Okay, good morning, everyone. I'm Bonnie Herzog, and today I'm honored to open this year's conference as President of the CAGNI Organization. Now, on behalf of the CAGNI Board, I'd like to extend a warm welcome to all of you and to thank you for joining us at our 54th Annual Conference and helping us to continue the special tradition that is CAGNI. So, as reflecting over the weekend, just how special CAGNI is, as I've been fortunate to attend this conference for more than 25 years, I have wonderful memories over those years of attending fascinating presentations, networking with members, and, of course, the fun dinners and nights at the bar. Now, the conference began with a small group of analysts who wanted to meet with consumer companies in February, preferably someplace warm, and that's what we have today.
For those of you who are here for the first time, what makes this conference unique is the collegial atmosphere which joins the sell-side, buy-side, and consumer companies. Now, the format is relatively straightforward. We'll have formal presentation in this large space, followed by breakout sessions that generally take place in the room next door. So, it's out this door or these doors, and then to the right is the breakout room. So, I'd also like to emphasize that this conference would not be what it is without the generous support of the companies presenting and sponsoring events here this year. Now, special thanks to Conagra, which hosted a great welcoming reception last night, to General Mills, our first presenter, who also sponsored another energetic kickoff breakfast this morning, and then to all the companies and their management teams joining us here this week.
Without the support of these companies, the conference really would not be possible. And, of course, many thanks to our dedicated and resourceful board: Andrew Lazar, Brian Spillane, John Feeney, Andrew O'Connor, and Tim Gamache, and then our newest additions to the board, Steve Strycula and Olivia Tong, all fantastic analysts and investors. Now, we have some rules of the road this week. A quick reminder that breakfast will continue to be open to all members and all registered guests, while lunch will be a working lunch that is open to members only, and then dinner will be for members plus one adult guest. Also, I want to emphasize that all registered members and guests must wear badges to official events for security purposes. The Wi-Fi password also for this room is CAGNI2025.
And then finally, please remember to take all of your belongings with you at the end of the day. Lastly, just a quick reminder that I'm going to be hosting this year's President's Reception on Wednesday night following Altria's dinner. Now, the reception will start at around 9:00 P.M., and it's going to be held at Sir Harry's, a bar located at the Waldorf side of the hotel. All members are welcome, and I cannot wait to see you there. So now, with that, I'm going to, you know, welcome General Mills. They are our first presenters this morning, and in keeping with a very longstanding tradition and partnership that has lasted well over 40 years, they are going to be our first presentation of the conference. So, with us here today are Chairman and CEO Jeff Harmening and then CFO Kofi Bruce.
Now, this is an exciting time for General Mills as the company has made solid progress improving its organic top-line growth, including volume and market share trends against a challenging macro and competitive backdrop. Mills has been particularly thoughtful about portfolio reshaping over the past several years and is benefiting from its high-quality and diverse portfolio that aligns with current consumption trends. To build on its momentum, management has decisively stepped up investment to drive even greater value to consumers with the aim to position Mills for sustainable and profitable growth longer term. So, with that, please join me in once again thanking General Mills for a delicious breakfast and welcoming Jeff and Kofi to the stage to kick us off.
Thank you for that very kind introduction, Bonnie, and greetings to everyone here and listening on the webcast. It is an honor to kick off CAGNI Conference once again this year. I'm pleased to be joined on stage today by Chief Financial Officer Kofi Bruce and our Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance, Jeff Siemon. I'd also like to thank Alyssa Bauersachs, Cornell Burnett, and Keith Holm, and the rest of our team who did a terrific job supporting our presentation and pulling together this morning's breakfast and displays. Before we get started, I'll remind you that our remarks today include forward-looking statements that reflect our current views and assumptions. This slide lists factors that could cause our future results to be different than our current estimates. I'll begin this morning by sharing the key messages that I hope you'll take away from today's presentation.
2025 marks five years since we formally launched our Accelerate strategy. Over the past five years, we've invested meaningfully in our brands, significantly reshaped our portfolio, built a competitively advantaged digital infrastructure, and advanced our people and planetary commitments, all while delivering financial results that have met or exceeded our long-term goals. Delivering those results required tremendous agility as we navigated through the pandemic, supply disruptions, record levels of inflation, and the prolonged period of consumer stabilization that we've experienced more recently. We know that success going forward will require us to continue to adapt and invest to meet today's consumers with more remarkable experiences across all of our brands.
