All right, I think we'll go ahead and get started. Good morning, everyone. Great to see everyone here at the New York Stock Exchange. It is 10:30 and the webcast is live, we'll go ahead and get started with the official formal remarks for today. I'm Jeff Siemon. On behalf of General Mills management team, and the entire investor relations team, we want to thank you all for joining us this morning. Thank you for your interest in General Mills. I will cover a couple housekeeping items before we get going. Please see Stephanie, Jack, Anna, or myself this morning today if you need any help with anything during the meeting.
Second, when we get to Q&A, please raise your hand, keep your hand up until a microphone gets to you so we can make sure to get all the questions onto the webcast. Finally, I will remind you that our remarks this morning will include forward-looking statements that are based on management's current views and assumptions, the slide behind me lists factors that could cause our actual results to be different than those estimates. With that, it's my pleasure to turn the podium over to Jeff Harmening, Chairman and CEO, who will kick us off this morning.
Thanks, Jeff, good morning, everyone. Welcome to those of you here at the New York Stock Exchange. I hope you enjoyed the terrific assortment of products this morning, I want to let you know that there are more coming after the presentation. Make sure that you leave some room for some great new Häagen-Dazs treats. We're delighted that you've joined us for an in-depth discussion of our fiscal 2020 business plans. I'd like to start things off, as always, by reiterating General Mills' purpose, goal, and strategy as a company, which remain firmly centered on our consumers. Our purpose is to serve the world by making food people love. This is the underpinning of why we do what we do every day. Making food people love drives connection and trust with our consumers, and the idea of service builds engagement with our employees.
The goal of our organization is to create growth that translate into top-tier shareholder returns over the long term. We know short-term returns can be generated in any number of ways, the foundation of long-term returns must be consistent, profitable growth. We work to achieve that goal by maintaining a relentless focus on our consumers. Our consumer-first strategy means deeply understanding the needs and lives of our consumers and moving quickly to meet those needs with our broad portfolio of brands. Since the acquisition of Blue Buffalo, we've expanded our definition of consumer-first to meet the needs of all family members, including the furry ones. Over the years, we've continued to adapt and evolve our portfolio to serve our consumers and drive growth. In fiscal 2019, General Mills generated roughly $17 billion in annual net sales worldwide.
Nearly 60% of those sales fell in our North America Retail segment, while each of our other four segments made up roughly 10% of our global growth business. From a platform standpoint, one-third of our portfolio is made up of fast-growing, highly profitable platforms that play in advantage categories and that will generate outsized growth for our company. This includes our four accelerate platforms, snack bars, Häagen-Dazs ice cream, Old El Paso Mexican food, and our natural organic brands, as well as our Blue Buffalo pet food business. Roughly another 30% of our business is comprised of cereal and yogurt, two large global platforms where we have differential capabilities and brands that position us to win. The balance of the portfolio includes regional snacks and meals, as well as dough and baking products that have leading positions and attractive margins.
We're proud of the portfolio we've built, highlighted by eight iconic brands that each represent more than $1 billion in retail sales worldwide. We're a company of brand builders, and we see tremendous opportunities to make meaningful connections between our consumers and our brands to drive growth next year and over the long term. Before we dive into our fiscal 2020 plans, I want to take a moment to recap our fiscal 2019 performance. I feel very good about the results we delivered in fiscal 2019. We achieved our guidance for sales growth with organic sales flat and total net sales up 9% in constant currency. We delivered our guidance for pro forma double-digit top and bottom-line growth for Blue Buffalo.
We generated two points of positive organic price mix, record levels of holistic margin management or HMM, savings in our cost of goods, and a significant reduction in core working capital. All which help us beat our guidance for adjusted operating profit, adjusted diluted EPS, and free cash flow conversion. I'm proud of our FY 2019 performance. We did what we said we would do and more amid a dynamic and sometimes challenging environment. Not only am I pleased with the results we delivered in 2019, but I'm also pleased with how we delivered those results. Over the past two years, we've built upon what has always been a strength of General Mills, our strong culture of skilled and dedicated employees.
We improved our performance by increasing our ability to adapt to changes we're seeing in the marketplace, whether it's how we forecast and respond to changes in our cost structure, how we bring the consumer into the center of our innovation process with our consumer-first design approach, or how we address external innovation by partnering with emerging brands through our 301 INC venture capital arm. We also strengthened our efforts to foster what I call a culture of belonging by formalizing a global inclusion strategy driven by our long-held belief that the best business outcomes are achieved by seeking diverse perspectives.
We stepped up our sustainability commitments in fiscal 2019, announcing new goals of advancing regenerative agriculture practices on 1 million acres of farmland and making 100% of our packaging recyclable by design by 2030. It's clear to me that culture matters now more than ever in today's business environment, Building a workforce of highly engaged employees can make the difference between winning and losing in the marketplace. We'll continue to focus on these areas because they're the right thing to do for our people, for our planet, and for our shareholders. I continue to believe that the most important thing we can do as a company is to return to delivering consistent, profitable sales growth.
About 18 months ago, we laid out a global growth framework that included three components to generating sustainable growth, competing effectively across our brands and geographies, accelerating our differential growth platforms, and reshaping our portfolio for growth. We've made progress in each of these areas over the past two years. At the same time, we have more work to do to achieve our long-term growth objectives. You'll see us advance further in each of these areas in fiscal 2020. For example, we'll compete more effectively and improve our performance in yogurt. We'll step up our growth rate on our accelerate platforms with a particular focus on U.S. snack bars, and we'll fuel strong growth on Blue Buffalo to maximize its contribution to our reshape strategy. We'll assess potential divestiture opportunities to further reshape our portfolio and enhance our growth profile.
Fiscal 2020 will represent a significant step toward our goal of delivering consistent low single-digit sales growth. Throughout today's presentation, you'll hear examples of how innovation and brand building are at the center of our growth agenda, whether that's our new Nature Valley Wafer Bar, our Häagen-Dazs Super Premium Ice Cream Cones, digital Box Tops marketing, or our Baby BLUE program for pet parents. You'll also hear examples today of how we're leaning into our global Strategic Revenue Management and e-commerce capabilities to fuel growth for our brands, building off success in fiscal 2019, where we generated two points of positive price mix and a 33% increase in e-commerce net sales. All of our segments are clear about expectations for the role that they will play in our business in delivering fiscal 2020 goals for the company.
For North America Retail, we're looking to improve our top-line growth while maintaining our strong margins. Our Convenience & Foodservice segment will deliver balanced top and bottom-line growth. For Europe and Australasia and Asia & Latin America segments will generate top-line growth consistent with last year while stepping up our profit margins. Asia & Latin America will see more material margin improvement in fiscal 2020, but we think both segments have opportunities to advance their margins meaningfully in the coming years. For our pet segment, we expect to deliver another year of significant growth on the top and bottom lines. With that as a backdrop, let me outline our three priorities for fiscal 2020. Our first priority is to accelerate organic net sales growth.
We'll improve growth in North America retail, we'll accelerate sales growth as we bring Blue Buffalo into our organic sales base, and we continue to drive strong growth for that business in fiscal 2020. Our second priority is to maintain our strong margins. Benefits from our HMM cost savings program and contributions from Strategic Revenue Management, or SRM actions, will provide the fuel to invest in brand building on our highest priority and highest return categories, including cereal, pet, our accelerate platforms, and yogurt. In addition, we'll invest to drive deeper data and analytics to support our e-commerce and SRM capabilities. Our final priority for 2020 is to maintain a disciplined focus on cash and pay down debt to achieve our fiscal 2020 leverage target of 3.5 x net debt to EBITDA. With those three priorities in mind, here are our financial targets for fiscal 2020.
We expect organic net sales to increase 1%-2%. We're targeting adjusted operating profit growth of 2%-4% in constant currency. We expect constant currency adjusted diluted earnings per share to increase 3%-5%, and we're targeting free cash flow conversion of at least 95% of adjusted after-tax earnings. Now, let me walk you through the agenda for the remainder of the morning as we dive deeper into our fiscal 2020 plans that support the targets I just gave. Jon Nudi will share our plans for North America retail business. He'll be followed by Shawn O'Grady, who will cover Convenience & Foodservice. Following Shawn's remarks, we'll pause to take questions. The second half of our agenda will kick off with Billy Bishop, who will share our plans for Blue Buffalo and our pet segment.
Bethany Quam will follow with a review of plans for Europe and Australasia. Sean Walker will then cover Asia and Latin America. Sean took over leadership of this segment earlier this calendar year and brings an excellent track record of leadership over his 29-year career with General Mills, including six years running our Latin America region earlier this decade. After Sean, Donal Mulligan will close by reviewing our joint venture plans and providing a financial summary. We'll take additional questions following Don's remarks. It's a packed agenda with a lot to cover, so let's get right to it, and I'll turn the podium over to Jon Nudi.
Thanks, Jeff. Good morning. I'm happy to be here today to provide details on our North America retail plans for fiscal 2020. We had two priorities last year, strengthen our top-line momentum and improve profitability for the segment. While our organic net sales were down 1% in fiscal 2019, we drove a step-up in our U.S. retail sales trends and a 3% increase in segment operating profit. As we turn to fiscal 2020, we're focused on further improving our sales trends while driving cost discipline to maintain our margins. Before reviewing our fiscal 2020 plans, let me begin with a quick overview of our segment, which generated $10 billion in net sales last year. We operate in two markets and have a broad, diverse portfolio of leading brands across more than 25 categories. Our goal is to be competitive, meaning we grow our whole share everywhere we play.
We serve millions of consumers every day. In fact, our products are enjoyed by more than 95% of households in the U.S. and Canada each year. After a challenging fiscal 2017, we've been laser focused on improving our end market competitiveness over the past two years. You can see that in our U.S. retail sales performance, which shows a clear step up, particularly in the two-year trend. You can also see it in our market share performance. In fiscal 2019, we grew or held share in seven of our top 10 categories, including encouraging share gains in cereal, yogurt, and refrigerated dough. As we go forward, we'll look to build upon our stronger competitive position, improving in the categories where we're lagging and pressing our advantage where we're outperforming the market. In fiscal 2020, we've established two priorities to deliver on the expectations Jeff just mentioned for North America Retail.
First, we'll improve our organic sales growth by maintaining our momentum on U.S. cereal, improving performance in U.S. snacks and U.S. yogurt, and competing effectively everywhere we play. Second, we'll maintain our margins by leveraging our SRM toolkit, continuing to drive significant HMM savings, and sustaining our overall cost discipline. Let's dig into some of these details, starting with the capabilities that will help drive our top line. Innovation plays a key role in driving growth across all of our categories. We stepped up our contributions from innovation over the last two years, and we expect to continue this performance in fiscal 2020. We have an exciting lineup of great new products in cereal, snacks, yogurt, and meals and baking categories that I'll show you in just a moment.
One key reason for our strong innovation performance has been a change we've made in the way that we innovate, leveraging a new approach we call consumer-first design. This mindset favors speed over perfection, getting products into test markets quickly, gathering consumer feedback, and iterating to improve the offering. This consumer-centric, iterative approach has been instrumental in refining several successful recent product launches, such as Oui by Yoplait, and Nature Valley Wafer Bars. The investments we've made in our global capabilities are driving growth in North America Retail. Broad-based SRM initiatives helped our segment generate one point, a positive organic price mix in fiscal 2019, which was a two-point improvement over fiscal 2018 levels. In fiscal 2020, we plan to drive positive price mix once again, leveraging all of the elements of our SRM toolkit. While winning on grocery shelves remains critical, we must also win wherever consumers shop.
They're increasingly shopping online. In fiscal 2019, our U.S. e-commerce sales increased by more than 50%, delivering roughly one full point of top-line growth for the segment. We built an advantage position in e-commerce over the past several years, with our online full market basket share representing a 118 index to our market share in physical stores. We're accelerating our investment in this space in fiscal 2020 with promotions like our Surprise and Delight sampling program and fully shoppable digital ads for our Annie's products. We're continuing to strengthen our retailer partnerships to optimize how our categories and brands are shopped online.
Our consumer-first strategy is central to everything that we do, finding ways to connect with our consumers means that we strive to build our brands with ideas that enable them to be more relevant in our consumers' lives and engage consumers in new and more modern ways. You'll hear about several modern brand-building examples in our category plans, I thought I would briefly share one that crosses categories. We've recently digitized our Box Tops for Education platform. This well-known program, which has contributed $900 million to schools since General Mills launched it 23 years ago, is now available on a mobile app, allowing our brands to show up in a modern way and making it easy for consumers to buy, scan, and earn. With that as a backdrop, I'll now share a summary of our fiscal 2020 plans across our largest categories and brands, starting with cereal.
Fiscal 2019 was a successful year for U.S. cereal, both for our business and for the category. We expanded our share leadership position and saw the category improve throughout the fiscal year. We grew our retail sales for the second year in a row. We led the category in innovation, brought strong consumer news and marketing to our brands, and improved our in-store execution over the course of the year. We believe there is room for more growth in the category, driven not only by our efforts, but also by changing consumer demographics. After several years of declines, the population of children in the U.S. is expected to increase over the next few years, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections. The number of adults aged 55 and over continues to grow rapidly.
