Good morning. I'm Melissa Napier, Head of Investor Relations for Conagra Brands. On behalf of our entire leadership team, I'm pleased to welcome you to our Investor Day. Over the next two and a half hours, you'll be hearing from our business, supply chain, and ESG leaders about how we will continue to deliver long-term shareholder value to our investors, business partners, and employees. Sean Connolly, our CEO, will start the day and we'll conclude with David Marberger, our CFO. We'll take a 10-minute break halfway through our session, and we'll close with Q&A after our financial update. Please enter your questions into the chat box, and I'll direct them to the appropriate senior leader to address. Before I turn the session over to Sean to start us off, I'd like to remind you that we will be making forward-looking statements and referencing non-GAAP financial measures in today's presentations.
You can find more information about our risk factors in our latest 10-K and reconciliations between non-GAAP and comparable GAAP financial measures in the slide deck appendix at the back of this presentation. Thanks for your interest in Conagra Brands and for joining us today. Sean, over to you.
Thanks, Melissa. Good morning to everyone on the webcast. Thank you for attending Conagra Brands 2022 Investor Day. We've got a lot of great content to share with you today. I'm going to walk you through the big picture, which is a look at all we've accomplished over the past seven years and what we expect to accomplish in the future. Tom McGough will then take you through a deeper dive into our portfolio and our approach to creating long-term shareholder value. Tom will be followed by Darren Serrao, who will detail our proven playbook on how to create strong connections between consumers and brands. Next, we will cover our supply chain. Alexandre Eboli, our new Chief Supply Chain Officer, will talk about our plans to build an advantaged end-to-end supply chain that will drive efficiencies and improve gross margins.
Katya Hantel, our Head of Sustainability, will provide an overview on our approach to ESG and how we're implementing processes that not only improve sustainability, but deliver value for our customers and our shareholders. Wrapping up our presentations will be CFO Dave Marberger, who will walk you through the numbers on fiscal 2022 and our outlook for fiscal 2023 and beyond. We'll end with a question and answer session with all of our presenters. Let's get into it. What we want you to conclude from our presentations today is that we have a strong, well-managed portfolio with leading brands in attractive categories. We have clear growth prospects. We have promising margin expansion opportunities, and that we will continue to take a balanced capital allocation approach focused on driving value.
At the end of the day, we want you to see Conagra as a compelling investment opportunity because you believe we have the assets, processes, people, capabilities, culture, and most importantly, the plan to unlock tremendous value for our shareholders. I'll quickly cover three topics today, our transformation journey, what we've achieved so far, and how we create value from here. I'll start with a brief reminder of our transformation journey. I joined Conagra in early 2015 after Hillshire Brands was sold to Tyson. I saw right away the opportunity at Conagra was clear. Conagra had a long history, and it had accomplished many things over the years. However, when I joined the company, it had gone the way of many aging conglomerates. It was complicated, had outdated capabilities, and was struggling to straddle both private label and consumer brands.
Overall, it wasn't performing as well as it could have been. In short, it needed a new beginning, and that's what we did. We gave the business a fresh start. Looking back to when we first installed our playbook in 2016, we can break down the past seven or so years into three phases. First, the transform phase, where we unwound decades of structure and culture. The build phase, where we infused the organization with new people, modern processes, a reliance on data, and a refreshed culture. More recently, the accelerate phase, where we sit today, focused on winning both in the marketplace and the workplace. It's great to move beyond the transform and build phases, but we know we've still got a lot of runway in the accelerate phase, and we'll share that with you today.
As we sought to transform our company, we focused in on three key areas, our portfolio, capabilities, and culture. Let's start with the portfolio. I shared this with you before, but it remains as true today as the first time I presented it. Our true north is perpetually reshaping our portfolio for better growth and better margins, and we do that three ways. First, we focus on strengthening the businesses we own. Second, we acquire new businesses that complement our existing portfolio. Third, we divest select businesses that are either a drag on our growth or our margins or just not a good strategic fit. When it comes to portfolio reshaping, we've done a lot. We've transformed not only our frozen business, but the category as a whole with our industry-leading innovation.
We've unlocked a fast-growing, nearly $3 billion snacking business, and we've had success modernizing our staples portfolio. In addition, we've added some terrific brands like Birds Eye and Gardein through the Pinnacle acquisition, as well as Angie's BOOMCHICKAPOP, Duke's, et cetera. These brands have provided not only additional sales, but new capabilities as well. Finally, we've divested numerous businesses that were either a drag or a poor strategic fit. You see those on the right-hand side of this slide. Now let's talk capabilities. The Conagra Way is our playbook on how to build brands that create lasting connections with consumers. Those of you who have followed us for a while will recall that our modern approach to brand building is more comprehensive than legacy industry practices. We anchor our investments and our efforts first in designing new, modern, and superior products.
This includes not only the food, but also aspects such as packaging and graphics. We invest to drive the physical availability or distribution of those products, both in store and online. Finally, we invest to drive mental availability, saliency, or top-of-mindness. We do that through meaningful one-to-one communication to the right consumers at the right time and place. This scalable, comprehensive approach and unwavering commitment to modernizing and premiumizing our portfolio continues to pay off and enables us to better manage our brands within any environment. Darren will illuminate this further in a bit. To help fuel The Conagra Way playbook, we've invested in a number of key capabilities, including demand science, which identifies the most on-trend growth attributes that need to be fed into our innovation pipeline. Design expertise that ensures our innovations are highly provocative.
Advanced analytics that contribute to everything from supply planning, to margin optimization, to procurement. Automation and machine learning, where we leverage technology such as artificial intelligence to drive faster decision-making. E-commerce, where we've driven major growth. Modern approaches to creating lasting connections between our consumers and our brands. You'll hear more about some of these capabilities later today. As Peter Drucker said, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast," which is why culture building has been such a priority for Conagra in recent years. We've worked hard to create a lean, non-hierarchical team that's able to learn, move quickly, and make sound decisions faster than ever before. This allows us to turn consumer insights into action and drive innovative ideas across the business in much less time and with much greater creativity.
We're a big company, but if you work for us, you would soon learn that we don't feel like one. We retain an entrepreneurial feel, but we're also a highly disciplined team. Alexandre will talk about this concept in relation to supply chain, but it applies to the whole company. We are a learning organization, which means that as you learn new things, you need to be comfortable discarding outdated models and beliefs. We're constantly establishing new skills and capabilities and applying them across the business to stay ahead in today's ever-changing marketplace. We've also learned that old models become obsolete, and that if we want to win, we can't cling to old orthodoxies that no longer work. This is my team. I'm proud to work closely with each of the people you see on this slide.
They are experienced, tested, collaborative team that comes to work each day to make a positive impact on the business, and the bench beyond them is every bit as impressive. Hopefully, our next investor day is in person so you can meet them. Clearly, it was a lot of work to transform Conagra Brands, but we did it to make the company stronger and to create value. Let's take a look at the results. Let's start with total shareholder return from fiscal 2015 through the just completed fiscal 2022. What I'm showing you here is Conagra versus two peer groups. The first consists of our near-in peers, General Mills, Kraft Heinz, Kellogg's, Smucker, and Campbell. The second is a broader group that includes our near-in peers, plus the snack and confection players, Mondelez, Hershey, and PepsiCo.
What you can see is we have delivered substantially higher total shareholder return than the median of our near-in peers and a bit more than the broader industry. As the bottom of the chart shows, despite that TSR delivery, our P/E ratio today sits at a substantial discount even to near-in peers. We think that's a compelling opportunity for investors. If you consider strong and sustainable EPS growth a driver of TSR, take a look at this slide. This is adjusted EPS growth from fiscal 2016 when we implemented our playbook through the just completed fiscal 2022. Here we are comparing Conagra to our near-in peers and the broader group that includes the snack and confection companies. You can see Conagra's adjusted EPS delivery over the seven-year period clearly beat the median of both peer groups by a solid margin.
Again, look at the bottom of the page. Despite the sustained, strong adjusted EPS growth, we sit here today trading at a discount to our peers. Our team is proud of those long-term results, but let's take a closer look at how things have evolved over the past three years, because that period has been quite unique, to say the least. When we hosted our last Investor Day in April 2019, we shared new three-year goals on sales growth, margin expansion, EPS growth, and free cash flow conversion. Well, clearly, that three-year window did not unfold as planned. The first two years were all about the pandemic, where we thrived. As Dave will show you later, by the end of fiscal 2021, Conagra was well ahead of pace on all four of these metrics. Fiscal 2022, as we all know, was the year of unprecedented inflation.
These compressed margins required record pricing actions, which then led to the typical lag effects associated with pricing. That lag brought EPS down off the stellar fiscal 2021 performance. When you helicopter up and look at where we are today, having navigated a highly volatile three-year period, I like where we sit and believe we are very well-positioned from here. Our sales growth now places Conagra Brands as the fourth largest food company in the U.S. One of the things I really like about our company is that our U.S. centricity enables simplicity at scale. Over 90% of our sales are domestic, and the scale and scope of our portfolio within the U.S. gives us a prime seat at the table with our top customers, where we do a majority of our business.
Our geographical focus means that only 18 U.S.-based customers represent approximately 80% of our total company shipments. These customer relationships run deep as we serve their needs in almost every aisle of the store. Knowing their businesses well and communicating with their leaders regularly allows us to deliver value at scale. Because we reach so many consumers in so many aisles, the depth of our consumer insights across dayparts and need states is an extraordinary resource as we drive future innovation. We also have many light touch brands where we can leverage common packaging, flavors, forms, and technology across the portfolio to deliver efficiency while also providing consumers with unique brand experiences. We have curated an enviable portfolio that looks nothing like what you would have found here eight years ago. Nearly 70% of our retail sales come from our highly attractive frozen and snacks businesses.
Another 20% comes from our ingredients and enhancers, which also have tremendous millennial appeal and are growth drivers for us. The final 12% is made up of meals and sides, which are our reliable cash-oriented contributors. These businesses are made up of iconic household name brands that 96% of Americans rely on regularly, and 82% of our portfolio is currently gaining or maintaining share, a real testament to what we've been able to accomplish with this business. You'll also see that more than 80% of our brands are number one or two in their category, and over 90% of the categories in which we compete are growing. Throughout our journey, we've been able to drive sales and share gains.
As we transitioned to our build phase in fiscal 2018, which you can see here on the left, we were focused on modernizing the portfolio and our marketing approach, as well as ramping up our innovation efforts. That work directly led to increases in our sales and share. As we move to our current accelerate phase, shown on the right, we've been able to attract and retain even more consumers who are embracing new permanent habits, like working from home more often. Our sales and share numbers have increased further, reflecting the power of our brands. What drove our growth over these periods was modern and premium innovation. That innovation has fallen into four priority areas for us. First, we've spent a lot of time reinventing our big brands and moving away from their legacy forms.
