company. Joining us from Colgate, our Chairman and CEO Noel Wallace, as well as VP of Marketing from Colgate's Asia Pacific region, Yves Briantais. It was four years ago on this stage that Noel began articulating Colgate's strategy for re-accelerating organic growth through a combination of increased brand support, premiumization and innovation, increased digital and e-commerce capabilities, as well as increased white space penetration across oral care, home care, personal care, as well as Hill's. As I'm sure Noel will discuss further, the results since have been impressive on that front, from 1% organic growth in 2017/18 to an average of nearly 6% over the past four years. To tell us more about Colgate's journey, let me turn it over to Noel.
Thank you, Steve. Well, thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone. Appreciate you getting up so early on a Friday after a long week, and I'm sure I'm not the first to say how great it is to be back in person with you. As a reminder, our safe harbor statement. I assume you've seen a couple of these this week. Let me announce our guest star today, which is Yves Briantais. Yves has been the key architect of some of our transformational strategies across Asia and particularly in China, which we're going to unpack a bit relative to some of the great things that are going on in that market and the success that we're seeing behind that strategy. Quickly on highlights for 2022. Challenging year to be sure.
Net sales were up 3%, behind 4% headwinds in foreign exchange. Organic strong at 7%, and importantly, that organic was broad-based across all four of our categories and all of our geographies around the world, both emerging and developed. Importantly, we took bold actions as we saw costs coming quickly after the first quarter inflation that came through the P&L. That allowed us to continue to build our brands throughout the year and sustain our advertising investment. Importantly, we saw the fruits of all of our innovation and digital transformation transfer into stronger market shares for both our toothpaste and our toothbrush business. As I said on the Q4 call, net sales for 2023 expected to be up 2%-5%. The assumption is low single digit foreign exchange headwinds there.
Organic growth at the top end of our range of a 3%-5%. A return to gross margin in the year, which is going to allow us to continue to fuel investment in building our brands, and as you'll see, a really strong pipeline of innovation going into 2023. Importantly, return volume growth into the P&L. We have guided to base business EPS growth of low to mid-single digits. Importantly, as we work on the middle of the P&L, generating more cash profits, lowering our working capital, we'll see cash flow increase and our ability to continue to invest behind the business and drive shareholder return. five key messages for you today. Right strategy. I wanna get into more details on the strategy that we talked about back in 2019 and how we continue to strengthen that strategy.
Importantly, talk about the capabilities that we feel are gonna future-fit the organization that we talked about, quite frankly, for a couple years and how we're strengthening those in terms of our execution. Spend more time on the middle of the income statement in terms of productivity, how we're getting leverage through the P&L and driving margin expansion. Re-accelerating cash to invest behind the business and drive shareholder value. Finish off with our sustainability strategy in terms of how we're looking to create a more healthier, sustainable future. Let me get into the strategy in a bit more detail in terms of how that's driving growth for our business. Here's what Steve mentioned. Back in 2019, I was on this stage, and we talked about how we were going to re-accelerate growth with a growth mindset across the company.
We had three key tenets to that strategy. Driving the core innovation, which is a big part of our of our portfolio today. Pursuing higher growth adjacent categories and segments. Importantly, looking at the new emerging segments, particularly e-commerce and some of the club store environments, to ensure that we have the right portfolio to capitalize on that growth opportunity. The second piece was ensuring that we were thinking about where the organization needed to go and some of the issues that got us into some of the slower growth that we were experiencing. It started with innovation, that we needed to get back to the heart and soul of what's made Colgate so strong across the world, and that's our science-led innovation. The digital transformation was gonna be a completely new way of working across the organization.
We knew we needed to find more analytical ways to drive pricing and work with our retailers to grow categories, and importantly, start to think about what the supply chain of the future was going to look like. There you see it. Since 2019, 16 quarters, the team has been able to deliver at or above our long-term guidance of 3%-5%. A lot of volatility in those 4 years that I'd talk about for just a second. First of all, it was after a couple very lean years of growth, we needed to put a new growth strategy in place to re-accelerate growth, and we saw that back in 2019. Clearly, in 2020, that strategy continued to strengthen, but we did see the benefit of some of our COVID-driven categories that we compete in.
