Good morning. It's Friday, day four, day four and a half, I guess, here at CAGNY. But before we get started, one thing I'd like to do. It was a really big lift to move this conference from Boca to Orlando. And so I really want to make sure we recognize Mark and his production crew, the Westons, the hotel, the security. Security was a big deal this year. So just take a moment and just recognize the effort that took to lift this conference from moving. And I'm pleased to have the opportunity to introduce Colgate this morning. With us this morning are Chairman and CEO Noel Wallace, General Manager and President of India Prabha Narasimhan. I think I did that right. And also John Faucher, who you all know.
Noel, I was looking at when I introduced last year, Noel came in as CEO with a focus on driving sustainable sales growth, which would then drive to the bottom line, which is obviously something that we all really value and is actually quite difficult to do. And he's done it. So Noel, we'd love to hear a little bit more now about how you're going to continue to do that.
Thank you, Bryan. And good morning, everyone. I appreciate.
Fundamentally, to bring a smile on people's faces. What better way to do that than continue to drive innovation and bring category-defining solutions to our consumers every day? And we've got that solution for you now, Colgate Total Active Prevention System, which is a toothpaste, a toothbrush, and a mouthwash. And the entire power of this regimen actually results in 15 times more preventative power.
The toothpaste uses a unique stannous fluoride stabilization system. That's what's helping fight the bacteria in our mouths that eventually lead to problems like plaque and gingivitis.
I really enjoyed the demonstration of how the new Colgate toothpaste gets rid of the bacteria.
I'm a dental hygienist , and I would actually tell people to use this toothpaste.
I loved it. I'm very excited about the new products that are dropping. The design of the toothbrush, I'm actually really excited about, and then the fact that it actually increases the foaming action of the toothpaste, so I am really super excited about that.
The Colgate Total System, it just seems like extra insurance. Using all three products together is just a win-win for our patients and for my family, to be honest, and I would definitely be recommending Colgate.
Great. Well, welcome, everyone. Good morning. I appreciate you getting up bright and early on a Friday morning. The video was from our New York Dental Congress back in December, where we introduced into the North America business our new Colgate Total. I'll come back and talk about that at length later in the presentation and talk about the real breakthrough science that we're bringing to the market and the early success that we're seeing behind that business in Latin America, which we launched back in the third quarter. A reminder of our Safe Harbor statement. Delighted to have Prabha Narasimhan with us today. She is our General Manager of one of our most exciting growth opportunities around the world, and that is India. We will take you through that in a lot more specificity, but more importantly, it really underscores how we take a global strategy.
We have repeatedly shown you in this meeting how we take the strategy and deploy it on the ground. Again, it's not just me up here talking about great things. You're going to see ultimately how we're scaling those capabilities and initiatives on the ground with the success that we're having in markets all over the world. Quick recap on 2024. A good year for our company. We surpassed $20 billion for the first time in our 218-year history. A great accomplishment for our team. That was driven by strong underlying organic growth at 7.4%. That 7.4%, as you may recall, had, with the negative impact of private label, would have come on top of that, so it would have been a little bit better. Every category and every operating division grew volume last year, which is terrific.
We want to see the broadness of that growth that underscores, again, I think, the success we're having with our scaling our capabilities. Our base business gross margin was up 240 basis points. That is really the fulcrum of our P&L, which we use to obviously support the business and the advertising. Advertising was up 15%. That was on top of a 19% increase in 2023. So again, we'll talk a lot about that this morning in terms of how that's driving brand penetration and most importantly, driving the health of our business. Our operating cash flow continued to be up. We'll talk about flexing the P&L and flexing our balance sheet. That gives us a lot of opportunities to do different things with our cash. I'll talk a little bit about how we're deploying that later in the presentation.
Ultimately, I think one of the non-economic measures that's very, very important to our business is our market shares globally, and particularly in oral care, where we compete in 200 markets around the world and the most penetrated brand in the world. We continue to see the growth in our market share as well. In terms of outlook on the fourth quarter call, I talked about net sales growth will be roughly flat. That's behind a mid-single-digit impact of foreign exchange. Organic expected to be within our long-term guidance of 3%-5%. That will include the exit of private label, which will happen throughout the year. Gross profit expected to be up on the year. Advertising will be flat to slightly up in 2025. GAAP EPS expected to be up mid-single digits. And our base business EPS expected to be up low to mid-single digits.