Tom will cover this in more detail, but I can tell you that some of the products we sell under the Birds Eye, Marie Callender's, and Gardein brands, as well as many others, are nothing like what those brands offered even a few years ago. Second, we've been able to extend our brands into high-growth benefits to take advantage of consumer interest in areas like keto-friendly, no sugar added, or extra protein. Third, we've been able to move many brands into adjacent categories, building on the work we've done to improve the base products. You see here P.F. Chang's salad dressing, Healthy Choice flatbreads, and Gardein soup, which are just a few examples.
We've really tapped into the power of licensing and partnerships to drive sales, whether it's our brands partnering with another brand to create unique flavor profiles like Swiss Miss and Lucky Charms cereal, or Duncan Hines teaming with American icon Dolly Parton. These products are proving popular with consumers. We've sold more than $1.4 billion of newly launched products since fiscal 2018, and those new products have sustained growth. We're seeing sales increase an average of 12% three years after launch. That means consumers like what we're doing, and they're coming back for more. Our customers have noticed as well, which is why we've seen a 1.3 x increase in TDPs for our fiscal 2022 innovation slate versus where we were in fiscal 2018. Our dollar sales per TDP are up 35% in fiscal 2022 over that same timeframe.
As I mentioned earlier, we've taken advantage of the unprecedented increase in consumer demand over the past 2 years. We've seen more than 2 million new consumers buy our products, and many are becoming repeat or regular buyers. Over the past 52 weeks, dollar sales have increased 7% among existing consumers compared to 2 years ago. We're growing with emerging groups like Gen Z, millennials, multicultural audiences, and kids. That bodes well for our long-term success. Our growth solutions span the economic spectrum, meeting the needs of a very diverse consumer base. More than 80% of our portfolio is geared toward the mainstream and premium categories. The balance are value offerings. As you can see on the right. All 3 categories are growing robustly, and these growth solutions are generally well-insulated versus store brands.
We've architected that lower private label exposure through M&A, exiting commodity-oriented categories like cooking oil, peanut butter, and liquid eggs. Today, our portfolio index is at 81 for private label exposure compared to the all-food average. More importantly, overall, private label is actually shrinking in our categories on average. That's because private label products perform less well in categories with center-of-plate or snacking offerings or where innovation is relentless. This is exactly how our two core businesses, frozen and snacks, compete. Now let's take a look at inflation-driven pricing and the associated elasticities of demand. Looking again at Conagra compared to our close-in peers, Campbell's, General Mills, Kellogg's, Kraft Heinz, and Smucker, you will see that all have taken inflation-driven pricing at similar rates. The impact of that pricing has driven some elasticity of demand, as you can see in the chart on the right.
I want to make two important points about this chart. First, these elasticities have been and still are well below historical norms. Second, Conagra's elasticities have been and continue to be fully competitive, if not favorable to peers. Tom will share more on this in a bit. Before I conclude this section, I will briefly come back to EPS. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, when we exited fiscal 2021, we were ahead of pace on adjusted EPS. I also mentioned that the lag effect associated with our numerous inflation-justified pricing actions in fiscal 2022 negatively impacted adjusted EPS. Here's how it looked across the full three-year window. As you can see, despite recent inflation, Conagra's adjusted EPS growth remained fully competitive versus the broader peer set and roughly double the median of near-end peers. When you put it all together, we are well-positioned going forward.
We've built strong brands that compete in attractive categories. We have limited private label exposure. We have modern and effective brand support. Our strength in portfolio has earned us the ability to take inflation-justified pricing, and it's also led to improved elasticities. We have simplicity at scale with our U.S. focus. As I said before, we have a very talented team. Overall, today's Conagra Brands is a focused organization, purpose-built and poised to drive future growth and shareholder value. Let's talk about that future. As you saw earlier, we are in the middle of the accelerate phase of our journey, focused on winning both in the marketplace and in the workplace. The expectations now are to sustain growth off of our higher sales base, expand margins, modernize our infrastructure, and smartly allocate capital. Sustained growth will be driven by three things.
We'll continue to drive our innovation momentum to premiumize and modernize our portfolio. We'll continue to invest to win on the high-growth digital shelf, and we will deepen our relationships with our consumers by garnering advocacy that unleashes virality. Darren will have a lot more to say about all of this later this morning. You'll also hear more detail during our presentations today about how margin expansion is a top priority for us. We will continue to take inflation-justified pricing as necessary. Productivity will ramp back up as the pandemic and supply chain frictions wane. We'll continue to introduce margin-accretive innovation to the marketplace, and we'll seek new ways to introduce automation to our supply chain. Another area of focus for us is modernizing our infrastructure more broadly.
We're taking a holistic view of our physical assets, technology, talent, and sustainability programs to ensure we're being as efficient and effective as we possibly can. Alexandre will unpack this in a little while. We've always taken a balanced approach to capital allocation, and that has not changed. It starts with high-return investments in our business. It includes disciplined M&A. We also have been and will continue to be focused on debt reduction. And of course, we believe in an attractive dividend and opportunistic share repurchases, all while maintaining a solid investment-grade credit rating. That's the big picture. To conclude, I will reiterate our confidence in our ability to drive shareholder value from here.
We've managed through the pandemic and come out of it a stronger company with millions of additional consumers, and we believe that many of the behaviors that have taken root over the past two years, like working from home and increased interest in preparing meals, are here to stay. The team has worked hard for 7+ years to curate the portfolio and culture that will carry us into the future. I believe we're well-positioned to consistently deliver value for years to come. Thanks for your time, and now I'd like to turn it over to our Co-Chief Operating Officer, Tom McGough.
Good morning. I'm Tom McGough, Co-Chief Operating Officer. My role today is to detail how we have fundamentally transformed our portfolio through a very strategic and highly effective approach to building strong brands. As you listen today, there are three themes. First, we compete in very attractive categories where we have strong leadership positions. More importantly, our approach to perpetually modernize and premiumize our brands has built a stronger portfolio and accelerated growth. Finally, for as much as we've done, we're just getting started and have a long runway of growth. This morning, I will cover our portfolio first, then each of our domains. We compete in attractive categories that are growing at a rate faster than overall food. In fact, over the last 4 years, our category's growth rate is 40 basis points higher, and we have strong positions within those categories.
82% of sales are from brands where we hold a leadership position, and 82% of the portfolio is building share. Now there's a nice symmetry to those numbers. We define our portfolio around four consumer domains, with frozen and snacks being the two largest and fastest-growing. They are over 2/3 of our portfolio. Ingredients and enhancers and shelf-stable meals and sides are high margin and strong cash generators. Each domain has a clear objective and growth strategy. In frozen, we invest to accelerate growth through an aggressive innovation program. Snacks is also about accelerating growth. While innovation plays a role, snacks are sold nearly everywhere, and the key to winning in snacks is building retail distribution and standing out at the point of purchase.
Finally, we expect our ingredient and enhancers and our shelf-stable meals and sides to grow in line with category sales as we modernize these brands and selectively invest in innovation. Sean outlined our journey to transform, build, and accelerate growth, and I want to provide some additional insight. First, we executed value over volume to upgrade the quality of our revenue base. We priced for brands that were underpriced and over-promoted, and we proactively purged low-value SKUs. Although slightly smaller, we built a stronger and higher margin revenue base from which to grow. At the same time, we were building innovation and e-commerce capabilities to modernize and premiumize the portfolio and to show up online. We launched those capabilities in FY 2018, and our sales began to grow organically. The timing was perfect.
We were ready when the pandemic drove a surge in high-quality trial as a new generation of consumers tried many of our modernized brands and upgraded products for the very first time. We showed up on e-commerce as consumers increasingly shop for food online. They love what they discovered, and those behaviors have become habits. Strengthening our brands also enabled us to effectively price through the recent unprecedented inflation. As a result, we've emerged as a stronger portfolio. Now, this is an important page. I can't overstate the impact and effectiveness of our innovation program. Prior to Sean's tenure, no one would have described Conagra as a top-tier innovation company, but we've posted a multiyear track record of innovation success. Last year, we generated nearly $1.4 billion in sales from new products launched in the last 5 years, with the vast majority of those concentrated in frozen.
What you see is every year's innovation is highly incremental and incredibly sticky. The pandemic accelerated online shopping for food, and it was critically important to show up in those searches and on the digital shelf. Our e-com investments were timely, and they paid off. We now generate $1.4 billion, over 10% of our sales online. This page and the next view chart our progress as we move through the three phases of transform, build, and accelerate. You can see our strategy play out in our sales performance. After resetting and upgrading the revenue base in FY 2017, we began to grow organically in FY 2018, and our sales are now accelerating from an elevated level. I think it's fair to say we have all been tested over the last several years.
Share performance is a measure of relative strength, and our portfolio and people have performed well in this challenging operating environment. As you can see, we consistently built share pre-pandemic, during the pandemic, and now during this unprecedented level of inflation. We've grown and increased share by building a strong connection between our brands and consumers. Brands grow and build share by winning more households. We've done that by attracting, adding, and retaining consumers across all demographic segments, and we've been particularly successful in winning a new generation of younger consumers. As we modernized and invested to upgrade our products, we have also strengthened and premiumized our brands. You can see the steady and consistent premiumization prior to the recent inflation, roughly 2% per year. When inflation hit, our brands were in a strong position to effectively price for the cost-justified inflation.
I want to go deeper on pricing and elasticities, and IRI has an instructive analysis. This chart shows elasticities for Conagra and our peer set, including General Mills, Campbell's, Kellogg's, Kraft Heinz, and Smucker. The data is current through the end of June, and it measures the elasticity of the U.S. retail business for ourselves and the peer set. The first thing that you see is our portfolio is less elastic than the peer set. It was prior to the pandemic, and it is today. The second thing you see is the elasticity impact has been muted for the entire industry. While we don't expect elasticities to remain at these levels, they have not yet begun to revert to historical levels. We believe there are several reasons for muted elasticities, and many of these will endure. First, prices for everything have gone up, but relative prices are unchanged.
Products that are direct substitutes in store have gone up, and it still costs a lot more to eat out. Second, there has been a fundamental change in consumer behavior. People are working and eating at home more. There is simply more demand regardless of price. A whole new generation of consumers have come into these categories for the very first time, and they don't have a historical reference point on pricing. Third, we also know that the elasticity impact wanes over time. It is not cumulative. As we have seen waves and waves of inflation, the impact from the early pricing actions have long dissipated just as a new wave takes hold. Finally, value is a function of quality and price. Brands are not static. You can change the value equation.
