Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening to those of you abroad. Thank you all so much for joining us today, both in person and virtually. I'm Alexis Tessier, VP of Investor Relations. I have a few housekeeping items to review before we get started, and kindly ask you to make sure that your phones and computers are on silent. Please be advised that during this presentation, we may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. These include expectations and assumptions regarding the company's future operation and financial performance. These statements are based on current expectations and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations.
Please refer to our 10-K, 10-Q, and other reports filed from time to time with the SEC, as well as the press release issued this morning for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could cause results to differ from any forward-looking statement made today. The slides accompanying today's presentation can be found on our corporate website under the Investors section, which is also where you'll be able to find a replay of the webcast. We will be hosting a Q&A session after the presentation, and we'll be taking questions from both those in the room as well as those attending virtually. Online participants, please type your questions into the webcast portal. You should see a box on the lower left-hand side of your screen. You may enter questions at any time during the presentation, and we will get to as many as possible during the Q&A session.
Last, but certainly not least, you may have noticed all of the Hain product we have around the room and outside, as well as the goodie bags on your chairs. Please feel free to add to the bag from the racks and tables outside. We have some really delicious snacks, beverages, and meal prep items, as well as personal care items that we'd love for you to try. Now I'll kick things off with a short video.
Introducing a new Hain Celestial. We're thinking differently about our future, redefining what's possible, and rediscovering our ambition as a growth leader of better-for-you brands. Driven by our purpose to inspire healthier living for people, communities, and our planet. We're reimagining our business in several ways: through optimizing our global operating model to drive scale, strengthening our end-to-end supply chain, building our capabilities across revenue growth management, integrated business planning, and working capital management. We're also redefining our go-to-market strategy through reinvesting in brand building, channel expansion, and innovation. We're driving growth in five key geographies: the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, and Europe. With our global portfolio of brands across five better-for-you categories: snacks, baby and kids, beverages, meal prep, and personal care. Across our portfolio of brands, two-thirds are number one or number two in their categories.
Our mission is to build purpose-driven brands that make healthier living more attainable by empowering our people, engaging our partners, and living our values. Be curious, own it, foster inclusion, and win together. We have the right team, the right brands, and the right building blocks to achieve our long-term growth aspirations. So join us as we build our future for growth.
Good morning, and welcome to Hain Celestial's Investor Day 2023. Since I arrived at Hain in January, we've been working as a global leadership team to evaluate our business holistically and to make the bold, transformative choices that will define our next chapter of growth. We've already made some changes to the business. We moved out of our headquarters in New York and identified a new global headquarters location in Hoboken, New Jersey, which will be the focal point of our hub and spoke working model. As we said in our recent release, this space is right-sized for our business. It supports the effectiveness of how we work across all of our locations and delivers efficiency in our overall footprint costs. We've also made some changes to our board of directors. In September, we appointed Neil Campbell to our board.
In turn, Mark Schiller and Dean Hollis will not be standing for re-election. I want to thank both Dean and Mark for their years of leadership and their contributions to Hain Celestial as CEO, as board chair, and especially for their support during my year of transition. And finally, Dawn Zier, our board chair, is in attendance today. Dawn has been a valuable partner in resetting our strategic direction. In addition to the changes to the board, earlier this year, we established a global leadership team with responsibility across the enterprise. I am joined today by our executive leadership team, many of whom you'll hear from throughout this presentation. Chris Bellairs, our former Chief Financial Officer. Ari Labell, President of our North America region. Wolfgang Goldenitsch, President of our international region. Jennifer Davis, our Chief Communications Officer. Kristy Meringolo, our Chief Legal and Corporate Affairs Officer.
Ken Thomas, our Chief Information Officer and Head of Business Services. Steve Golliher, our Chief Supply Chain Officer. Arlene Karram, our Chief R&D Officer, and Joanne Murray, our Chief People Officer. I'd like to formally introduce Lee Boyce, who was recently appointed as our Chief Financial Officer over there.