So the five things I'll cover today in a lot more detail. First of all, again, I'm going to underscore our strategy, what we're doing around the world. I've been talking to you for the last five years about the strategy. We continue to evolve and sharpen that strategy. But the important thing is it's developing consistent compounded bottom line growth for the business. Penetration and brand health. Again, a lot of what we're trying to do around the world is continuing to get penetration growing in the categories. If we can grow penetration on a sustainable basis, that drives long-term growth for the business and makes our advertising that much more efficient. Driven by the advertising is brand health. We're going to take you through some of the metrics that we look at to ensure that our advertising is working and how we're deploying that around the world.
We talked about leverage in the middle of the P&L. And gross margin is obviously a very important area for us, but we're looking at all areas of the business to drive productivity and efficiency. That allows us to continue to fund the advertising. Free cash flow, importance in how we're deploying our cash and using that to fund investments in terms of driving more return on investment moving forward, as well as returning money to our shareholders. And then I'll finish off with talking about culture. I think in a world of a lot of uneasiness, it's important that we continue to be very focused on the culture of the organization and how we continue to enable and unlock the opportunities our people can deliver back to the company. So let's talk about our strategy and how we're delivering consistent compounded earnings growth and top line growth.
Last six years, we've delivered against our long-term aggregate of 3%-5%. You see, we've either been at or above that number for the last six years. Again, I think this is the notion of driving consistency that the strategy is working. We're not pivoting every year to something different. We know what we need to execute, and we're scaling those capabilities around the world. Importantly, a measurement for us is how we're doing across the categories which we compete. As you well know, we're very focused on four core categories. That allows us to really get the sharpness against the strategy in terms of how we want to execute. You can see the growth back from 2018, adding roughly $5 billion of incremental sales to the business across all of the categories in which we compete.
Similarly, looking at the scope and the scale of our business around the world, as you know, we operate in 200 countries and territories around the world. It's important that we continue to show growth both in emerging and in the developed part of the world. You can see that consistently we've been able to do that. As we come out of an inflationary environment, it's been very important part of our brand penetration strategy to ensure that we're driving volume consistently across our categories. You can see in 2024, we did exactly that as we pivoted more from a pricing environment to a volume environment. You've seen that across all of our core categories. Hill's, as you remember, had the impact of private label on that number. It would be up a little bit more than that if we took the private label out.
Overall, a 3% volume growth in 2024 was a terrific performance for the company. Why are we getting that consistent volume growth? Again, the strategic decision that we made back as we deployed the strategy in 2018 was we needed to improve the health of our brands and make sure we're investing consistently across the geographies and the categories in which we compete. You can see we've increased the advertising to sales from 10%-13%. That's roughly $1 billion of incremental advertising that we've put through the P&L. We've been able to do that because we've been able to focus on getting gross margins and costs down to allow us to continue to invest in the long-term health of our business. Ultimately, cash flow, very, very important to us.
Stan has talked to you a lot about growth margin cash, and we get everyone in the organization focused on this. This gives us flexibility to think about how we want to deploy that cash moving forward. We delivered a 35% ROIC in 2024. This is obviously a key area. We can put our cash back into the business. We had record return to shareholders in 2024 as well of 26% in terms of that. But the cash flow allows us the opportunities to do things in the marketplace that grow shareholder value and long-term growth for the business. And ultimately, an important measure for us is earnings per share. And you can see that we want to be peer leading. That is our goal. That's what we set the teams as a target. And we were up just shy of 12% in 2024.
But ultimately, what we're looking for is how do we continue to improve the health of our brands, grow brand penetration, which ultimately is delivered in global market shares. You can see that over the last three years, we've made a sustainable improvement in our global market shares in toothpaste and up to a 41%. And this is notwithstanding the fact that foreign exchange, particularly given the strength of our Latin America business, certainly keeps this number from growing even faster at times.
Okay, so I'm going to focus a lot more now on growing brand penetration and brand health and try to instill how important this is to our business and why it's so important for us to look at this in terms of the confidence we have in the long-term growth models of our business and ultimately our ability to grow categories in terms of dollars and market shares. So three things that we focused on in terms of brand penetration. First of all, it's getting the right R&D investment into the business. That R&D investment, in turn, delivers great science-based technology into our portfolio. That science-based technology allows us to get strong claims and clinicals that we can drive advocacy for in the market, whether it's through profession or key opinion leaders, allows us to premiumize the business as well and get consumers to see more value in our business.
We're now deploying that across all of our price tiers, which is very, very important in a market like we're in today. Second is we've been talking for four or five years now on the investment in the future of the company. The investment in the future is building the capabilities that we think are going to be absolutely fundamental to ensure that we maintain a competitive advantage in the markets that we compete. We've been building those in digital and data. As you heard last year from Diana in the AI space as well. We're really now starting to see how we scale these capabilities around the world, not simply develop them.