When you invest in the product to increase quality, you can increase price, and that is what we've done. That is what we mean by modernizing and premiumizing products. As a result, we have fundamentally liberated our brands from their legacy forms and price points. Here's our scorecard over the last 52, 13, and 4 weeks, once again through June. The key point is we've achieved cost-justified pricing with muted volume impact. On the left, our dollar sales have accelerated. In the center, our June retail pricing is up over 16% and it has accelerated 660 basis points from our pricing over the last 52 weeks of 9.7%. On the right, units are down 6.6%, only 150 basis points weaker than the last 52-week trend of 5.1%.
Volume performance has been in line with our expectations. As you see highlighted in green, there is significantly less elasticity impact from accelerated pricing over the last 13 and 4 weeks. Now, how are we doing versus our peer set? Our pricing is roughly in line and our volume and sales are relatively better. I started with the statement that Conagra has emerged stronger and the data is very clear. Now let's look at our frozen business and how we've transformed our brands and categories. First, frozen is our largest and most strategic domain. It is approaching 50% of our portfolio. When you look broadly at frozen food and compare its growth to food overall, and fresh food in particular, all were growing comparably prior to the pandemic, but frozen is now growing much faster.
Frozen has accelerated as consumers discovered its quality, convenience, and superior relative value. Millennials who have been late in family formation are now having children. When children are present, at-home eating and frozen food usage increases. In fact, frozen food usage increases 50%. With higher at-home eating, cooking often means assembling components, and frozen is a convenient solution that is always on hand. It delivers superior relative value. The products have the quality, cuisines, and modern attributes consumers expect, and it is more affordable than eating out, and there is less food waste as fresh can spoil after even a few days. Conagra Brands is in an advantageous position to capture frozen growth. We've built the largest frozen business in the United States with over $6 billion in retail sales, and we compete primarily in three attractive categories, meals, vegetables and sides, and plant-based protein.
These are large and growing categories. Let's start with frozen meals, which is the largest category in the entire frozen aisle. It has two segments, single-serve meals and multi-serve meals. We are the leader in frozen single-serve meals, a $6 billion category where we have absolutely excelled, growing nearly 5 share points over the last 4 years, primarily from Nestlé and Kraft Heinz. Private label is almost nonexistent within the category, but we have taken share from them as well. For many years, this category was underperforming, and many questioned whether frozen food was still relevant. Our view was it wasn't frozen that was broken, but it was the food. We embarked on a mission to transform the category by modernizing and premiumizing the food, and we had reinvigorated the category with our first wave of innovation in FY 2018.
Since then, the category has grown by $1.3 billion, and we've driven nearly 2/3 of that category growth by increasing our sales $800 million. We've done it through four powerhouse brands, each delivering consistent, sustained growth. Marie Callender's is a billion-dollar brand. Healthy Choice and Banquet are each on pace to $1 billion. We've applied our playbook to Hungry-Man, acquired from Pinnacle, to reinvigorate growth. In a world of ratings and reviews, product performance and product experience determine brand strength. We've built a top-tier innovation capability founded on superior design. This is our North Star. We believe, and we have proven, that strong brands and growth are rooted in superior design, which includes great taste, contemporary cuisines, and modern pro-product attributes, all packaged and presented in differentiated and provocative ways.
Through this process, we modernize and premiumize our products and liberate the brands from their legacy forms and prices. The results are undeniable, and you see three things. First, our innovation has impact. In FY 2022, our single-serve meals brands generated over $600 million in sales from innovation launched since FY 2018. Second, our innovation is highly incremental. We're generating roughly $100 million in incremental sales each year from innovation. Third, our innovation is sticky. You see that in the colored boxes, which track how each year's innovation performs over time. For example, the innovation launched in FY 2018 generated more sales in FY 2022 than in the first year. There's no sophomore slump. Every year, innovation is building upon itself. Clearly, our innovation capabilities and the investments we made in the product are building strong brands.
Let's look at how we've done this with each of our four powerhouse brands. Healthy Choice was created for baby boomers concerned about heart health. Now there's a market for that, but not among millennials. We transformed Healthy Choice into a progressive wellness brand with contemporary cuisine, modern ingredients, and progressive health attributes that appeal to a wide range of consumers. All this is packaged in an innovative, sustainable fiber bowl, eliminating plastic, and the provocative graphic design really stands out on shelf. By modernizing and investing in the product, we premiumized. We went from selling the stuff on the left for under $2.50 to many on the things on the right for around $4. We are the clear leader in better-for-you single-serve meals. As you can see on the left-hand side, we have 38% share.
On the right side, we've posted spectacular growth, nearly 60%, generating over $300 million in incremental sales. Marie Callender's, our largest meals brand with over $1 billion in retail sales. Sales have accelerated as we've modernized Marie Callender's from traditional into contemporary comfort food with our highly successful bowl platform. Banquet is one of my most favorite Conagra Brands. There is no better example of liberating a brand from its legacy form and price point than Banquet. No one, no one thought we could sell Banquet for more than a dollar, but we transformed Banquet into the mega platform. Contemporary food with mega flavor and mega protein, all provocatively packaged and priced around $3. Banquet sales have grown by $200 million. As the name implies, Hungry-Man is all about satisfying big appetites.
We applied our playbook to modernize and premiumize Hungry-Man with double chicken bowls for those heartier appetites. We are the clear leader in indulgent single-serve meals and continue to strengthen our position. On the left, our share is approaching 50%. On the right, we've added nearly half a billion dollars in sales over 4 years. By modernizing the products, we premiumize the brands. The left-hand side highlights the premiumization we achieved prior to the inflation. On the right-hand side, our strong brands enable us to effectively price for that cost-justified inflation. As I indicated before, brands grow when they win more households, and our brands reach the most households within single-serve meals. If there is any question on whether our strategy to modernize brands and upgrade the product experience is effective, here are two additional data points.
We are the only major player whose loyalty has increased, and we are winning younger consumers. Looking forward, we have a strong innovation pipeline, including a new pizza platform for Healthy Choice. Banquet is also extending into pizza with great new Banquet Mega pizzas. Now this is one of my favorites, new Marie Callender's Duos. These are contemporary meals with two great-tasting flavors in one single-serve meal. We continue to add to Hungry-Man with double meat bowls. Beyond those powerhouse brands, we also have great brands capitalizing on the growth of international cuisines with P.F. Chang's in Asian and Frontera, a premium, authentic Mexican brand created by acclaimed chef Rick Bayless.
We also have several brands that penetrate attractive micro markets in channels, including Kid Cuisine, Evol, which has always been at the forefront in the natural channel, will be the first brand in the category to offer carbon neutral meals. Katya will talk more about this innovation later today. We're bringing Purple Carrot, a leading vegan brand, to retail. Single-serve meals is clearly an exciting category, but there are occasions when consumers need to prepare meals for many, and that is where the second-largest frozen meal category, multi-serve meals, comes into play. We are also the leader in multi-serve meals, a $2.5 billion category that is up over 20% in the last three years. We have a strong portfolio of multi-serve brands, with Birds Eye being our largest. Birds Eye Voilà is the leader in skillet meals.
With more at-home cooking, consumers continue to look for convenient, high-quality ways to prepare meals, and we're expanding the range into oven prep to capture more of those occasions. Convenience is a timeless truth in food. Our new Voila oven baked meals are contemporary casseroles that are more convenient as they bake 30 minutes faster than competitive items. Sheet pan meals are a growing at-home behavior. Google searches for sheet pan meals are up 29%, and we are expanding our successful line of sheet pan meals to feed larger households. These are prepared in the oven in just 25 minutes. While Birds Eye is our largest brand, our other brands reach additional consumers and occasions. For example, there has been a sustained surge in at-home Asian cooking, and we provide a full range of P.F. Chang's solutions for authentic Asian meals.
We're adding to it a great new line of Asian-inspired shrimp. Bertolli is our Italian brand, and we are launching easy-to-prepare, microwavable Bertolli side dishes. These are prepared in less than 5 minutes. Finally, we've developed a contemporary Marie Callender's lasagna platform. Now these are just some of the solutions consumers use to prepare meals for many, but vegetables also play a key role at mealtime. Now let's look at our vegetable and sides business. We are a category leader in frozen vegetables, which is a category approaching $4 billion in sales. Our strategy is to modernize and premiumize the product range into value-added products. The value-added segment is over $1 billion and is growing 2x faster than commodity vegetables. We lead in this segment, and it plays to our strength: innovation. As a result, it is a higher margin and more insulated from private label.
As we've done in meals, we're liberating Birds Eye from its legacy formats and price points by modernizing the product range. Restaurants are innovating with great-tasting, vegetable-based sides and appetizers, and we're bringing that culinary inspiration to retail. With more at-home eating, millennials are looking for that contemporary culinary experience at home, and we are winning these younger households. The key is innovation. While we're just getting started, our innovation is off to a very strong start. Like our meals innovation, every year's innovation has impact. It's highly incremental and very sticky, and we have a strong pipeline. We're expanding our successful cauliflower wings platform, launching loaded cauliflower bites, innovating with packaging technology to provide oven-roasted quality from the microwave, and expanding into holistic nutrition with a line of nutrient-dense vegetables and ancient grains.
This modern innovation is leading to premiumization, with pricing growing at a rate 2x faster than commodity vegetables. Vegetables is clearly a great category, and there's another exciting area in plant-based eating. Now let's look at plant-based proteins. This has been a dynamic category with headline-grabbing news in food service and expansion into refrigerated retail. Both these spaces tend to be unbranded and low-margin segments, and that is what we're seeing. Despite the froth in these segments, we stayed focused on frozen retail. It is the largest segment, higher margin, and primarily branded. The category will be sustained by continued interest in health, sustainability, and animal welfare, but will be defined by attracting flexitarians. Ultimately, that comes down to taste. Gardein is a category-leading brand in frozen with a strong track record of consistent growth.
We've invested to improve product performance and continue to make tremendous progress with Gardein Ultimate Burgers and Ultimate Chicken. As a result, we are winning new buyers. Our repeat rates continue to increase, and they're increasing at a faster rate among younger consumers who are the heaviest category users. We continue to innovate. Our chicken wings are a category-leading innovation. We're expanding in the sausage, an emerging high-growth segment, and we're introducing a line of Gardein Ultimate single-serve meals. As in frozen, it's evident our broad portfolio is a real strength. With our portfolio, we reach more households across more occasions through all classes of trade across the entire pricing spectrum, and we have a long runway of innovation growth. I think it's important to also share how we effectively manage this breadth. We manage portfolio breadth by what we call simplicity at scale.