2021, we then had, obviously, some difficult comparisons. We continued to execute against that strategy despite some of the supply chain disruptions that we were incurring. In 2022, continued to build that momentum as we went through the year, taking courageous pricing early on in the year and seeing that momentum build as we went through the back half of 2022. The point I'm trying to make is the durability of the strategy is there, independent of how we were tested in different market environments over the last four years, and we continue to see that momentum build. Importantly, as we've guided in 2023, we see that continuing to be at the high end of our target range. Why is that? Growth across all four of our categories.
We added $2 billion in net sales to the top line of the company since 2018, every category contributing, and importantly, every geography contributing to that despite significant foreign exchange headwinds. If I leave you with anything, it's we're confident in the strategy. We feel we're executing good top-line momentum across the organization, and we feel good about where that's going. Why is that? We have a very focused portfolio in terms of how we think about the categories in which we compete. They're attractive core categories, high gross margin and high cash characteristics to them as well, and they're all growing here in North America and around the world. You know our four categories well: oral health, pet health, personal care, and home care. All of them, obviously, categories where brands play a very, very important role in consumer selection.
Brands that are very strong around the world. We're number one or number two in almost all the categories in which we compete. Some of these categories have very strong geographical strengths, but nonetheless are very, very strong, and consumers really, really trust and engage with the categories and the brands that we offer. Importantly, these are categories in the tough economic environment that we're in that consumers use every single day. I'll talk a little bit about that, like the Colgate brand, which is in 60% of the world's households, the highest penetrating brand in the world of any consumer products company. Our products, not just oral care, are used every day, but you can see the shaded categories here, which is the bulk of the categories in which we compete.
At minimum, 75% of our categories have daily usage compared to some of the other HPC categories that we see in the middle of the store. Sunscreen, obviously, a growing category for us, where you're getting recommended, as you know, to use a sunscreen every single day. Importantly, the brand choice is very, very important in the categories in where we compete. Trust is important, and people spend significant amounts of money in learning to ensure that they're buying the right products. As a result, you see low private label penetration in the categories in which we compete. In fact, in many of our categories, private label is actually declining, and you see that in comparison to other HPC categories where that penetration number is much, much higher.
We do that by ensuring that we're obviously building quality brands that consumers can interact with, but importantly, ensuring that we have innovation across multiple price points in a category. Here's an example in Brazil, where our Sorriso brand is the opening price point at 100, and our elmex brand all the way up at a 200 index to our entry-level brand. Importantly, it's building trust, and you've heard us talk quite a lot about the importance of the profession across many of our categories. Building that endorsement level, building that science-based rigor with the profession is something that really sets us apart from many of our competitors. We continue to find ways in New York now to engage the profession and really create a flywheel effect across all of the different brands and segments that we compete in.
We have an organization in New York that's simply looking at best practices and how we engage dermatologists, aestheticians, vets and vet techs, dentists, hygienists, and making sure that all of that learning is consolidated and scaled across the entire enterprise. You see some of the work that we're doing in dental conferences around the world, again, to continue to promote our science-based products and make sure that we continue to partner with the profession on bringing them the best products they can offer to their patients and pets. We're not stopping there. We're taking the digital transformation into the professional area as well. We're taking a lot more of our targeting in terms of the digital work that we're doing to ensure that we're creating personalized connections with the profession.
We're making sure that we're not only talking to key opinion leaders, but likewise to digital influencers, which is an emerging area of opportunity for us, and making sure we're thinking about the future in terms of how we make sure we partner with schools and their curriculums to ensure that the proper knowledge around nutrition and oral health is clearly present. That's a little bit about the strategy. The second piece, what we were trying to instill as we started in 2019, was making sure that we had capabilities that were gonna change the way we worked as a company. We wanted to ensure that we were leveraging those across the entire enterprise.
It started with getting back to the basics of where we came from, which was phenomenal formulas that were based on a lot of clinical rigor and science to drive premiumization in the category. Last couple weeks, we've introduced Colgate Total Plaque Pro-Release. This is a terrific new product. It's amino acid, arginine combination, a unique formula that we've been working on for quite some time. Plaque is clearly understood as the key oral health issue in the market. Consumers know that it creates cavities, obviously, and a leading indicator to gingivitis as well. We now have a formula that dissolves and lifts away gum-harming plaque, which is terrific. Our meridol business in Europe is our premium therapeutic line on the gum positioning. We haven't relaunched this brand in over five years. We have a significant new formulation coming to the market as we speak.