These two age groups also happen to be the ones with some of the highest levels of per capita cereal consumption. Our opportunity is to drive further category improvement by engaging with these consumers and providing them the great-tasting, convenient, nutritious cereal brands that they love. With that in mind, our brand-building efforts are tailored to reach these consumers. We're introducing refreshed heart-healthy messaging on Honey Nut Cheerios this year to clearly communicate the health benefits of this product to boomers, who we know are increasingly seeking brands that they know and love, but also meet a certain health profile. We're continuing our terrific partnership with Ellen DeGeneres to drive another 1 million acts of good across the country, reaching 5 million acts of good to date.
On Cinnamon Toast Crunch, our plans will focus on extraordinary taste by delivering permissible fun across our full product line, including last year's successful Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros launch. On Reese's Puffs, we'll feature our It's What You Really Want campaign. We also recently unveiled a one of a kind influencer collaboration with musician, artist, and fashion icon, Travis Scott, who designed an exclusive Reese's Puffs box. We sold these limited edition boxes online at $50 per box, and they sold out in 30 seconds. Breaking through with younger consumers means connecting with them where they are, partnerships like this can give our brands powerful relevance. We also have a strong lineup of events in fiscal 2020. We are thrilled about our first half partnership with "The Lion King," which includes on-pack promotions and exciting in-store displays featured on brands such as Cheerios, Reese's Puffs, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
We have even more events planned for the back half that we'll share as the year unfolds. In addition to the brand building initiatives I just mentioned, we're introducing another strong lineup of innovation across the portfolio, including Blueberry Cheerios, Peanut Butter Chex, and Morning Summit, a new premium hearty cereal with flakes, fruits, and nuts, including almonds as the first ingredient. Morning Summit retails for around $13 per 38oz box, which is a pretty attractive price point compared to those Travis Scott Reese's Puffs. With Cereal plans to build on these big growth ideas and strong fundamentals, I'm optimistic about our outlook for the year ahead. Let me share a brief video to bring these fiscal 2020 plans to life. All right, turning to U.S. Yogurt, we've significantly improved our performance since fiscal 2017, and we're competing more effectively.
We posted full-year market share growth last year for the first time since fiscal 2015. Our job to do in fiscal 2020 is to further improve U.S. Yogurt in order to help drive the category back to growth. In fiscal 2019, U.S. Yogurt category retail sales were down 2%, driven by 6% declines on Greek yogurt, which makes up roughly 45% of the category. The non-Greek segment grew low single digits in fiscal 2019. We see this as an attractive opportunity, and you'll see our plans position us to compete in this growing part of the category. In fiscal 2019, we improved our performance on our core brands, driving retail sales up mid-single digits on Go-Gurt, and stabilizing retail sales on our original style Yoplait. In fiscal 2020, we'll build upon this momentum and invest in news, innovation, and messaging to make Yoplait mom's go-to all-family snack.
We're partnering to offer taste-oriented equities on original style Yoplait and Go-Gurt. We'll participate in the first half The Lion King movie promotion, and we'll tap into increasing consumer demand for simple offerings like Simply Go-Gurt. On innovation, we'll capture new snacking occasions by launching into the growing yogurt beverage segment with our new Yoplait Smoothies, which come in three great tasting flavors. We'll support this entire portfolio of core products with increased media support behind our Big Little Wins campaign, celebrating how Yoplait helps mom raise good little humans, one little win at a time. Let me show you a quick video that captures this new campaign.
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In addition to our efforts on our core Yoplait product lines, we continue to innovate to expand our leadership position in the Simply Better Yogurt segment, which now makes up 11% of the category and generated high teens retail sales growth last year. Oui by Yoplait was our first launch into the segment in fiscal 2018, and we expanded our offerings in fiscal 2019 to include Oui Petites, driving increased snacking occasions with an indulgent flavor lineup. In fiscal 2020, we will continue to grow the Oui portfolio by expanding into desserts with the new Oui Crème Dessert line, featuring flavors such as lemon tart and vanilla bean. Last year, we introduced YQ, a new yogurt brand made with ultra-filtered milk that delivers what modern consumers are looking for, high protein, less sugar, simple ingredients, and great taste.
We believe in this consumer-first offering, heard from consumers we had room to optimize after launch. To further improve our in-market performance, we're rolling out a renovated YQ protein product with an improved taste profile and more direct intuitive packaging that features the product benefits more prominently. This new product is on shelf now, and we're driving awareness through our real good protein messaging, in-store trial driving levers, and digital support. Finally, I'm pleased to share with you the new GoodBelly probiotic yogurt that launches this month, which I hope you've had a chance to try this morning before the presentation. GoodBelly offers a modern approach to digestive health that meets a rising consumer interest in incorporating more probiotics into their diet. Leveraging our venture capital arm, 301 INC, we licensed the GoodBelly brand and created a high protein, lactose-free yogurt with a clean ingredient deck.
We're launching six flavors this month with digital, social, and in-store support lined up to build awareness and drive trial. In total, we're excited about the news and innovation we're bringing to the U.S. yogurt category this year. We expect these initiatives to drive a third consecutive year of improvement in our U.S. yogurt net sales trends. Turning to U.S. snacks, we have a long track record of growth in these businesses, including 3% compound annual net sales growth in the five years through fiscal 2018. Fiscal 2019 was a more challenging year, with net sales down 4%, and we're focused on improving upon that performance in fiscal 2020 behind innovation, renovation, brand building support, and in-store execution. Our U.S. snacks operating unit is made up of three distinct categories. Snack bars, which represents roughly 60% of the unit's retail sales. Fruit snacks, which makes up another 25%.
Salty snacks, which makes up the final 15% of our Nielsen measured takeaway. We have incredible brand assets that, when combined with our innovation and technology expertise, provide us with a competitive advantage in our categories. With that in mind, let me tell you about our plans to improve our snacks performance in fiscal 2020, starting with U.S. snack bars. Nature Valley is the leading brand in the snack bar category and the number one granola bar with families and boomers. Our Nature Valley performance fell short of expectations in fiscal 2019 due to less impactful innovation and lower levels of merchandising, and we're taking specific steps to address these issues in our fiscal 2020 plans. While Nature Valley has a long history of successful innovation, performance on our more recent launches has been mixed.
We're getting back to innovation on the core bar in fiscal 2020 with a new line of crispy, creamy wafer bars. These new bars are made with light and crispy whole grain wafers, layers of peanut butter, and a crunchy granola topping, providing a differentiated texture experience for consumers. It's still early, but wafer bars are off to a good start, with strong display and consumer support plans on tap for the summer and fall. Nature Valley merchandising also underperformed in fiscal 2019, particularly in the first half. In fiscal 2020, we're focused on securing key merchandising windows and improving our in-store display. One way we'll do that is by leveraging our scale and partnering with Big G Cereals to offer a high-value Box Tops promotion during the back-to-school season.
In addition to improving our innovation and in-store execution, we'll increase brand building support of Nature Valley in fiscal 2020 behind the crunchy and sweet and salty product lines. We're investing in our We Are Better Outside campaign, focused on helping Nature Valley consumers get outside more often to receive the health benefits of nature. In addition to Nature Valley, we have a focused improvement plan for our ONE franchise in fiscal 2020, starting with Fiber One. Over the last few years, Fiber One fell out of step with modern weight managers and lost relevance with many on-trend weight management programs. We've gone back to our roots this year and improved Fiber One's weight management credentials by renovating 75% of the line to reduce the calorie count, sugar, and net carbs. We think this change, coupled with the right size distribution on shelf, will help stabilize the brand.
Last year, we extended the ONE franchise with Protein One, a line of bars featuring high protein and low sugar with only 90 calories. While it's still small, we have seen early success. We'll continue to support the Protein One brand to build trial and awareness with an upcoming partnership with "The Bachelorette," including four pro commercials featuring past contestants and our snack emergency messaging. Beyond Nature Valley and our ONE franchise, we have plans to continue our growth trends on other parts of our snack bar portfolio in fiscal 2020. On Epic, we'll continue to broaden availability for our Epic performance bars, a high-protein offering made from cage-free egg whites and just five to six simple ingredients.
We'll expand our Epic meat bar product line with two new Rise & Grind bars in bacon, pork and egg yolk, as well as chicken, egg yolk and apple varieties that provide a delicious, high-protein, on-the-go breakfast option. On LÄRABAR, we'll support the brand through messaging, partnerships, and in-store events, and we'll ramp up distribution for our new LÄRABAR protein bars, which are gluten-free, vegan, and non-GMO, and deliver 11 grams of plant-based protein with just eight or fewer ingredients. On treat bars, we'll build off significant growth in fiscal 2019 with the launch of a new Honey Nut Cheerios treat bar. We'll also execute cross-category merchandising and events, such as our upcoming unicorn event featuring Lucky Charms cereal and treat bars. To round out our snacks portfolio plans, let's turn to fruit snacks.
We were capacity constrained on this platform in fiscal 2019, which limited our ability to capitalize on the growth trends in the category. With new capacity now online, we're well-positioned for growth in fiscal 2020, leveraging a great lineup of product news on Fruit Roll-Ups and shapes, including Jolly Rancher flavors and Disney equities like Toy Story, supported with increased levels of brand-building investment. We're also focused on expanding availability by securing distribution in new retailers and leveraging optimized pack sizes to capture secondary in-store placement. To summarize, I feel good about our plans for U.S. snacks. While there's hard work ahead of us, we have the right people and the right plans in place, and we expect to continue to improve our performance in fiscal 2020. Next, let's turn to our national organic portfolio. This is a large and growing business for General Mills.
In fact, we're the second-largest national organic food producer in the U.S., featuring well-known brands such as Annie's, LÄRABAR, Muir Glen, Cascadian Farm, and Epic. Our portfolio has grown at a double-digit compound rate since we first acquired Small Planet Foods in fiscal 2000 and now generates more than $1 billion in net sales. We're looking to continue this track record of growth in fiscal 2020, led by Annie's, the largest brand in our national organic portfolio. Mac and cheese is the foundation of Annie's. It's the way many consumers are introduced to the brand, and it's at the center of our fiscal 2020 plans. This year, we're bringing taste-driven innovation and product news to our mac and cheese line. We're launching Annie's One-Pot Pasta Meals, a delicious and convenient one-skillet meal solution that helps mom get more veggies into her picky eaters.
We're introducing a new recipe and improving the packaging on our Rich & Creamy mac and cheese products, and we're increasing our investment in media and merchandising behind our Annie's More Than Just Food campaign. We also have exciting plans in place to drive growth on Annie's fruit snacks this year through channel expansion and packaging formats for all occasions. Finally, we're advancing the Annie's mission, which is the heart of everything that we do on this brand. Building on last year's successful limited edition products, we're now offering two mac and cheese SKUs featuring pasta and greens that come from a community of four family farmers in Montana who use regenerative farming practices. Beyond Annie's, we have plans to drive growth across the rest of our natural organic portfolio. At Cascadian Farm, we recently modernized the packaging and will increase our in-store support in fiscal 2020.
We're launching innovations such as gluten-free honey vanilla crunch cereal and new fruit infused bars. Epic has grown tremendously since we added it to our portfolio in 2016. We'll continue to expand the brand in fiscal 2020, ensuring our top-turning core bars and strips are available across channels. We'll innovate with new items such as the Rise & Grind bars I mentioned earlier, as well as new flavors of our fast-growing pork skins product line that offers consumers a low-carb salty snack. Old El Paso is the leader in the U.S. Mexican food category. Innovation, consumer messaging, and in-store activation have helped drive 5% compound retail sales growth for this brand over the last three years, more than double the growth rate of the category. This has translated to more than a full point of market share growth over the same time period.
Our plans for Old El Paso in fiscal 2020 is to build on this track record of growth. It starts by winning in store. We know that consumers are more likely to buy Mexican food if they're prompted within the first 15 feet of the store before they pass by the produce section. Our OEP taco stands leverage this insight to drive growth for our business, and our customers like them because shopping baskets that contain Mexican food are larger than the average basket by roughly 20%. In fiscal 2020, we'll execute these in-store displays across a full calendar of events. We'll also continue our Anything Goes in Old El Paso campaign to remind consumers that tacos are easy to customize, expanding our digital and social presence to drive year-round inspiration.
With the average American eating tacos once every nine days, even more than spaghetti, we need to continue to bring them variety. This year, we're introducing new varieties of bowls and kits, as well as refreshed packaging to improve shoppability at shelf. Beyond Old El Paso, let me quickly highlight our fiscal 2020 plans for a few other large brands within our U.S. meals and baking portfolio, including Progresso soup, Pillsbury refrigerated dough, and Totino's hot snacks. Three brands that collectively represent more than $2.5 billion in annual retail sales. On Progresso, we're getting back to introducing more product news now that we have our supply chain reorganization behind us. In the first half of fiscal 2020, we'll bring taste news to a substantial portion of our portfolio, and we'll launch three great new flavors of our Rich & Hearty line.