We are thrilled to have Lee join our team. Chris and Lee will be transitioning over the next few weeks, and you're obviously going to be hearing quite a bit from Lee in the coming quarters. We are excited to spend this morning with you and taking you through Hain Reimagined. We'll start by providing a little bit of context on the business and what prompted us to revisit our strategy. We will review the shared vision and our plan to holistically transform Hain, which we are calling Hain Reimagined. Ari and Wolfgang will then talk about our growth outlook and the path to deliver in each of our core categories, including recent momentum we are seeing in the business.
Ken and Steve will then talk about our Fuel Program, which is a critical component of Hain Reimagined that will enable us to fund our growth and drive margin expansion. Chris will detail the financial algorithm that Hain Reimagined delivers and how we are evolving our business, our P&L, and importantly, our balance sheet. Finally, we will end with a Q&A session to address any outstanding questions that you might have. I'd like to start by sharing a view of our company and setting the strategic context for our bold Hain Reimagined plan. We're in our thirtieth year as a company, but we've never been more clear on who we are and where we will drive differentiated value for our consumers, for our customers, and importantly, our shareholders. We are a global better-for-you company.
We are a global leader in better-for-you categories spanning food, beverage, and personal care. We operate in five consumer-centric, global, better-for-you platforms: snacks, baby and kids, beverages, meal prep, and personal care. We hold a strong position in five developed markets with a high penetration of better-for-you products, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, and Europe. We have a portfolio of brands that hold leadership positions in their respective categories, but importantly, with opportunities to both expand, reach, and gain share. We have an experienced leadership team working with a passionate and committed global team. I'd like to really share what makes Hain distinctive. While many of our peers in consumer goods have some natural and organic options in their portfolios, our business is focused almost exclusively on better-for-you.
From on-the-go snacks to beverages to body and sun care, we are committed to helping people achieve their aspirations to lead healthier lives. Our focus on better-for-you provides a deep understanding of the consumer and their evolving needs around healthier living. The breadth of our portfolio enables us to support consumer demand for healthier options to meet everyday needs across a wide variety of categories. In snacking, whether at home or on the go, our portfolio includes great-tasting brands like Garden Veggie and Terra chips in North America and Hartley's in the UK. For parents, encouraging healthy eating habits early, from babies to school-aged children, our Earth's Best and Ella's Kitchen brands are leading natural and organic brands in North America and in the UK.
For consumers seeking everyday beverage choices with healthy herbal benefits or plant-based, dairy-free options, we have a portfolio of brands such as Celestial Seasonings, Natumi, and Joya. For shoppers looking for ingredients to prepare healthier meals at home, we have leading meat-free brands like Yves and Linda McCartney, nut butters like MaraNatha, premium oils under the Spectrum brand, and a leading better-for-you yogurt brand in Greek Gods. Lastly, healthy eating isn't just, or healthy living isn't just what you put in your body, it's also what you put on your body, and we have a portfolio of brands in personal care to support consumer needs in sun and skin care with Alba Botanica, Hair and Body with Avalon Organics, and soaps and cleansers under the Live Clean brand.
The breadth and depth across our platforms and our geographies gives us a deep understanding of consumer demand for better-for-you options across a wide variety of categories. We see opportunity to leverage our synergies and share innovation, best practices, and learnings across geographies and brands within our global platforms. In addition to the synergies across our regions, our balanced portfolio allows us to meet consumer needs for value, for convenience, and for availability across, across a wide variety of channels and price points. For example, in our international business, as the market balances between brand and private label, premium and value retail outlets, our portfolio mix enables broad coverage and share growth in key categories like plant-based meats and beverages. We face challenges in the macro environment over the last two years, which have presented significant headwinds for our business.