While the current environment brings opportunities and challenges, I am confident that our leading brands, our differentiated capabilities, and world-class people at General Mills put us in a strong position to deliver sustainable growth and attractive returns for our shareholders over the long term. During our remarks this morning, I'll review our Accelerate strategy and the results we've delivered over the past five years. Then, I'll share how we're working to generate sustainable growth by leveraging our Remarkable Experiences Framework. And finally, Kofi will explain how we translate that growth into shareholder value over the long term. For more than 150 years, General Mills has been innovating to deliver on consumers' needs and make food the world loves. Over that time, we've adapted to a changing world, served consumers with remarkable products, and grown into a company with $20 billion in annual net sales and nine iconic billion-dollar brands.
We've built a culture that attracts great talent and is recognized as a great place to work, to grow, and to belong. With our purpose as our North Star, our Accelerate strategy highlights the choices we've made about where to prioritize our resources to drive top-tier shareholder return. We expect these choices to result in long-term value creation through consistent sales growth, margin expansion, cash conversion, and cash return to our shareholders. Our choices on where to play center on product platforms and geographies where we have unique advantages and a right to win. From a geographic standpoint, we're focused on eight core markets, North America representing roughly 85% of our fiscal 2024 net sales base, and beyond North America, we prioritize China, Brazil, the U.K., France, Australia, and India, where we have the scale and infrastructure to drive profitable growth.
From a product platform standpoint, we're focused on five global platforms: cereal, pet food, snack bars, Mexican food, and ice cream that make up roughly 50% of our net sales, and where we have leading brands, global growth potential, and strong margins. We also have several local gem brands like Pillsbury, Totino's, Wan Chai Ferry, and Annie's, which make up another 30% of our net sales and have attractive long-term growth potential in a more limited geographic scope. We continue to evolve where we play to deliver on our long-term growth ambitions. We've been active in reshaping the portfolio over the past six years, including three transactions announced this fiscal year. We acquired the North America Whiteb ridge Pet Brands business in December.
This acquisition complements Blue Buffalo and expands our exposure to the cat feeding and pet treating subcategories, which collectively represent nearly half of the $52 billion in U.S. pet food category sales. We're particularly excited to leverage our capabilities to accelerate the Tiki Cat brand's strong momentum in the fast-growing wet cat food space. Last September, we announced our plans to divest our U.S. and Canadian yogurt businesses to Lactalis and Sodiaal, respectively. While yogurt as a category has been growing recently, our portfolio did not have a meaningful presence in the high-protein, low-sugar segment that has been driving the category's growth. We closed the sale of our Canadian yogurt business last month and continue to expect the U.S. yogurt divestiture to close in calendar 2025, subject to the receipt of regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.
In total, we've executed more than a dozen acquisitions and divestitures since fiscal 2018, turning over nearly 30% of our net sales base. This portfolio reshaping work has added more than a full point to our enterprise growth exposure while also enhancing our underlying margin profile. Through the changes in our portfolio, we have maintained our focus on the things we can control to drive growth, to drive long-term sustainable growth, and we've continued to execute on four key pillars of our Accelerate strategy: boldly building our brands, relentlessly innovating, unleashing our scale, and continuing to stand for good. We are putting our strategy into action with an eye toward the most meaningful trends that will define the consumer environment and represent the largest opportunities for growth over the next decade. First, continued demographic shifts will favor brands that can create connections with an increasingly diverse and older consumer base.
Second, we believe the humanization of pets will continue, leading pet parents to treat their pets more like members of the family and driving further premiumization within the pet food category. Third, technology advancements, including digitization, AI, and the development of drugs such as GLP-1s, will continue to transform consumers' lives and the ways in which they interact with our brands. And fourth, we believe climate and its impact on our value chain will continue to grow in importance for our consumers, our customers, employees, and our investors. Let me share how we're leveraging our Accelerate strategy to address these macro trends and drive sustainable, profitable growth. We're proud to have a portfolio that includes nine iconic brands that each generate more than $1 billion in retail sales.
Bold brand building has been a hallmark of our company over our history, and we're continuing to invest behind strong campaigns for brands like Blue Buffalo, Pillsbury, Totino's, Häagen-Dazs, and many more. Our media investment was up nearly 40% from fiscal 2019 to fiscal 2024, and we expect it to be up again in fiscal 2025. Our latest campaigns feature bold, relevant, and modern messages that resonate with today's consumers. So let's roll the video. In addition to boldly building our brands, we're focused on relentlessly innovating to deliver on evolving consumer needs. At General Mills, we believe innovation comes in many forms, from developing new products and platforms within our established brands to improving value for our consumers through new and renovation of our existing offerings.