We have more innovation coming in the second half that we'll share with you later this year. On Pillsbury, we drove retail sales growth and market share gains in fiscal 2019 through strong innovation, meaningful product renovation, and improved in-store execution. In fiscal 2020, we'll introduce new Place & Bake brownies in three different flavors, creating an easy solution for families to enjoy freshly baked sweet treats without the mess. We have product news on Pillsbury Grands! biscuits with the crispier outside and fluffier inside message, and we'll continue our Made at Home media campaign with TV, print, and digital support. Totino's hot snacks had a strong year in fiscal 2019, growing retail sales mid-single digits and getting a half point of share.
Our fiscal 2020 plans include new pack sizes and innovations such as our mini snack mix, which includes four of your favorite mini hot snacks in one bag with one convenient cook time. Overall, we feel good about the plans we have in place to improve North America Retail's top line in fiscal 2020. At the same time, it's imperative that we translate that top-line improvement into a strong bottom line. We'll do that by leveraging our global capabilities to drive efficiency throughout our organization. As I mentioned earlier, we expect our Strategic Revenue Management efforts to drive positive price mix for the segment in fiscal 2020. We'll deliver another year of significant COGS HMM savings to help offset inflation and provide fuel to invest back into our business.
This will include additional savings from our global sourcing capability, as well as benefits from the expansion of our Zero Loss Culture initiative. Through Zero Loss Culture, we're increasing our manufacturing efficiency, reliability, and predictability by driving out all forms of waste. As we roll out this program across our supply chain locations, it will unlock efficiencies and additional capacity to service the business. Let me wrap up my section by summarizing today's key messages for North America Retail. We made important improvements throughout our business in fiscal 2019.
In 2020, we'll strengthen our organic sales growth by maintaining momentum on U.S. Cereal, improving U.S. Snacks and U.S. Yogurt, and competing effectively everywhere we play with strong innovation, sharpened in-store execution, and modern brand building. We'll maintain our margins by executing SRM and HMM initiatives that will offset inflation and provide fuel for growth investments. I'll close by thanking our North America Retail team. We have an incredibly talented and committed team that wants to win. I look forward to sharing our progress against these plans in the year ahead. With that, I'll turn the podium over to Shawn O'Grady.
All right. Thanks, Jon, and good morning, everybody. I lead our Convenience & Foodservice segment, as well as our global revenue development, which includes e-commerce and Strategic Revenue Management capabilities around the globe. This morning, I'm going to focus our time on the C&F segment, where I'm proud to say we had a terrific year in fiscal 2019, with net sales up 2% and operating profit up 7%. These results give me confidence that we have the right foundation to capitalize on growth available in our channels. You'll see that reflected in our fiscal 2020 plans, which call for another year of top-line growth while maintaining our advantage margins.
Our success is grounded in our mission, creating growth away from home together. Today, you'll hear me talk about how we bring the company's consumer-first strategy to life in C&F with an operator-first mindset that focuses on creating growth for our businesses and for our partners. We give operators easy, great-tasting, and cost-effective products that satisfy their consumers across away-from-home channels in the U.S. U.S. consumers spend nearly $1.5 trillion a year on food and beverage, and more than half of that is food eaten away from home, where consumers are willing to pay a premium for convenience, accessibility, and experience. Going a layer deeper, the away-from-home market is comprised of both food service and convenience store channels. Food service, which makes up the vast majority of away-from-home food, can be separated into commercial and non-commercial business.
Commercial is larger and describes the restaurant industry, while non-commercial includes channels that serve food as part of a broader operation, such as K through 12 schools, college and universities, hospitals, long-term care facilities, and hotels and lodging. Our foodservice business is split relatively evenly between these two spaces. As we look at convenience stores, opportunities exist for us in what operators would call center of store, which contains a good deal of snacks and beverages, as well as the faster-growing business of hot, prepared foods. Industry research groups expect these channels to grow low to mid-single digits in the near future, which makes this a large and attractive space for us to play. We're set up well to capture a meaningful portion of the industry growth because of our advantaged business model.
We have tremendous physical and brand assets that we leverage largely from our North America Retail business. We develop deep operator empathy that forms the basis for our industry-leading innovation capability. We operate our own direct selling organization for both the convenience stores and the foodservice channels. This not only allows us to capitalize on existing demand, also gives us the opportunity to offer new ideas that create demand for our operators. We've built this advantaged business model over the past decade, fueling a dramatic improvement in our operating profit margin structure. In fact, we've expanded our profit margin by 13 % points since fiscal 2008 to 21% of sales in fiscal 2019, driven by portfolio optimization, supply chain streamlining, and an emphasis on our Focus 6 platforms.
With our improved margin structure, we're now able to invest back into the business to drive top line and take advantage of the growth opportunities that exist in our channels. We've prioritized six advantaged platforms to compete in the away-from-home food industry. Our Focus 6 platforms include cereal, yogurt, and snacks, frozen biscuits, frozen baked goods, and frozen meals. These platforms now make up more than half of our segment's net sales and more than two-thirds of our profit. We have advantaged technical capabilities that allow us to bring differential innovation to these platforms, and we have brands that matter to the operator and to the consumer. Cereal, yogurt, and snacks are categories where we partner heavily with Jon's North America Retail team, drafting and adapting innovation for our channels. Across our 3 frozen categories, we leverage our strong Pillsbury branding and heritage baking expertise.
Here, we provide tremendous value for our back-of-house customers in foodservice as we bring solutions centered on the needs of these operators. We have two simple and clear priorities to deliver our goals for fiscal 2020: drive top-line growth across our Focus 6 platforms and combine the positive mix from the Focus 6 with savings from our long-running HMM practices to offset inflation and maintain margins. Now let's take a brief look at our plans for the year ahead. We'll start with cereal. We're the share leader in K through 12 schools and college and universities. We'll continue to compete effectively in schools with operators and consumer-first innovation using brands that kids recognize to drive increased participation. For example, in K through 12 schools, we'll have a full-year of our two-ounce equivalent grain or two OEG cereal offerings.
Historically, operators have had to serve cereal with a slice of toast or another grain alternative to meet the two-ounce grain requirement that qualify the meal for federal reimbursement. This created complexity for operators to keep inventory and more menu options. We now offer five of the top cereal brands in a new two OEG format, including Honey Nut Cheerios and a reduced sugar version of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. We are already seeing increased school participation for this offering, including secondary schools, where they are looking for a larger serving size. In colleges and universities, we are the number one granola manufacturer. In fiscal 2020, we are bringing a new Nature Valley oats and dark chocolate granola offering that is more indulgent and visually different to drive incremental placement and usage. We are also renovating our oats and fruit granola, including the product by adding 20% more fruit.
Turning to yogurt, our plans for fiscal 2020 will build on the success of our Yoplait ParfaitPro bulk offering. This multi-serve format delivers the great taste and texture of Yoplait yogurt in a convenient, easy-to-use bag. Net sales for ParfaitPro grew in fiscal 2019 behind usage like Yogo coffee coolers and smoothies. In December, we announced that Yoplait ParfaitPro is now gelatin-free, making it easier for food service professionals to meet a broad array of dietary needs. In fiscal 2020, we will expand our support with new recipes and partnerships to make Yogo coffee coolers even easier for operators, and we will actively sell against our preferred taste and texture. In addition to unique offerings like ParfaitPro, we also have opportunities to drive growth with products from our North American retail portfolio that consumers already know and love.
In fiscal 2020, we are planning to expand distribution on Oui by Yoplait to business and industry, retail outlets and hospitals, and catering in full service lodging, where operators can charge for the premium experience that that brand delivers. Moving on to snacks, I am excited about the innovation lineup that we have in convenience stores for fiscal 2020. We expect to deliver continued success on Gardetto's Crisps, which launched in February, and we just introduced Chex Mix Max'd, a brand-new Chex subline that delivers a shock to the senses snacking experience with a combination of textures and intense flavors. In fruit snacks, we have new flavors of both Gushers and Mott's hitting shelves nationally this month.
On snack bars, you heard Jon mention about the new Crispy Creamy Wafer Bar, which we will also be launching this summer, and we are expanding distribution on Treat bars, which have been very successful for us to date. As I shared last year at Investor Day, we are investing behind our broader frozen baking platform through our manufacturing capabilities, sales focus, and branding. To support that strategy, we shifted frozen baked goods into the Focus 6 and created news in an advantage category such as scones, muffins, and cinnamon twirls, which drove mid-single-digit net sales growth into fiscal 2019. This year, we are bringing our biscuits and other baked goods to more places by expanding distribution in multi-unit restaurants, including coffee shops and catering locations.
Our entire portfolio of baked goods will be supported by a Pillsbury brand campaign designed to inspire our operators to come together and share their expertise. We'll leverage our baking capabilities to further accelerate growth with larger custom partners. In convenience stores, we'll take our convenient grab-and-go stuffed waffle with the trusted Pillsbury brand to national distribution. This product features a new operator-friendly microwave option with longer hold times. We'll also continue to partner with large commercial customers to build on successful fiscal 2019 baked good items, including McDonald's donut sticks, Burger King's Cini Minis, and Pizza Hut's Cinnabon mini rolls. Take a look at this video, which highlights how we're leveraging our heritage of baking leadership to make the making easier for Foodservice operators.
In fiscal 2020, we remain focused on maintaining our margins and high levels of HMM and positive product mix. We have important HMM initiatives underway, including driving savings and sourcing through packaging and production improvements to drive ingredient savings, optimizing our logistics network to reduce transportation costs, harmonizing our formulas on certain products to drive efficiency and increase internal production capacity. We'll also continue to benefit from selling a more profitable mix of products as we deliver faster growth on our higher margin Focus 6 platforms.
With that, let me close my section of remarks with a quick summary. We had a terrific year in fiscal 2019. We see exciting growth available in away-from-home food channels, we'll capture that growth with news and innovation driving our Focus 6 platforms in fiscal 2020. We'll do that and drive HMM and mix to maintain our margins. Our whole C&F team looks forward to delivering another successful year of growth in fiscal 2020. Now I'll turn it back to Jeff Siemon. We can kick off the Q&A. Thank you very much.
All right.
Nice job, Shawn. We'll take about a 15-minute pause for Q&A here on the webcast before we go to the second half of our remarks. We've got some microphones in the back, and we can kick off with questions. Let's go to Laurent Grandet here.
Hey, good morning. This question is more for Jon. Terrific agenda in terms of innovation this year. Like to understand how you manage in terms of prioritization between all those lines, all those brands, the sales force, having to prioritize all of these. Like to understand this a bit more. Also, you are creating a long tail of products, SKUs. How you cut or you decide to cut that long tail, so that you still become efficient managing those brands. Thank you.
Yeah.
Two questions. One was about prioritization.
Oh, my we do compete. No.
There we go. All right.
We compete across 25 categories in North America. It's obviously something we talk about a lot. One of the things we did a few years back, which really helps, is said that we want to compete in every category that we compete in. We really charge our business teams with understanding what is it going to take to be successful. If you're in cereal or snacking, innovation is really important, and we invest resources there. In other categories, in some of our meals and baking categories, it's less about innovation. It's more about having the price right every day and focused on merchandising as well.
We charge every team with competing effectively, meaning hold or grow share. By doing that, those teams come back and tell us what needs to be done. As a segment, then we'll obviously, and as a corporation as well, steer some dollars to categories that we feel like could grow even faster. This past year, we saw some great traction with cereal and made some additional investments in that, particularly as we ended the year. We're seeing some really nice in-market movement as a result of that. That was your first question. The second question was, remind me.
SKU priority.
The tail. The reality is most innovation doesn't work. I think the estimates would say 10% of all innovation sticks for three-plus years. We believe that we have to have a big funnel of ideas. One of the things we're focused on, as I mentioned, is getting better and faster with the way that we innovate. In some cases in the past, we might have brought something to market as a trend was leaving the market because it took two or three years to get there. Through this consumer-first design process that I talked about, we're able to get from idea to market in less than a year. As a result of that, we think we're going to be on the front end of some of these trends.
The reality, we've got to take our whacks, if things aren't working, we will move on from them. In other cases, like YQ is a great example, we feel like we have something. We were just a bit off. We felt like it was worth iterating, getting the packaging more clear, the benefits coming through, improving the product itself. It's a bit of a juggling act. We believe innovation's critically important, particularly in many of our big categories, we're very focused on getting to market faster and really being on the right trends.
Great. Okay. Let's go to David Palmer here in the front.
I don't know if we're going to be talking more about cereal later, but with regard to cereal, you've been outpacing the category for a little while now. I know one of the things that people worry about is any time you have a share gain or for an extended period of time, that that will reach some equilibrium at some point.
Yep.