While they're still present, these headwinds have begun to ease. The plant-based meats and non-dairy beverage categories were impacted by softening consumer demand. However, we are beginning to see stabilization in both of these categories. Yves remains the market leader in Canada and is gaining share, and we've seen private label, meat-free, and non-dairy businesses return to growth in the UK and in Europe. Our capabilities, our capacity, our reputation for quality provide a strong market position to build upon, and Ari and Wolfgang will provide examples of some of the early momentum we're beginning to see in both of these categories. We've seen global supply chain disruptions across the industry and have taken steps to stabilize our operations in key areas with expanded capacity, capability, and network contingency. Like everyone else, global inflation created significant cost increases and put pressure on margins across the entire consumer goods landscape.
The plan you will see today balances volume, price, and cost, and allows us to proactively manage inflationary pressure while we ensure availability and affordability for our consumers. We've seen increased competitive activity in our categories as more brands try to push into the natural and organic space. However, by leveraging the insights of our focused portfolio in better-for-you, we believe we are uniquely positioned to support consumer demand for healthier options. In addition to the external, we faced internal challenges in executing against these changing external dynamics, resulting in inconsistent performance and reactive attention to category challenges. As a company, we need to be more disciplined in how we operate our business and to make the changes to be more nimble and more focused. The plan you will see today is one that drives improved prioritization around where we will invest to realize our full potential.
Despite these challenges in recent years, we remain confident in the consumer demand for natural and organic products. Across categories, we see increasing consumer interest in healthier options and healthier lifestyles. In fact, nearly all U.S. shoppers buy better-for-you products across nearly every category. We believe this trend towards healthier living is a long-term trend that will continue to grow in importance for consumers. And furthermore, we believe our exclusive focus in better-for-you positions Hain with a clear opportunity to expand our reach in our core markets. Since I arrived in January, we've taken a broad and holistic review of our business. We uncovered areas of inefficiency that have impacted our ability to realize the consistent and profitable delivery potential of our business.
As such, we've taken an unvarnished look at our brand and product portfolio, our route to market, the efficiency of our supply chain, and our cost structure, and how we are organized to execute. We've made a number of bold and early choices regarding where to play, the categories and geographies that make up our core, and how we will win, where we need to step change critical capabilities to gain share and deliver consistent results. The plan you will see today represents a bold transformation in our business, how we go to market, our cost structure, our organization and operating model, our culture, and our ways of working. This is a holistic reimagining of Hain Celestial. I'm excited to share more about our future vision for Hain. Everything we do at Hain stems from our purpose, our mission, and our vision.
Our company's purpose is to inspire healthier living for people, communities, and the planet through better-for-you brands. Our entire organization is rallied behind this purpose. In all that we do, we work as a team towards the mission to build purpose-driven brands that make healthier living more attainable by empowering our people, engaging with our partners, and living our values. Our vision is to be the global growth leader of better-for-you brands, and we are excited to bring our new and refreshed mission to reality. Making a positive impact on the world around us has always been core to the ethos of Hain. This is why we developed a comprehensive impact strategy centered around three core areas: healthier planet, healthier products, and healthier people. For healthier planet, we strive to reduce our environmental footprint and resource use by driving reductions in energy, water use, and waste.
Within healthier products, we seek to enable consumers to make healthier shopping choices by providing accessible, healthier products through purpose-driven brands. And to support this, we developed a global sustainable packaging strategy with robust goals for reducing our plastic usage. For example, we aim for 100% of rigid plastics to be recyclable by 2030, and we are committed to selling better-for-you products. Today, 96% of our global food products contain no artificial flavors or colors, and 76% of our products are non-GMO. Finally, as a part of our healthier people commitment, we engage and inspire our employees and communities to live healthier lives. We've established several charity partnerships with organizations such as Feed the Children, Feeding America, Convoy of Hope, and Fare Share to direct unsold products to those in need.
Importantly, diversity and inclusion sits at the heart of our company. We are proud to have 43% female talent in leadership across the global organization and 21% racially or ethnically diverse talent in our leadership team. The principles and commitments within the three pillars of our impact strategy inform everything that we do, and we've embedded these impact goals into our day-to-day processes, our projects, and our performance metrics, and are fully committed to continuing to drive a positive impact. Today, we are excited to launch our holistic plan for Hain Reimagined. Sort of feels like a coming out party, to be honest. Our company is both a disruptor in the broader consumer products landscape and a scale player in natural and organic better-for-you.