We've been able to step up our contribution from innovation in recent years, including net sales from new product innovation up nearly 20% so far this year, and we're excited about our innovation pipeline, including several launches that have the potential to be significant growth contributions in fiscal 2026. Over the past five years, we've made significant investments to build a world-class digital infrastructure that positions General Mills to unleash our scale for growth and for profitability. Since 2019, we've doubled our investment in digital, data, and technology to transform our enterprise foundations and capabilities. This investment has unlocked significant opportunities for growth and efficiency in areas such as data-driven marketing and strategic revenue management, which I'll touch on briefly, and in supply chain digitization, which Kofi will cover later as key enablers of increased holistic margin management cost savings.
Our digital and technology foundation is unlocking opportunities for General Mills to strengthen our data-driven marketing capabilities. Our teams are leveraging AI-enabled tools to build consumer relationships and improve the effectiveness of our marketing mix and messaging. Our enhanced audience targeting capability allows us to target audiences independent of channel, which significantly reduces overlap and reach consumers more efficiently. We are also leveraging industry-leading tools to monitor our campaigns in real time and adjust our message delivery to drive the highest return on investment. For example, in fiscal 2024, we launched a highly effective media campaign for our new Progresso Protein line that utilized precision audience targeting to serve consumers' personalized creative when they were searching for protein and meal solutions. This year, we're targeting GLP-1 consumers and telling them how Progresso's protein and fiber benefits can fit seamlessly into their new routine.
Our access to robust data sets and analytical tools is enabling our strategic revenue management, or SRM, capability to deliver improved competitiveness across our operating segments. We're leveraging analytics to optimize our promotional investment, assessing and improving ROIs across thousands of merchandising executions by customer, by brand, and by product. Our SRM tools are uncovering opportunities to drive more profitable mix and to execute price pack architecture changes that allow us to deliver better value for consumers with the right size, in the right channel, and at the right price point. The final pillar of our Accelerate strategy is standing for good. One way this comes to life is through advancement of our global impact commitments, helping drive resilience in our planet for our people and for our business.
We've placed a differential focus on three commitments: reducing greenhouse gas emissions, advancing regenerative agriculture, and utilizing recyclable or reusable packaging, where we can have the most meaningful impact. And we continue to make progress on these goals. For example, we are investing to advance regenerative agriculture in the regions where our ingredients are grown, with the aim to improve soil health, water quality, biodiversity, and farming community outcomes. By partnering with farmers and local organizations, today, we have more than 600,000 acres engaged in regenerative agriculture programming, which puts us well on our way to achieving our goal of 1 million acres by 2030. I'm pleased with how we've executed on our Accelerate strategy since its launch five years ago, and I'm proud of the strong financial results we've delivered during that time.
Between fiscal 2019 and fiscal 2024, we generated compound annual growth of 5% in organic net sales, 5% in constant currency-adjusted operating profit, and 7% in constant currency-adjusted diluted EPS, all of which were in line or ahead of our long-term goals. That said, evolving consumer behavior in today's economic environment has resulted in a prolonged period of stabilization following lockdown-driven demand and then inflation-driven pricing. While we drove strong competitiveness during the past five years, it has not met our expectations over the last 18 months. We are fully committed to returning to sales growth and will take the actions and make the necessary investments to achieve that goal.
Utilizing a Remarkable Experiences Framework, we regularly assess each of our brands across five key areas: product, packaging, brand communication, omnichannel execution, and value, to identify where we are remarkable and differentiated versus competition and where we lack a distinct competitive advantage. With these insights, we can work to double down on our strengths or close the gap to a competitor to increase the likelihood that we will be the consumer's brand of choice. Deploying this framework helps us meet consumers where they are with brands that deliver on their evolving needs. Today's consumers are making food choices driven largely by two main factors: a focus on value and a focus on benefits. On value, consumers are choosing to save money by continuing behaviors they adopted when inflation was elevated. They're doing more meal planning.
They're utilizing technology to compare deals across outlets, and they're shopping a wider variety of channels to maximize savings. In some cases, consumers are leveraging these savings to spend on food that delivers benefits that matter most to them. They're seeking offerings that are packed with desired nutrients, especially protein, and they're managing special diets like gluten-free, dairy-free, and more. They're increasingly seeking bold flavors and experiences full of spice and buzzworthy foods. At the same time, they're looking for nostalgia and throwback favorites with forms and flavors that call back to their childhood, but with fresh and exciting benefits. Our number one priority is to accelerate our organic sales growth. To do that, we're working to improve our competitiveness by delivering more remarkable experiences that meet these evolving consumer needs. Let me share how we're leveraging the remarkable experiences framework to accelerate growth across our four segments.