You've heard us talk a lot about whitening over the last couple of years. That was a strategic thrust for us. We now are going to continue to raise the bar in the whitening segment with the first 5% hydrogen peroxide toothpaste, which you see there is continuing to drive incremental share for our whitening business here in the U.S. Let me show you a spot on that, which just rolled in the last week.
Teeth were made to indulge. With Colgate Optic White Pro Series toothpaste, you can remove 15 years of stains in two weeks. Live life to the bite with Colgate Optic White.
Feel free to drink all the coffee you want this morning. You can use that product afterwards. Quite a few markets around the world, peroxide is regulated. Our scientists have developed what we internally call MPS, which is a active oxygen formula, which we're using and launching in different parts of the world now. That will be our best whitening product outside the U.S. You can see here an example in Malaysia, where that's continuing to drive great incremental share. Overall, the consolidation of all of our whitening efforts, you can see the great success we've had in that segment over the last 4 years, where we've added 400 basis points of market share to our business. Importantly now, we've worked hard on the everyday daily use products.
We're going to now continue to take our peroxide knowledge and the science that we've learned over the last six or seven years in that area to the at-home market with new whitening kits. This is a unique product that takes significant uniqueness of a wavelength technology in lighting, combines that with peroxide to increase the efficacy of our product. Terrific stuff there at a very premium price. Sustainability, an important part of our growth strategy. You see the Recycled Clean Brush. This is our first 100% recycled plastic-handled toothbrush with plant-based bristles, so obviously an area where consumers are looking very closely at the products they interact with, and this is clearly an opportunity for incremental growth for us. There's no better place to represent what we're doing with science than in our Hill's business.
Let me show you a spot that kinda sets up the next couple charts.
Feeling healthy by leaps and bounds. Making a dinner that makes their whole day and giving your best friends the best nutrients for their best life. Science does that.
Finishing the rollout of Derm Complete, this is a very unique formulation that is a breakthrough opportunity to provide environmental sensitivity benefits to pets at home, both on the food and the environmental side, which is where it's quite unique. Obviously, at a premium price. This is the Prescription Diet line. In the last 2 weeks, at the Western vet conference out in Las Vegas, we introduced this new product called O-N-C. This is called ONC internally or is an oncology product. 12 million pets in the U.S. suffer from cancer. That's a growing area in the market, unfortunately. And when pets have cancer, unfortunately, they often stop eating. Now we've got a high-caloric nutritional formula to get dogs to eat.
Better than I explain it, let me turn it over to our head of technology who's gonna take you through a very personal story and kind of how this product was born and the great results that we've seen from it.
Ours started with a little bump above his left eyebrow. It was removed, but unfortunately, it came back very quickly. That's when we knew there was something wrong.
They said, "Yes, it's cancer. Yes, we do need to remove his eye. He will also have to have treatment with radiation.
As Harlow was recovering from his surgery and the radiation therapy, he lost 15% of his body weight. They wanted to stop the therapy because if a dog can't eat enough to live, then he can't survive the therapy. They had tried several tricks, like meat-based baby food, and he would reject it. We started him on this new Prescription Diet food, and he would eat it. The fact that this food is so tasty and yet has complete and balanced nutrition, it's exactly what he needed.
He has come back to himself. He loves to run. He likes to jump. You see the spirit in his eye.
Great stuff. That product rolling out in the U.S. as we speak. Moving on to skin health. We obviously have the number one brand recommended by dermatologists with Elta sunscreen. We competed in the cream segment exclusively, and what we've done over the last couple years is really found ways to formulate the uniqueness of our formulas into both sticks and the rapidly growing spray segment. Those are rolling out as we speak. Importantly, the innovation that we're putting into the market, it's nice to see us being recognized. The Women's Wear Daily recognized the Elta brand as the breakthrough brand of the year. Again, I think a testament of some of the great innovation that we're pushing into the market in that space. We talk a lot about PCA.
PCA, the origins of that brand were with estheticians, and estheticians in the skin peel area, specifically. A lot of knowledge on how to do effective skin peels and the training required with estheticians to make that happen. We're taking that knowledge now into the mass segment with a new exfoliating product that we're introducing in the market now. Finishing off with Filorga, a new advanced eye treatment that targets five areas of the eye and has visible results in seven days. A terrific product that we're rolling out across Europe as we speak, and later into Asia. This one's an interesting one. 37% of the population in Brazil have tattoos. That continues to grow.