For that reason, we believe that it's critical that our Hain Reimagined plan blends both the traditional scale consumer goods growth models with the disruptive brand playbook that will enable the growth of our portfolio of brands while harnessing the power of our reach and scale. We participate in attractive categories with better-for-you tailwinds, but we're also obsessed with solving consumer needs. We will leverage our scale distribution network and our partnerships with our strategic customers, while also being focused and disciplined in how we will expand the reach and the penetration of our brands. We will build brands that balance mass appeal with a focus on clear consumer targets, demand spaces, and a reason for being.
We will realize scale benefits in our operations and our cost structure while leveraging a test and learn playbook to trial concepts in the market quickly and fail or scale fast. Finally, to find and retain the best people, we will combine elements of the global talent acquisition and development models of large consumer companies, while also maintaining an entrepreneurial culture that creates unique opportunities for our people. In short, we will out small the big and out big the small. Hain Reimagined is grounded in four strategic pillars. First, we will focus. We have a winning portfolio organized around five consumer-centric global platforms. We have simplified our footprint in five core markets, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, and Europe, and we are aligning our organization and operating model to that footprint, leveraging our scale and realizing synergies across the business. Next, we will grow.
Our growth plan is focused on share gain in three core better-for-you platforms, snacks, baby and kids, and beverages. To do this, third, we will build. We will enhance our critical capabilities to execute our growth plan. These will include improving our brand building by developing a disruptive marketing playbook and a capability that more seamlessly integrates brand strategy, experiential marketing, and e-commerce. We will drive channel expansion and away-from-home and omni e-commerce to open up new growth areas, to build awareness and reach for our brands, and to improve our mix. And we will drive innovation with a strong focus on consumer needs, with the ambition of becoming a leader in bringing disruptive, better-for-you concepts to market. To fund all of this, our final and last pillar is Fuel. We have our costs and our SG&A. In combination, the execution of these pillars, go-to-market .
To fund all of this, our final and last pillar is Fuel. We have a company-wide program to identify efficiencies across our P&L, and to balance our P&L and balance sheet that will unlock savings, allow us to Fuel our growth plan, and to expand our margins. We will be disciplined in revenue growth management with a focus on net price realization, on promotional effectiveness, price pack architecture, and product mix to drive profitable growth. We will execute initiatives against working capital management to improve our cash conversion cycle. We will drive end-to-end operational efficiency by optimizing our costs and our SG&A. In combination, the execution of these pillars, Focus, Grow, Build, and Fuel , will unlock our financial algorithm and enable compelling shareholder returns. I'm now going to take you through each one of these pillars in a little bit more detail.
First, I'm going to start with focus. We have a strong starting position with a diverse portfolio of better-for-you brands across five attractive and growing platforms, snacks, baby and kids, beverages, meal prep, and personal care. We have defined a clear role for each of these brands and platforms in our portfolio. We will prioritize our investments and our resourcing against the three key platforms where we expect to grow and gain share, snacks, baby and kids, and beverages. Starting with these growth brands, we have a strong portfolio of better-for-you snacks with strong brand awareness and a unique consumer proposition, such as Garden Veggie and TERRA chips. Ari will take you through more of the plans for growth, specifically in snacking.
Baby and kids is a truly global platform for us, with two leading brands that will be critical for our future growth, Earth's Best in North America and Ella's Kitchen in the U.K. and Europe. Wolfgang will walk through the exciting plans and early momentum that we're seeing in this space. In our beverage platform, Celestial Seasonings is a leader, is the leader in herbal tea, which we will leverage as we expand the portfolio into broader tea offerings and new occasions. We will also stabilize the position of our non-dairy beverage brands, Joya and Natumi in Europe, which Wolfgang will cover in greater detail. In the balance of our businesses, given the size of these businesses and their recent performance, we will maintain or stabilize the brands in our meal prep and personal care platforms.