Returning North America retail to growth will be critical to our long-term success. Our focus in North America retail is on improving the remarkability of our core brands to drive greater household penetration with growing consumer cohorts, ultimately leading to stronger market share and sales growth. While we're still in the early stages, let me show you where we are executing across a few of our largest categories. In U.S. cereal, our brand building, investment, and category-leading innovation have helped us build on our number one share position, with Big G Cereals getting two points of pound share over the last five years. To build on our leadership position, we're focused on delivering value, winning with our key consumer demographics, and leading the category in innovation.
Our successful Cheerios Heart campaign is back this quarter with heart-shaped O's and special edition boxes featuring the names of those who inspire consumers to make heart-healthy choices. We continue to lead the category in innovation with nine of the top 10 best-performing new product launches in fiscal 2025, helping drive almost a full point of increased household penetration with multicultural consumers. Our latest launch, Cheerios Protein, is already turning in the top third of the category in key channels. We're building on our leadership position in the billion-dollar granola segment, with retail sales up 18% this year, behind growth in our core and innovation like our Nature Valley Dipped line, which offers consumers indulgence and nine grams of protein per serving, and we partnered with the Ghost brand to reach Gen Z consumers with two new Ghost protein cereals.
This launch is attracting new cereal consumers with more than 70% of sales at key retailers being incremental to the category. Progresso Soup is also delivering remarkable new products that deliver on consumer demand for more functional benefits like protein. Progresso Protein was the number one innovation in the ready-to-eat soup category in fiscal 2024, and we've repeated this success again this fiscal year with the launch of Old El Paso Soups. Using the strong equity of our Old El Paso brand, we delivered a superior tasting product with aisle-disrupting packaging and remarkable brand communication, utilizing our partnership with football legends, the Watt Brothers.
Not only did we entice new consumers into the soup aisle with 15% of OEP soup sales coming from consumers who are new to the category, but we drew in more consumers to our Old El Paso branded products in the Mexican aisle as well, with almost 40% of shoppers who reach for an Old El Paso Soup later adding an Old El Paso Mexican product to their basket. Our Totino's Hot Snacks business has significant runway for growth, with a sizable household penetration opportunity, particularly outside the Midwest. This year, the brand worked to broaden awareness and consideration through a campaign focused on its winning affordability message: 10 rolls for about $1. Just last week, Totino's launched its first-ever Super Bowl commercial, which is tracking to be one of the game's most shared ads on social media.
Let's go ahead and roll a special extended version of the ad, which will see how many of you in the room are our target audience. Let's roll the film.
Thank you for sharing your Totino's Pizza Rolls. No problem. I'll miss you, Jazmo. I'll miss you too. I'll share them across the universe. Jazmo. Unfortunately, that's just a part of life. We didn't know him as well as you, so it's not as sad for us. Not that we didn't want to. Just didn't open up around us. Now he's dead. Ow! I got some gunk on my foot. Everybody okay? Yes. The door's hit his head so hard. The eyeball came off. He had nowhere to go, so the pressure shot it to here. Anthony, you'll be all right. You got to go to school tomorrow. Totino's Pizza Rolls, the most snackable pizza in the universe.
On Pillsbury refrigerated dough, we had a disappointing start to the key baking season last fall. So we made changes to improve our remarkability and our competitiveness. We made targeted investments to narrow price gaps and bring more value to consumers. We stepped up our taste renovation news on Pillsbury biscuits and cinnamon rolls, and we increased our media support with holiday advertising featuring the dough boy across crescent rolls, cookies, and cinnamon rolls. We're seeing positive early results, with Pillsbury pound volume turning positive in the month of January in Nielsen-measured channels. While our overall competitiveness in North America retail has improved versus last year, the improvement has come more slowly than we initially anticipated.
Moving forward, our focus is on delivering more of the elements of the remarkability that resonate for consumers, stepping up product news with a focus on bold flavors and functional benefits, enhancing our brand communication with data-driven marketing, leading in omnichannel execution with improved distribution, display, and e-commerce visibility, and bringing consumers more value by addressing price gaps and stepping up our price pack architecture work. Successfully executing these plans on our core brands will be the key to returning North America retail to growth. In turning to pet, we've made good progress on returning this business to growth by highlighting Blue Buffalo's ingredient superiority for pet parents. In the U.S., we're gaining pound share and holding dollar share across all channels. Our focus going forward is on continuing to accelerate our growth on Blue Buffalo and expand our portfolio. Pet is critical to our enterprise growth aspirations.
