Good afternoon and welcome to the Conagra Brands 2021 Annual Shareholders Meeting. I'm Richard Lenny, Non-executive Chairman of the Board of Directors and presiding officer today. I now call this meeting to order. The agenda for our meeting is as follows: following a few introductory remarks, we'll conduct the formal business of the meeting. We'll conclude with our CEO and my fellow board member, Sean Connolly, providing a few comments about our business and answering any appropriate questions which are submitted. First, welcome to those who have logged in. We appreciate your participation in today's meeting. We're conducting this year's meeting virtually as it provides access to all of our investors as we navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to provide a fair, informative, and orderly meeting, we've established rules of conduct.
The rules of conduct and the meeting agenda can be found in the lower right-hand corner of your screen. We'll conduct the meeting in accordance with these documents. Your cooperation is appreciated. Please note that you may vote electronically and submit questions during the meeting by following the prompts on your screen. Let's get started. Conagra Brands, under Sean's leadership, performed exceptionally well in fiscal 2021, delivering superior marketplace and financial performance. These results are even more impressive against the backdrop of a global pandemic, one which was both unexpected and unprecedented. With an employee-first mindset, the leadership team took all appropriate measures to ensure that the Conagra workforce could perform its job safely and effectively despite the ever-changing environment. This clearly demonstrated the company's agility, resourcefulness, and resilience. From a governance standpoint, your Board of Directors was equally as agile.
The board moved seamlessly from in-person to virtual meetings in 2021 and continued to perform at a high level. This reflects the directors' ongoing engagement in the business and the board's collaborative and collegial culture. The composition of the board continues to evolve behind its board refreshment initiative. The Conagra Board of Directors is now more diverse in terms of its representation, skill set, and experience, thus providing enhanced oversight of and guidance to management. On behalf of the Conagra board, we thank you for your continued investment and belief in Conagra Brands. Now we'll move on to our official business, and Colleen Batchelor, Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary, will get us started. Colleen.
Thank you, Rick, and good afternoon. Today's remarks may include forward-looking statements which represent our current expectations concerning future events and financial performance. All forward-looking statements are based on information currently available to us and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. To learn more about the risks and uncertainties that could affect our business, please refer to the documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, we may also discuss some non-GAAP financial measures today. Reconciliations of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found on our website at conagrabrands.com/investor-relations. This 2021 Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Conagra Brands is convened in accordance with the notice and Proxy Statement first distributed on August 6, 2021, to shareholders of record as of July 26, 2021.
We have appointed Peter Sabolich as our independent inspector of elections for today's meeting. Mr. Sabolich has informed me that at least 90% of Conagra Brands' voting stock of record as of July 26, 2021, is represented at this meeting either in person or by proxy. This means that a quorum is present and the legal requirements to proceed with this meeting have been met. To promote efficiency, the chairman has waived the formalities of motions and seconds and declared the order of business as stated in the agenda to be accepted by those present. The time is now 2:04 P.M. on September 15, 2021, and the polls are now open. The polls will remain open until we officially close them later in the meeting.
Thank you, Colleen. The proxy statement sets forth four proposals to be voted on. No other proposals may be presented for a vote at this meeting, and no proposals or nominations from the floor will be heard. The first three proposals have been presented by the company. The first proposal is the election of the director nominees named in the proxy statement, each for a one-year term expiring in 2022. The director nominees are as follows: Anil Arora, Tony Brown, Manny Chirico, Sean Connolly, Joie Gregor, Fran Horowitz, Rajive Johri, Melissa Lora, Ruth Ann Marshall, Craig Omtvedt, Scott Ostfeld, and I, Richard Lenny, am also a director nominee. The second proposal to be voted on is the ratification of the appointment of KPMG LLP as our independent auditor for fiscal 2022. Present by phone today representing KPMG is Larry Ward.
Larry is available to respond to appropriate questions during the question-and-answer session at the end of this meeting. The third proposal to be voted on is the advisory approval of our named executive officer compensation. The fourth proposal included in our proxy materials is a non-binding shareholder proposal. The shareholder proposal, the shareholder supporting statement, and the company's statement of opposition to the proposal are included in the proxy statement. We understand that the shareholder proponent, Mr. John Chevedden, is on the phone line. Mr. Chevedden, in accordance with the rules of conduct that we've provided to you in advance of the meeting, you have three minutes to present the proposal. Please proceed.