Ultimately, getting the middle of the P&L continuing to be healthy, that allows us to increase the quality of our advertising, the quantity of our advertising, and ultimately how we analyze the effectiveness of our advertising. Let me start off with science-led core and premium innovation. I talked back in 2019 about the underlying elements of our strategy, which was core adjacencies and channels, making sure that we brought real scientific breakthroughs across the entire portfolio. I'll take you through some of that now. No better manifestation of that than Colgate Total. This is one of our biggest core businesses around the world. We're now relaunching it with some breakthrough technology in the market. We're figuring out how to optimize active ingredients in this formula to provide superior prevention in oral care areas that can lead to very serious issues in the mouth.
So this is a great piece of technology that we're putting into the marketplace. But a little bit differently this time is we're also bringing the technology and the enhancements into the rest of our portfolio. Guys, it's not clicking. There we go. We're launching a complimentary toothbrush, and this is a terrific, terrific piece of technology. It's high-density tufting, which is a unique technology that we've been using for quite some time. But we have two different types of tufting strands in this brush. On the outside of the brush, we have tapered bristles, which allow for deep cleaning between the gums and between your teeth, almost like a flossing mechanism. In the middle, we have more polishing-type bristles that actually polish and remove stains. But the real unique aspect to this brush is the configuration of the bristles and the tufting accelerate the foaming of the toothpaste.
That acceleration of the foaming of the toothpaste then allows that toothpaste to work harder between the gums and between the teeth, so it's a great technology that complements each other that we think will be quite unique in the marketplace, and to further complement that, we've launched a mouthwash into the business, so Total will now have a full regimen of products providing significant oral health benefits to the consumer. You can see the claim there, 15 times plaque removal versus an ordinary toothpaste, so again, the key issue in oral health has always been plaque. Our ability to reduce that in a meaningful way with this regimen is an exciting proposition for us to launch in the marketplace, and that's why we went to the professional community first in the Dental Congress back in New York in December to introduce this technology.
I talked about it, I believe, in the September meeting last year about the initial launch of the Colgate Total in Latin America. You can see the success that this business is already having on our Latin America business. The shares are up across all of our core markets. On the right side of that chart, you'll see the penetration numbers, which continue to grow, which is absolutely terrific for the business. The other aspect is in one year, we have grown our share of the premium segment by 70-80 basis points. Again, with the 72%-73% share across the continent of Latin America in toothpaste, our responsibility is to grow category dollars as well as grow household penetration, but most importantly, drive premiumization. You can see what that's doing to our business there.
A jewel for us in our European business, which we don't talk a lot about, is Elmex. I have mentioned to you how we're thinking very differently about the portfolio of brands that we have around the world and how we leverage those brands. Here's an example of a new technology we're bringing into Elmex, the Sensitive Plus Gum. We're strengthening, obviously, the relationship we have with the professionals in that market. You can see in Germany, which is one of our most competitive markets, Elmex is now the number one brand recommended by dentists for sensitivity. So a terrific performance in the German market. But it's not just the German market where we're seeing success. If you look at the European shares, you can see the strength of this brand and the consistent success that we're having behind driving this business across Europe.
We've basically doubled the business in the span of 10- 15 years, which has been just terrific. The other aspect is this brand is at a super, super premium price. So it's at the top end of the category in terms of pricing, driving category dollars and more gross margin dollars for our business. Ultimately, it's not just about what the Elmex brand is doing, but is it driving the portfolio of Colgate brands to a higher market share? And you can see back to 2010 where we had a 35 share, I think it says there, up to now almost a 38 share. So again, it's driving incremental value. But again, it's through deliberate and very prudent approach to how we think about the portfolio and managing the portfolio between Colgate, Elmex, and the Meridol brands is successfully driving the incrementality to our business.
Moving on to skincare, Elta, steeped in science, steeped in a real clinical superiority in terms of its UV protection and how we bring new products to the market. You can see we're able to gain the number one brand recommended by dermatologists, the number one brand trusted by dermatologists, and the number one brand used by dermatologists themselves. That doesn't happen without a significant amount of effort in terms of the science that we bring and the partnership that we have in our collaboration with the dermatology community. We're now launching a real breakthrough product for sensitivity in terms of UV protection. A lot of consumers have sensitive skin, which causes redness. We now have a product that reduces that redness by up to 50%. Quite innovative in this technology. And I encourage all of you that may have sensitive skin to try this because it's a real breakthrough.