These businesses will deliver critical value to the P&L, both in reducing top-line pressure, but also in improving our margins. Once these businesses are stabilized and in a strong position, we will explore our strategic options around these categories and brands. We believe this focus strategy enables us to rightsize the resource allocation behind the platforms with the greatest potential. In addition to our portfolio focus, we are simplifying our global footprint. We currently distribute our products in over 75 markets. However, our five largest markets, the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, and Europe, represent over 90% of our net sales. We believe these are the most attractive markets with high growth, high consumer better-for-you penetration, and offer us strong potential to extend our platform positions.
Going forward, we will focus our footprint in these in operating our businesses with offices, commercial leadership, and corporate functions in those markets. Where we manufacture, we will streamline our manufacturing footprint in these five markets with efficiencies in our owned production and our co-manufacturing network. In distributing our products beyond our direct presence in these five markets, we'll serve our broader footprint through a network of strong distribution partnerships. To drive stronger results, we will change the way we work and operate as a company. We've initiated a redesign of our global operating model, aligning our organization and our resourcing strategy to where we expect the greatest growth in our business. In the future, we will operate our business in two macro regions, North America and International, with four regional operating units underneath.
This will allow us to realize benefits of scale in our corporate functions by centralizing global centers of excellence and expanding shared services with lighter regional support. This new operating model enables us to drive synergies between our global businesses, and in platforms like baby and kids and categories like meat-free, we will drive stronger global coordination and consumer insight sharing to leverage marketing, product, and innovation across geographies. In addition to these structural changes, we have dramatically improved our organizational effectiveness, driving increased collaboration and speed through new processes and ways of working. We believe these structural and process changes to our global operating model will allow us to better leverage the scale and reach of Hain. Growth is the second pillar of our plan. We believe in the strong underlying growth of better-for-you across our categories.
While better-for-you penetration is growing, there continues to be significant headroom in our most important categories, and paired with growing consumer interest in healthier alternatives that Fuel their day-to-day, we believe we will continue to experience tailwinds in better-for-you. Furthermore, shopper demand in better-for-you continues to be attractive, making more trips and spending nearly twice as much as the average buyer. Notably, while we expect continued tailwinds from our leadership in better-for-you, we expect our plan to drive share gain in key platforms. We expect snacks to be the largest contributor to our growth, with significant gains in driving velocity, expanding into away-from-home channels, and launching breakthrough media campaigns that drive awareness of our brands as healthy, fun, and delicious.
In baby and kids, we will deliver growth through innovation of our two leading brands, Earth's Best and Ella's Kitchen, with a focus in snacks and expanding beyond babies and toddlers to grow with our consumers as they get older. In addition, we aim to accelerate our e-commerce sales, especially the high-growth category of purees. Within beverages, specifically tea, we expect to grow by innovating to deliver enhanced consumer benefits, such as sleep and wellness, and more convenient formats. And while we expect to drive the bulk of our growth in snacks, baby, kids, and beverages, we are focused on stabilizing performance in the areas that have been under pressure more recently, including non-dairy beverage, meat-free, and personal care. Our plan will focus on mitigating top-line pressure and improving margins in these businesses. Our third pillar is build.
To realize our growth plan and deliver sustainable results, we recognize the need to materially enhance our capabilities in brand building, in channel expansion, and in innovation. While this requires investment, our plan will focus on driving more productivity from the dollars we spend today, targeting our resources in the areas where we expect to drive growth and changing the way we work. I'll share a bit more detail on how we'll enhance each of these critical capabilities. Increasing awareness and household penetration of our brands is a significant unlock to our growth plan, and to do this, we need to materially enhance our brand-building capabilities. We plan to take a get better before we get bigger approach in how we spend.