We saw a unique opportunity with Protex, which is the number one antibacterial soap used in Brazil, to actually formulate it to skin protect the colors that you have from a tattoo. We have 78 million people now that will hopefully be looking to use this new Protex tattoo product. If you need some of this, talk to John afterwards, he'll get you some. Big fabric softener business south of the border, particularly in Latin America. Odors that cause from humidity are a big issue. Good insight into that. We needed longer-lasting fragrance to make that happen. We've got a new product going into the market. Let me show you a spot on that now. Good insight there.
Okay, quickly on digital and data, a really big opportunity for us to have the company think very differently. As a result, we brought in significant amount of talent from the outside and done a lot of work to train our own people. Three key areas on our digital and data strategy that I thought I'd talk about a little bit. First is how we're upskilling people, then mastering the digital shelf, which is really the first point of entry, and then making sure that everything we do is analyzed in ways to drive more efficiency and productivity. You've heard me talk about some of the work that we've done to really transform the organization to think differently.
In 2021, we trained 16,000 people around the company in e-commerce and digital marketing, making sure that everyone really understood how important this was for us to drive. Last year, we rolled that training into data literacy with 14,000 people. The important part is we're creating real scalability in the organization with how people really think and engage in a digital world. It's very important. Some examples of seeing all that effort transpire into the marketplace. This is how we think about the digital shelf, the four key metrics that we analyze ourselves on a daily basis: availability, placement, content, ratings, and reviews.
You can see in the top 10 global markets, we're showing sequential improvements on all of those each quarter against all of our metrics, which again, has translated into strong market shares. On the data side, we're really looking to improve our targeting. This is such an unlock for the company when we think about how we use data analytics to improve not only how we use programmatic media and our digital media, but likewise, how we think about it in revenue growth management, which I'll talk to you in just a moment. You can see some of the great ideas that we're using data for to not only retain loyal buyers as an example, but to win back lapsed users. Everything now should be analyzed in the digital world. Moving on to media efficiencies.
You can see the points here. We're really trying to optimize now how we think about media and where we use media around the world and what type of mediums we have. In 2022, we covered about 60% of the world of our working media. We continue to push that and hopefully get to 100% here soon. The most important metric is what is that really doing for us as a company? You can see the continuous progressing and improvement that we made around driving ROI, whether it's our total media spend or even in TV, and the fact that digital now has a 1.3 index on ROI to the rest of our media. Good learning there, and the company really thinking about making sure every dollar we spend is returning something to the business.
Data, likewise, in revenue growth management, particularly in a high inflationary environment that we've seen over the last 12 months, we need to use the power of data to make smarter decisions across the market. Our analytics team has now provided proprietary tools to all of our commercial teams around the world to ensure that they're using data algorithms to make important business decisions around how we're taking pricing and driving category dollars. You can see the success of some of the RGM efforts that we've had over the last 2 years, and this continues to build year in and year out for us, and as a really important competitive advantage in the marketplace to think about how we take pricing in the most effective way and the success of that in 2022. Last point on data is ultimately how that translates into driving your e-commerce business.
E-commerce is a data-driven business. Clearly, in terms of our success has been the fact that we've truly understood that and found ways to drive that business successfully. You see in 2022, double-digit growth following double-digit growth in 2021. It's about 14% of our total sales now, and the sales growth on toothpaste in 7 of the top 10 markets where we really have good measurements, we continued to grow share. Our online share, importantly, is higher than our brick-and-mortar share in our key markets around the world. Let me turn it over to Yves, and he's going to take you through a really exciting discussion on how we're transforming our business in Asia, but particularly on the success that we're having in China. Yves?
First, why this picture? Good morning. This picture is not about the 2 elephants, because there are no elephants in the room today. It's about this guy with a smile. Usually, I'm not in love with my smile when I have a picture, but on that one, I looked at the picture and I was like, "My God, I was so happy." I thought it would be a good smile to start the presentation with, because I'm here today to tell you a story that is quite a happy story. A story of why and how. Why, despite huge changes last year, you know them, APAC has been hit by COVID more than any region. We had many lockdowns still last year in China, impacting the category growth. We had cost inflation, you know that, we had some very strong foreign exchange headwinds.