Taking a lot of the learning that we've acquired from the skin health acquisitions years back, we're now taking that learning into some of our mainstream personal care products. Here's the Protex brand in Brazil, where we've introduced retinol and hyaluronic acid products into the market for enhanced skincare, so the skincare that consumers are used to getting for their face, we now offer for the whole body and giving significantly improved hydration, and you can see the share growth that we've had behind that business in a very short period of time. Sanex, another jewel of a brand in Europe that we don't talk to, but again, as we've been able to unlock more advertising support for the business, we've been able to fund some of these incredible brands in certain markets around the world.
Sanex is one of those brands that has a historic, real breakthrough type of advertising that we've seen very effective in the market. You can see, the DermoTherapy launch is the new patented formula with amino acid. That amino acid is the same technology that we have in some of our Elta brands as well that we've been able to leverage now into body wash as well, and that's supporting the premium position of that brand. Moving from more skin health to more of the sensorial segment, a big part of the body wash market around the world is sensorial brands, fragrances, natural ingredients, and you can see we've relaunched the Palmolive brand with some great new fragrances and ingredients, and that's driving some nice share growth for us in another very highly competitive category like Germany.
Home care, Fabuloso, a great relaunch that we led some years back in the notion of concentrating the cleaner category. Excuse me. And what's happened here is we've seen now all of our competitors follow that, which has been terrific. The great news about this is we're offering consumers real value with enhanced ingredients in the product, which brings better cleaning performance, better fragrance delivery, but more importantly, reduces our plastic content by almost 50%, which is terrific in terms of our environmental footprint and providing consumers real value add at the same time. And then moving on to Hill's, we've talked a lot about getting the supply network adjusted in order to meet the demands of the marketplace. And we've spent a lot of time not only in acquiring facilities, but building new state-of-the-art facilities to give us maximum flexibility to go after new segments in the category.
This is variety packs. I'll come back and talk about this a little bit later. But variety packs are a growing part of the market. This allows us to get more penetration of the Hill's brand, particularly in the cat side. And I'll come back and show an example of that later. Okay, an area that I really enjoy talking about, and this has been very much a part of the capability strategy that we put together four or five years ago. If you recall in quite a few of the CAGNY presentations, we've had individuals come up and talk about these individually, talk about AI, talk about our digital transformation, talk about the analytics strategy that we have in place. But what I want to share with you now is why they all may work independently on different areas of the company.
They really maximize themselves and converge when we want to get to the focus of driving consumer centricity and really delivering our messaging in a much more relevant way to the consumer, and that's where a lot of our investment and training has gone in the company to make sure that we're getting to the personalization that's required in the marketplace, so optimizing digital media performance first. Digital media is complex and really, really messy. Messy from the standpoint that you have a lot of diverse platforms to use and choices to make. All those platforms have their own form of data, structured, unstructured data. What we have to do is get to a place where we can take all of that data and put it into a tool in an efficient way.
Historically, what we were doing was having our agency and analytical people work on each of the platforms individually. That was taking time, wasn't getting us the answers we needed as quickly as we needed to. We worked with an outside partner, and we now have a tool that we use that basically aggregates all of that data from the platforms that we use around the world and gets back to the marketers and the media teams on what's working, what's not, and that's a very efficient way now for us to look at our media in terms of how we want to optimize that, so a great tool that we're now deploying around the world, which gives us real-time decision-making across a diverse set of backgrounds. You probably heard this idea about retail media, and retail media is one of the fastest growing spaces in the market today.
That hits not only through the gross to net line, but through the advertising line as well. What's important for us is to look at this as an opportunity to drive category growth with our retailers. So yes, it can be expensive, but it can be very effective if we have the tools in place to truly analyze whether that retail media spend is working for us. So we now have the ability to track those investments on a customized basis with each of our retailers. We can then unlock specific audiences in partnership with them. So they're sharing their data with us, and we're going after specific areas. We may go after non-users. We may go after triers or high-loyal users. But it allows us to be very specific in terms of how we target our media spending.
We can now take our marketing mix modeling as well and do a closed-loop system with a specific retailer. Historically, marketing mix, we would do it at a market basis. We now have the ability to take marketing mix modeling, go into a big retailer, and truly assess how we want to spend our money in the most efficient way. And then the most exciting area, which I think Diana talked to last year, is clean rooms. And that fundamentally is when we take our data, proprietary information, we share it with the retailer, their proprietary information in a confidential manner, and we figure out how the two datas work together to make sure that we're maximizing the personalization of our messaging and our targeting. So exciting work in that space. AI. We talked about last year, where will we focus?