Could you talk I know you talked about how the cereal category is improving lately, which is good news. Can you talk about that competitive landscape, and will you be able to keep it going while you're concentrating on these other things?
Yeah. Cereal is still our biggest category, very profitable. It's a very important category for us, and we believe in cereal. We think it's a great category that provides nutrition to consumers to start their day. We like the category a lot, and we focus on two t hings, is building our brands. We have four of the top five brands in the category. Again, we are the leaders in the category in many different respects. We want to build those brands and do it in a more relevant way. Again, I mentioned Reese's Puffs and Travis Scott. That's not something we would've done five years ago. I'll tell you, it's really relevant. Getting out where consumers are and being a part of culture is something that really works for our brands.
Things like Lucky Charms, which have been around for many, many years, are coming back in vogue again. Again, we're seeing younger consumers really resonate with them. The second thing we focus on is innovation. Again, we've had a really strong track record there over the last few years as well. Last year, we had five of the top six new products in the category. Again, with the lineup that I just shared with you, we feel good about what's coming. Now, we've had really good success with some of our taste-driven cereals, and we like that.
At the same time, there's lots of jobs to be done in cereal. One of the areas I'm personally excited about is the Morning Summit, which I referenced in my presentation, as well as another product that we have in club stores, which is really focused on, in some cases, grain-free, in other cases, almonds and nuts as the first ingredient. Again, going for a very different consumer. We like the category a lot.
I talked to you, there's some real macro things that were going against us for a few years when it comes to population growth as well as the trend back to away from home breakfast. We feel like the category is set up for stability. The category's at its best when all the manufacturers are innovating and building brands. Everything that we've seen is that everyone's trying to do that as we speak. We feel good about how we're performing. We feel good about the category, and we think we can continue to have some nice performance.
Yeah, I do want to add on to this one and to say, it's a good question, and it's an interesting one because I've heard commentary that, can you keep gaining share? We did five years in a row between 2007 and 2012, I think the answer to that is yes. The key is what Jon talked about. It's innovating on your core and while developing the best new products. I'm really pleased with what his team is doing. The marketing is really good on both our core and the innovation, and that's the key. For us, the focus is on growth. Whether we gain share or not, that'll be an outcome, but the focus is on growth, and we've done it two years. We've grown two years in a row, and we're looking to do it for a third.
Great. Let's go to David Driscoll here in the middle.
Thank you. It's David Driscoll from Citi. I'd like to build on this one, take it up a level to the North American Retail segment itself. By our math, the implied guidance for the top line within the framework of the guidance you've given for the total company would suggest ongoing negative organic revenue growth for the North American Retail segment for the coming fiscal year. The Nielsen data shows positive growth in both the 12-week and in the four-week data, and it seems to be strengthening. Can North American Retail actually achieve a positive organic revenue growth for a year? If not, what would cause the current data to weaken?
Good question. First of all, we don't give segment-level guidance, so I won't comment on what we're planning for the year. As I stated, our focus is on improving our top line. We were down 1% in fiscal 2019. We hope to get better and expect to get better as we move into fiscal 2020. In terms of Nielsen, we feel really good about the momentum that we had exiting Q4. We're off to a good start in the month of June. I think you received those Nielsens today. Believe that we have the plans in place across the categories that we need to win in. Again, as I mentioned, it's about keeping cereal growing. It's about improving yogurt, where we were still down last year. We want to get back to growth on yogurt.
It's improving our snack bar business, which was the biggest drag that we have, down 4% in snacks in total last year. Competing effectively in the rest of the categories. I feel really good about the plans we have in place. Clearly the one headwind we have is snack bars. We're putting a lot of focus and effort there. Otherwise, we feel like we're going to have a very strong year in the year ahead. The one thing that we've talked about very openly this past year is a bit of a disconnect between Nielsen and reported sales as retailers draw down inventories. I would expect we'll see some of that in the coming year. Hopefully not to the same extent we saw in fiscal 2019, but we would expect to see some.
Thank you.
Great. Let's come up to the front here, Brian.
Thanks. Jon, just in terms of snack bar improvement for 2020, could you touch a little bit on, you talked in your discussion before about your merchandising was a little bit off last year. Can you add some more color to that? Was it more competitive? Was it because you didn't have the right
Yeah
Product and just what's going to change there? I guess, as we're thinking about just how snack bars improve, how much of it is just that sort of a change in merchandising execution, and how much of it is going to be dependent upon success of the new products?
Yep. Great question. From a merchandising standpoint, the biggest thing that happened last year in the first half is we really missed back to school, which is a critical time of the year for granola bars. We feel really good about the plans we have in place. As I mentioned in my presentation, we're partnering with Big G Cereals to have a great back to school event for retailers. We have a really good line of sight to what's coming. Again, obviously, we need to execute and make that happen, but we think that'll really help us. If you think about our bar line, it really is made up of distinct brands that have very different jobs. Nature Valley is our biggest brand. It's 60% of our total granola bar business.
It's really broad based and really thrives off of innovation. Last year, innovation didn't work as well as we needed it to. We really like this Crispy Creamy Wafer bar. I hope you've had a chance to try it. That's off to a really nice start so far again. We need to see that work. Fiber One is really about getting out of whack with modern weight managers. The height of Fiber One, the macros in Fiber One lined up with something like 60% of all the diets in the U.S.
Today, prior to our renovation, it lined up with 10% of the diets in the U.S. We reformulated it to go to lower net carbs, lower sugar. We like what we're seeing early days on that as well. We feel like the new products will help. We feel like the renovation of Fiber One, you'll see us get sequentially better, and we actually think in the back half, you'll see us significantly improve as we lap some distribution that we lost in January of last year.
Great. How about Jason English back here in the back?
Hey, good morning, folks. Thank you for the question. I don't mean to neglect Sean too much, but another question for Jon, if I may. Jon, you were showing great progression on price mix growth through last year, though the fourth quarter surprised with a bit of a trend reversal. Can you remind us what drove the price mix degradation in the fourth quarter? Talk a bit about your expectations for price mix as we progress through next year and what the drivers of that expectation are. Thank you.
Yep. Thanks, Jason. We feel really good about the price mix we drove in fiscal 2019. We drove one point of price mix for the year. We drove one point of price mix in the back half of the year. We had some fluctuations between quarters, and the biggest thing that we faced in Q4 was going up against a period where we didn't have much merchandising in fiscal 2018. We got back to more normalized levels, and with that, came a trade true-up, which drove the price mix that you referenced. Our SRM toolkit has really gotten a lot stronger. We've talked before that we went to the outside, hired some experts in revenue management.
I can tell you, our team is in a much better place today than a few years ago in terms of having the skill set and the tools to effectively manage price moving forward. We fully expect to drive positive price mix in the coming year. I mentioned it was 1% in fiscal 2019. That's actually two points better than what we delivered in fiscal 2018. If you look at our average unit price in market, that was up about two points, in line with our category. I would say Q4 was a bit of an anomaly in terms of how it was reported. We feel really good about how we're trending into the coming year.
All right. How about Ken Zaslow here on the side? Hannah? Yep.
I'll be a little bit more inclusive of both you guys. Both North American Retail and Convenience, you guys are talking about flat margins. What would it take for General Mills to be able to expand margins again, in either one of the businesses? Is it more structural, or is it company specific, and would we see a change in that over time?
I'll go first and give Jon a chance to drink some water. I think on our Foodservice business, which really has probably been the best-kept secret from a margin story inside the company, 13 years ago, we were sitting at 8% margins, today we sit at 21% margins. A fair amount of that was structural, to get out of businesses that were less profitable. If you look over the last three years, the real benefit has come from driving mix and accessing the SRM toolkit that we've developed. As we look forward into the coming years for just specifically the Foodservice business, we think that play will continue.
We think the mix piece of it can continue to play for us, especially as we drive more from our frozen portfolio, which tends to be premium priced. As we grow, it opens up new opportunities for us to look at what our manufacturing footprint looks like between internal and external, get after some of the opportunities that you really don't have when you're not growing. We see opportunity going forward. It probably won't look like the last 13 years where we expanded a point a year, we still see opportunity.
Let me broaden. On an enterprise level, first, I would say that I get asked from time to time, what are some of the things that General Mills does that are underappreciated? Our Foodservice business was one of those. If you close your eyes and said, "You've got a $2 billion business that's growing 2% and driving 7% profitability, how would you feel about that?" You'd feel great. I think one of the hidden gems of General Mills, one of the reasons we want to highlight it today is our Foodservice business. It's a really good business.
It's growing. It's really profitable. For me, the key on an enterprise level to maintain or growing our margins in aggregate, our margins in aggregate are about 17 points. To the extent that we can accelerate growth and Convenience & Foodservice and do the same thing in North America Retail while growing Blue Buffalo, who will be up here in a minute, those margins are all north of 20. If we can maintain those margins and accelerate growth, the whole enterprise margin structure actually goes up.
Okay. We'll do one more before the break. Steve Strycula, then we'll do a transition up here and bring the second round of speakers up.
Hi. A question for Jeff. Jeff, I heard you say in your opening remarks, similar to something you said in previous Analyst Days, that you'll look to maybe do some divestitures potentially this year, look at the portfolio. Why is now the right time, FY 2020, to go down that path versus the past two or three years? I ask this in the context because several other packaged food companies have recently divested assets and maybe haven't received the price in the marketplace or transaction multiple that people were thinking. Is now the right time?
Well, I'll speak to mostly the last two years because that's when I've had the reins. I think over the last year, we talked about 17 months ago that we'd look to divest some of our assets. We still believe that we will, but we wanted to make sure that following a third quarter a year ago, which wasn't what we were looking for, as well as having acquired Blue Buffalo, we felt like the key for the last 12 months for us is to make sure that we can show we can execute on what we have. We feel great about our ability to have done that, both on Blue Buffalo and the rest of our business. For us, we will continue to look at divestitures, and roughly 5% is what we're looking at.
I think a couple of points to make on that. The reason we would do it would be to enhance our growth profile while focusing our assets and our resources on things that are the most likely to grow. Some addition by subtraction. The other thing I will tell you is that our cash generation is really good. The fact that we took down our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio to 3.9 is what we're really proud of, and the fact we're on track to take it down to three and a half by the next year. We're generating lots of cash. The reason I say that is we're not going to give anything away just to say that we've done it.
I'd rather come back and tell our investors that we've decided not to divest because we couldn't get the pricing that we think would value shareholders than to come back and say we're strategically right, but actually for shareholders, we're wrong. We will continue to look for opportunities to divest in order to enhance our growth profile and focus on our most important businesses, but only if we think that we can generate returns for shareholders that we think they'll value over the long run.
We'll take a one-minute pause and shift speakers up. We will be back. We will stay on, give us one minute here. Want to grab a quick snack bar in the back.
You are staying.
Oh, no. You can go, yeah. All right, let's see if we can bring folks back in and get ready to get started here. We'll go ahead and kick off the second half of our remarks this morning. I'm really pleased to welcome up Billy Bishop to the stage, who leads our pet segment, one of the co-founders of Blue Buffalo. Billy, we'll pass it off to you.
Thanks, Jeff, and hello, everybody. It's great to be here today to provide an update on the continued growth of Blue Buffalo and the plans that we have in place to keep the growth going in fiscal 2020. There are a few key messages I hope you take away from my comments this morning. First, I continue to be incredibly excited about the growth prospects that lie ahead for Blue. We are leading the transformation of the pet food category. Second, I'm extremely proud of the results we've delivered in fiscal 2019, including double-digit pro forma growth in net sales and segment operating profit. Third, we have another year of strong top-line growth ahead of us in fiscal 2020, driven by terrific plans in food, drug, and mass, or the FDM channels, as well as e-commerce and pet specialty.
Finally, we're going to continue to drive strong bottom-line results as we leverage the capabilities General Mills can bring to bear for our business. Now let's get into a few of those details. My family and I started this business over 15 years ago because we love our pets and we care deeply about the quality of food that we feed them. We believe there are many pet parents out there who feel the same way we do. In fact, everything we do as a business is centered around the fact that we think of our pets as a member of the family. Our True BLUE Promise guarantees that our products are formulated with the finest natural ingredients. Pet parents are increasingly aware of the quality of food they feed their pets, and they're seeking products that meet their higher expectations. Blue fills that need.
The philosophy is captured in our mission, "Love them like family, feed them like family." Pet food is one of the largest food categories in the U.S., with retail sales of roughly $30 billion, and it has consistently grown at low single digits in recent years. When you look at the growth by segment, it gets more interesting. Within pet food, there are two primary segments, wholesome/natural and mainstream. As the trend of pet humanization continues and pet parents become more aware of what they're feeding their pets, it's causing a tremendous shift away from mainstream to wholesome/natural, which has been leading the growth category over the past several years. Retail sales for the wholesome/natural segment were up high single digits in fiscal 2019 and accounted effectively for all of the growth in the category.