Hello. This is John Chevedden. Can you hear me okay?
Yes, we can.
Proposal four: Adopt a Mainstream Shareholder Right to Written Consent sponsored by Kenneth Steiner of Great Neck, New York. Shareholders request that our Board of Directors take the necessary steps to permit written consent by the shareholders entitled to cast a minimum number of votes that would be necessary to authorize an action at a meeting at which all shareholders entitled to vote thereon were present and voting. Written consent is an effective means to bring an emerging issue to management attention. It is a check-and-balance method to offer a safeguard to management on an emerging issue that management may be overlooking. Written consent can be a means to give management a head start on addressing an emerging opportunity or an emerging problem. Hundreds of major companies enable a shareholder right to act by written consent. This proposal topic won majority shareholder support at 13 large companies in a single year.
This included 67% support at Allstate. This proposal topic also won 63% support at Cigna in 2019. This proposal topic would have received higher votes than 63%-67% at these companies if more shareholders had access to independent proxy voting advice. A shareholder right to act by written consent affords Conagra management strong protection for a holdout management mentality. Since a significant percentage of shares do not vote at the Conagra Annual Meeting, any action taken by written consent would need 60% supermajority approval from the shares that normally cast ballots at the Conagra Annual Meeting to equal the required majority from the Conagra shares outstanding, and the shares that voted at our Annual Meeting are the shares that are most informed about the business of our company. Most Conagra shareholders have absolutely no right to call for a special shareholder meeting.
Approximately 80% of S&P 500 companies give shareholders the right to act by written consent or the right to call a special meeting or both. Our management has neither, and management does not even attempt to address why we have neither right for shareholders when most reputable companies have at least one of these two rights for shareholders. The management response to this proposal is disappointing, and shareholders deserve better. Management claims that it is something to brag about when we have the routine governance practices that most other reputable companies have. Management has not claimed to have done one thing to improve the rights of its shareholders in the past five years. The objections that management raises have no weight and can easily be avoided. Written consent can be structured so that all shareholders receive notice in a transparent manner. Institutional investors own 80% of our stock.
Management, in effect, claims without support that the vast majority of institutional shareholders whose day job is to make sound investment decisions can easily be hoodwinked so that it's supposedly best not to enable institutional shareholders to have an effective means to bring emerging issues to management. Please vote yes, adopt a mainstream shareholder right to written consent.
Mr. Chevedden, thank you for your statement. For the reasons set forth in the proxy statement, the board recommends a vote against this proposal. As Colleen mentioned, the polls are open. If you previously voted by proxy, you do not need to vote today unless you wish to change your vote. For the shareholders online who have not yet voted, we'll take about a minute or so now to pause the meeting and allow you to vote by following the instructions on the meeting page. This completes the items to be voted on at today's meeting. The time is now 2:11 P.M. Central Daylight Time on September 15, 2021, and the polls for voting are now closed. Colleen will now report on the preliminary vote results.
The inspector has given me a preliminary tally, and the preliminary voting results are as follows. On the management proposals, shareholders have elected all 12 director nominees, ratified the appointment of KPMG as our independent auditor for fiscal 2022, and approved our Named Executive Officer compensation on an advisory basis. Proposal four, the non-binding shareholder proposal regarding shareholder action by written consent, was approved by shareholders. The final vote tallies, certified by the inspector of elections, will be included with the minutes of this meeting and publicly filed with the SEC on a Form 8-K within four business days after this meeting.
Thank you, Colleen. And with that, I'll officially adjourn the business portion of the meeting. I'm now most pleased to introduce the President and CEO of Conagra Brands and my fellow board member, Sean Connolly. Sean completed his sixth year as our CEO this past April. Over these past six years, Sean has transformed the company's portfolio, culture, and results. Sean's leadership during the pandemic has been superb, continuing to deliver industry-leading results while always remaining focused on the safety and well-being of our employees. Thank you, Sean.