There's a lot of areas that we can decide to go after in the space of AI. We have made a conscious effort to go after where we think it's going to drive both revenue and efficiency within the company. In this sense, we're looking at promo optimization, and so what we've now is developed a proprietary tool that we tested with a major U.S. retailer last year, and now we're rolling that out. What it does is it aggregates all of the promotional history of that retailer, takes billions of inputs, and basically spits out optimization plans for the grid, so a real breakthrough that we've now validated with one of our key retailers last year, and we're going to be scaling this across multiple retailers around the world as we move forward through.
It's going to give us the best combination we think of how we need to spend and ultimately try to optimize not only the spending we have from a gross to net standpoint, but spending that would drive category growth for our retailers. Another exciting area is content, so what you're basically seeing here is an AI-generated Colgate piece of generated content on the left. This example is from CP France, and when we deploy generative AI into helping us decide what is the most effective way to deploy content and drive engagement in the online world, what this did is it changed the visuals, optimized how we communicated those visuals and the language we used. You can see that it improves our engagement level, so engagement level, how consumers interact with that thumbnail in the online world by 2x.
Again, this will drive more effectiveness for our spending and ultimately better category growth for our retailers. Digital shelf, which is somewhat implicit in what I just talked about. Three or four years ago, we decided that we needed to have four key KPIs on how we wanted to consistently measure the effectiveness of our digital shelf. We were great at the digital shelf in a brick-and-mortar store. We weren't as good at deploying consistency and execution with the digital shelf in the online world. You can see the great progress we've made in that space, up 36% since 2022. This is against four KPIs. What that 90 means is that we're 90% in compliance with what a best shelf looks like in the online world.
We now have this automated so we can consistently see, and it moves up and down from week to week based on what the retailer's algorithms are doing, but it allows us now to identify problems and opportunities and be very proactive about addressing those, and then obviously the area of creativity, which everyone loves with AI, and this one is, I think, unlocking a significant opportunity for our innovation teams, and basically, what it's allowing us to do is to take years and years of insights, couple that with data from Google Search or from any other of the online platforms that we're partnered with, and build insights that now we can generate concepts and new product ideas with, and it really is in with the flip of a switch.
You basically put your prompts in, and out of those prompts comes a whole series of potential ideas that we then refine and ultimately take to the market and test very, very quickly. So let me just show you some examples of that. So let me just tell you how easy this is. I asked John Faucher to develop some new product ideas. And what he decided to do was to say, "You know what? Let's go to CAGNY. Let's think about the stress that all of you go through, whether you're in a bear market or a bull market." And I asked him to develop some prompts based on what he thinks the insights of this audience would be and develop some new product ideas for me.
So you can see here he said some of the insights are you work long hours, you probably drink a bit too much coffee at times, and it's a very high-stress environment. Some of your portfolios are doing great. Some of your portfolios are not doing so good. So let's see what Gen AI gave us. So this was the first one. Colgate Market Blitz, caffeinated power mint. Colgate Market Blitz, caffeinated power mint keeps your breath as sharp as your instincts with an energizing caffeine kick and an icy mint blast because your breath should be as strong as your portfolio. Now, literally, this is John Faucher doing this. So it took nothing. It took five minutes for him to put this in, and it spits out the information. Now, some of your portfolios may not be as good as this, right? So there's the bear part of it.
So let me show you the Bear Market Blend that came up. A rich, lathering body wash designed to wash away the stench of financial ruin and deep regret, infused with the tears of sell-side analysts, notes of desperation, and a hint of cedarwood. This formula replenishes lost liquidity and revives broken spirits. So again, it's a wonderful, wonderful tool in a way that we think we're going to truly optimize some of our—well, we'll get better at this. But now, so I said, "John, that's great. I want you now to go do a focus group with the CAGNY attendees." And that's exactly what he did. This is the focus group he ran here in CAGNY. And you can see some of the verbatims we got. It's like a beaten raise from my mouth. I mean, how do you get better than that?
So in any case, it's a great tool. And all kidding aside, it really is going to advance our priorities in the area of innovation and I think get us much more efficient. So what I'm going to do now is talk about increased advertising. We've talked a lot about the increase in the P&L and what that's doing for us. So I want to spend some time sharing how we're thinking about that. But first, before I get into the specifics, let me share some advertising with you.
[Foreign language]
[Foreign language]
When weight kept them down, science helped them soar. When morning kisses turned sour, science made them sweet. When itching kept them up, science helped them rest easy. When the world gave them setbacks, science gave them bounce backs. And when your vet delivered life-altering news, science delivered life-changing nutrition. Hill's Prescription Diet, science did that.