We expect this strong growth trajectory to continue as we're still in the early days of this transformation. Because Blue Buffalo is by far and away the leader in the wholesome natural segment, at nearly three times the size of the next largest competitor, we'll be the biggest beneficiary as the category transformation continues. The Blue business objective is very simple. We want to reach more pet parents and feed more pets. Our primary focus in the near term is growing our market share in the U.S. and Canada, and we've outlined a clear strategic framework to guide our efforts. We're focused on significantly expanding Blue's availability so that pet parents can get the Blue products they want anywhere they shop for pet food. We're continuing to use our holistic go-to-market approach to drive Blue's awareness with pet parents and influencers.
We're putting together a particular emphasis on growing with younger pets and younger pet parents who prefer wholesome natural food for their puppies and kittens. Finally, we're working to increase our share of wet food and treats, which are parts of the category where we under-index today. I mentioned earlier, we grew our segment's net sales and operating profit by double digits in fiscal 2019, which was our first year as part of the General Mills family. In fiscal 2020, we're going to build on those excellent results and keep driving both our top and bottom lines. Our first priority for FY 2020 is to continue our strong top-line growth. We expect FDM and e-commerce to lead our growth again this year, and we're bringing unique innovation and programs to the pet specialty channel that we think will help our retail partners drive excitement and differentiation in their stores.
Expanding our profit margins is our second priority for FY 2020, we'll do that by leveraging General Mills' capabilities to drive efficiencies across our business. Let me provide some details on how we'll deliver against these priorities in FY 2020, starting with our plans to continue our strong top-line growth. Blue has a track record of tremendous growth since we launched in 2003, we've built a strong position as the leading wholesome natural pet food brand in the U.S. The single biggest driver of our success so far, what has set us apart from many of our competitors in this space, has been our unique go-to-market model, which we use to drive awareness with pet parents and influencers.
Since we launched the brand in 2003, we've invested over $1 billion on brand building with a three-pronged approach. We build the brand through educational compare and decide national TV advertising, focusing on the quality of ingredients in Blue's foods versus other large brands. We increase Blue's awareness through exceptional in-store displays, signage, and education at the point of sale. This includes our in-store pet detectives, who educate pet parents about the quality of ingredients in Blue and help them find the right Blue recipe that meets their pet's specific needs. We invest in digital marketing with best-in-class content creation, premium brand presence, and advantage placements online. Let me show you a couple of our recent TV spots that demonstrate how we execute our educational messaging and reinforce Blue's True BLUE ingredient superiority.
[Presentation]
The awareness we've built with our go-to-market model has resulted in tremendous sales and market share growth as we've expanded Blue into FDM over the last two years. We now have more than a 70% ACV distribution in FDM, and for customers where Blue has been in distribution for at least 12 months, our fourth quarter fiscal 2019 retail sales grew nearly 30% versus prior year. In the last 12 weeks, Blue was the market share leader for total pet food in a number of FDM accounts and held double-digit market share in four large customers. Our success in FDM is driving category performance as well. Since our launch into FDM in August of 2017, Blue has contributed more than half of the retail sales in the entire category.
One significant benefit of our expansion into FDM is that millions of households in the U.S. have become new Blue pet parents. Our research indicates that more than 70% of pet parents who purchased Blue in FDM over the past year are new to the brand. We continue to see our household penetration grow from roughly 6% when we launched in FDM to nearly 10% today. With continued strong awareness and broadening our availability, we see further upside to our household penetration in fiscal 2020 and beyond. We have solid plans in F 2020 to drive significant growth in FDM. We'll build out our presence across our current FDM customers, expanding and optimizing the assortment of Life Protection Formula and Wilderness product lines available in their stores.
We'll execute national merchandising events like our Blue Year's Resolution activation, secure secondary placement, and generate excitement for Blue throughout the year. We'll continue to focus on securing eye-catching and informative in-store signage and displays to engage pet parents at the shelf. We'll amplify Blue's visibility in FDM by leveraging our pet detectives, who play an important role in educating pet parents about the benefits of wholesome natural products like Blue at the point of purchase. Finally, we'll reach new FDM customers this year by expanding Blue into club and drugstores. E-commerce remains an important channel for Blue, representing roughly 25% of our net sales. Pet food sets up incredibly well for e-commerce since a pet's steady and predictable diet creates a subscription-like buying pattern. Blue continues to grow and gain share in this channel, including 21% retail sales growth in fiscal 2019.
Not only is Blue the number one pet food brand sold online and the most searched pet food brand online, a recent study reported that Blue is the highest-selling brand among all consumer packaged goods in the U.S. We're targeting another year of strong growth in e-commerce in fiscal 2020, and our plans are focused on driving availability, assortment, and brand presence online. We'll increase our e-commerce exposure with large FDM customers, ensuring we have the right products available for their click and collect and delivery models. We'll also explore different pack sizes that may be more ideal for online purchasers. We will continue to invest in our online digital presence, knowing that the right content can make a difference in a pet parent's buying decision.
We want to clearly communicate the benefits of Blue to pet parents and ensure they have a similar branded experience regardless of where they shop online. This includes having the right visual images on the product detail pages, premier banner placement, advantage product display, and e-retailer ad features. In addition to FDM and e-commerce, our FY 2020 plans include exclusive initiatives with our retail partners in pet specialty to bring exciting news to pet parents who shop this channel. For example, we're bringing unique innovation this year that will resonate with pet specialty shoppers. In August, we're launching our new Carnivora product line in pet specialty. This super premium offering maintains our True BLUE Promise, made only with the finest natural ingredients, and features more protein and select parts of the animal for a growing number of pet parents seeking optimal prey nutrition for their pet.
We'll also introduce differentiated recipe assortments for pet specialty, such as our chicken-free Rocky Mountain Recipe in our Wilderness product line. We'll execute exclusive programs that leverage the unique aspects of the pet specialty channel. One example of this is our new Baby BLUE program, which we'll be launching later this year. I won't share a lot of the details today, but I'm incredibly excited about this initiative, which will focus on bringing solutions to pet parents at a life stage when they are most engaged, and then keeping them in the Blue brand for the lifetime of their pets. I look forward to sharing more about this program later this year. In addition to driving strong top-line growth, we are focused on leveraging General Mills capabilities in FY 2020 to drive efficiency and expand our segment operating profit margin.
We'll capitalize on the global SRM and HMM capabilities you've heard my colleagues talk about to offset inflation and provide fuel for investment behind our business. We'll achieve the remainder of the $50 million in synergies we outlined at the deal announcement, including savings driven by global sourcing, as well as full-year benefits of the elimination of duplicative administrative costs. We'll finalize the commissioning of all of our formulas and diet types and fully ramp up production at our new factory in Indiana, which will start to drive cost benefits in the second half of the fiscal year. In summary, I'm tremendously proud of where we are and excited about where we're going. Blue is leading the transformation of the pet food category as pet parents increasingly seek wholesome natural products for their pets.
We delivered double-digit top-line growth and bottom-line growth last year. We have strong plans in place to drive additional growth in fiscal 20. We're targeting 8%-10% net sales growth on a like-for-like basis. In other words, if we were comparing 52 weeks this year to 52 weeks last year. The realities of our calendar timing in F20 are a bit different than that. I'll let Quam walk you through that in more detail a little later in this presentation. We expect the strength of our F20 plans and the benefit of our significant FDM expansion last year will accelerate our all-channel retail sales growth above F19 levels. We'll deliver strong profit growth for the pet segment in fiscal 20, driven in part by the benefits of being part of the General Mills family. [inaudible]
Well, thank you, Billy, and good morning to everyone. I'm happy here today to share our fiscal 20 plans for Europe and Australia. Our segment generated $1.9 billion in net sales in fiscal 19, and we are tightly focused on four global platforms to drive growth, yogurt, and our three accelerate platforms, Mexican food, ice cream, and snack bars. These four platforms represent approximately 80% of the segment's net sales. When looking at our business by market, roughly three-quarters of our net sales are generated in France, the U.K., and Australia. Yet these markets only represent about 20% of our segment's population, so there's clear potential for geographic expansion as we look ahead. We see opportunities for growth in Europe and Australia. In fact, our mindset remains the same. This segment is an emerging company operating in a developed market.
Our brands compete in large categories that have high levels of household penetration. Our brand's penetration within these categories is still relatively low. We're focused on continuing to close those gaps by leveraging our global scale, marketing capabilities, and proven innovation from around the world. Those efforts grew our penetration in ice cream, snack bars, and Mexican in fiscal 19. To capitalize on these opportunities for continued growth, our segment has rallied behind the mission of serving more consumers by creating more love for our brands in more places. Our strategy is to drive profitable share growth by leveraging our consumer-first focus across our four key platforms. We've outlined three key priorities for our segment in fiscal 20. First, we will grow our Mexican, ice cream, and snack bar platforms. These are highly attractive categories where we have great brands with strong momentum and attractive margins.
Our second priority is to compete effectively in yogurt. We're navigating a difficult environment in France, where roughly 75% of our yogurt sales are generated, where we're facing continued dairy inflation and challenges in achieving net price realization. I'll share our plans for how we're going to compete effectively in yogurt in fiscal 2020. Our third priority is to drive margin expansion through HMM savings and SRM initiatives that will deliver positive price mix for our segment. Let me share some highlights of our fiscal 2020 plans, starting with Old El Paso. Old El Paso serves consumers across more than 25 countries with meal kits, tortillas, chips, and side dishes. The category has grown 3% over the last 52 weeks. There's plenty of growth ahead.
While consumers in the U.S., Europe, and Australia have a similar openness to Mexican, the actual category penetration in our segment is much lower than the U.S. With a leading market share position, there's a significant opportunity to bring new consumers into the category and drive growth for Old El Paso, as well as our retail partners. The key to bringing in new consumers is driving increased awareness by leveraging our advertising, online presence, and in-store placement. In fiscal 2020, we'll increase category visibility through our Make Some Noise campaign, which highlights the social nature of Mexican food that brings friends and families together.
As Jon mentioned earlier, in-store displays are an effective consumer vehicle for Old El Paso, especially when they're positioned next to the produce section. Additionally, we'll innovate to address consumers' needs in areas such as gluten-free, where we've launched soft shell tortillas and meal kits. We've expanded our presence in Mexican snacking with the launch of new tortilla bowls, a scoopable chip that's the first of its kind in Europe. Let me show you a brief video that summarizes our Old El Paso plans across Europe and Australia.
[Presentation]
Turning to ice cream, Häagen-Dazs is a fantastic global brand with a premium positioning and unmatched product quality. With a geographic footprint in more than 25 markets, we've driven innovation, in-market activation, and distribution expansion to generate 14% compound growth in Häagen-Dazs retail sales over the past three years. Häagen-Dazs appeals to ice cream consumers who seek premium and indulgent moments. That's the focus of our FY 2020 innovation, headlined by our barista ice cream collection, which is inspired by the rapid growth of coffee culture in Europe and Australia. The new range of pints, mini cups, and stick bars delivers the luxurious creamy taste of Häagen-Dazs with popular coffee flavors such as barista macchiato and caramel chai latte. Additionally, we're entering a segment that has taken the category by storm this year, permissible indulgent ice cream.
We've launched gelato mini cups, crafted with premium ingredients and no more than 150 calories. Cultivating premium brands requires differential marketing. We're building our extraordinary brand equity in fiscal 2020 through our global advertising campaign, which emphasizes the pure ingredients in every pint, cup, and stick of Häagen-Dazs. We'll also continue to expand distribution this year, building on successes we've seen in recent years, expanding availability in the U.K. and launching in Australia. We're still in the early days of expanding throughout Central and Eastern Europe, including recent launches into Poland and the Czech Republic, two markets with more than $800 million in combined category retail sales and growing at double-digit rates. Now on to snack bars. Our snack bars portfolio delivers against a wide range of consumer needs, and it has contributed significant growth to our segment in recent years.
In fact, Nature Valley and Fiber One have combined to generate 35% compound retail sales growth over the past three years. Our snack bars are now present in more than 20 markets in Europe and Australia, and with a market share of roughly 11%, there's plenty of growth ahead. Our FY 2020 snack bars plans are focused on driving penetration on our core brands while expanding our portfolio to new occasions. On Nature Valley, we'll drive brand awareness through consumer activation and partnerships, and we'll pursue omni-channel leadership through new pack sizes and formats. On Fiber One, we're fueling distribution expansion on recently launched varieties such as Fiber One Popcorn, and we're continuing to expand our range of remarkable tasting brownies and cake bars.
Building on our track record of success in the U.S., we've recently launched LÄRABAR in the U.K., a market where we can capture incremental penetration in the fast-growing real food segment. Let me share a video with you to show how we're bringing our snack bars plans to life in fiscal 2020. Let's shift gears to our second priority for the EU-AU segment, competing effectively in yogurt. Our yogurt business represents roughly 40% of our net sales in Europe and Australia, with revenues concentrated in just two countries, France and the U.K. Where we are the third largest branded player in both markets. Our portfolio in France is broad, with brands competing in both adult and kids yogurt segments. Our portfolio in the U.K. is more concentrated, and we are the market share leader in kid yogurts.