Thanks, Rick. It's a pleasure to be here today to share a few words about our recently completed fiscal 2021. I want to begin by saying that on behalf of Conagra Brands, I hope that each of you and your families are continuing to stay healthy and safe. Overall, I'm proud of how the entire Conagra team responded to fiscal 2021's dynamic environment. Our employees' dedication enabled us to navigate these unprecedented times and deliver for our customers, consumers, communities, and shareholders. During fiscal 2021, we saw continued strength in our frozen and snacks businesses and greater relevancy for our large staples business. We acquired and retained multiple years' worth of new consumers, grew share across categories, and continued to invest for the future. Our organic net sales increased 5.1% during fiscal 2021. We also delivered a 15.8% increase in adjusted diluted earnings per share versus a year ago.
On a two-year CAGR basis, adjusted EPS grew 14.6%. We also executed our balanced approach to capital allocation during fiscal 2021. We repaid debt and achieved our leverage target of 3.5-3.6 times ahead of schedule. We repurchased approximately $300 million of common stock, and we paid $475 million in cash dividends to shareholders. Shortly after the conclusion of the fiscal year, our board of directors increased our quarterly dividend by 29%. I'm also pleased with our team's focus on our communities during fiscal 2021. You can learn more about our key environmental, social, and governance initiatives in our Citizenship Report , which is available on our conagrabrands.com website. I'll highlight a few of our fiscal 2021 focus areas today. First, during fiscal 2021, we designed and began work against a new human capital strategic plan.
We've heightened our focus on building a more diverse team to deliver our goal of creating the most impactful, energized, and inclusive culture in food. We also remained committed to improving the sustainability of our operations during fiscal 2021. As part of our annual Sustainable Development Awards program, employees from across Conagra designed and implemented more than 200 sustainability-focused projects that conserve water, reduce waste, and save energy in our operations to improve our efficiency and help protect our environment. And I'm very proud of our fiscal 2021 work to support our neighbors in the communities where we live and work. During the year, we continued our longstanding partnership with Feeding America, the nation's leading hunger relief nonprofit. At this time of extraordinary need, we donated 30 million pounds of food to Feeding America's network of food banks.
Across Conagra, our team remains committed to doing the right things and doing things right, and today, a bit over a quarter into fiscal 2022, we remain optimistic about our opportunity to continue leveraging our portfolio, our capabilities, and our people for shareholder value creation. I won't be discussing fiscal 2022 first quarter results today. We'll announce those in a few weeks on Thursday, October 7, and I hope you'll read the press release and listen to our conference call scheduled for that morning. Again, thank you for joining us today and for joining us for the long term. I look forward to continuing to accelerate growth and maximize value creation at Conagra Brands. I'm excited about our future and appreciate your trust and continued support. We'll now address any appropriate questions. All right. I will start with a question here. It's actually a multi-part question.
I'll take it one piece at a time. First piece of it is, how do you balance your research and development of new products versus acquisitions of new products? The answer to that is that the vast majority of our effort is on the perpetual renovation and innovation of our own products. We have a lot of wonderful brands here at Conagra, but the consumer is always changing, and we need to continue to update and modify and renovate those brands so they're constantly evolving with the consumer. That work is ongoing every single year, and it's a substantial body of work. But occasionally, we do make acquisitions of products that are new to our portfolio because they fit strategically and are additive to what we do while leveraging our skills. So we do both. We've done both historically in the past and do the renovation piece more frequently.
The acquisition piece comes along occasionally, depending upon if we find an asset that fits and is valued properly. Second part of this question is, at what stage is Conagra in passing costs along to customers? And I think that speaks to the inflationary environment we're in. And will this go into 2022 and beyond? I think the answer to that is that principally, we take pricing action when that pricing action is justified by inflationary costs on the input costs for the products that we make. That's certainly been the case this year. We've taken multiple waves of pricing action, and whether or not we need to do that in the future depends upon what happens with inflation from here. So that is something that we continue to monitor. Moving along to the next question, we have a statement that was issued by Ms.
Jane Garcia from the great city of Detroit. Ms. Garcia wants to acknowledge Conagra for our continued support of food banks throughout the country. She also asks whether or not there are any specific things we have done to provide additional COVID relief in the last 18 months. Ms. Garcia, I would say to you, thank you for the kind words. As you know, over the past 20 months, in addition to the millions of dollars in money and food donations, we've found many ways to galvanize our employees to volunteer virtually and in person while keeping everybody safe while doing so. And we also, our Month of Service program resulted in many employees participating in service projects. Regarding product, on average, Conagra Brands donated 1.9 million pounds of product every month last fiscal year, and our product is distributed to Feeding America and to its 200 food banks.