So at Working Media, when you take out production, when you take out agency fees, that's the real measurement in terms of how we think about impressions, reach, and frequency in the market. You can see that we've increased our media almost two and a half times since 2018. But the real question is, okay, you've put a lot of money in it. What is it doing for the business? We measure the return on effectiveness. So I just took you through all of the tools that we're thinking about on that convergence of data, analytics, and AI, and how we're using that to truly optimize the return on investment. And you can see that our ROI is not only improved on the digital side of the business, but it's also improved on the traditional side of the business.
The traditional, I think, is coming from a lot of the training that we've done. Yves talked to you some years back about the concentrating, but we've done a lot of work to get the advertising effectiveness improved, but more importantly, how we think about deploying that and the personalization that comes with that drives this number, so what I want to do now is shift again, and I want you to take all of what you've heard from me this morning and certainly over the last couple of years, and again, it's trying to give you tangible examples of how we're taking a strategy and deploying that consistently around the world in ways that scale and drive continuous improvement of their strategy, so I'll turn it over to Prabha now to take you through that. Prabha.
Thank you very much, Noel. Good morning.
It's absolutely my privilege to be here to talk about the Colgate India business. But before I jump into the India business, just a quick snapshot to remind you about India as a country on its way to being the third largest economy by 2030 and the fastest growing economy amongst the larger economies in the world. While that has slowed down, it's slated to still be the fastest. This growth is leading to very favorable demographics. The 200 million number that you see there is the middle and upper-income households by 2030. Just to put it in context, that 200 million is close to a billion consumers and is as many households as there are in Europe. So if you're in the CPG world, a very, very attractive audience to go after.
And these two, coupled with each other, also lead to a change in the retail environment, pushing more and more towards the self-service and the e-commerce type of retail, which is always good for companies like ours because it allows for discovery of products, which then makes it share a ccretive margin, a ccretive premiumization, a ccretive. So with that, I'm going to come and talk a little bit about the India business. We are a listed company in India, $8 billion of market capitalization. If you had invested in the share 45 years ago, it would have delivered a 24% CAGR since then. We are the number one oral care brand in the country, almost three times as large as the second brand, and have a penetration in a country the size of India in nine out of ten households.
And this is backed up by exceptionally strong execution, where the brand is available in seven million individual stores in the country and has a distribution that is near universal. But even with these numbers, oral care has tremendous potential to grow in India. While the penetration has now, over the last decade, reached universality, whether it is urban or rural India, consumption still lags. So even compared to a market like the Philippines, which is quite similar, urban consumption in India of toothpaste is at only 0.7x, and rural consumption in India, where 65% of India's population lives, is half that of the Philippines. And then on the other vector of can we add value to this category? Yes, we can. Because at this moment, premiumization is also quite low if we compare it to comparable categories like bathing soaps or shampoos.
So on both vectors, whether it's consumption or its value, there is opportunity, tremendous opportunity for us to grow. And we look at this opportunity to increase household penetration on three vectors. How can we get in more product? How can we get that to more people? And how can we get more money out of it? So starting with the more product, here are the numbers. 80% of urban India does not brush twice a day. Only one out of two rural consumers brush daily. And the average frequency of replacement of a toothbrush is once in nine months, once in six months in urban India, and as long as once in 15 months in rural India.
Definite opportunity for us to stay very true to our mission and what brings all of us to work every day, which is to improve the oral health and well-being of every single Indian. And we've been doing this for the 87 years that we've been in the country, starting with the Bright Smiles, Bright Futures program, which is a foundational education program that talks to young school children, teaching them the right oral care habits. This program has reached over 180 million children since its inception five decades ago and consistently gets built on. This year, we will. Last year we reached eight million children. This year, we will reach another 10 million children. We also have strong government partnerships. A quarter of the country's population is covered by a partnership between the government and Colgate to help impart this education.
Very recently, we've launched, building on Noel's point on the utility of AI, an AI-generated dental report that comes to you on your phone. Access to dentists in the country being relatively limited, this is a game-changing way where consumers can actually just assess their own health through an AI-generated report coming through photographs on their phone. I then move from more product to more people. Starting with our core brands, we have three core brands, as you can see on the screen. They go to 272 million households who buy on average 1.2 tubes, and they have seven times a year, making it therefore a little over 2 billion tubes of toothpaste that we sell in the country.