We're particularly focused on four brands within our portfolio, Panier, Petits Filous, Yop, and Perle de Lait, that hold strong positions in the respective segments and are positioned for attractive growth in the years to come. We're investing in consumer-first innovation, renovation, marketing communications in fiscal 2020 to drive growth for these brands across the segment. In France, we're focused on improving the trajectory of our yogurt business in FY 2020 by distorting resources behind three of our biggest brands. On Panier, we have product news that raises the awareness of the brand's 100% real fruit recipe in support of local farmers through the use of 100% French milk. Additionally, we are expanding into the premium and fast-growing plant-based yogurt segment with the launch of Panier Végétal.
On Perle de Lait, we're focused on launching premium innovation that unlocks price mix benefits, such as our Perle de Lait chocolate offering that provides a delicious and indulgent dessert experience. On Yop, we plan to engage authentically with teens through a multi-channel marketing campaign that reaches our target demographic very effectively. We're introducing product and packaging improvements that resonate with today's modern teen. In the U.K., we're focused on strengthening our leading share position in kids' yogurt with news that hits on all ages and stages. Our FY 2020 plans on Petits Filous include consumer-first innovation that addresses key pain points for mom. We recently launched a drinkable yogurt format with a mess-free sports cap, a first for the category in the U.K. We're recruiting new moms through the launch of a no added sugar Petits Filous variety.
We're increasing investment behind our play free advertising campaign. With these efforts, we'll help to improve our position on the yogurt business for growth in this large and evolving category. Our final priority for fiscal 2020 is to deliver margin expansion. We expect to drive HMM savings and execute SRM initiatives to deliver positive price mix for the segment. These efforts will help to offset continued margin headwinds that we're facing, specifically the continued challenging operating environment in France, the uncertainties of Brexit, and sustained input cost inflation for key commodities such as dairy.
With that, I'll summarize my comments from today. Our Europe and Australasia segment is an emerging company in a developed market with considerable opportunities to drive growth. We feel good about our fiscal 2020 plans to drive growth for Old El Paso, Häagen-Dazs, and snack bars and to compete effectively in yogurt. We're focused on delivering HMM savings and SRM benefits to drive margin expansion for this segment. I'd like to thank you for your time today. I'll now turn the podium over to Sean Walker to tell you about our plans for Asia & Latin America.
Thank you, Bethany. Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be here today for the first time as Group President of our Asia and Latin America segment. I've been with General Mills now for 29 years, and most recently, I ran our corporate strategy group where I helped Billy transition the Blue Buffalo business. Prior to that, I ran the Latin American business for six years. I'm here today to tell you a little bit about our fiscal FY 2020 plans for the Asia and Latin America segment. The segment covers all of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, a diverse footprint that represents 150 countries and six billion people. These countries drove nearly two-thirds of the world's packaged food sales growth over the last five years, so there are clear opportunities for continued growth in this segment.
Our largest market is China, followed by Brazil and India. These three markets generate more than 60% of the segment's $1.7 billion in net sales. Our Asia and Latin America segment delivered broad-based, mid-single-digits organic growth in FY 2019, which translated to significant operating margin expansion. Our fiscal FY 2020 plans look to build on that momentum. Our segment remains motivated by our vision of delivering sustainable and profitable growth by serving more consumers more completely across emerging markets. We've outlined three key priorities for our segment in fiscal 2020. First, we will continue momentum on two of our fastest-growing global platforms, Häagen-Dazs ice cream and snack bars. We estimate that these two platforms will drive nearly two-thirds of our segment's net sales growth in fiscal 2020.
Our second priority is to compete effectively and improve margins on our key local brands, including Wanchai Ferry in China and Yoki and Kitano in Brazil. Lastly, we're taking action to drive significant margin expansion in fiscal 2020, driven by improved profitability in our big three markets, China, Brazil, and India. Let me provide additional context for our 2020 plans to bring each of these priorities to life, starting with ice cream. The ice cream category in Asia and Latin America has generated impressive mid-single-digit growth in recent years, reaching over $33 billion in retail sales in 2018, driven primarily by continued growth in the super premium segment. Euromonitor expects category growth to accelerate to 8% compound growth rate over the next five years.
Häagen-Dazs generates roughly one-third of our segment's net sales through a combination of shops, retail outlets like hypermarkets and supermarkets, food service channels, and a growing e-commerce business. We hold leading share positions across key Asian markets, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea. In fiscal 2019, the brand delivered low-single-digit retail sales growth in Asia on top of mid-single-digit growth in the prior year. While Häagen-Dazs is a smaller component of our Latin American business, it's one of our fastest-growing platforms in the region and increased retail sales by double digits during fiscal 2019. In fiscal 2020, we'll drive growth on Häagen-Dazs behind three key initiatives: launching differential innovation, executing a unified consumer activation plan across markets, channels, and product formats, and accelerating channel development in retail outlets, shops, and online.
I'll share examples of our plans in each of these areas with a focus on Asia, our largest region. Häagen-Dazs consumers seek variety and appreciate premium, one-of-a-kind offerings. We're coming off a strong year of innovation, including excellent performance on stick bars as we continue to secure distribution gains and bring new offerings to the market, such as our popular peanut butter crunch and matcha green tea flavors. For fiscal 2020, our plans strive to build on that momentum by launching differential innovation in the handheld segment, which represents almost 70% of the ice cream market in Asia and has grown double digits over the last five years. We're introducing the first super premium ice cream cone in three indulgent flavors: vanilla caramel almond, matcha green tea, and chocolate almond.
We're launching those new items into selected Asian markets where we have operational expertise and potential to drive scale in the business, with plans to expand distribution more broadly over time. Beyond cones, our Häagen-Dazs innovation efforts focus on delivering our consumers with a strong pipeline of new flavors, delighting our consumers with a strong pipeline of new flavors, formats, and consumer experiences targeted specifically to our three key seasons in Asia. We're building on last year's fruit and flower line by introducing our limited edition summer fruit collection in frozen yogurt and ice cream varieties. This new range offers refreshing flavors like zesty yuzu and orange, and kiwi mango that are made with real fruit and provide a sweet, indulgent treat during the hot summer months. Häagen-Dazs mooncakes have been an important part of the Mid-Autumn Festival in China and other regions in Asia for more than 20 years.
Last year, we expanded our gifting range around the Chinese New Year while building our presence in adjacent categories such as premium chocolates. This year, we're introducing refreshed packaging and product designs for festive mooncakes in China, our largest market, as well as growing markets like Hong Kong, where Häagen-Dazs is the number 1 seller of ice cream mooncakes. We're extending proven winners such as our recent tiramisu and cream cheese mochi innovations by launching two limited edition mochi flavors during the winter season. We're fueling those innovation efforts and driving awareness on our core business through a unified consumer activation plan during our three key seasons. As the Häagen-Dazs brand has grown across Asia in recent years, we've seen our target consumer become increasingly connected across geographies. We've developed a 360-degree, always-on engagement model that applies consistent marketing strategies across key markets in Asia.
This model reaches across platforms and resonates with millennial consumers, leveraging a mix of TV, PR, and digital platforms, including social media influencers who seek unique and authentic experiences. For example, our Nothing Can Be Cooler activation went live this spring to build awareness of our summer fruit collection, which has driven strong initial results for the new launch. As Bethany mentioned, we're executing global activations that leverage our extraordinary brand equity, such as our Püre campaign for new flavors and core lines of cones-Pints and stick bars. We're approaching channel development opportunities from multiple angles to drive growth and solidify our premium positioning. Our fiscal 2020 plans are centered on driving executional excellence across three important channels, retail, e-commerce, and shops. In retail, we're focused on driving consistent execution across key markets such as China, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
The point of sale is a critical moment for the consumer buying process in the impulse segment. We know it's imperative to stand out in store, so we're improving our in-store presence with Häagen-Dazs branded freezers to reinforce our consumer activation and to increase our visibility in retail locations. We expect our investment in freezers will drive incremental distribution in retail channels this year and enable further channel expansion in years to come. E-commerce remains an attractive growth opportunity for Häagen-Dazs across Asia, where e-commerce food solutions are highly developed compared to the U.S. For example, nearly 20% of grocery sales in South Korea are through e-commerce platforms. In China, we're seeing rapid advancements in the speed and availability of home delivery solutions, particularly through mobile technology.
Our e-commerce business grew nearly 40% in China last year, Häagen-Dazs holds the leading share position at Alibaba and Tmall, the two largest e-commerce players in China. We expect to generate double-digit e-commerce growth again in fiscal 2020 as we leverage real-time, data-driven insights to develop targeted marketing strategies. For example, we're investing in our CRM capabilities to connect directly with consumers through personalized online content, which has driven incremental sales for our shops business as consumers are increasingly sharing their ice cream creations across social platforms. Lastly, we'll continue to leverage our shops business to build the broader Häagen-Dazs brand. Our shops offer premium experiences and creations that generate buzz on digital platforms and uplift the brand image.
We benefit from the extensive consumer data gathered from our shops, which we can use to meet our consumers' needs and build penetration channels where the brand is still gaining traction, such as hotels, restaurants, airlines, and other foodservice outlets. Let me share a video with you to show how we're building these Häagen-Dazs plans and how we have them come to life across Asia. Let's roll the clip. Those cones are extraordinary. Now let's transition to snack bars, our second global accelerated platform. Our snack bars business was a key driver of our segment top-line improvement in fiscal 2019, growing more than 30% across both Asia and Latin America. We expanded our global footprint on brands like Pillsbury in India, Betty Crocker in the Middle East, and Nature Valley across Asia and Latin America.
We expect to continue that growth trajectory in fiscal 2020 through portfolio expansion and effective brand building on Nature Valley. We're leveraging our global bars portfolio and manufacturing expertise from the U.S. and Europe to launch locally produced Nature Valley biscuits in India and the Middle East in single serve and multi-pack formats. We've developed a go-to-market strategy that ensures we can offer the best value at the right consumer price point, while also driving profitability for the segment. We're leveraging global idea sharing to quickly bring compelling innovation to market. For example, we're seeing the expansion of on-trend flavors like coconut and almond butter in the U.S., so we're launching Nature Valley Coconut Almond protein bars in the Caribbean and Central America. We're also applying key learning from brand building initiatives that have worked well in other segments.
That means we're investing in digital-led advertising campaigns to drive brand awareness in markets where we see significant category penetration opportunities, particularly in Latin America. We're investing in broad-based sampling programs to build trial with young active adults who seek an energy boost from our core crunchy bars and protein bars. In addition to the acceleration plans for our global platforms, we're focused on ensuring our key local brands continue to compete effectively with new portfolio strategies and investments. Starting with our Yoki business in Brazil, our plans are centered on portfolio expansion into new segments of the category that are growing quickly. For example, we're introducing larger sizes and new pack formats of nuts and popcorn that compete in the responsible abundance segment by offering consumers more value for healthier snacking options.
We're continuing to support Yoki and build brand loyalty through our Live Your Roots campaign that is about enjoying life with loved ones through food, traditions, and celebration. For our Kitano business in Brazil, we'll focus on improving our retail execution through new in-store caddies and displays, and we'll leverage value-added core renovation to be more competitive on shelf, such as our lower sodium Mais Vita offerings. We're competing more effectively in China with a transformation of our Wanchai Ferry business model. Wanchai Ferry delivered mid-single-digit net sales growth in fiscal 2019 and significantly improved its margins despite facing rising pork prices due to the African swine fever outbreak. We will strengthen momentum on Wanchai Ferry in fiscal 2020 by maintaining our focus on driving profitable growth on the core dumpling business.
We're introducing premium innovation that will drive positive net price realization and mix for the segment, such as healthier dumplings with increased vegetable content. We're also broadening our portfolio with pan-fried versions of our core dumplings, which is an emerging trend in China. We're expanding into a new retail outlet in China called Hema, a premium, technologically advanced brick-and-mortar store owned by the Alibaba Group. Amazing place. Our third segment priority is to drive margin expansion by significantly improving the profitability of our three largest markets. In China, margin expansion will be driven by increased benefits from our HMM and SRM actions. We're leveraging the scale of our global sourcing team to drive HMM savings across our supply chain network.
We're pulling the key levers of our SRM toolkit to drive positive net price realization across the segment, including trade optimization and list price harmonization on our Wanchai Ferry business. In Brazil, we're focused on optimizing the way we go to market, ranging from the initial procurement process to customer delivery, and eventually placement on the shelf. This broader initiative will drive margin expansion through supply chain efficiencies and enable accelerated growth in the market by allowing our sales team to focus on securing more profitable distribution points. In India, we're making investments in growth capacity to expand our highly profitable bakeries and food service business, which plays in a channel that has the potential for sizable growth in the coming years.