Why, despite all those headwinds, we managed to accelerate the growth of our region last year? What happened? Look at that. In 2022, we managed to deliver the strongest growth for APAC in the past 9 years, this has been largely driven by China, despite the fact I told you that China was a challenge in terms of lockdown. Indeed, in China, we became the fastest-growing oral care brand in 2022. What is the how? How did we manage to do all of this? What was the key driver of this performance? Simply the fact that we started to transform our marketing organization. Noel talked to you about capabilities, I'm gonna show you right now what we did since 2019 to implement those capabilities on the ground to drive the business growth that you've seen.
Two pillars: innovation, disruptive science-led innovation, and communication. We will talk about effectiveness and efficiencies. You see that here I did not put digital transformation. We'll talk about it, but digital is now part of how we do communication. This is part of our life. Innovation first, and let's start with the end, which is the results. In 2022, the weight of innovation in APAC was multiplied by almost 2. Meaning that today, innovation in our region represents 20%-22% of our sales, which is a huge achievement, huge improvement done in 1 year. What did we do to get there? First, I would say we are obsessed with incrementality. We don't want innovation any longer that is not driving incrementality, not driving growth, both for our share of market and for the category.
To drive incrementality, we decided that it was time to look forward and not backwards anymore. Look forward means that we need to understand what is going to happen in the category before it does happen, and we developed the idea of need state. What is a need state? Three components. The why. The why is a deep human motivation that drives future behaviors in the category, things that are starting to emerge, that you start to notice, but that are not big yet, that have not been tackled by anybody yet in the market. The what is how we translate those need states, those future behavior into benefits that consumer want on our categories. The how is what do we do, how do we deliver on those benefits through our products. I'll show you two examples. We started with need states.
It's a concept we developed for China in 2019. Need state number 1, admirable impressions. What does it mean? It means that in China, you have more and more people who are successful, who were born in tier 15 city and are moving to tier 1, and they are happy, and they want to show it. They want to signal the fact that they are successful. The benefit that they are looking for, whitening. Why? Because they want to go in the society with a smile that is reflecting their success. There is another need state in China, which is issue with aging. You're successful, you're 35, you are at your peak, you start noticing that your body is changing.
In China, you talk a lot about black triangles in your gum that you don't want to see happening, because that's a signal of the fact that you are aging. Gum is a key benefit on this segment. We went after those need states with very innovative products, with a strong science-led point of view and point of differentiation. One with Colgate Enzyme White, and the other one with Colgate Miracle Repair with amino acids. Doing so, when we are looking forward, what we do is that we are reinventing our segments, because we are launching products that don't exist. We are tackling benefits that were not existing before in the category. We talk about Enzyme White. You will tell me whitening is not new. This product adds 800 index to the category. That was new.
Miracle Repair, we talk about it, a product that is working against aging. In the middle, you see a product that we've launched in the rest of APAC because whitening in the rest of APAC is a new segment. We are driving whitening proactively in the region. We do that with our segments, but we are opening new segments as well, new categories. Here you see at-home whitening, which is something that we sell now in the entire region, even in places where it did not exist, and in places where you will not expect at-home whitening to be, because both the category, the segment of whitening is small, and the income of people is quite limited. Now you go to Thailand, you go to Malaysia, you go to Philippines, and this category exists and is growing nicely for us.
The other thing we decided to change is that if you talk about premiumization, the experience with our product doesn't change, there is an issue. We started to borrow the codes of beauty and implement them in our category. I show you again an example from China, Miracle Repair. You can see that the tube is different from the usual tube that we have, with a beautiful cap, with a beautiful printing, with codes visually that are different. This product has the highest repurchase rate ever in China, three times better than the number two product. It is a success. If you combine innovation that disrupts together with an experience that is superior, you manage to deliver premiumization. Here I gave you, I give you four examples, always the same. I told you Enzyme White, close to 800 index to the category.
Miracle Repair, 360. O2, 300 index in the rest of the market. The at-home whitening that we discussed, 250 to the category. Look at what's happening. This is China. This is our shelf market on the left, and on the right is our RSP. We started with an RSP which was 97 to the category, and we are now at 190 as a range. The share, of course, beautiful story. We moved from 2.1% in 2018 to 7.3%, and we just got the share for January, we are at 9%. The growth is that it is, the momentum is on, and we keep going. Now you heard what Noel said. We are not the category, and we are not a brand only for the happy fews.