What that means is we take a platform approach to innovation and determine all the ways we can execute a winning idea across multiple brands and drive a higher ROIC. Now here are some examples. We developed a plant-based bowl to replace plastic packaging. We are executing and amortizing that investment across the scale of our portfolio for greater impact and higher return. Our brands reach unique buyers. Therefore, we can take a popular recipe that appeals to a broad group of consumers, make late-stage customizations, and generate more sales with very little incremental effort or investment. Another example is extending the reach of our vegetable innovation. Birds Eye reaches a mainstream household while P.F. Chang's reaches another, looking for an Asian twist. Finally, we've invested to develop great-tasting plant-based protein, and we monetize that across multiple brands with very little incremental effort or investment.
It's evident that we have built a very successful frozen business, and we're doing the same with our second domain, snacks. Now let's take a look at our snack business. Snacks are our second-largest domain and the fastest-growing. A few years ago, no one would have described Conagra as a snacking company. Now, we had some snacking brands, but we treated them as center-of-the-store commodities. Sean had a very different vision, and we went on a mission to stand up a snacking company. Today, our snacking portfolio is approaching $3 billion with category-leading brands. Now, scale is one thing, but performance is another. We're growing faster than snacks overall, and we are outperforming many of the largest snacking companies. We are a warehouse snacking company that leverages our existing supply chain without tying up capital, maintaining a complex lower margin DSD network.
We start in a strong position with over a $2 billion permissible snacks portfolio and $800 million in sales in sweet treats. I sometimes hear we are in disadvantaged snacking categories because we're not in the large categories like chips, candy, and cookies. However, when you compare growth rates between those categories and ours, our categories are growing faster. In fact, permissible snacks are growing much faster than snacks overall. Our permissible snacks are high protein, low carb, high fiber, which are all advantage attributes. There is low private label development in our categories, much lower than both food overall and snacks in total. Let's look at our permissible snacks, beginning with meat snacks. We are a leader in meat snacks with a large scale position. We are approaching $1 billion as the business continues to grow at a strong double-digit rate.
More importantly, while jerky is larger, we lead in the faster-growing and higher margin stick segment. Sticks are growing faster because they deliver a better eating experience and are more affordable. Slim Jim is a powerhouse brand. It is the meat stick leader, and it is approaching $1 billion in retail sales. You saw that winning in frozen is about great innovation. While innovation is a component, snacks are somewhat different. Snacks are sold everywhere. No matter where you are, you can purchase a snack. Winning is about physical availability, showing up everywhere a snack is sold and standing out at the point of purchase. There's also a big component of building a connection with consumers through engagement and experiences with your brand. Slim Jim excels at both.
We make Slim Jims in all sorts of sizes and packaging configurations, so we have the right product, package, and price for the retail location. In C stores, we sell single sticks for immediate consumption, and in traditional grocery stores, we sell multi-packs for future consumption. Both are growing at a double-digit rate. There's no one more identifiable as Slim Jim than Randy Macho Man Savage, and we created our biggest Slim Jim ever and called it Savage with 18 g of protein. It is the number one new product in all of meat snacks. This also creates great merchandising to stand out in store and has propelled Slim Jim in social media. Snack brands have a lot of social currency, and Slim Jim stands apart in terms of user engagement. We lead in Instagram, and we're one of the fastest brands to 3 million followers in TikTok.
This is all unpaid, user-generated content. Darren will talk about this in greater detail. In terms of pricing, we are in an advantageous position as our elasticities have been lower than jerky. Going forward, Slim Jim offers high-quality, affordable meat snacks. Our best-selling item retails for less than $2, while jerky is pushing $8. Popcorn is our second permissible snack and a great category. Most don't appreciate this is a big category, approaching $3 billion in sales, where our portfolio is outpacing category growth. Popcorn is an at-home entertainment snack whose relevancy is only increasing with more streaming and in-home entertainment. We've built a large-scale business in the U.S. at over $700 million between microwave and ready-to-eat popcorn. We have another $200 million in Mexico and Canada. Our brands are absolutely killing it in microwave popcorn, where we lead the category.
We've grown share nearly 10 share points over the last 4 years. 10 share points. This is another situation that having two brands is a real strength as each plays a unique role and reaches different consumers. Orville Redenbacher is a category leading brand, and we modernized it as real, natural, and better for you. As a result, it has broad appeal across a wide range of consumers. Act II, on the other hand, is all about bold flavor and fun. It's the number one brand in Mexico with 90% share, and that has carried over to the U.S., where Act II over-indexes with Hispanic households, one of the fastest-growing demographic segments. We've effectively priced these brands for inflation, more so than other branded competitors, and at the same time, building our share by nearly 10 share points.
In ready-to-eat popcorn, Angie's BOOMCHICKAPOP is a leading brand that has a long runway of distribution growth. Now let's look at plant-based protein snacks, where we are also well-positioned. Sunflower seeds is an underappreciated category where we have 50% share. Sunflower seeds are a great snack, high in protein, low in carbs, nutrient-dense, and full of flavor, perfect for the paleo lifestyle. They are growing faster than many other nuts and seeds. We lead the seeds category with the two strongest brands. David, the market leader, is America's favorite brand. BIGS is the fastest-growing brand. BIGS makes the biggest and boldest flavored seeds imaginable, and we do that with licensing. This is a form of marketing that does not show up in the A&P line. Taco Bell seeds have become one of our fastest-selling items.
We just launched a great Takis flavor, and Vlasic Dill Pickle is the category leader. Now we're launching David's with Frank's RedHot, the number one hot sauce brand. There are times to indulge, and our sweet treats offer a permissible indulgence. We compete in three sweet treat categories, ready-to-eat pudding and gels, hot cocoa, and baking mixes. These are attractive categories as we have leadership positions within each and private label presence is relatively low. When people think of legacy Conagra, they often think of Snack Pack. This is a brand we have modernized and premiumized through licensing, making it relevant and salient for today's consumer. This is an important example of how we liberate brands. Snack Pack had been priced at $1 forever. By creating value through licensing and upsizing the package, we were able to achieve higher absolute pricing and relative pricing.
Typically, when you upsize a package, price per ounce decreases. In this case, we achieved an increase of over 60% per ounce. That is what we see time and time again. When you modernize products, you can premiumize the brand, liberating it from its legacy form and price. This modernization has reinvigorated growth, with Snack Pack reaching $300 million in retail sales. We will sustain this growth with exciting new indulgent flavors and great new licenses. We've applied the same playbook to Swiss Miss with modern packaging designs and contemporary flavors, and we've built a successful Better For You platform, reaching new category users. This is a brand that is growing at a double-digit rate for the last five years. We continue to find ways to innovate and create value, and sustainability is one of those.
As Katya will describe, we've innovated with a sustainable package that is building our share. Similarly, we are overhauling the Duncan Hines brand, moving it out of the 1990s and significantly premiumizing the product range. Value-added baking is growing at a rate 3.5 x the category, and our vision is to transform Duncan Hines from commodity baking mixes to value-added solutions. We see three attractive value-added segments, epic experiences, southern baking, and modern lifestyles. Consumers are baking Instagram-worthy desserts at home, and we lead in this emerging segment. Duncan Hines makes it easy to create these desserts with our new Epic line. This is the #1 category innovation. Southern baking is a thing, and no one embodies this better than Dolly Parton. We've partnered with Dolly to create authentic Southern favorites and to expand Duncan Hines into muffins and biscuits where we don't compete today.
Keto is one of the fastest-growing lifestyles. For those following keto, enjoying great-tasting sweet treats is really difficult. We lead innovation in this area, and we are now the category leader. We deliver great taste with no more than 5 net carbs across a growing line of keto items. These are also top-tier innovation items. As you can see, we've built a great snacking company, and there is a long runway of growth across all of our brands. Now we will move into our highly profitable Staples portfolio. Within Staples, our ingredient and enhancers in shelf-stable meals and sides play a leading role preparing at-home meals. At-home eating continues at an elevated and sustained level. This increase translates into 16 additional meals per capita, and that's over 5 billion more meals sourced from home.
More of those eating occasions originate from center of the store, and those occasions continue to increase. On the right, you see the impact in our categories, where sales have remained at an elevated and sustained level. The notion that center of the store is dying is simply a myth, and we've won share within these categories. Here's a quick look at how we continue to modernize and selectively invest within these categories, beginning with ingredients and enhancers. Our ingredient and enhancers are category leaders, and we're extending these brands into new occasions. With more at-home cooking, PAM is an indispensable cooking aid, and our new PAM Ultimate is our best PAM ever. As I mentioned before, there has been a sustained surge in at-home Asian cooking, but it can be challenging for many to prepare. We are making it easy. You can now make the signature P.F.
Chang's chicken lettuce wraps and popular honey chicken at home. We're tapping into the explosive growth of Asian sauces with both premium and mainstream offerings. On Reddi-wip, we have two innovations. First, we're introducing a zero-sugar, keto-friendly Reddi-wip, and we're opening up new occasions with our Reddi-wip Sweet Foam. It's increasingly being used by food service operators to give a barista quality cold brewed experience. This is another example of how we can take a retail innovation and leverage it for greater scale and higher ROIC through our food service selling organization. Next, we've modernized and premiumized Mrs. Butterworth's with epic experiences, in this case, through a large licensing partnership with Cinnabon. Ro-Tel is the number one diced tomato brand, and we are building on its momentum by launching Ro-Tel with hatch peppers. Finally, and this is one of my favorites, a sweet and spicy Vlasic pickle.
Ingredients and enhancers is an exciting area where we will do more. It aligns with consumers' interest in exploring contemporary flavors and cuisines. Now our last domain, shelf-stable meals and sides. While shelf-stable meals and sides is the smallest part of our overall portfolio, these category leading brands deliver convenient and affordable meals. No brand does it better than Chef Boyardee, and we are introducing Chef Boyardee big bowl microwave meals that are highly convenient for heartier appetites. We continue to find attractive market segments that don't require huge resources to cultivate. For example, we are modernizing and premiumizing Wolf and Marie Callender's chili with Angus beef. We're launching a range of Gardein soups and chilies with plant-based protein, and we're expanding our line of Healthy Choice soups.
Finally, Hebrew National has always answered to a higher authority, and we are introducing 100% premium kosher beef bratwurst into the faster-growing premium sausage segment. Regardless of the category, we continue to discover great opportunities to modernize and premiumize all elements of our portfolio. In closing, our product range and brands today are dramatically different from Conagra of the past. We've been very focused and highly successful in modernizing our products, liberating them from their legacy formats and price points, and accelerating growth. In these dynamic times, it's logical to go back to the past, the last recession, the last inflationary time to project the future. Keep in mind that when you do that for us, you will be assessing the legacy products and brands that no longer exist. This is a whole new Conagra.