And regarding contributions, yes, we have continued to make cash contributions to support many frontline hunger relief agencies in the communities where we do business. And the last thing Ms. Garcia did in her statement here today is to continue to encourage and challenge Conagra to make progress on its diversity initiatives, particularly with Hispanic consumers. And my response to that is we absolutely agree. And as you heard in my prepared remarks, that's a priority for us. We're working hard at it, and I'm pleased to say we're making good progress at all levels of the organization. That brings us to the next question, which is regarding Conagra's stock price, which has been under pressure since last quarter's earnings. And the question says, "I'm assuming this is because of inflationary pressures.
How's the pricing environment for Conagra products, and do you see the stock price rebounding anytime soon?" I just mentioned the pricing actions that we are, in fact, taking. But with respect to the stock price, the food sector in general, it's widely recognized by our investment community that we are in an acute inflationary environment. The level of inflation that food companies are experiencing this year is much more significant than we've experienced recently, and that is pressuring the stock of many of the companies in our space. I think the market will watch very carefully to see what companies like Conagra are doing to offset that inflation through pricing actions as well as productivity initiatives. And as the evidence of those actions comes to the forefront, I think the market will gain confidence that we are navigating that inflationary environment well.
The next question that's come in is, has this pandemic created opportunities for the company to acquire selected products or possibly the whole company that does not have the financial or marketing capacity where its current owner is? And the answer to that is, overall, we take a very balanced approach to capital allocation. We invest in our business. We pay a healthy dividend. Occasionally, we buy back shares, and occasionally, we make acquisitions. We're always open-minded to any of those options. We weigh the relative value of them versus one another in any given window. We're always on the lookout for acquisitions that make sense strategically, are additive, and leverage our capabilities, and have the right valuation. So that hasn't changed, and all of those capital allocation options will continue to be part of our playbook as we move forward.
The next question is, has the company received any feedback from customers concerning supply-demand bottlenecks? Where do you see growth? And where do you see growth in digital sales for the company going forward? So two parts. The first piece is supply-demand bottlenecks. Everybody knows that since the start of COVID, the level of demand for food companies' products has been elevated. It has remained elevated, and with Delta variant and other labor issues, that has strained the supply chain of many companies in the space. I tip my hat not only to our folks, but other companies for working this very effectively to the best of their abilities. And it's a day-by-day challenge, but I'm proud of the work our team is doing to keep servicing our customers and getting products to our consumers on the shelves.
In terms of the digital sales piece, growth in digital sales, I think that's referring to online sales and e-commerce business. Our e-commerce business last quarter hit an all-time high. It's been an investment area for us. It's a priority for consumers. Consumers have increasingly turned to shopping online as a convenient way to procure the products that meet their needs. We don't see that slowing down anytime soon. We think that'll continue to grow, and therefore, it will continue to be a priority area and an investment area for our company. Next question is, what inning is Conagra in concerning packaging modifications and improvements? And my answer to that question is that work will never be done. And it will never be done because the consumer never stops changing their desires and taste.
And the challenge for a company like ours is to remain dynamic and retain the ability to keep up with those ever-changing consumer tastes as an outstanding innovator. And if you've tracked our progress in the last seven years, you've seen us change from being a laggard in the industry on innovation to being the leader in the industry on innovation, and I'm incredibly proud of our team for that. The next question is, can we count on double-digit increases in the dividend in the future? We don't have anything new to announce today regarding our dividend. We pay a strong dividend, as I mentioned in our prepared remarks after the close of last fiscal. We increased it by 29%. The next question is, will Conagra be following President Biden's mandate that all employees be required to obtain COVID vaccinations or be tested in accordance with President Biden's executive order?
This is obviously brand new news. We don't have all the details yet. We're gathering those, and as those become clear, we will have a clear point of view, and it will be available for everybody to see. And the final question we have today is, does our company pay any extortion to political groups like Antifa, Proud Boys, BLM, etc.? And I would say, principally, as you can imagine, we don't pay extortion to anybody. That's not where our investment priorities are. Those are our questions. And so therefore, that concludes the 2021 annual meeting of shareholders of Conagra Brands, and thank you once again for joining us today.