We're applying learning from our route-to-market improvements in Brazil to drive efficiencies in our retail operations. In summary, our Asia and Latin America segment delivered broad-based organic sales growth in fiscal 2019 while driving significant margin expansion. We will sustain that momentum in fiscal 2020 by growing Häagen-Dazs and Nature Valley and by competing effectively on key local brands. We're taking action to significantly improve profitability in our three largest markets, which will drive margin expansion for the segment in fiscal 2020 and beyond. Thank you for your time today, and I'll turn the mic over to Donal.
All right. Thanks, Sean, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll cover our joint ventures, summarize our plans on margins, cash, and capital allocation, then close today's remarks with our fiscal 2020 financial outlook. We have two unconsolidated joint ventures, Cereal Partners Worldwide and Häagen-Dazs Japan. CPW is our 50/50 joint venture with Nestlé that was established in 1990 and markets more than 50 cereal brands in 130 countries outside of North America. With annual revenues of $1.65 billion, CPW is the global number 2 cereal player outside North America and has leading share positions in many fast-growing, emerging cereal markets across Central Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Häagen-Dazs Japan has been operating in Japan for more than 30 years with Suntory as our primary JV partner and has grown to reach nearly $400 million in annual revenue.
Our CPW plans in fiscal 2020 focus on bringing new consumers to our brands through compelling news and continued portfolio expansion. We are the only cereal manufacturer to have whole grain as the number 1 ingredient across all of our brands. We're pressing this advantage in FY 2020 by increasing consumer support behind a refreshed whole grain campaign across all our regions. In addition to whole grain news, CPW has a strong innovation lineup in 2020, including new organic cereal offerings under the Lion and Fitness brands, building on success we saw last year with the introduction of organic Cheerios, Chocapic, and Nesquik varieties. We're leveraging the insights and expertise of our 301 INC team here in the U.S. by launching GoodBelly probiotic cereals for the first time outside of North America.
At Häagen-Dazs Japan, our fiscal 2020 plans look to strengthen performance in our mini cups and crispy sandwich varieties by driving green tea, HDJ's most iconic flavor. We have a strong quarterly innovation flow, including premium offerings that celebrates the 35th anniversary of our original green tea launch, which will be supported with year-round consumer activations. We're rolling out new packaging based on an updated design that has proven to be very successful in other parts of the world. We'll also drive growth in the fast-growing handheld segment, including consumer communication, to emphasize the crunch experience that differentiates HDJ's crispy sandwiches. With commodity headwinds continuing, we're taking actions to improve profitability in both JVs, including SRM initiatives and HMM cost-saving actions to reduce complexity across our supply chain and generate efficiencies in our manufacturing processes. Let's turn to our financial overview.
We remain committed to our shareholder return model and the four levers we use to create value. We're targeting consistent low single-digit organic sales growth over the long term. A modest amount of margin expansion will turn low single-digit sales growth into mid-single-digit adjusted operating profit growth. From there, we look to convert our earnings into cash with a goal of at least 95% of adjusted after-tax earnings converted to free cash flow. We look to return at least 90% of that free cash flow to shareholders through dividends and net share repurchases over the long term. Later in the presentation, I'll cover our capital allocation strategies coming out of the Blue Buffalo acquisition. Achieving these performance metrics has generated double-digit returns for General Mills shareholders over the long term.
You've heard our plans to accelerate sales growth behind our consumer-first strategy and global growth framework, as well as examples of how we're driving margin expansion across our segments. I'll provide more color on our plans to maintain our strong margins in FY 2020, then cover details of the other levels of our model. Margin expansion starts with our drive for efficiency throughout our organization, products, and processes. HMM is at the center of this effort and continues to generate significant savings in our cost of goods. We delivered over $2.1 billion in cost of goods sold HMM savings over the past five years. I'm pleased to say that we beat our goal of $4 billion of HMM savings this decade, including record levels in FY 2019. We've taken additional actions in recent years to improve our efficiency and better align resources behind our high-growth initiatives.
We restructured our supply chain network, we streamlined our global organization structure, among other initiatives, to reduce administrative costs. In total, these projects delivered $700 million in aggregate cost savings through FY 2018 above and beyond HMM. Together, these actions helped us deliver 120 basis points of expansion in our adjusted operating profit margin between FY 2015 and FY 2019, that's after investment back into our brands and for new capabilities such as e-commerce and SRM. Our strong cost discipline remains important in today's operating environment. We have actions in place to support our profitability in 2020 and beyond. As proven by beating our $4 billion HMM goal, we've ingrained a continuous improvement mindset over the past decade that will help us drive ongoing HMM savings of approximately 4% of COGS in the years ahead.
In FY 2020, plans call for continued strong levels of HMM savings, driven in part by further benefits from our global sourcing initiative. Our stronger SRM capability is identifying opportunities for net price realization across our categories and geographies, which will help us achieve positive organic price mix again in FY 2020. We have initiatives underway that will drive efficiencies across the organization and pave the way for future growth. Enterprise process transformation is a critical initiative at the center of these plans. We're advancing our go-to-market execution by improving workflow orchestration and data management across functions, with the goal of getting the right products to market 50% faster with less effort. Within finance, we're optimizing our data hierarchy, reporting, and processes to better leverage our scale for global insights.
We're implementing a new demand and supply planning process to improve forecasting accuracy and secure the resulting supply chain cost and capital savings. Beyond these initiatives, we're also optimizing our route-to-market strategy in Brazil and certain European geographies to drive efficiencies in how we go to market. As you heard throughout the presentation, we're planning investments in brand building and global capabilities to drive improvement in our organic growth profile in fiscal 2020 and beyond. We've made tremendous strides in developing our SRM and e-commerce capabilities, we're still in the early stages of optimizing all the data at our disposal. We're investing in the depth of our data analytics to drive competitive advantage and unlock additional growth for our brands.
We're also stepping up our brand-building investment to drive consistent sales growth, including Blue Buffalo in-store displays in FDM channels, our Healthy Hearts Make the Good Go Round campaign in U.S. Cereal, and our Püre marketing campaign across our global Häagen-Dazs business. We have clear plans in place to drive improved organic sales while maintaining our strong margin in fiscal 2020. We expect positive margin contribution from significant HMM savings and our SRM actions. Faster growth on our higher-margin Blue Buffalo business will be another margin tailwind, including the benefit of lapping last year's Q1 purchase accounting inventory step-up charge and will benefit from other efficiency initiatives, such as our global supply chain optimization. On the other hand, we expect margin headwinds from continued input cost inflation, as well as the growth investments I mentioned a moment ago.
Let's shift gears from margins to cash conversion, the third lever in our model. A key enabler of cash conversion is a disciplined focus on core working capital, we've made significant progress on this front in recent years. Since fiscal 2014, we've driven core working capital down by over 70% through improvements in accounts payable as well as reduction in inventory days, generating over $1 billion in cash. We expect core working capital to be a source of cash again in fiscal 2020. The reason we expect further working capital reductions is that while we've made great strides in improving our core working capital, we haven't yet reached the top quartile of our global food, beverage, and household product peers.
More specifically, we see runway left for further improvements by continuing to drive our global terms extension program, by reducing inventory levels as we optimize our logistics network, and by applying our proven capabilities to Blue Buffalo's balance sheet. Our goal is to convert at least 95% of adjusted net earnings into free cash flow on a rolling three-year basis, which balances out the inherent volatility in the annual cash figures. Thanks in large part to the core working capital reduction I just mentioned, we've consistently exceeded that goal this decade, including 115% free cash flow conversion in fiscal 2019. As a result, we've generated $6.2 billion in cash and 109% conversion rate over the past three years. That's before we see the full benefit of adding Blue Buffalo to our portfolio.
Returning cash to shareholders is the final lever in our model, our long-run capital allocation priorities have enabled strong cash returns over time. First, we prioritize smart capital investments that fuel cost savings and growth initiatives, averaging roughly 4% of net sales. We then look to return cash to shareholders through dividends, which we target growing with earnings over time. In fact, General Mills has paid dividends without interruption or reduction for each of our 90-plus years as a public company. Our next long-term priority for cash is M&A. We're continuously evaluating strategic activity and will deploy capital when we see a clear path to create value for our shareholders, such as our recent acquisitions of Annie's, Epic, and of course, Blue Buffalo. We then look to return cash through effective share repurchases, targeting a 2% annual reduction in our share count over a multi-year timeframe.
Thanks to our strong cash conversion, we were slightly ahead of that goal in the five years prior to the Blue Buffalo acquisition, despite the fact that we used a portion of our free cash flow to fund acquisitions during that period. Having increased our leverage 15 months ago to help fund the Blue Buffalo acquisition, we've adjusted our near-term capital allocation plans to prioritize deleverage. Specifically for fiscal 2020, we expect capital investments to total approximately 3.5% of net sales, relatively in line with fiscal 2019. We plan to maintain our quarterly dividend rate at $0.49 per share. At this dividend rate, our yield remains strong at more than 3.5%, which is among the top quartile of our global CPG peers.
We put share repurchases and large-scale M&A on hold, we're applying this cash towards debt reduction, including paying down over $1.3 billion in debt in fiscal 2019. We closed fiscal 2019 with a net debt to adjusted EBITDA leverage ratio of 3.9 x ahead of our planned expectations, we expect a combination of further debt reduction and earnings growth this year to reduce our fiscal 2020 leverage to 3.5 x. With that in mind, let me outline our key financial assumptions for fiscal 2020. Probably the most complicated component of our FY 2020 plan assumptions is the effect of the calendar change to our pet segment. Through fiscal 2019, we operated Blue Buffalo on a one-month lag to our corporate calendar, as we've done in the early stages of each of our significant acquisitions over the past decade.
In FY 2020, we will shift the business to a May year-end to align with our corporate calendar. Consistent with past practices, we will include that extra month in our organic net sales results. This slide breaks down the impact of the calendar differences by quarter and for the full-year. As you can see, calendar differences will cause a headwind to our pet segment results in Q1 of FY 2020, then become a significant tailwind in Q4. In total, we'll report 57 weeks for the pet segment in FY 2020 compared to 53 weeks in FY 2019, which will add approximately seven percentage points to the pet segment's full-year organic net sales growth in FY 2020. Combining the calendar differences with the 8%-10% like-for-like growth that Billy mentioned, we anticipate pet segment organic net sales growth in fiscal 2020 will be in the mid-teens or better.
Hopefully, that's clear, and if not, feel free to follow up with Jeff Siemon after today's presentation. Let's cover some of the more straightforward assumptions in our plan. Our fiscal 2020 results for our four legacy segments will include a 53rd week in the fourth quarter. Contributions from this 53rd week, the impact of divestitures executed in FY 2019, and currency translation are collectively expected to result in a reported net sales growth, finishing one to two percentage points above our organic net sales guidance. We're planning for increased growth investments in brand building and global capabilities like e-commerce and SRM to drive improvement in our organic growth profile in fiscal 2020 and beyond. We expect holistic margin management savings and input cost inflation to each total roughly 4% of COGS. We're roughly 50% covered on our global commodity positions at this point in the year.
Below the operating profit line, we estimate benefit plan income for the non-service component of our plans will total approximately $120 million, up roughly $30 million from FY 2019 due to lower interest expense and higher asset returns. We expect net interest expense to total approximately $500 million. We're planning for the adjusted effective tax rate in fiscal 2020 to be roughly in line with the fiscal 2019 rate, and we anticipate average dilute shares to increase approximately 1%. I'll close by reiterating the fiscal 2020 guidance that Jeff mentioned earlier. Organic net sales are expected to accelerate from flat in fiscal 2019 to 1% to 2% growth in fiscal 2020. We expect this acceleration to be driven in roughly equal parts by the 8% to 10% like-for-like growth for Blue Buffalo, the extra reporting month for Blue Buffalo, and improved growth in North America Retail.
As we referenced, we expect aggregate growth consistent with FY 2019 levels for our Convenience Stores and Foodservice, Europe and Australasia, and Asia and LATAM segments. We estimate constant currency adjusted operating profit will increase 2% to 4% from the base of $2.9 billion reported in FY 2019. Constant currency adjusted diluted EPS is expected to increase 3% to 5% from the base of $3.22 we earned in FY 2019. We're targeting free cash flow conversion of at least 95% of adjusted after-tax earnings. We do not expect currency translation to have a material impact on FY 2020 adjusted operating profit or adjusted EPS. That concludes the review of our FY 2020 plan. With that, I'm going to turn the mic back over to Jeff for Q&A.
We'll do another section of Q&A. I'll ask Jeff Harmening to come up as well. Let's start with Andrew Lazar up here in the front. Anna?
Thanks very much. Don, you mentioned that General Mills had historically high HMM savings this past fiscal year, and that was with volume still being down in a large segment like North America Retail. Maybe you can talk a little bit, or maybe to put Jon Church on the spot, but a little bit about when volumes start to return to a little bit of positive in a segment like North America Retail, what that does potentially to HMM savings and in what ways that actually enhances it from what's already been a pretty strong result.