Now, please welcome Darren Serrao, my colleague and Co-Chief Operating Officer, who will further describe the Conagra Way to brand building. Darren.
Thanks, Tom. Good morning, everyone. I'll be taking you through our unique approach to building stronger and more enduring brands, the progress that we've made over the last five years, as well as a view on where we're headed in the coming years. We've built and successfully leveraged a unique approach to modernizing, premiumizing, and strengthening our portfolio of brands. Tom quantitatively demonstrated the progress that we've made over the portfolio relative to our peers by linking the marketplace success to our holistic approach to brand building. I'd like to use this time today to build on Tom's presentation by demonstrating the disciplined and consistent approach that we've taken to strengthening our brands. I'll also discuss our deliberate migration away from the industry practices of the past to an approach which leverages data, technology, and creativity for greater impact and lower cost.
Finally, I'll discuss our next evolution in this marketing journey, which is creating a level of community engagement and consumer loyalty that few brands enjoy. As the graph demonstrates, organic sales growth is more highly correlated with multiple expansion and shareowner value creation than any other factor examined. Given these data, it's no surprise why CPG companies invest so heavily in building stronger brands that can support this sustained organic growth. It also explains why the industry treats advertising investment levels as a leading indicator of future growth potential. The only problem is that research shows that there's no clear link between ad spending and growth. Nineteenth century businessman John Wanamaker famously sniped that 50% of the money that he spent on advertising was wasted. Since then, research has confirmed Mr. Wanamaker's assertion, placing that number even higher than 50%.
In fact, a recent study from Northwestern University showed that more than 80% of advertising yields a negative ROI. Perhaps even more shocking was the very poor sales response associated with increased investment levels. In addition, our internal analysis of peer performance shows that despite robust levels of ad spending nearing 5% of net sales, that there was, in aggregate, no strong correlation between the high ad spending and growth. It's this stark but often ignored evidence of the declining impact of traditional advertising on both revenue growth and on profit that led us to transform the way that we market our brands. As Sean put it earlier, we have unlearned and relearned. You may recall from my 2019 investor presentation where I shared how this new approach deviated from the established norms of the industry and our peers.
We called it the Conagra Way to Brand Building. As the data in these charts demonstrate, our brands are driving category-leading retail growth, share expansion, and more with traditional advertising investment levels that are meaningfully lower than our nearest category competitor. On the right-hand side of the chart are a few examples of a broad-based and consistent outcome that can be seen across nearly every segment of our portfolio. We've built a scalable and repeatable system that leverages an orchestration of investments and capabilities across the four critical pillars shown on the left. As Tom highlighted in his presentation, this approach has delivered superior outcomes across all of the critical KPIs that define brand strength. I'd like to take a few moments to briefly touch on each of these capability investment areas and highlight the impact that they've had on our brands.
Perhaps no capability has been more foundational than our use of consumer behavioral data in concert with the adoption of a set of proven evidence-based principles. Over the last seven years, we've built a data collection, integration, and analytical capability with a team of highly talented experts that leverages this behavioral understanding to fuel our product innovation and our modern marketing disciplines. This superior behavioral insight has resulted in an industry-leading innovation and communication success rate that has set a new standard. The reality is that any brand, regardless of size, will struggle to remain vibrant and relevant, especially across generations if its products become outdated. Heavy levels of advertising will not compensate for products that fall short of evolving consumer expectations.
It's for this reason that our unique approach to strengthening our brands has prioritized investments in modernizing and premiumizing our products through a more contemporary food design and highly provocative packaging. As you can see from this graph, we've invested heavily in the products across the portfolio to introduce these contemporary attributes. The evolution from the legacy food form to the more contemporary form has been foundational to the development of stronger, more relevant brands that are superior to and well-insulated against branded and unbranded competition. The importance of this brand modernization strategy to our brand-building effort is underscored by the data in these three examples. As you can see, the data on consumer perceptions of these brands between their legacy product and the contemporized version in every case has improved materially.
The consumer clearly recognizes and appreciates the investments that we've made in the food, the ingredients, the modern attributes, the provocative flavors, and in the quality. In short, the entire eating experience has been enhanced through this process, and with it, so has the consumer loyalty and value perception. The dramatic improvement in these products and the resultant improvement in consumer perception supported higher unit prices as well as reduced consumer price sensitivity even before COVID. The data in these two charts illustrate this point for our frozen single-serve meals portfolio. As you can see on the left, pre-pandemic prices per unit rose 7%, driven by these product modernization efforts. The chart on the right demonstrates how the new products strengthen the overall value perception of these higher priced products as pre-pandemic elasticities improved by 22%.
In other words, despite the higher prices, consumers recognize the higher relative value of these more contemporary brands. The successful modernization and premiumization of our portfolio has also been recognized by our retail customers. In an ever-present battle between assortment breadth and complexity, our customers are increasingly scrutinizing existing and new items for duplicative SKUs that offer little incremental growth. The chart demonstrates the relative value that the Conagra portfolio modernization efforts have provided to our customers as weighted TDP share has expanded materially across all classes of trade. The contemporization and premiumization of our products has not only driven our success but it's also helping our customers meet their own growth aspirations. In addition to contemporizing our portfolio and driving physical availability, we've been on a multiyear journey to modernize a decades-old industry advertising model that, as we saw earlier, is delivering very little value.
You'll recall that Conagra was a leader within our peer set, migrating from traditional advertising to a more effective and efficient model early on. We've leveraged this model successfully over the years, shifting away from broadcast media to digital as consumers rapidly change their viewing habits. We have created real-time personalization to deliver the right message at the right time to the right consumers. We've successfully tapped into social engagement to deepen consumer connections and expand omnicommerce activation to ensure that we're influencing consumers as close to the first moment of truth as possible.
To successfully execute this approach across our portfolio of brands, we've invested in building enterprise capabilities, including data, technology, and talent to create a repeatable and scalable model, which is the foundation of our modern marketing practice. The Conagra Way has built stronger brands across the portfolio, and while it's fair to observe that we certainly have not followed the traditional industry model to brand building, it's nonetheless unmistakable that our broad portfolio of brands has delivered on all of the quantitative measures of a stronger, healthier portfolio, both in absolute terms and more importantly, relative to our peer set. I would also argue that we've achieved this success in ways that are enduring, driven by stronger consumer connections, improved brand perceptions, and loyalty to a portfolio of brands that are constantly evolving to meet consumers' ever-changing needs.
These measures of brand health have translated into both sales growth and, more importantly, consistent share expansion over time. I'd like to pivot here from what we've achieved over the past few years to a discussion on where we're headed. Now while we've evolved our approach to modern marketing to emphasize a more digital and personalized communication strategy, the external environment continues to evolve in two ways that are having a profound impact. First, the fragmentation of media is making ads more inefficient, and second, a culture of consumer choice makes ads less and less effective. I'll unpack each of these two dynamics. The concept of media fragmentation is certainly not a new topic, and it's often framed in terms of the number of mediums, channels, and more recently, the number of digital platforms.
However, the stark reality is that while our population remains largely static, consumers are increasingly spending more time per day on a rapidly growing number of digital options. This presents a challenge to brands to efficiently reach consumers without the significant duplication and waste that's often a result of this environment. At the same time, consumers have grown tired of ads. While this continued fragmentation negatively impacts the efficiency of ad buys, perhaps the more troubling development is the continued erosion of consumer sentiment towards both advertisements and advertisers. Collectively, advertisers have bombarded consumers with so many irrelevant ads that they're not only skipping them at a growing rate, but also increasingly large numbers of us are outright irritated by this unwanted intrusion. It's clearly not hard to see why research shows that 80% of advertising yields a negative ROI.
Now I know some of you are thinking to yourself, "This phenomenon can't be widespread. After all, I love ads." Now notwithstanding your affinity for ads, this issue is evident across all generations and is most pronounced among the youngest two cohorts that together represent the largest segment of the population. The chart on the right highlights the motivations among all ad blockers, regardless of age. As you can see, the top three motivations are closely ranked and demonstrate the frustration with the sheer number and irrelevance of the advertising content, regardless of the media platform on which it's served. It shouldn't surprise us that in addition to blocking ads or moving to ad restricted environments, consumers are increasingly relying on other sources for information and recommendations on new products or services.
A mix of friends, reviews, influencers, and experts are replacing branded advertising as an unbiased and trusted source of product information. In fact, data from Trustpilot indicates that nine out of ten consumers read reviews before buying a product. As a result of these well-evidenced shifts, we've continued to evolve our modern marketing model from a model that exclusively relies on paying for the distribution of created ads, to a model that now leverages content from our collaboration with consumers to engage broader communities of loyal followers, which we call consumer advocacy. This new focus on consumer advocacy is not a replacement for our principled approach to modern marketing, but rather an additive evolution to better connect with a growing population of younger consumers who have a strong preference for content that is created and shared by a trusted online community of friends.
One of the features of consumer advocacy that sets it apart from an ad-based model is the propensity for consumer-generated content to tap into culture in ways that pre-produced broadcast content often fails to do. The proximity to culture, along with an endless supply of fresh to the minute content, can create a timelessness and relevance that can drive the virality of a message. Although the virality of content is often spontaneous and unpredictable, it's also true that it requires the right conditions in order to give the content the opportunity to achieve broad-based popularity. Our advocacy model has matured over the past few years, and over that time, we have, through trial and retrial, landed on these four guiding principles.
Slim Jim has successfully cultivated a relationship with a passionate group of fans by successfully leveraging the meme culture as a conduit for the brand's authentic participation in culturally relevant conversations. This graphic demonstrates social talkability, which is a composite measure of the number of conversations and the depth of engagement in the conversation initiated by the brand. As you can see, Slim Jim has achieved a depth and breadth of engagement that is two times that of the best performing brands. While social talkability is a useful indication of the relevance of the brand, retail sales and share is a strong indication that cultural relevance is translating into business success. Recall, we transitioned Slim Jim from a paid advertising model to a zero paid advocacy model in FY 2019.
The brand has since achieved a level of cultural and business success that has accelerated well past its own historical benchmark and eclipsed its nearest and largest competitors. We'll be taking Slim Jim to the next level, started in fiscal 2023 with the introduction of the Metaverse. That's our take on the popular Metaverse. This best-in-class Web3 portal provides the massive Slim Jim community entry to a membership-only virtual world for access to everything from NFTs and bespoke digital collectibles to customizable avatars, community gaming, and social experiences, all in a secure virtual reality environment. This success has given us the confidence in the integration of consumer advocacy into our modern marketing approach. We've since begun to scale this effort to a number of high-profile brands across the portfolio.