We will focus first on increasing the productivity of the dollars we spend today, then increasing our investments in marketing to be more in line with industry average over time. We will focus on fewer, more substantive priorities, distorting our marketing resources to the brands in our core platforms, where we expect to accelerate growth and gain share, better-for-you snacks, baby and kids, and beverages. As we rightsize our spend, we will continue improving efficiencies and rebalancing our working versus non-working marketing spend. And we've developed a new brand-building playbook at Hain called Agile & Amped . Through this approach, we will deliver fully integrated omni-channel campaigns that are deeply rooted in consumer insights. To build awareness and drive household penetration, we will follow an always-on approach to brand support to keep our prioritized brands top of mind with our consumers.
We're integrating our brand strategy, experiential marketing, and omni-channel capability into a marketing center of excellence to build truly integrated plans. As an example of how Agile & Ampe d works, let's look at it in practice with Earth's Best. At the heart of Earth's Best is an obsession with the people we serve, little ones and parents alike, and a commitment to building healthier habits, eating habits that last a lifetime. We drive awareness and recall through compelling and emotional storytelling that delivers our purpose and benefits, like the Good Food Made Fun campaign that celebrates making food fun and gets little ones excited to try and enjoy better-for-you food.
We strive to win the shopping moment at the shelf, either in-store or online, by being available in priority and growth channels like e-commerce and having easy-to-shop packaging with a cohesive brand look that stands out on shelf. We are directing our marketing, we are directing our marketing to digital channels such as retailer media and social, and testing our creative and messaging to be sure that it resonates with consumers. Ultimately, our goal is to be a resource to parents and top of mind on their path to purchase. We believe these enhancements and our brand-building capability will drive short-term volume and long-term brand health, unlocking share gain for our brands. In an effort to meet our consumers through more occasions and moments in their journey, we're expanding our presence in under-penetrated channels.
This expansion, both in away-from-home and omni-channel e-commerce, will play a material role in our growth plan, generating revenue and extending the reach and awareness of our brands. Furthermore, these channels are margin accretive for us and will help improve our margin mix. We plan to materially bolster our capabilities in omni-channel e-commerce to meet consumers who are increasingly shopping online across both pure play and retailer.com. We've enhanced our dedicated team with tools and resources required to win in the omni-channel landscape, and we're leveraging digital shelf data platforms to give us the right data insights into critical KPIs, such as in-stock rate, share of voice, and content optimization, that will help inform real-time decision making in these online channels.
As you've heard me mention before, globally, away-from-home channels, including food service, convenience, hotel and travel, college and vending, provide a meaningful expansion opportunity for us and a way to reach consumers who are increasingly on the go. These channels drive brand reach and visibility, and they're price and margin accretive as shoppers are willing to pay more for convenience. For example, in the U.S., nearly 50% of eating occasions occur away-from-home, with 1.5 million food service points of sale, compared to 63,000 grocery retail outlets. We see similar dynamics in our U.K. and European markets. About 30% of food sales in the U.K. are in the food service channel. Given our relatively low penetration in away-from-home channels, convenience and food service represent significant opportunities in our core.
We are establishing a dedicated team equipped with direct selling, broker and distributor relationship management, and channel marketing resources to meaningfully accelerate our growth in away-from-home channels. We believe our brand portfolio can be readily adapted for away-from-home, particularly in snacks, tea, yogurt, and in meat-free. To effectively distribute our brands in away-from-home channels in a way that is margin accretive to our business, we will customize our price pack architecture and our packaging. We are also augmenting our industry presence and equipping our away-from-home team with the data and the tools required to win. More importantly, we have already begun to see momentum in our away-from-home business, with recent wins in the convenience channel, with our snacks portfolio and food service accounts in restaurants and on college campuses. Stay tuned, more to come.
Innovation already plays an important role within Hain. It has led us to build out a full Birth to Backpack portfolio strategy in our baby and kids platform. Innovations such as baby pouches that have health benefits and crunchy sticks that help with teething continue to cement us as a leader in better-for-you, baby and kids. These innovations have not only driven our top-line growth, but have also contributed to the margin expansion in our business. We plan to focus our innovation efforts on our core platforms, emphasizing better-for-you snacks, baby and kids, and beverages. We will shift our focus from the volume of launches to more focused, bigger, and better innovation. We will put the consumer at the center of our innovation efforts and harness our scale and our breadth in natural, organic, and better-for-you.