Yeah, it's a good question. I'll touch on it and Jon jump in if I don't cover all the key points. I think there's two things I would point out. One, obviously more volume means there's more savings because when we save money on in terms of how we run our lines or our buying, the more volume we're running, the more dollar savings that creates. The second one, which maybe is lost sometimes, is the fact that part of HMM or our continuous improvement, our Zero Loss Culture that Jon's ingrained in our supply chain, is about having the lines run continuously, more effectively.
Less downtime, for example. What that means is when we have more volume, we don't necessarily need more labor, we don't need more capital or more lines in the plant. There's an efficiency gain there that is actually captured outside of HMM, but is part of our margin story. I think those are the probably two things I would point to. Then, of course, there's the leverage on the fixed plant, I guess I would add that.
Great. How about Kenneth Goldman here in the front table? Next one over.
I have two quick ones. Shawn, you mentioned significant margin expansion or at least opportunities. Can you quantify that for us to any extent? It's hard to model what significant means, so I'm just trying to get a sense for the near term and the longer term. Don, the goal of three and a half times leverage by the end of this year, that feels a little bit conservative to me given the rate you've been delevering lately. Can you perhaps get closer to three times by the end of the year if things go as planned? Would you back off sort of debt pay down at that time if you do feel like you're getting toward your goal?
To take the first question first, Ken, as you know, my friend Jeff Siemon reminds me constantly that we don't give segment guidance.
You did.
Well, I said we're going to have expansion. What I will tell you is that as we continue to gain scale, particularly with product lines such as Häagen-Dazs and snack bars that are higher margin items than some of our local brands like Wanchai and Yoki, we're going to get expansion. Reported segment right now, we're mid-single digits. I would expect that to, over time, to increase as we gain scale. The specific target for FY 2020
I won't share with you unless Don chooses to.
Don does not choose to. On the leverage, we do feel good about our cash generation. We paid over $1.3 billion in debt this year. There's no reason that we won't be in that same kind of zip code as we go into FY 2020. We think that, combined with our earnings growth, will get us that three times. To your point, we are focused to going past that as we get past FY 2020. As we get to that point, we're getting closer to our pre-Blue Buffalo leverage ratios around that three times. Then we'll start looking at our, what I'd call, our more normalized capital allocation policy, both dividend increase and more meaningful M&A activity. All right. How about let's stay at the same table. Robert Moskow.
Hi, thanks. Actually, for Jeff Harmening. I think advertising and promotion spending this year on the base business was about flat. Maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong. I want to know what the plan is for fiscal 2020. I think the plan is to increase it. Then I was hoping you could speak a little more broadly about how you think about the balance between traditional A&P spending and also, I think, the advertising spending that's available now at the retailers. Some of it sounds much more targeted, may be a good way to cut out waste. How do you view that trade-off?
I'll answer the second question first. As we think about brand building, we're agnostic as to where we spend it. The key is what's the objective, who you're trying to reach, and what's the most effective way to do it. If you're trying to reach a millennial pet parent, digital is probably a pretty good way, and that could be on Hulu or Netflix or something like that. If you're trying to reach somebody about cholesterol messaging for Honey Nut Cheerios, and you're trying to reach a boomer, you might have a different target. The first thing I would say, we measure all of our returns and our media investment, is really gets back to what is the objective we're trying to accomplish and realizing that the number one lever you have on media is their creativity.
What is the idea you're trying to get across, and how well do you get across that idea? When it comes to brand building, I would say more broadly, not for take aside the media line for a minute, but if you look at brand building more broadly, we do intend to increase it this year. In the last few years, we have either held it steady or decreased it. We think there's an opportunity to increase our brand building, and by that, I don't mean price point spending, I mean brand building. Some of that'll occur on the media line, but some of that'll occur throughout the levels of the P&L, as you noted.
It could be through customers or some other means. I think we have really good ideas. We have really good ideas in cereal, we have good ideas in yogurt in the U.S., we have good ideas on Häagen-Dazs globally, on snack bars globally, on Mexican. We feel like we have really good ideas to invest behind, and we did a little bit in the fourth quarter, and we like what we saw, you can probably see more of that this year from us.
Great. Let's maybe pass it right behind to Alexia, right behind you there.
Thank you. Just a quick one to Jeff about the level of uncertainty that there is because of the changing environment at the moment. If you think back five years, things were probably a little bit easier to forecast. It wasn't quite as murky as it might be today. You're obviously working your way back to a better algorithm, but what would you say are the key uncertainties or risks, particularly around fiscal 2020 as you look out here?
The question about it's a dynamic market, I think the rate of change is going to increase. I don't think it's going to decrease. We've certainly come to grips with that. It can either be a challenge or an opportunity. It depends what you make of it. For me, I think it's a net opportunity. Anytime you see change, the question is, can you change better than everybody else around you and faster than everybody else around you? In terms of uncertainty, we've lived with it this past year, and that's one of the reasons I'm proud we delivered what we said we're going to deliver, and we intend to do so again next year. I would say probably the most uncertain is Europe, and certainly with Brexit, although we grew in the U.K. this past year.
Is the U.K., are they going to exit, or are they not going to exit? What does that mean? How do you build inventory? How do you not? Our team navigated really well, but I think that's one of the big risks. The other is the environment, the business and climate for us in France is not particularly productive. As Bethany said briefly in passing, there is quite a bit of inflation, and pricing in France is not the easiest to come by. That's going to continue to be a tough market. That's probably the place that's the most challenged from a business environment standpoint.
Great. Let's go to Jonathan Feeney here in the middle table.
Thanks so much. Quick question for Billy. According to your plans, you are going to have something like doubled household penetration since 2017. I guess a couple of questions. First, what is it about this next 6 million households that was so different that you found a hard time reaching them independently? Secondly, what is it, maybe related to that, did General Mills kind of bring to Blue Buffalo that enabled that? Because frankly, it is pretty countercultural thinking right now. What is in fashion is that people can just build businesses and target reach wherever they want with digital. I would love to hear your perspective on that. Thanks.
Yeah, no, man. The bulk of it really came through distribution. We knew we were looking at expanding first and foremost our Life Protection Formula footprint, and then introducing Wilderness as well. We always knew that the FDM section of the pet food market was always the largest. Again, just we wanted to do it in a very thoughtful and meaningful way, both on the pace of execution as well as the way we went to market with our merchandise offering.
Again, when we advertise and use our go-to-market model, we do touch pretty much most of the pet parents out there through our TV advertising, through our digital, and through some of the print that we do, as well as in store with our pet detectives. I think how it all works synergistically together, now pet parents that have heard of us, obviously, can find us in some of the outlets where they prefer to shop. Still a lot, I think, out there to make happen and go get, but that really has helped us enable that type of household penetration that we just reported on.
Great. How about let us go to Brian here. Might have time for one or two more.
All right. For Jeff and Don, I guess, it's a follow-on to Alexia's question. With the sort of the environment just being more dynamic than it's been, it seems like it just costs more to grow just across the industry right now. Why is mid-single-digit operating profit growth still a good long-term sort of algorithm, right? If we really want to sustain the top line in order to drive the rest of the P&L, you thought at all about backing that down a little bit just to make sure that we don't lose focus on really driving the top line and have that sort of sustainability?
Yeah. I think the first key for us is getting back to sustainable sales growth. That really is the key, and to try to make money while we're doing that. When we talk about our long-term algorithm, I think for the long term, mid-single-digit profit growth is really important to our long-term algorithm, even if we're not going to get quite all the way back this next year. This next year, it's really apparent that, to me at least, that hitting our profit target and accelerating organic growth is really the task to do. We think that we have the initiatives to do it and to do so efficiently. The improving the organic sales growth is the key.
With that, everything else seems to work better. There was a question asked earlier about HMM. HMM works better in an environment of change and growth. We've been doing really well with HMM, where we haven't really been growing. To the extent we start to grow, that actually helps the HMM flywheel. To the extent we continue to change, whether it's the logistics network or how we do procurement, that also helps as well. I think actually our profitability will be aided by our acceleration of growth.
Yeah. I'd just add a couple of things on the financial side. We have two goals. We want to drive double-digit annual shareholder returns for our shareholders, and we want to be in the top tier of our peer set. Whether you look forward and kind of run the math, you look backwards and what has driven those kind of results, it's been centered largely on mid-single-digit operating profit growth. There's a lot of different ways people have gotten there over time. To Jeff's point, the best way to do it long term is through top-line growth. That mid-single-digit operating profit growth really tends to be the fulcrum of what drives those strong returns.
Great. How about go to Sorry, let's go Laurent here, and then we'll go to Rob in the back.
Thanks again. A question for Billy. I like to reconcile maybe what I've got in my mind in terms of math between the 8-10% organic growth, which to me seems to be a bit conservative with some numbers you gave. Same-store sales, you mentioned, was about 29% in retail. You will have lots of gain in terms of distribution. This year is the first three quarters. E-commerce is growing double digits, and yet, I agree, pet specialty channel is, let's say, minus mid-teens, but you got some innovation coming there. How can I bridge between those numbers and the 8-10%, which seems to me a bit conservative?
Sure, Laurent. Basically, it's on that 52-week like-to-like scenario as we talked about. As we were actually in our fourth quarter for fiscal 2019, we had a couple of major launches. One was with Walmart, and the other was with our Wilderness product line expanding into FDM. We actually see that sort of pipeline fill as sort of a little bit of a headwind to us as we look to the fourth quarter on a 52-52 like-week basis. If you remove that, I think you'd see us comfortably in the double digits for sure. That's really what is keeping us within that range on a like-for-like basis. Get that right, Don?
I guess I would add, look, on food, drug, and mass, the rollout's going really well, and we're really pleased with not only the distribution expansion but how Blue Buffalo has performed in accounts where we've had it for a while. E-commerce is growing. While it decelerated in the fourth quarter, I think holistically what we're going to see over time, even this coming year, is e-commerce start to back to re-accelerate again as our food, drug, and mass customers really enter into e-commerce. The drag on our growth right now, we're not planning for a turnaround in pet specialty, even though we have some initiatives we think could take hold.
The pet specialty channel, we're still forecasting to decline by double digits, even though, as hopefully you saw on the screen, whether it's Carnivora or Baby BLUE or some other things we're working on to get back to growth with pet specialty, we think we have some initiatives in place that can help change the trajectory of that business, but we're not counting on it in our assumptions for now. We continue to partner with our pet specialty retailers.
Not to pile on too much, but what we always try to look at is what's the consumer takeaway? That consumer takeaway has been in the high single digits. We think that will continue as we go into our FY 2020, we'll probably be a touch above that because of the opportunity we have from a distribution standpoint.
All right. Great. Let's go Rob in the back.
Great. Thank you. I guess what I heard today was you're saying you can hold margins in North America. Blue Buffalo, I assume, is margin mix positive, you're speaking to margin expansion potential non-U.S. segments. I guess, if I think about what organic sales growth guidance is for 2020, what op profit guidance is obviously baked in some margin accretion within a year. Through the entire discussion around volume leverage, HMM ability, potential some pricing in North America, I guess just some commentary or just color feel is level of confidence in your ability to, one, hit the guidance for the year.
It doesn't seem like there's a tremendous amount of risk there. If that organic sales growth guidance is at 2%, let's say, it works, consumer takeaway ticks up, do you feel like you have the ability to potentially outperform your guidance on the operating profit side? If so, would that be reinvested back or could you drop that to the bottom line? That's it. Thanks.
I'll start by saying we have just given guidance, we're not going to start shading guidance or coloring guidance. We are very focused on getting back to getting that accelerated top line, getting up to the 1%-2%. We think we have really strong plans to get there, it's going to be driven by the continued growth in Blue Buffalo and the improvement in our North American business. Continued good performance in the other three segments. I don't want to drive by that either. We've also been very clear that we're going to be making some investments this year to help drive that.
Those investments are going to be across our brands on a whole number of vehicles that Jeff touched on earlier. It's going to be in capabilities. We talked about SRM and e-commerce. There's also some investment we're making behind those enterprise process transformation activities I mentioned. Very similar to what we did with global sourcing two or three years ago that has paid back very nicely. We expect the same in those. Those investments are obviously incorporated into this year's number.
Look, I'm glad we're getting the question, do you think you can outperform? It's not a question we were getting a year ago, even though we had confidence we could do what we said we're going to do. I take that as a sign that you all have confidence as well. Look, we're confident that we can do what we said we're going to do, as we were a year ago. I think what you hear us saying now is that we need to improve our organic growth, and we think we can do that. We think we have the initiatives to do that. We're certainly executing well. We executed well in fiscal 2019. We have a good line of sight. I think as an organization, we're going to execute well in fiscal 2020. We plan on delivering the guidance that we set out, just like we did this year.
All right. I think we are officially at the top of the hour, I think we'll go ahead and close it there. Thanks for everybody. Thanks for your time here. Hopefully, you had a chance to enjoy some product for those here in the audience. Thanks to all of you on the webcast. We'll go ahead and close the webcast now.