While it's still early days, we're thrilled with the progress so far and remain confident that this approach will deepen consumer connections and enhance the long-term health of our brands for decades to come. We intend to build on this momentum, increasing our investment levels in fiscal 2023 and beyond as we broaden our marketing model and scale our investments to build consumer advocacy and greater affinity with consumers across our portfolio. I'll wrap up this discussion by reiterating my key messages. We've built a new and unique approach to brand building that has replaced increasingly obsolete legacy practices. Our capabilities and approach have proven to be effective and efficient in building stronger brands with deeper consumer connections that are supported by superior products, broad-based omni-channel distribution, and now an industry-leading modern marketing model that emphasizes advocacy over ads.
Taken together, this effort will continue to drive organic growth and share expansion that drive greater business outcomes for Conagra and its shareholders. Thank you. We'll now take a short break. When we return, Alexandre Eboli will share his perspectives on supply chain transformation.
Good afternoon. My name is Alexandre Eboli, and I have the great pleasure and honor to lead the supply chain here at Conagra Brands. During our time here today, I will share the elements of the next chapter of our supply chain transformation while providing examples of the kind of work and results we intend to deliver in fiscal year 2023 and beyond. To start, let me set the stage with the 5 key messages that I would like you to take away from today. First, we are starting from a very strong base, including an experienced and capable team. Second, we are prioritizing expansion of gross margin through an aggressive productivity agenda that will cut across the end-to-end supply chain. We will make strategic choices and remain disciplined in how we allocate capital. We invest in people, assets, and technology to enable agile and resilient supply chain.
Finally, serving our customers to world-class standards is at the core of our strategy, and by implementing it, our ambition is to be the best supply chain in the food industry. Before we go into the specifics, I would like to provide a high-level view of what makes up the supply chain at Conagra today. We have 15,000 employees working across our facilities and supply chain functions. We make 5,000 items across 42 Conagra plants. These plants produce 80% of our volume. The remaining 20% of our volume is produced by a capable set of external partners. We partner with approximately 1,000 suppliers that provide ingredients and expertise to support our business. Today, we ship out of 25 distribution centers to our customers. Eighteen of those customers represent 8% of our volume per year.
The size and scale of our supply chain allow us to be a protagonist in the food industry and play a leading role in the development of it. Let me start by reviewing what we have done since our last Investor Day. Over the last three years, we have built a foundation that will serve as the base for the next three years. By fully integrating Pinnacle, we have been able to realize the intended productivity synergies and sourcing savings. Looking at our assets, we have made investments in our plants and DCs, while also consolidating operations and investing in automation. On the technology front, we have advanced our work planning tools, and we are now leveraging best-in-class technology such as Blue Yonder. In logistics, we have implemented Oracle Transportation Management to optimize our flow of goods. At the same time, we have integrated Pinnacle into our SAP portfolio.
Most importantly, as you know, over the last two years, we have been focused on ensuring that our products are on shelf and available for our customers while navigating the very complex environment associated with the pandemic. Given the circumstance, we are happy to have supported the growth of the business with in-stock levels that according to both customers and market institutes, were at the top end of our industry. A strong collaboration with our customers and suppliers was the key to delivering this performance. Finally, last year, we implemented a new organizational structure, and we have a new leadership team in place with the right skills and experience required to meet our objectives. This all sets us very well to deliver the ambitious goals we set for ourselves over the next three years.
In summary, we have delivered what we had promised three years ago in our last investor day. We delivered our cost synergies objectives associated with the consolidation of Pinnacle. We also delivered our materials and sourcing agenda through programs like Margin by Design and expanding our Supplier Excellence program. We expanded the Conagra Production System, not only to Pinnacle plants, but also our legacy Conagra sites. Lastly, we optimized our manufacturing and distribution footprint. Now, let's focus on the future. Over the next three years, our plan is to deliver $1 billion in cost savings while becoming the best suppliers to our customers. We will do that through what we are calling the Fuel for Growth program. Fuel for Growth is composed of five key elements supported by strong technology backbone. Those five elements are. First, optimizing our network and focusing on delivering best-in-class service to our customers and consumers.
Second, driving productivity through a structured and disciplined integrated margin management program. Third, implementing an agile and demand-driven end-to-end supply chain. Fourth, investing in our people, building a highly capable, diverse, and inclusive team. Fifth, driving the sustainability agenda is at the core of our strategy. As we say here, right for the planet, right for the business. By implementing the Fuel for Growth program, we will accelerate productivity over the next three years. From a historical average of 2%-3%, we expect to accelerate productivity to achieve 4% of cost of goods sold by fiscal year 2025. I'll go into the details, each one of the five elements, as well as our intended plans, while provide examples along the way that provide proof points of our ability to achieve these results. Let's start with the optimization of the network.
We'll simplify and optimize the network to drive improved service and efficiencies. Let me start with the manufacturing one. As I mentioned earlier, we have 42 plants that produce 80% of our volume. We are making productivity investment in all sites, but a special focus and resources will be allocated on the top 8 that drive about 50% of our conversion costs. For the balance of the plants, we'll drive continuous improvement while exploring options to simplify, consolidate, and build external partnerships to drive scale and cost optimization. Turning to logistics. Today, we have 25 distribution centers supporting our business. We will reduce our distribution centers by 50%, while at the same time leverage best-in-class logistics operators to provide automation that will allow facilities to run 24/7, service our customers, and optimize our costs.
As I mentioned before, you'll see throughout this presentation that I will be showing case studies that provide evidence of the work we have started, and that will serve as the base for meeting our strategic agenda over the next three years. Let's start with case number one. In this case study, we would like to highlight the work we have recently done in our frozen network, specifically in Atlanta, Georgia. In this location, we have consolidated both Conagra and former Pinnacle operations in the Southeast. This is a 24/7 fully automated distribution center operating with 50% fewer people than a traditional warehouse. Only in this location, we are expecting to deliver $3 million in savings in our warehousing cost per year.
Over the next three years, the consolidation of the network across both frozen and ambient networks across the country is expected to deliver $200 million total savings in logistics, with optimization not only of warehousing costs, but also transportation costs by optimizing the number of miles we travel. The second element of our Fuel for Growth program is integrated margin management. Driving productivity has always been an important part of the Conagra supply chain. Our plan is to strengthen and expand our existing program by enabling enhanced data and analytics. The expanded program takes a very disciplined and structured approach in which a cross-functional team systematically identifies opportunities across the supply chain to reduce costs in materials, manufacturing, and logistics. The next few slides will provide examples of our integrated margin management program.
Case study number two shows the results of this cross-functional approach to cost savings in product design. This is an example from our bakery in Indianapolis. This team is composed of resources across R&D, manufacturing, logistics, finance, and procurement. With every product design assessment, we begin by benchmarking our products against our competition to identify alternatives for ingredients and packaging while keeping the key attributes that our consumers love about our products. In this example, not only we're able to improve our material costs, we are also able to reduce repetitive manual labor, ultimately reducing our costs by 250 basis points. Case study number three shows the work we continue to do with our strategic suppliers to drive margin. In this example, we consolidated our supplier base at an ingredient pantry to deliver 17% savings to this part of our ingredient portfolio.
Additionally, the supplier's expertise helped to drive $6 million-$7 million of net sales associated with our innovation agenda. As we continue to apply our Fuel for Growth playbook over the next three years, we expect to deliver $500 million in material costs, both through product design and through our procurement strategy. As I move into the next session, I'll be talking about our approach to supply chain technology and our end-to-end planning capabilities. Let me start with our technology roadmap. As I mentioned earlier, the right supply chain technology strategy enables an efficient and agile supply chain execution, while also providing the right tools to take advantage of the vast amount of data we collect across our infrastructure. Our holistic and integrated strategy has five layers of technology. Let me start from the base up. At the base, SAP is fully integrated as our transactional system.
Over that base, we are making investment in specialized applications like Blue Yonder for supply planning and Oracle Transportation Management for logistics, among others. On top of that, we have built a data lake to take advantage of the vast amount of information being collected across these specialized applications. Finally, at the top layers, we have the intelligence and orchestration layers, where we apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to drive insights and agility. Our very thoughtful forward-looking strategy will enable sustainable results well into the future. Let me provide some perspective on our planning process and how we are driving value through technology. By modernizing our planning tools and processes, we'll be able to drive both top-line sales through improved customer service and bottom-line savings through optimized operations. By leveraging scientific forecasting and machine learning, we can generate improved forecasts for business by item, location, week.
These improved forecasts feed our supply planning tool, Blue Yonder, that can generate scenarios in a very agile way, producing improved optimized supply plans for our manufacturing operations. The tools that we are now using provide us with greater visibility and allow us to make data-driven decisions on long-term capacity plans. As I mentioned before, we expect these tools and capabilities to deliver an increase in revenue through improved service, decrease operating costs in our plants and distribution centers while reducing overall working capital. Case study number four is an example of the capabilities we have built in the area of long-range capacity planning. Earlier, you heard Tom talking about the growth we have seen in Slim Jim. On this chart, you can see that we have unlocked 40% capacity over the last 4 years, and we will unlock another 20% over the next 12 months.
With Slim Jim being the largest meat stick brand, our long-range demand forecast continues to be strong. We leverage our planning tools to define forward-looking capacity requirements across our network. Right now, we are evaluating future investments to support growth beyond 2025. One core element of the agile supply chain we are building is driving digitization at our manufacturing facilities. Connected Shop Floor is the program designed to deliver such a plan. Case study five provides a view of the modernizing investments we are making in our manufacturing sites. The first phase of our Connected Shop Floor program will deliver four capabilities and serve as the template for the manufacturing transformation. The first pillar of the program is connected line. We'll be connecting all equipment on production lines to the web, providing a constant flow of data to our teams.
The second pillar is connected worker, providing an electronic way for the team to collect data on a mobile device. The third pillar is yield management, which allows the teams to track material efficiency, supplier quality, and adherence to the standards required to produce consistent and repeatable products, minimizing waste. Lastly, we are investing in dashboards and alerts so that our frontline teams and site leadership can take timely actions on high-priority events. As you can see, our plan is to deliver $300 million in manufacturing savings over the next three years, and the Connected Shop Floor program will be a key enabler of that. Accelerating our growth and productive agenda requires the right investment to not only build capacity and drive innovation, but also upgrade the foundational elements of our supply chain, including safety and quality.
Our disciplined approach will accelerate capital spending over the next 3 years to between 4% and 5% of net sales, compared to a baseline of 3.5% - 4%. We then expect this to moderate back to our prior capital allocation plans pre-fiscal year 2023. These investments will be deployed two-thirds to growth and productivity and one-third to foundational elements like quality, safety, and infrastructure. Obviously, an ambitious program like this will require that we continue to invest in our people. Our people are a key element that will make this program a success. We not only want to attract and retain the best talent, but we also want to develop and grow these future leaders in supply chain. Here are some of the ways we are attracting and retaining our supply chain leaders and building our bench strength for the future.