In global platforms like baby and kids and meat-free, we will drive stronger coordination and sharing of our consumer insights and innovation across markets. These stronger cross-functional linkages from concept to commercialization will accelerate our speed to market and make us more responsive to consumer needs. We have a really exciting innovation pipeline and have had success with a number of recent launches. We recently leveraged the U.K. to introduce Earth's Best Crunchy Sticks teething sticks in the U.S., which has been well-received and supported strong growth in Earth's Best snacks in the last quarter. It's become one of the brand's fastest-turning items in both units and dollars, and a top quartile performer in natural snacks for a major retail partner. The fourth pillar, an important pillar in Hain Reimagined, is our Fuel, to fund our growth plan and deliver margin expansion to our P&L.
This year, we launched a holistic Fuel Program to drive efficiency in our end-to-end cost structure. Our Fuel Program consists of three primary levers: revenue growth management, working capital management, and operational efficiency. We are developing the capability and playbook for more disciplined revenue growth management to optimize our pricing, our promotions, our price pack architecture across our global portfolio, and enabling top line and improving gross margins. We see significant near-term opportunities to improve our cash conversion cycles and inventory position to release cash to the balance sheet. We've identified significant opportunities within integrated business planning, procurement, manufacturing, and logistics to unlock savings across our entire Hain cost structure. We expect the changes made across these areas to enable 400-500 basis points of adjusted gross margin improvement in our P&L by FY 27 and to working capital improvement.
We believe our Hain Reimagined plan will deliver a compelling and achievable long-term financial algorithm with attractive shareholder returns. The plan represents a material transformation of our P&L, inflecting our top line growth and improving our margins. Our long-term financial algorithm is founded on at least a 3% organic net sales growth rate with upside as we build capabilities that will enable a sustainable growth model. We will pace our investments relative to our savings from the Fuel program to ensure EBITDA growth and margin expansion over the planning horizon, and we will closely monitor the return on our investments to determine the appropriate pacing of those investments. We have a path to delivering a low double-digit EBITDA CAGR, achieving low double-digit EBITDA margins by FY 27.
Now I'd like to turn it over to Ari and Wolfgang to share plans around our forms.
Thanks, Wendy. Good morning and good afternoon, everybody. As Wendy mentioned, our plan is grounded in building our brands and gaining share in our core platforms. We have a strong starting position with a portfolio of better-for-you brands across attractive, growing global platforms, and we have developed detailed plans to win, leveraging our brands' unique strengths and positions in the market. We are excited to preview a subset of these plans with you today, and we'll share examples where we are beginning to execute and see momentum in the business. We'll start with three of the platforms where we expect to disproportionately drive the growth of Hain Reimagined. Those are better-for-you snacks, baby and kids, and beverages. Let's start with better-for-you snacks, with our better-for-you snacks business, food and beverage, with double-digit market growth over the last few years.
We are proud of our portfolio of better-for-you snack brands, including Garden Veggie Snacks, Terra chips, Garden of Eatin', and ParmCrisps. Today, I'll talk about Garden Veggie and Terra specifically. First off, as we look ahead to how we want to continue to grow these, these important brands in our portfolio, we took a look at how consumers talk about us. What we've seen is that the brand awareness for Garden Veggie is very high, at 77%, which shows strong conversion to purchase. In an effort to align our equity more closely to how the consumer perceives us, we will focus the positioning under the Garden Veggie brands, the Garden Veggie brand, going forward. Garden Veggie is the largest brand in our snacks portfolio and a market leader in better-for-you puff snack segment, with strong distribution in traditional channels such as food, mass, and natural.