We are a brand for everybody. Not everybody can afford a toothpaste at 800 index to the category. We developed what we call the hero halo strategy, meaning we advertise our hero products that you saw to generate interest, to motivate people about the brand and the category. What we do next is that we decline those products into products that people can afford because they are at a lower price point, but leveraging the same concept. You move from hero in e-com to halo in e-com, where you have a range of products, adjacencies that are building the same concept, to halo in brick and mortar, where you have a product, same concept, but more affordable for people, and it works. We did it for Miracle Repair, but we did it as well for Enzyme.
I just wanted as well to show you that it's not only a story about China. We learn a lot with China, now we are implementing and rolling out the same learning to the rest of the region. Here I show you an example of Thailand, the impact that the launch of O2 super premium product had on our share, but as well on our pricing. That's the first pillar, innovation. Now the second pillar, communication. I told you, we've done the digital transformation. In two years' time, during COVID time, by the way, we hired 175 people in the region to help us on digital, all of them coming from the outside. We managed to integrate them in the team despite the COVID challenges.
Doing so, we built some new in-house capabilities, search, but as well content. You will see, I will show you a few examples, that the need for content is becoming huge, and we cannot afford any longer to develop content with an outside agency only. We are now developing content in-house. Doing all of that, we are obsessed with this idea of e-commerce, where we want to win, and we are winning. As you can see, we drove a triple-digit e-commerce net sales growth over the past 2 years in the region. Now we are one of the leaders of the retail environment. We transformed digitally, and now we need to take care of effectiveness. We do that before we take care of efficiencies. Why?
Because a very senior media person once told me, "If you have a media plan that is ineffective and you make it even more efficient, then you make it even more ineffective." It's critical that before you talk about efficiency, you start taking a look at your effectiveness, which means we need to have pieces of communication that people love and remember. We are upskilling the creative capabilities of our team with a very thorough training. We are really working on making sure... You know our portfolio. We have lots of products. We are now making sure that we have a very clear view on the strategy of communication to make it consistent and to have an execution which is super engaging with an incredible craft. Tension. We need human tension in our advertising.
We need to be less generic than we used to be, and we need to have advertising that people remember because we are talking to them about the tension that they can identify with. The results is that today, all our advertising is performing significantly above the norm. That's the only thing we want. We want to be above the norm, not at the norm. We are starting to win beautiful awards in different award show. That's important because we know that awards are correlated to success in terms of net sales. On top, of course, we keep driving the effectiveness of our advertising through analytics. I will show you two examples so that you understand visually what I'm talking about.
Two advertising, one which we call higher order, which is talking about the purpose of the brand, and one which is talking about product. You will see that the two of them work very well together and that we don't have two advertising that are fitted anymore, that it's one brand that is being built.
They told me I was a mistake. It's been this way my whole life. The looks, the judgments, the loneliness. I mean, I think I was getting used to it. No matter what I did, nobody gave me a chance.
It took me a while to stop listening to the negativity. I stopped and focused on me. I found my strength, the power that I thought I never had. I realized we're stronger when we smile. Hello, Malaysia.
This is our higher order advertising, and now I'll show you a product advertising.
The best smiles are the ones you don't hold back. New Colgate Optic White O2, made with millions of active oxygen bubbles that gently whiten teeth in three days.
Very strong, amplified in all touch points. As you can see, this is content that we are creating for the campaign internally and doing very well, driving the shelf market. Of course, now that we have effective advertising, we need to work on the efficiencies, and that's what we've been doing relentlessly over the past few months, generating lots of millions of savings that we reinvest in the business. We're using marketing mix modeling. We're using programmatic media buying. We have media best practices in place, and we are doing thorough auditing of our investments, covering 100% of our investments. We are not perfect yet, but we are getting there. We are committed. It's just the beginning.
The intent is to become the marketers of the year by 2026. We are working very strongly towards it.
Thanks, Yves. He gets all the fun stuff to present, really great work that he and the team have done over in Asia. We talked about innovation and the strategy. We've talked about the capabilities we're building. Let me focus now on the middle of the income statement and how we're driving more productivity through the P&L to ensure we fund the advertising and drive margin expansion. You know about our Global Productivity Initiative. We got ahead, so to speak, of the inflationary environment that we saw coming in 2022 with this program, which will continue to deliver savings this year and a little bit into next year. Our funding to growth, you know it well, strong acceleration of the funding to growth in 2022. We expect to see that level or higher in 2023.