We are investing in both the corporate teams and our hourly colleagues that run our front lines. Starting with our frontline teams, we are leveraging technology to modernize the way we recruit and onboard the hourly employees. Our research indicates that a positive experience throughout the recruitment and onboarding phases are the best predictors of retention and employee satisfaction. We are also leveraging innovative solutions for employee self-scheduling that meets their work-life needs. On the corporate leadership front, we'll continue to reinforce skills development of the supply chain fundamentals while expanding our supply chain academy to include advanced skills in digital modernization, data and analytics, and leadership. Finally, we will continue to offer great reward and experience that excite and empower future supply chain leaders. As I mentioned before, over the last year, we implemented a new organization construct. Our team is organized in three fronts.
The first drives growth, fully integrated into our business teams. The second drives the scale and efficiency with our external interfaces, customer suppliers, business partners. The third focus on capability development and our long-term strategic agenda. The supply chain leadership is composed of very experienced leaders with vast experience, not only at Conagra but also across multiple leading players in the CPG industry. One last case. Case study number 6 shows the investments we have made in Waseca, Minnesota. We invested $265 million of capital in a greenfield site, replacing an old 80 years old legacy processing plant. The new plant is 250,000 sq ft and is designed for expansion. We process and freeze peas, sweet corn, and rice that will be shipped to our factories that produce our meals.
Not only is Waseca able to deliver 20% more volume, but it will also be 40% more efficient. With the investment made in this plant, this site can make ready-to-eat vegetables, a key capability for the future. We are also able to pack the entire season in 7 days less than the previous plant, which allows us to provide even fresher products to our consumers. As you can see, an investment of this magnitude drives value across all pillars of our Fuel for Growth program.
It unlocks capacity of our network, it improves margins through better efficiencies, it improves our foundational elements of safety and quality, embeds all technologies of our Connected Shop Floor program, creates development opportunities for our people to operate a new facility, fully automated and digitized operation, while driving improvements in our sustainability agenda by reducing consumption of water, energy, and improving our carbon footprint and reducing waste. This is a great way to transition to the fifth pillar of our Fuel for Growth program. As we think about how we'll deliver today and transform tomorrow, we'll be sure to do that in the right way. Sustainability is always at the core of how we design, make, and ship our products. To tell you more about our sustainability strategy, I will turn it over to Katya Hantel, Senior Director of Sustainability.
I have had the pleasure of working closely with Katya over the past year and truly appreciate her knowledge and collaboration across the organization.
Thanks, Ale. At Conagra, we aim to do what's right for the world and our business. Our ESG program covers a broad range of environmental, social, and governance topics. Today, we will focus on environmental sustainability. Our approach to sustainability supports a healthy planet while driving a healthy business. We focus on five key topics, climate change, packaging, agriculture, water, and waste, with initiatives designed to drive value for investors, customers, and consumers to decrease regulatory risks and increase employee engagement while improving our corporate reputation with non-governmental organizations and other external partners. Not only do our focus areas improve the environment, but as consumers increasingly look to purchase products in line with their values, we see sustainability as a way to drive growth for our company.
Over the last three years, retail dollar sales of food products with sustainable attributes have increased for each of our five sustainability pillars. Our sustainability goals and metrics drive progress in these areas. Our climate change target is validated by the Science Based Targets initiative, an ambitious corporate climate effort leading the way to a zero carbon economy. By 2030, we're working to reduce our manufacturing greenhouse gas emissions by 25% while also reducing emissions tied to sourcing, including our ingredients and packaging materials by 20%. By 2025, we strive for 100% renewable, recyclable, or compostable plastic packaging, with 93% of our total packaging volume meeting sustainability metrics to date. Our sustainable agriculture program includes sourcing 100% certified sustainable palm oil, and we plan to meet our 100% cage-free egg goal by 2024, one year earlier than our original target.
When it comes to water, we operate with relatively low risk. According to a World Resources Institute assessment, nearly 85% of our operational water comes from areas on the lower end of the water risk spectrum, and 87% of our manufacturing waste is diverted away from landfills. Sustainability also means modernizing our product portfolio in line with consumer demand for climate-friendly products, sustainable packaging, and less waste. As Tom mentioned, Evol recently launched the industry's first carbon neutral frozen meals to positive retailer feedback and distribution. Eight Evol meals are certified carbon neutral by the Carbonfund.org Foundation, which means that we measured the carbon footprint of these meals and packaging over their full lifecycle from farm to fork and beyond, and invest in wind energy and forest preservation projects that remove an equal amount of carbon from the atmosphere.
Our carbon neutral meals are manufactured in a true zero waste facility, where at least 90% of manufacturing waste is diverted away from landfills each year. These meals come to consumers in paper-based serving bowls inside recyclable and sustainably sourced paperboard cartons. We've calibrated our sustainable agriculture program to reduce dependency on water, pesticides, and fertilizers. Our Birds Eye vegetable and Hunt's tomato farmers have improved soil health and conserved water through innovative practices like crop rotation, soil analysis, drip irrigation technology, and more, avoiding 56,000 gal of pesticides, reducing annual fertilizer required for broccoli and cauliflower by 5%, and water required to grow tomatoes by nearly 15%. Fiber packaging has been part of premiumizing our frozen portfolio. In 2017, Healthy Choice introduced a first of its kind plant fiber serving bowl as an alternative to single-use plastic.
Since then, we've expanded plant-based serving bowls to other frozen brands and avoided an estimated 23 million lbs of plastic while helping drive about $1 billion in sales as part of our overall modernization strategy. Sustainable packaging has also driven benefits across snacks and sweet treats. In 2020, Conagra launched a new package design for multi-serve Swiss Miss hot cocoa. We were the first major hot cocoa brand to move from non-recyclable round canisters to a more space-efficient recyclable cube, a canister that fits better on trucks when empty upstream in our supply chain and fits better on retail shelves as a completed consumer good. This new packaging drives business and environmental benefits throughout our value chain. Consumers benefit from a more ergonomic, easy-grip container that's recyclable.
The recyclable and space-efficient design reduces the energy required to manufacture and transport the containers, cutting the carbon footprint by 15% and saving more than 1,000 gal of diesel fuel annually from reduced truck transportation miles while increasing retailer shelving capacity up to 150%. Better packaging design contributed to increased distribution, helping drive a 7-point market share increase since 2020. In summary, Conagra's approach to a healthy planet drives a healthy business. Since 2009, sustainability initiatives across our supply chain have driven nearly $280 million in savings. We've reduced our energy use and associated carbon emissions by more than 215,000 metric tons. That's the same climate benefit as planting 3.5 million trees.
We've eliminated the need for 32,000 tons of packaging materials, conserved 3.7 billion gal of water, and avoided more than 122,000 tons of manufacturing waste. We have done well by doing good. Thank you, and I'll turn it back over to Ale.
Thank you, Katya. What an inspiring agenda. I love that Swiss Miss example. Right for the business, right for the planet. Well, throughout this presentation, we navigated through our Fuel for Growth program and its five pillars. Before I close, we prepared a video to summarize all we have shared, but more importantly, to give you the opportunity to meet some of our leaders in supply chain and some of our operations. Let's see the video.
At Conagra, we are building the best supply chain in the food industry. We have proactively invested in supply chain modernization, building muscle over the past three years to position Conagra for the future. Through disciplined investments in technology, manufacturing, and logistics operations, we've secured a good and healthy supply chain, grown through an international crisis, and are now growing an integrated company. Innovative and transformative, our resilient, agile, customer-focused, and integrated supply chain, supported by strategic automation investments in warehouses and production facilities, best-in-class technology for better data analytics, and decisions that are right for the environment and right for business, help us deliver today on our current customer and consumer commitments as we continue to transform people, assets, and technology.
The world has changed, and it started before the pandemic. We had to be an integrated solution. We had to be in a fast solution. We had to be in a solution that was doing some of the work for us. From a technology standpoint, we've invested in an enterprise planning tool that will help us with forecasting, inventory management, and also give us signals around any demand challenges that we have. With Microsoft Azure, the data and analytics give us predictability in terms of trends, our transportation, and our logistics spaces.
We leveraged the abundance of data we had on hand, everything from retail data to shipment data, datasets that aren't as commonly used, such as weather data and macroeconomic data to create hundreds of thousands of models to accurately predict demand at an item-level location. Being able to adapt our operations very, very quickly with that foresight from our demand sciences group was critically important to getting out ahead of the challenges. Investment in modernization is bringing digital technology into the plant to maximize performance and employee engagement across Conagra Brands.
It's just not about the technology in and of itself, it's really about the people. We're doing several things. One is we're upskilling the people that we currently have at Conagra. We're also looking to invest in new skills and bring new skills on board. We have a path to automate our facilities over the next 5 years to the tune of approximately 75%. We're able to scenario plan where historically we haven't been able to by using cutting-edge modernized tools, powering it by AI and ML to actually drive impact immediately by recognizing the value of a superior signal being delivered to supply chain. Conversations in the level of strategy we're able to engage in today, fundamentally different than three years ago.
This is an investment in what the future looks like for us, what modernization looks like. The combination of the Connected Shop Floor, Conagra Production System, employee engagement with this beautiful new facility will help us significantly reduce our cost per pound. Our goal is to have the peas harvested in the field and in our freezer in less than 5 hours. We're now able to collect data from today, derive insights about a long-term demand signal two, three, five years in the future, and make really planful actions. We've been on this journey for a number of years, and we can clearly see how that investment is paying off.
All the way from what's happening on the shelf and within the shelf set, back through a consumption signal, back through shipments to our retailers and what it is they're holding on shelf, and then how that translates back to our operations. Planning is so critical because of that. Across Conagra Brands, strategic investments continue to modernize our people, assets, and technology, enabling a resilient end-to-end supply chain and a more sustainable integrated business that's agile enough to withstand volatility. Conagra, delivering today, transforming tomorrow.
I hope you have enjoyed the video. Let me close by recapping with the five key messages I opened with. First, we are starting from a strong base, including an experienced and capable team. Second, we are prioritizing the expansion of gross margin through an aggressive productivity agenda that will cut across the end-to-end supply chain. Third, we will make strategic choices and remain disciplined in how we allocate capital. Fourth, we will invest in people, assets, and technology to enable an agile and resilient supply chain. Finally, serving our customers at world-class standards is at the core of our strategy. By implementing it, our ambition is to be the best supply chain in the food industry. Thank you very much for your attention today, and have a great day.