Pet food is a $52 billion category in the U.S. and a $130 billion category globally. And we expect the premium segment of the U.S. category, where our portfolio is focused, to return to mid-single-digit growth over time. To accelerate our pet business, we're focused on three key priorities: continuing to lead the humanization of pet food, growing our core Blue Buffalo business in North America, and driving our expanded portfolio, including Edgard & Cooper in Europe and White Bridge Pet Brands in the U.S. The trend toward humanization has been the key growth driver for the pet food globally, and Blue Buffalo has led this humanization trend for more than 20 years.
Our expanded portfolio now gives us more opportunities to help pet parents feed and treat their pets like family, and we will continue to bring innovation to the category to stay at the forefront of the humanization trend. We have a long track record of growth on Blue Buffalo, having nearly doubled the size of the brand since we acquired it in 2018. And while Blue Buffalo is the most loved and trusted natural pet food brand in the U.S., it represents only 6.5% of the total pet food category. To continue to grow and win more pet parents, our team is leveraging the Remarkable Experiences Framework to deliver a superior brand communication, products, and in-store execution, all at a compelling value.
Blue Buffalo was the first brand to teach pet parents to read ingredient labels and ensure that every ingredient was something they would feel good about feeding someone in their family. All of our products abide by the same nutritional philosophy we call the True Blue Promise. About a year ago, we introduced improved brand messaging to highlight ingredient superiority on our Life Protection Formula line. The messaging is bold, unapologetic, and authentic from one pet parent to another, and it's delivering strong results with Life Protection Formula pound volume up mid-single digits in the U.S. and measured channels thus far in fiscal 2025. We look to bolster that growth with remarkable innovation, including a new salmon flavor launching in the second half of fiscal 2025. On the Wilderness subline, we've made several changes to improve our performance.
Pulling a page from the successful Life Protection Formula playbook, we've created Wilderness's first-ever ingredient superiority ad, highlighting the fact that it has 30% more protein than the largest competitor in the space. Could we please run this ad?
When your dog hears the call of the wild, make sure they have the right fuel to answer. Blue Wilderness Chicken, with 30% more protein than Purina Pro Plan Chicken, is formulated to give your dog the energy they need to explore, to discover, and to take on the wild with you. Blue Wilderness, stay wild.
We also relaunched our Wilderness grain-free line, which is bringing in incremental pet households. And we provided pet parents more value by introducing a smaller bag size to reach a more affordable price point. These efforts have gained traction.
We've dramatically reduced Wilderness declines versus a year ago, with retail sales now growing in many parts of food, drug, mass, and e-commerce channels, though headwinds and pet specialty remain a drag on overall performance. Going forward, we'll keep working to highlight Wilderness's remarkability and return the business to growth. And on our Tastefuls Cat Food line, we've leveraged the taste superiority message to drive growth in both dry and wet food, with total pound volume up mid-single digits in the U.S. measured channels in fiscal 2025. Our third priority in pet is to drive our expanded portfolio. Our acquisition of White Bridge expands our presence in wet cat food, which is the fastest-growing segment in the U.S. pet food category.
And we're seeing exciting opportunities to accelerate our growth in pet outside North America, leveraging the Blue Buffalo brand as well as our recently acquired Edgard & Cooper brand, which has a strong and fast-growing position in the natural pet food category in Europe. With positive momentum in North America and a small but fast-growing presence in international markets, I am confident we'll continue to accelerate our pet food business and see it once again drive differential growth and profitability for General Mills. Before turning it over to Kofi, let me briefly highlight the growth opportunities in our other two segments. In international, our performance in fiscal 2025 has been mixed, with strong market share results in most regions offset by headwinds from a tough consumer environment in China, our largest market outside North America.
Our focus is on stepping up our growth on key platforms and markets while working to stabilize our performance in China. While our results have been challenged on Häagen-Dazs Shops, we see an opportunity to accelerate growth on our Häagen-Dazs retail business, building on our recent success with retail sales up 6% in our top markets in Q2. We're continuing to focus on driving distribution on our core products. We have renovation news on cookies and cream, and we're excited about the launch of a renovated stick bar in Europe and in Asia. We're also looking to accelerate on our distributor markets, capitalizing on distribution opportunities for Häagen-Dazs, Old El Paso, and Nature Valley in markets like Mexico, the Nordics, Germany, and the Middle East. And finally, we're laser-focused on taking the necessary steps to turn around our top and bottom-line performance in China and Brazil.