Our job here is to ensure that we are leveraging the absolutely amazing technology that Colgate has in oral care to give superior products, give the consumer a better experience, and make sure that it is available at the store that she wants to shop at. And for that, we have fabulous technology at the premium end of the portfolio, as Noel already mentioned, but we also have fabulous technology in our market-standard products. One example being Colgate Strong Teeth, with its arginine technology, which is actually world-class, delivering cavity protection and two-times stronger teeth, sits in our flagship portfolio. And similarly, we have technology across every one of our variants. And this we test rigorously against competition. So 87% of our brands are superior to competition. 100% of our brands have had a packaging upgrade over the last little while.
95% of the money that we spend on advertising is tested and tracks ahead of the benchmark norms. This is important because in combination, this is what gives us the superiority as we look, as we present ourselves to the consumer. All of this is backed by physical availability. As a company, we cover 1.7 million outlets directly through 5,000 distributor sales representatives who go to market every single day. It's not possible for us to speak to those 5,000 individually and give them individual instructions. That's where tech comes in. A handheld device that ensures that for every single one of those 1.7 million outlets, we have a recommendation of what that outlet can sell, basis its history, and basis the macro environment around that outlet.
On a monthly basis, we generate 30 million such recommendations, which the handheld then helps the DSR to execute. Similarly, we do the same thing for the self-service part of our business, where image recognition allows us to tell the merchandiser, we have 1,200 of them, instantly whether the on-shelf availability is right, whether the share of shelf is right, and whether the planogram is being adhered to. Absolutely fabulous use of tech. On the last one, which is more money, we talked about how there's a significant opportunity to premiumize the oral care business. We have three, again, three legs to that, Colgate Total, which we see the success of Colgate Total around the world. Penetration in India of Colgate Total still remains in single digits and a huge opportunity, similarly Visible White.
Similarly leveraging our extremely strong partnership with the dentists in the country built over numerous decades to sell a therapeutics portfolio. Overall, media has gone up in India by about 300 basis points in the near term. Most of that has actually been invested in driving this premium business. What does all that result in? Because what matters to us most is the health of our brand. You can see significant improvement in the health of our brand, whether it be top of mind, which is the first brand that comes to your mind when you think oral care, as you think oral care. As we go up, obviously this is a sum total of 100. Therefore, competition has to go down.
Top of mind up, consideration and brand of first choice up, and the four key measures that matter to us: oral care expertise, oral care technology, worth paying more for, and distinctive brand. All of these have seen a tremendous increase. Net net, all of this eventually has to come back into the P&L. Over the last two years, we've delivered a net sales growth of 8.3% at 1.7 times the FMCG average in India or the CPG average in India, adding a little over $100 million. This is an exceptionally profitable company with EBITDA margins of 33%, which have been strengthened over the last couple of years by 340 basis points and continue to be peer leading.
And in summary, I guess what I want to leave you with is that CP India is an exceptionally strong business sitting in a country that has tremendous headroom opportunity for growth along all of the three vectors. We think we have really world-class execution that will allow us to capitalize on this opportunity and continue to remain the growth engine for Colgate-Palmolive in total. I want to hand it back to Noel.
Thank you, Prabha. So let me transition quickly into another business where penetration and building brand awareness and brand health is critically important. That's Hill's. The segmentation of this category, we've continued to deploy strategies to grow within each segment. You can see across all the key indications or key segments in the pet category, we're growing. You can see the unexploited opportunity that we still have in cat wet there.
Speaking of cat wet, half the category is in cat wet in terms of cat food. So we need to make sure that we're utilizing our supply chain much more effectively to go after that. I mentioned earlier the importance of variety packs. If you see on the right-hand side of that chart, while the cat wet market is growing 4%, it's really being driven by the variety segment, which is where cat owners want the selection to be able to personalize and customize the food for their pet. You can see here that we're expanding that wet portfolio. Tonganoxie, the plant that we built, was specifically designed to give us this flexibility, and we're now starting to roll these out in the U.S. market, and ultimately we'll deploy that around the rest of the world. Likewise, we're identifying new trends in the marketplace.
A lot of our insight work is doing terrific work. In this case, you're seeing that we're seeing a significant increase in pet owners looking for foods for sensitive stomachs for small dogs, puppies, and small cats. That we have that technology for large dogs. We're now deploying that for obviously puppies and kittens, and importantly, this notion of silent sufferers. This is what we've talked about before. About 5% of the market uses a therapeutic dog food, where 80% would benefit from a therapeutic dog food. We need to educate the market in that regard, and let me show you a piece of advertising that helps do that.
Many health conditions hide in plain sight. Are you missing any signs? Find out at seehiddensigns.com. Science Diet did that.