Hello, everyone. It's great to be with you today. Since we started executing the Conagra Way playbook in fiscal 2015, we have delivered strong financial results while aggressively reshaping our portfolio. We've made significant investments in product innovation, quality, and capacity. We have also invested in expanding our capabilities across the company. Our balanced capital allocation approach has supported growth in the business while providing attractive returns to shareholders. We feel strongly that the business is well-positioned to drive sustainable growth as we move forward. Let's jump in. Today, I will review our financial performance from fiscal 2016 through fiscal 2022. I will then review our fiscal 2023 guidance that we shared on our recent earnings call, as well as our fiscal 2024 and beyond long-term financial algorithm. Let's start with our historical financial performance.
This is the framework for how everything you heard from our team today leads to strong total shareholder return. It starts with our Conagra Way playbook driving growth, along with our focus on driving productivity and expanding margins. This translates into strong cash flow, which we allocate between prioritized investments and returns to our shareholders. This highlights Conagra's financial performance going back to fiscal 2016, our first full year executing the Conagra Way playbook. You can see the improvement in our rate of organic net sales growth, operating margin, adjusted EPS, and cash flow generation. The recent fiscal 2022 results reflect the 16% inflation we incurred and the impacts of that on margins, EPS, and cash flow, given the pricing lag. The long-term financial picture supports strong progress in Conagra's performance.
Our double-digit EPS growth since fiscal 2016 compares favorably to peer companies that are more directly aligned with our portfolio, as well as with a broader peer group that includes the confection and snacking companies. As Sean discussed, our long-term profit performance has resulted in strong relative TSR performance. We believe that the long-term financial algorithm, which I will review shortly, combined with the current multiple discount to peers, makes Conagra a compelling investment opportunity. As we often discuss, we follow a balanced approach to capital allocation. Since fiscal 2016, we have increased operational and capital investments in our business, and we have reconfigured the portfolio while providing strong returns to our shareholders, all while maintaining our commitment to a solid investment-grade credit rating. We exit fiscal 2022 with a strong balance sheet.
Our debt maturities are balanced, and 98% of our debt is fixed, which is important in this rising interest rate environment. We have made important investments to eliminate risk and fully fund our pension plans over the last 5 years. After taking our net debt to EBITDA leverage ratio to 5.5x after acquiring Pinnacle, we finished fiscal 2022 at 4x with expectations to reduce this in fiscal 2023 and beyond. As we communicated on our earnings call, we have revised our targeted long-term net debt to EBITDA leverage ratio to 3x. I will discuss that in more detail shortly. Our strong cash flow enables Conagra to invest capital in the business. Since fiscal 2016, we have increased our CapEx investment as a percentage of net sales to support our growth and productivity priorities.
As Ale outlined, we expect this to continue going forward given our attractive investment opportunities. This summarizes the significant amount of M&A activity we have executed since fiscal 2016 to reshape our portfolio into a pure-play branded food company with scale. What is often overlooked, however, is the amount of resource capability it takes to execute such an aggressive agenda. Conagra has strong capabilities in acquisition integration and in supporting transition services to buyers on divestitures. We acquired Pinnacle Foods in fiscal 2019 and are very pleased with the addition of these brands to our portfolio and the significant synergies recognized by Conagra. We have converted all domestic operations to SAP and just announced the opening of our new state-of-the-art Birds Eye Vegetable plant. All of this done while managing through a very disruptive COVID environment.
As you saw in Tom's presentation, we continue to apply the Conagra Way playbook to modernizing this portfolio, and we are excited about the future growth potential. In addition to deploying capital to invest in the business and acquire new brands, we have been able to return a significant amount of capital to our shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases. Our dividend payout ratio and yield are very competitive with peer companies, and we've averaged approximately $300 million per year in share repurchases since fiscal 2015. I will now pivot to discussing our outlook going forward. I will start with our fiscal 2023 guidance that we provided on the earnings call two weeks ago. For fiscal 2023, we expect organic net sales of approximately +4% to +5%, driven by low-teens price mix.
We expect adjusted operating margin of approximately 15% as the benefits of pricing and productivity will be partially offset by low teens inflation. As a result, we expect adjusted EPS growth of +1% to +5%. As we called out on our earnings call, we expect approximately $0.13 of EPS headwind in fiscal 2023 versus 2022 due to higher interest expense, lower pension income, and a slightly higher estimated effective tax rate. As part of the fiscal 2023 guidance I just discussed, we will be making important investments to support the business. Starting in the first quarter, we expect SG&A to accelerate to support investment in our talent and infrastructure, particularly continued investment in automation. We also expect to spend approximately $500 million or 4% of net sales in CapEx to support growth and productivity priorities we discussed today.
I will now discuss our updated long-term financial algorithm, which is beyond fiscal 2023. I will review the components of the algorithm, which are highlighted on this chart, and then provide some additional color on aspects of this algorithm. For fiscal 2024 and beyond, we expect our annual organic net sales growth to be low single digits. This growth rate is forecasted to be off of a fiscal 2023 base that is higher than it would have been with pre-COVID growth trends. We are projecting our adjusted operating margin to be mid to high teens. We expect to improve our margins each year as we move forward, focusing on four key drivers that I will discuss. We expect our adjusted EPS annualized growth at mid to high single digits based on our estimated sales and margin improvement.
We believe this algorithm will drive strong cash flow from operations, which we expect will exceed $1.2 billion annually. As LA outlined, we forecast to accelerate capital to 4%-5% of net sales through fiscal 2025 as we ramp up our supply chain investments before we go back to 3.5%-4% after fiscal 2025. We are targeting a dividend payout ratio of approximately 50%-55% as we prioritize strong shareholder returns. With our dividend increase announced last week, we are now paying a dividend per share of $0.33 per quarter or $1.32 annualized, which is within this range. We also announced our updated net debt to EBITDA leverage ratio of 3x. Let me give some color on how we think about this.
We are setting this leverage target to confirm our commitment to a solid investment-grade credit rating. Given the current volatile economic environment and forecast of increasing interest rates, we believe prioritizing debt paydown is sound financial policy. We are not guiding to exact leverage levels by year, but our move towards 3x long-term leverage target is driven by our estimate of core operating profit, the CapEx ranges as outlined, our estimated dividend payout ratio, and modest share repurchases to offset estimated shares issued for employee compensation. Given the current volatile environment around inflation and supply chain, we are not forecasting significant working capital improvement compared to fiscal 2022 in our long-term financial algorithm. We believe this will be a longer-term cash flow opportunity as we accelerate our supply chain investments. This leverage target also assumes no acquisitions or divestitures.
This highlights what we expect each domain to contribute to the overall low single-digit organic net sales growth target. As demonstrated today, our frozen and snacking portfolio strategies are compelling, and we expect they will drive above targeted growth as part of the long-term algorithm. We expect our other domains and businesses to contribute positive growth, but at a lower rate than frozen and snacking. Continuously improving our gross margins and our operating margins is a top priority. There are four primary drivers of margin improvement as part of our long-term algorithm as outlined on this chart. They are price realization to offset inflation, supply chain productivity, margin accretive innovation and mix, and leveraging automation to maintain our best-in-class lean SG&A. I will now hit each of these levers quickly.
The unprecedented level of inflation in late fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022 required us to offset this cost with inflation-justified price increases to our customers. The significant investments we've made in our portfolio discussed today have been critical in our ability to implement this pricing starting in late fiscal 2021. We believe that the carry-in and new pricing for fiscal 2023 will enable us to offset the pricing lag that negatively impacted fiscal 2022 profit. While we expect the inflation rate to moderate after fiscal 2023 compared to current levels, we will continue to use pricing strategy as a key component to managing inflation volatility in the future. You had the opportunity to hear Ale outline our supply chain strategy and approach to driving productivity. This chart summarizes some of the key components that he discussed.
This Fuel for Growth productivity approach leverages investments in technology to accelerate our long-term productivity performance moving forward. We communicate frequently about the great top-line impact of our innovation, but we have strong discipline at Conagra to ensure that our innovation is accretive to margins. Healthy Choice is a great example of that principle at work over the last several years. As you have seen, we have leveraged the new Power Platform innovation in Healthy Choice to accelerate sales growth. We have increased our cost of goods sold investment in the Power Platform by over 20% versus our legacy Healthy Choice platform by improving the ingredients and the packaging. This increased investment allowed us to create higher consumer demand at a higher price given the premium quality of this offering. This has resulted in a brand that is more modernized with accelerated top-line growth.
The Power Platform gross margins are over 400 basis points improved versus the legacy platform, increasing the overall margin for the brand. This demonstrates our innovation playbook for investing more in the product and packaging to drive better margins and growth. This highlights the key components of our modern marketing approach that Darren discussed earlier. We expect to increase our A&P investment to approximately 2.5% of net sales moving forward to support this program. This outlines Conagra's SG&A structure. At 8.4% of net sales, we are operating the business at 400 basis points below the industry average SG&A level of 12.4%. It also demonstrates the synergy benefit of building scale with the Pinnacle acquisition. Our current structure enables us to be more agile and make faster decisions.
We are not estimating reductions of our current SG&A percentage level in our long-term margin outlook. In fact, we estimate that our longer term SG&A as a percentage of net sales will approximate 8.5%-9% as we focus on investments in people and technology to continue building our capabilities. Over time, we evaluate two types of acquisitions, larger, synergistic acquisitions, which happen less frequently, and smaller, modernizing bolt-on acquisitions, which happen more frequently. We've done many smaller acquisitions over the past six years and have also done one large synergistic acquisition in Pinnacle. We have clear strategic and financial criteria for potential acquisitions, and we are always evaluating potential opportunities, although bolt-on acquisitions are more likely as we move forward. It is the strategy that Sean discussed earlier. We perpetually reshape our portfolio for better growth and better margins.
We have also been very active in divesting and spinning off assets. We start with a continuous assessment of the categories we compete in and how we are positioned in those categories. If we determine that certain businesses are not a strategic fit, we evaluate third-party valuation compared to our intrinsic value. We also evaluate the impacts of potential EPS dilution and stranded overhead challenges with the potential benefit of accelerated deleveraging. This concludes my presentation for today. On behalf of all of our speakers, thank you for joining us. We've spent the morning showing you how we've been able to deliver strong results while also reshaping our portfolio to drive value. We've also discussed the significant investments we have made across the organization in important areas like innovation and supply chain to enable our business to compete more effectively.
We spoke about how we've maintained a balanced capital allocation approach that supports our growth and returns value to shareholders. Given all of the information and presentation shared with you today, I hope you agree that Conagra Brands is a compelling investment opportunity, and we are well positioned to consistently deliver value for the years to come. Thank you for your time. My fellow presenters will now join me for the Q&A session.