We've seen some green shoots recently, including growth for Häagen-Dazs in retail sales in China and a return to retail sales growth for the Yoki brand in Brazil. And we have more work to do to fully deliver on our growth goals for international. Turning to North America food service, we are looking to maintain our positive momentum that's delivering mid-single-digit organic sales growth in the first half of fiscal 2025, with more than 70% of our measured businesses growing or holding share. Looking ahead, we're focused on continuing our leadership in K through 12 schools, where we stayed ahead of our competition through a regulation-ready portfolio of reduced sugar cereals, individually wrapped muffins, and whole grain cereal bars. And we'll leverage our industry-leading capabilities in dough to expand our presence in frozen baked goods, bringing in-store bakeries, restaurants, and non-commercial operators remarkable products while helping them minimize back-of-house labor.
In summary, I firmly believe that even as we navigate the near-term challenges of a prolonged consumer recovery, our continued focus on executing our accelerate strategy and investing in delivering remarkable experience for consumers will position General Mills to generate consistent, profitable sales growth over the long term. I'd now like to hand it over to Kofi to talk about how we'll translate that growth into attractive returns for our shareholders.
Thanks, Jeff, and hello, everyone. I'm incredibly proud of the progress we've made in recent years to advance our accelerate strategy, reshape our portfolio, build capabilities, and deliver strong financial performance. Let me share how we think about driving shareholder value, the results we've delivered in recent years, and how we plan to create value for our shareholders over the long term.
Our strategy for maximizing shareholder returns centers on four key areas: sustainable sales growth, margin expansion, disciplined capital management to convert earnings into cash, and returning that cash to shareholders via dividends and share repurchases. Over the long term, we aim to deliver 2%-3% organic net sales growth. When coupled with modest margin expansion, this will generate mid-single-digit adjusted operating profit growth. And we then strive to convert at least 95% of adjusted net earnings into free cash flow, returning approximately 80%-90% of this to shareholders through dividends and repurchases. This approach targets mid to high single-digit adjusted, diluted EPS growth, and ultimately top-tier shareholder returns. And as Jeff mentioned, over the past five years, we've delivered growth that met or exceeded each of these long-term goals.
While I'm proud of our team's success over the past five years, the prolonged value-seeking orientation we've seen from consumers recently has presented challenges to our ability to deliver organic sales growth in the short term. And let me be very clear. We are not satisfied with this performance. We are fighting every day to return to the growth we know that this business is capable of. And we have initiatives in flight across the enterprise to reignite top-line growth. And you've heard about many of them from Jeff today. We look forward to accelerating our performance and continuing to create value for our shareholders. As we look at this path forward, we are laser-focused on three levers to improve our organic sales growth. First, we are working aggressively to further improve our competitiveness and capture more of the growth available in our categories.
This is the lever most in our control, and as you've heard from Jeff, it's where we're spending most of our focus and our resources across the enterprise, guided by the Remarkable Experiences Framework. Second, our portfolio shaping efforts continue to strengthen our growth profile. We've done significant and productive work here already, and we'll look selectively at opportunities to further reshape our portfolio as we go forward in the future. Third, we expect to benefit as our categories gradually return to their historical growth rates. While recent category pound volume growth has generally been in line with or even slightly ahead of those historical rates, the overall level of price mix has not kept up with long-term trends. This is not surprising given the significant level of inflation-driven pricing we saw in our categories over the past three years.
We'll see how category trends evolve in the coming quarters, but for the moment, we'll continue to focus on what we can control, which is our remarkability and our competitiveness. Following five consecutive years through fiscal 2023, where we held or gained share in at least 50% of our priority businesses worldwide, our market share performance took a step back in 2024 as private label and smaller brands improved their service and got back on shelf more regularly. We made progress in improving competitiveness during fiscal 2025, though it has come more slowly than we had initially expected. Fiscal year to date, through January, we've grown or held pound share in roughly half of our priority businesses worldwide. Our dollar share has also improved, but it is lagging pound share due to the investments we've made to bring consumers more value in this environment.
Moving forward, our work to bring innovation, brand building, and greater value to consumers should help us further improve our competitiveness and grow more in line with category trends. In terms of reshaping our portfolio, Jeff mentioned that we turned over nearly 30% of our net sales base since fiscal 2018 and added more than a full point to our underlying growth exposure through these changes. We'll continue to look for opportunities for further bolt-on acquisitions or divestitures, leveraging our always-on M&A capability. In total, we expect that by increasing our competitiveness and benefiting from a return to historical category growth trends, we can generate 2%-3% organic net sales growth over the long term, further supported by opportunistic portfolio shaping. With a base of 2%-3% organic net sales growth, we can deliver mid-single-digit growth in adjusted operating profit with a modest level of margin expansion.