Importantly, looking at how we capitalize or how we use our capital and our facilities to drive accelerated productivity through automation, which will ultimately allow us to do the great things you just saw from Yves, and that's building brands and creating stronger brand health for a sustainable future for our business. Our fourth is how we're accelerating free cash flow. Obviously, a big opportunity for us as we see to reduce our working capital and continue to accelerate our return of funding to shareholders. Capital expenditures. Capacity building has been the key focus for us over the last two years. Productivity and automation into our facilities as well, and obviously using some of that money in our sustainability area that we'll talk to in just a moment.
Here's a aerial view of the new Tonganoxie plant that will open in the later part of 2023. This will be our most automated and sophisticated wet plant in the world. Likewise, important to return our funds to shareholders 128 years of dividend payments and 60 years of increases, combined with our shareholder our share buybacks, $28 billion of cash returned to shareholders over the last 10 years. On the M&A side, you saw the recent acquisitions that we made. We think a really intelligent and prudent way to use our balance sheet to increase capacity and do it at a much lower cost than building it from a greenfield, which is obviously going to help accelerate and sustain good growth at the Hill's business moving forward.
Last, finally, moving on to sustainability, a very important part of our strategy, moving forward and the work that we're doing around social impact as well as achieving our climate targets. Our Bright Smiles, Bright Futures continues to build. A lot more focus and learning on this. We're starting to digitize that program around the world as well to reach more to more children. Up to date, we've reached 1.6 billion, on our way to 2 billion, which is our ultimate target. On the Hill's side, we've donated over $300 million in the last 10 years through our Food, Shelter & Love Program. The important part here really is helping pets get adopted all over the world, with over 13 million new pets finding new homes, which is wonderful.
We talked about recyclability, our proprietary technology, developing the first recyclable toothpaste tube in the world. We have shared that technology. We're about 40% through rolling that out across the entire world. I have a spot here to show you how we're bringing that to life to encourage people to recycle their toothpaste tubes.
Hey. Is it true you don't have aluminum like us?
Nope. I'm made from HDPE.
What's that?
That means I'm all recyclable plastic. No garbage bin for me.
Oh, wow. Lucky you.
A good way to connect the brand to the purpose of our company, which is reimagining a healthier future for all people, which is great. Our climate targets are an important part of how we set our sustainability targets longer term. We're very proud to be the first multinational company in our sector to have our net zero targets approved by Science Based Targets initiative. This is the gold standard in approving and evaluating your climate targets, we feel we're in a very good position there. You heard me talk about zero waste, an area that has been a distinct advantage for us in the market. We now have 32 certifications in 19 countries across 5 continents, that's higher than any other company in the world.
A terrific work in terms of how we continue to push our sustainability strategy. Likewise, on the governance side and the transparency side, a lot of work that goes into getting these reports out there and making sure that consumers and shareholders understand where we are from a sustainability standpoint, hold us accountable and making sure that we communicate the great work that we're doing in that space. In summary, strategy is working, continuing to accelerate the top line of the company to ensure long-term profitable growth. The top line continues to be a critical focus for us, but we're now getting much more focused on the middle of the P&L to ensure that we get the gross margin recovered, so we continue to invest in building the brands and bringing great innovation to the market.
That will allow us to grow earnings per share with more leverage through the P&L, and ultimately utilizing our strong balance sheet to accelerate cash flow and ultimately drive investments into the business and return money to shareholders. With that, I'll turn it over to any questions. Jason.
Great. Thanks . A question, just picking up on your, on your last slide, one of the key points there was going to be gross margin improvement. Taking a longer term view, understanding the expectation is to get some gross margin improvement this year. There had been a longer term ambition to reach 65%. There's been a setback here for understandable reasons with cost headwinds and FX. Is 65% gross margin still a reasonable ambition? How large a priority is that for you and for the organization? Do you feel like you have the right incentive structures in place throughout the organization to drive that behavior? Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you. As you know, over the years, the fulcrum of our P&L has always been gross margin. The company is completely fixated on getting gross margin to grow back in 2023. That's as we said earlier. The longer term view is we will continue to grow gross margin. We eclipsed the 60% a couple years ago. We feel quite confident based particularly on the portfolio makeup we have now with skin health coming into the business and a lot of upside growth, that we will continue to see the acceleration of that. All the work that we're doing at Hill's. Hill's will have a slower progression given some of the new plants that we're integrating and obviously the continued acceleration of ag prices in that regard.