Likewise, getting great ROI for our investment.
You see, we've increased that two and a half times, as well as getting the ROI up 1.7. And that ultimately translates into improvement in our health measures. And you can see across visibility, distinctiveness, and brand of first choice all growing nicely. Let me move on to productivity and efficiencies real quickly. Obviously, this is an area that you know we've done very well. It's part of our DNA. We have really tried to make our funding, the growth, and productivity work harder for the business and the P&L. And you can see the strength of that business over the last of that funding in the last two years. And that's driving the continued strength of our gross margin, our gross profit. You can see, in 2024, back to near record levels.
We continue to feel very good about where we stand in the middle of the P&L to generate that advertising. Cash flow importance, obviously, in terms of how we deploy the cash that we make. You can see capital expenditures has peaked at 3.9. That was behind the construction of the Tonganoxie plant, but we're still investing a healthy amount of our cash back into the business. I mentioned our ROIC at 35%. That's a great way to get return to our shareholders in terms of building long-term growth opportunities. And the cash flow was up 17%, as I mentioned earlier, and a record payout to shareholders last year. A chart that we're always proud of: 62 consecutive years of dividends, 130 years of consecutive payment of a dividend back to 1895. And we've returned close to $30 billion to our shareholders over the last 10 years.
Let me finish off with values. A lot of uneasiness in the market. What we're focused on is the 34,000 people that work for our company and making sure that we continue to enhance our culture. It's underpinned by our values of caring, inclusive, and courageous. And we live that every day. And we walk the talk in what we do. An example of that is Bright Smiles, Bright Futures. An example of that is the shelter program we have. Likewise, the Colgate Women's Games, we've just celebrated its 49th anniversary. Environmental, in terms of our lead in recyclable tubes, was with Colgate going first and now sharing that technology around the world. Zero-waste facilities. We have more zero-waste facilities than any other CPG company in the world, which helps drive efficiency and lower our cost.
Ultimately, that leads to the strength of our business and our confidence in terms of where we're headed. The strategy is working. We feel we can accelerate the change with the capabilities that we're putting in place and gain an advantage in that space. And ultimately, that's going to continue to improve brand health, which is the single most important measure for sustainable growth of our business. And hopefully, the penetration will come behind that. So with that, I've got a couple of minutes. I'll open it up to any questions.
Dara Mohsenian of Morgan Stanley. So Prabha, just high-level perspective, what do you think the biggest unlock is for Colgate in terms of driving higher per capita consumption of toothpaste over time in India? Obviously, some of that is development of disposable income at the consumer level.
But in terms of what's in your control, what are the biggest priorities? And Noel, maybe you can just touch briefly on North America. It's been a source of controversy down here this week. Obviously, there's been some weakness, but maybe just give us a bit of a short-term update there. And also, post some of the pricing reset you've taken over the last few quarters, can you just sort of highlight how the business is positioned maybe after we cycle that weakness post this quarter from a market share standpoint and if you can return to organic sales growth? Thanks. Go for it.
Okay. So I think, firstly, Colgate India has been instrumental in getting the penetration to being universal through the activities like Bright Smiles, Bright Futures, partnerships with the government, et cetera.
I think from a consumption perspective, our first task is really to get urban consumers to brush twice a day, and that is a marketing challenge, and that's exactly how we're approaching it, so the insight here is that most Indian consumers eat dessert before or after dinner, and then they go to bed with sugar on their teeth, which then makes it obviously exceptionally bad for your oral health, and so they're nudging them just with this idea of that's the wrong behavior with which to go to bed, and driving above-the-line communication that helps us to get to making this a priority is the way that we're going, coupled with the activities that we do in school and using children as change makers to drive exactly the same thing, so it is a marketing challenge over the next decade or so.
Yeah, not much to add to North America beyond what you've heard this year. I think there's a general uneasiness in the consumer environment in North America right now, which is probably driving trips down a bit in retail environments, driving some of the category unit volume, which we've seen quite sluggish, and we'll see what happens with that over time. But we certainly have seen that a little bit more pronounced over the last month that we've seen a little bit of the consumption slow down. Relative to, and we're not immune to some of the inventory discussions that were discussed earlier in the week. But I think it's much more of a consumer uncertainty right now in terms of what's going on in the market. You talked about pricing North America, which was the one area that we did make some price adjustments in.
We've seen the volume come back nicely as a result of that. We had overpriced in some of our categories. We'll lap that pricing as we move into the back half of this year. So we think we'll be in a better shape to continue to drive volume. So with that, my clock says zero. I thank you very much and appreciate your interest in the company.