Our fiscal 2024 adjusted gross margins of 34.8% were slightly above our pre-pandemic margin, reflecting our strong cost savings and strategic revenue management efforts, offsetting the impact of significant cumulative inflation in recent years. Our fiscal 2024 adjusted operating profit margin of 18.1% was up 120 basis points versus fiscal 2019, driven largely by leverage on overhead expenses. This margin strength provides us flexibility to reinvest into the business, to improve our competitiveness, and accelerate our growth. To fund the investments required for stronger top-line growth going forward, it is critical that we find ways to drive increased efficiency throughout our enterprise. This starts with our ongoing focus on holistic margin management, our industry-leading COGS productivity program. General Mills has leveraged our capability to generate 4% savings in our cost of goods sold for more than a decade.
In recent years, we've been able to accelerate our savings above that level as we began to reap the benefits of our investments in supply chain digitization. With a continued strong pipeline bolstered by digital supply chain initiatives, we have good visibility to generating 4%-5% COGS again in fiscal 2026. We expect our move to supply chain digitization to drive increased efficiency and resiliency, leading to better service at lower cost and, in many cases, with reduced carbon footprint. Our journey began with a significant investment in connected data foundations. We moved our business and operational data to the cloud and instituted governance measures to ensure strong data integrity across the enterprise. From there, we launched autonomous planning in our logistics network and AI-enabled execution across our manufacturing facilities, both of which have unlocked significant savings opportunities.
For example, the integration of AI in our logistics planning process has resulted in higher levels of customer service, reduced warehouse and transportation costs, and fewer trucks on the road each year. Our AI models assess more than 5,000 daily shipments from plants to warehouse, turning 50% of these shipments into no-touch automation and generating more than $20 million in savings since fiscal 2024. In manufacturing, our line operators have access to real-time performance data that allows them to optimize throughput, reduce cost, and minimize waste. This year alone, we will save more than $50 million in waste reduction. Looking forward, we will continue to expand autonomous planning and AI-enabled execution.
We'll take the next step to advance towards a connected ecosystem with our supplier and our customer partners, creating an end-to-end network to predict and manage upstream disruptions and ensuring we have the right product in the right place, the right time, at the lowest possible cost. The third lever of our shareholder return model is converting earnings to cash. We've delivered tremendous performance on core working capital management for more than a decade, including generating nearly $1 billion in additional cash since fiscal 2019 through lower core working capital balances, driven primarily by a focus on payment terms optimization. Going forward, we continue to see additional opportunities to drive further core working capital optimization and maintain our top-tier cash conversion cycle. The improvements we've made in core working capital have helped us maintain a strong track record of converting earnings into cash.
In each of the past six three-year rolling periods, we've driven free cash flow conversion ahead of our long-term goal of 95%. This includes a cumulative $7.4 billion in free cash flow generated at a 96% conversion rate in the three years ending in fiscal 2024. With strong cash generation as a foundation, our capital allocation priorities reflect our thoughtful approach to utilizing cash to drive attractive returns for our shareholders. We see our balance sheet as a strategic asset, and we're deploying capital in shareholder-friendly ways. Our first priority is investing back in the business, with capital expenditures expected to be approximately 4% of net sales over the long term. The next cash priority is our dividend. General Mills has paid a dividend without interruption for 126 years, and we expect to grow our dividend roughly in line with earnings over time.
After dividends, we'll look to deploy our cash for strategic acquisitions that enhance our growth priorities and our growth profile. Our final capital allocation priority is share repurchases. We expect to drive 1-2% average annual reduction in net share count over a multi-year timeframe. We remain highly focused on maintaining a strong balance sheet while returning cash to shareholders. Over the past five full fiscal years, we've grown our dividend rate by 22%. We've reduced net shares outstanding by 4%, and we've returned a cumulative $11.1 billion to shareholders over that time. We believe our model of high-quality, sustainable growth, and disciplined capital allocation will enable us to continue to drive strong cash returns to shareholders over the long term. Let me close by summarizing the key messages for today. We've successfully executed our Accelerate strategy and delivered strong performance over the past five years.
Amid today's more challenging consumer environment, we're investing to meet consumers with more remarkable experiences and accelerate our top-line profile, and we're confident that our unique combination of leading brands, differentiated capabilities, and world-class people puts General Mills in a strong position to deliver on our ambitions and drive strong returns for our shareholders over the long term. With that, I think we'll take a few questions, and I'll turn it over to Jeff Siemon.
Well, wow, literally hustling down with the microphones. Nice job, team. Okay, let's start right up here with Ken Goldman.