You'll see sequential growth moving forward, as we continue to execute our pricing and funding the growth areas in that business. I don't wanna say 65 is actually the target. We know we can continue to grow gross margin sequentially through this year and into next, and that clearly is our ambition. Now we don't know where costs will go over time. We never expected to see the unprecedented inflation that we saw in the P&L. The important takeaway though is you see the strength of our brands and our ability to take pricing in the categories, and our ability to continue to bring innovation at the premium side of the business, which we think ultimately gives us a lot more confidence that we can continue to drive gross margin in the long run.
Certainly, we wanna get back into the 60s, and that's the ambition. Lauren.
Thanks. I was curious if you could talk a little bit about chunks of the portfolio that didn't get attention today. Home care, some of the more, let's call it rudimentary personal care categories, and the degree to which those businesses are as ripe for innovation as what you've been able to do and continue to do with oral care and pet, or if they are sort of sustainably slower growth, you know, cash flow machines?
Right.
to help the business .
A little bit of all of that, Lauren. I mean, they obviously generate a significant amount of cash. They're well incorporated into our manufacturing facilities around the world. I did show some. Obviously, the Protex brand is one of our largest brands in Latin America on the personal care side, both on the bar soap and the body wash side. You saw some great innovation coming to market. Suavitel, really strong business in Latin America and parts of Europe under the Soupline name. Clearly, we are putting the innovation engine against those. I think some of those businesses historically hadn't been giving some of the science-driven aspects that we needed to bring into that business. Stephan, who's our new head of R&D, clearly understands we see more opportunity there.
To get to your last part of your question, these business generate and spit off a substantial amount of cash for the business and absorb a lot of overheads for the company. We obviously balance them to make sure that we're driving profitable growth in those, to make sure we're taking that investment to grow in our faster growth categories like oral care and skin health and pet nutrition. Rob?
Great. Question for Yves, and a great presentation. Amazing what you've done with the Colgate brand in China. Just kind of two-part question. Could you, one, kinda put what you're doing with Colgate in the context of a greater China strategy, both in toothpaste and elsewhere? Like, you know, what's going on with elmex, meridol, Hawley & Hazel? Kind of the greater strategy there. Just give us an update in terms of what you're seeing on the ground in China, with Filorga and travel retail and, you know, the gradual opening up of China and what that means for your business. Thanks.
Yeah.
I have to push a button. It works? Yes. What I presented today about China is really the vision we have for the rest of our portfolio, which mean that this idea of leveraging ARIs to premiumize ARIs like e-commerce. This idea of taking the category to another place, which is far beyond cleansing your teeth only. It's something we started with Colgate, and that we're gonna bring to the rest of our portfolio, starting with the H&H or even elmex. elmex, I didn't talk about it today, is a success in China. It's today the number one toothpaste for kids, so it's working very well delivering on the needs of the Chinese consumers.
It's a recipe that works for Colgate, but that's why we're playing across the portfolio of our brand, and that is delivering across. Again, if you realize what I said, is that on top it's working in the rest of the region. It's really an inspiration for the rest of the region. Regarding your second question, what's happening in China, it's very volatile. We think Q1 will still be challenging in terms of categories, because there will be some reminiscence of COVID. But the level of travel is back to the pre-COVID level. Which mean that we are very hopeful that sequentially, as of Q2, we're gonna see some strong improvements. If people are traveling, it means that people are going to travel retail.
If people are going to travel retail, it means that Filorga will benefit from it. Middle of Q2, we think things will be back to normal in China and the second half of the year will be far better.
Yeah. I'll just speak quickly on the Filorga business. I mean, the travel in China has certainly accelerated in the first quarter, and we see that in the second quarter. International travel's been somewhat passive still, and we expect that to recover in the back half of the year.
I think with that, we're out of time. We'll take the remainder of questions next door in the breakout. Thanks.
Thanks, everyone.
Thanks to Colgate.