are in the right categories. We're in the super premium plus categories that are gonna drive growth. We have great capabilities in those categories, and we have the ability to innovate to fill space if we would like to. There are definitely still some areas out there that would be of interest to us.
But we have done a lot of work, a lot of M&A in this space recently, and I think it will help the organization to be focused on really execution, and then we'll evaluate the opportunities when they're ready.
I think, like, two organic examples I'd bring to mind are the ones that you've experienced the closest, right? Woodford Reserve, that investment to take a distillery out of mothballs and invest the kind of capital that Owsley invested, with the kind of vision around creating something that, you know, was truly special and unique, not just in flavor and taste, but in what an expectation a consumer would have of a distillery tour. That was a significant bet at the time when the category of bourbon wasn't really setting the world on fire.
This place, you know, when I ran Old Forester before I took this job, and, you know, it was a tough decision to take the job for me personally, because it was a brand that we had successfully seen kind of fall off the consideration set, except for Jefferson County, Kentucky. I mean, we went from 1 million cases in the '70s to when I got the job, it was less than 100,000 cases. Lawson, Paul, they'd invest $50 million plus in this facility on a bet that we could connect the story of this family back to the story of Old Forester, America's first bottle of bourbon. It's now, you know, over 500,000 cases. We've completely turned the P&L upside down in the right way.
We've created innovation and storytelling that I think is unique to the category. I don't think very many companies would actually make that bet on a brand like Old Forester, that, frankly, had kind of lost its way, other than the beautiful households of Louisville, Kentucky, that refused to let it die.
Very good. All right, we have time for one more question. Who's closest to a microphone? Oh!
Bonnie, would you like the question? You sure? It's Steve Powers from Deutsche Bank. And I actually had, well, two. One's a, one's a follow-on from Lauren's question, one's a build on Bill's question. The follow-up to Lauren, you mentioned about 70%, Thomas, 70%, you know, owned distribution today. As you think about that 2032 ambition and further conversions going forward, as well as new markets coming in, is that 70% about the right balance, or do you have an, an ambition that it embedded in the 2032 outlook to go higher or, or not?
And then the build on Bill's question was, you know, beyond, beyond Jack, when you think about overall American whiskey, and doubling that, you know, how much growth should we think about, as you think about it, coming from, you know, core SKUs, like core Tennessee Whiskey or core Woodford Reserve, versus the rest of the brand family and further expansion? Because I'm just trying to figure out, you know, how much expansion is too much as you balance diversification against just complexity and brand dilution.
Okay, Matias, do you wanna start with the-
Yeah, I can start with that.
Then go to RTC.
Yeah, look, when it comes to innovation, and, you know, we really innovate off our strong trademarks, but we do it very carefully. So we are very thoughtful and very focused. We've said before in Investor Day conference two years ago, our innovation principles is fewer but bigger and better. So products that we can really scale up globally would be the focus. So, I mean, it's hard to put exact numbers to your question, but I would say the core still plays the majority of, you know, of the role in growth with the appropriate big bets in innovation, especially on the premiumization side. So that would be the way we think about that in American whiskey.
Let me add just one more point to the Jack thing. I think one of the more important slides that we showed here this morning was that one, the 30-year, 20-year, 10-
And five.
and five, basically all the same number. You know, that, that, that says something. I mean, it is. And those kinds of numbers are what we expect in the future, too. I mean, that, being able to do that, we have found a way, one way or the other, to continue to grow, grow the franchise. And to the RTC piece, 'cause they're connected, I think that, you know, we don't, I don't have a target necessarily. We will continue to take markets where it makes the most sense. Those are often defined by markets that are trying to grow beyond just the Jack Daniel's trademark, too, because as of what Marshall said a minute ago, you can't get third parties to do anything anymore, beyond just the Jack Daniel's brand. And so, we will continue to do that, continue to grow.
I don't, I wouldn't say there's a ton of that built into the base case model that we have, and there's not a ton of innovation, really. Everybody wants to know when we're gonna do new flavors and things like that. I mean, we are, w e've been a little more restrained with that over the last couple of years, and we'll focus on the, the ones Matias showed, the Bonded and the super. The super premium innovations are important, and that will continue to happen.
Okay, so if we were not able to address your question today, Bonnie, or for those of you listening on the webcast, p lease contact me directly. You are free to ask questions that you may have. Also, as we break into lunch, we will all still be present for the next 45 minutes or so before you all go on your tours. We will be posting a replay of this event by the end of the week on our investor relations website. So if you want to watch this over and over again, maybe with a bag of popcorn, you feel free to do that. For those of you that are watching the webcast, you may sign off now. Those of you in the room, I've got a few more messages for you. So for those of you in the room, lunch will be served in the hallway behind you, where you had breakfast.
You can feel free to either come back in here and sit at any of these tables; it's open seating or highly recommended. There is a fabulous patio out the other side, on the other side of this building, that actually overlooks the river and part of the Louisville skyline. So, feel free to go out there and gather and eat as well. At 11:45, you will be called for the beginning of the tours. So again, look at your pins, whether you're Old Forester, Jack Daniel's, or Woodford Reserve. That is how you will be grouped and meet with your teams. Please also keep your badge, your name badges on. It just helps our security personnel identify who you are. I don't want anybody to get tackled as you're running through a door somewhere.
Also, as added incentive to keeping those name badges on, you are invited to shop at our Old Forester Distillery gift shop downstairs, and there are some specialty bottles that you will see displayed on either side of the stage here, that you have the opportunity to purchase. Not everyone has the opportunity to do so. It's only those of you with name badges. So, be sure to go down and do some shopping. If you happen to be on the tour with the Old Forester pin, you're gonna wind up actually out by the Cooperage last, going to the airport directly thereafter, and then that bus will come back here for those of you that aren't getting off.
But if you're not gonna be able to make it to the gift shop after 3:00, please go ahead and shop during the lunch hour. It is open and available at that time. I think. Oh, two more things. Investor Day gift that I promised you, that if you didn't stuff into your purses or in your coats last night, would be available for you. They are going to be boxed outside for you, as well as a very unique opportunity. We created a Brown-Forman 150th anniversary coffee table book for our 150th. We do have extra copies of that. So if you are interested in taking one, one will be available to you. So with that. Oh, one more thing, just remembering.
We have a barrel, also, an Old Forester barrel, that you have the opportunity to sign. It will be filled at some point in time and then actually put in the warehouse here that you will tour later today. So, please, mark your name and the occasion of being here for our Brown-Forman Investor Day 2024. With that, let's have some lunch.