I'm J.P. Morgan. Kofi, you mentioned that progress in 2025 has come more slowly than expected. At the same time, you're not updating investors today on your financial outlook for the current year. Can you talk about this decision a little bit and what some of the key elements are that you're looking for, either exogenous or endogenous, that might affect your view of the year? Thank you.
I know you asked Kofi, but I'll be the proxy for Kofi on this one. And what's not going to be a shocker, it's been a volatile couple of months. And I was saying three kind of main ways. One would be Nielsen movement data, which I'll get into in a little bit. And then the second would be on customer orders, and the third would be government, and particularly in tariffs. And so as we look at those three, we wanted to get a few more data points before we either affirmed or redid guidance for the year. And having a few more weeks of Nielsen data under our belts and a little bit more clarity on what's coming with tariffs and customer orders, we thought would be in order.
If I take those one at a time on Nielsen movement, our Nielsen movement is roughly the same as it was last quarter. We've made improvements in a couple of important areas like Pillsbury and Totino's. We showed those today. We made investments, and those have paid off at least as well as we thought. They've been offset by some softness in the snacking category. This is going up against comparisons that were really tough from a year ago. We saw a lot of growth in January last year. We just want to make sure as we look at the next four weeks, do those trends continue, or do we see some stabilization? The second is in our customer orders. We expected after the timing of Thanksgiving holiday to bleed some inventory in our North America retail business.
We've seen a couple of points more than we thought. And we were kind of wondering, is that really a matter of people's big customers' year-ends ending in December and January? Is there something else going on? Because we don't have a high level of inventory with our customers. And so we want to see how Q3 closes and see if that's something that's more pronounced or whether it's something that's short-term in nature. Over time, it doesn't really matter. But as you're thinking about a year, it matters. And then in pet food, we've been growing pound share and holding dollar share. So we feel good about that in pet food. Pet food customer orders are always a little more volatile than they are in North America retail, particularly because we have a lot of e-commerce customers. And so our sales through our customers are relatively flat.
But we've seen a four- or five-point drag on customer inventory relative to sales. And so is that just something that happens this quarter or what happens over time? And again, I'm not concerned about that, but as we think about guidance for the year. And then finally, with tariffs, again, 95% of our products are sourced in the U.S. And so over time, tariffs aren't really meaningful for us. But to the extent there's a tariff on Canadian goods, which affects oats, or there's a tariff on tin plate steel, which could affect packaging on things like soup or wet pet food or Yoplait lids, is just something we want to make sure we have some more knowledge of. And so that's why we didn't reiterate guidance today.
Again, another four weeks will give us some more clarity on all these things, and we'll give an update as we do Q3 earnings.
Great. Going to Andrew Lazar here on the off.
Hi. I'm Andrew Lazar, Barclays. I know it's too early to get overly specific on fiscal 2026, but maybe you can go through some of the sort of key puts and takes just because there's a lot going on, whether it's reinvestment in the business, ultimately the closing of the U.S. yogurt sale, things like this, just to kind of level set us on sort of what we should be thinking about next year. Thank you.
Sure. Thanks for the question, Andrew. As you can imagine, we do remain laser-focused on doing what's necessary to drive continued improvement in our competitiveness. It should come as no surprise that the consumer environment and the expectations, at least in the near term for the consumer environment, would put us in a position where even as we continue to expect improvement, probably not expecting to see us grow in line with our 2%-3% long-term target, largely because we expect price mix to remain somewhat muted as a contribution in the near term. So I think that's the first piece.
I think the second, as we look at sort of the profile for cost and the cost environment, based on what we know right now, we feel confident that our 4%-5% levels of COGS productivity will put us in a position where we will have flexibility to accommodate reinvestment back into the business, and our posture remains situated so. There are some structural things that, as we go into the next year, that are probably important to call out. We will have a 53rd week, which mechanically and in line with our past practice, we have generally reinvested back into the business, and we would expect to do so again next year to further aid our goal in improving competitiveness. Lastly, we expect to close our US yogurt sale.
While we are still going through the customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval, assuming that we're to close on the first day of our fiscal year, we would expect that to be about a five-point drag on operating profit and about a four-percentage point drag on earnings per share. That's probably up modestly from what we said at the time of announcement of the deal and really just a function of the fact that since then we've acquired White Bridge and are accommodating a little bit more debt and a little bit more debt paydown with that. We do expect to use a significant portion of the proceeds, however, for share repurchase still.
Looks like we're into the seconds on the timer here. So I think we'll take the rest of the questions over the breakout session.
Yeah, I think we're going to pause there. Thank you again, Jeff and Kofi, for a great presentation. So the breakout room is out these doors and to the right. Thanks.