The strength of this brand is rooted in a loyal consumer base that loves Garden Veggie for its taste and as a better-for-you alternative made with quality ingredients. This strong consumer advocacy has translated to great performance. Garden Veggie has had strong momentum in recent years, growing over 40% in dollars in the last 52 weeks compared to two years ago, and picking up nearly 4 share points during that period. We expect to continue to grow Garden Veggie, and we will expand availability in away-from-home channels, including convenience stores, with the right price-pack architecture for the way consumers purchase in these channels. We will also continue to drive growth in conventional channels through improved execution and by closing distribution gaps. And lastly, innovation into new segments, new flavors, and pack sizes will continue to be a key growth driver.
We have already begun to see traction in convenience stores and away-from-home channels. Garden Veggie Straws were recently accepted into several large convenience store chains, resulting in new distribution across thousands of locations in this fiscal year. We also continue to see distribution gains in conventional channels that have increased the brand's TDPs by 14% in the 12-week period ending July. Next, we'll shift to Terra chips. We believe Terra is a brand with a distinctive offering and a compelling value proposition for consumers. It is the first ever whole vegetable snack brand because it is natural, colorful, made of a variety of vegetables, and a better-for-you alternative to potato chips. Terra has strong overall brand health, with higher awareness and trial rates than the category average. Our consumers are adventurous snackers who love the variety and blend of flavors and textures that Terra provides.
While Terra is typically shelved with potato chips, we see low cross-purchase with other potato chip brands, suggesting Terra plays a unique role for consumers. We see this in Terra's high rate of exclusive households relative to other better-for-you brands. Terra's uniqueness and customer affinity allows us to play at a premium to the broader snacks category. As with Garden Veggie, we expect to grow Terra chips above the category and see opportunities to improve distribution, increase brand awareness, and expand penetration in away-from-home channels. We have improved capacity on our supply chain and have a path to increasing distribution. In conjunction with this distribution drive, we have launched a coordinated marketing campaign, along with refreshed packaging and an updated vegetable blend that we expect will drive awareness and household penetration.
We will also optimize promotional frequency with an always-on approach to brand support, which will improve our competitiveness and drive consideration and conversion. Like Garden Veggie, we think Terra has strong potential in underpenetrated channels, where consumers are increasingly seeking better-for-you snacking options. We will expand distribution of Terra to convenience stores and other away-from-home channels. All of these actions, combined with a great starting point as a uniquely positioned and loved brand, gives us confidence in a bright future for Terra. And we're starting to see momentum with this plan. We are driving early distribution gains with recent wins at several large retailer partners, which we expect to benefit our financials. Our brand-building initiatives for Terra are already underway and performing well.
We launched our Crazy Delicious Vegetables media campaign, and early results are showing that the campaign was effective for driving positive lifts in brand awareness and purchasing intent. I will now turn it over to Wolfgang to talk about our baby and kids platform.
Thank you, Ari. As Wendy highlighted earlier, we are excited about the opportunity we see in better-for-you baby and kids, and are proud to have a portfolio that gives parents the ability to help their little ones grow a love for good and healthy food. Specifically, we are excited about baby and kids as a global platform, where we can leverage insights, product, and innovation across our leading brands, with Earth's Best in North America and Ella's Kitchen in the UK. Starting with Earth's Best, that offers a full product line of better-for-you options for kids from the infant to the toddler stage. In the high-growth baby and toddler snack segment, Earth's Best is the number one brand and has been rapidly gaining share, with over 7 percentage point share gain since January 2021. We are also the number two brand in organic formula.
On top of that, Earth's Best leads better-for-you baby brands in total awareness and trial use. Absent recent industry-wide supply challenges in formula, we expect to grow Earth's Best above the overall category. We will do this by increasing awareness of the brand with consistent messaging and packaging, optimizing distribution with historically under-penetrated retailers, and focused innovation in snacks and purees. We are creating a more cohesive brand identity for Earth's Best, leveraging consumer insights across shelf and developing consistent visual branding, packaging, and messaging. As supply challenges in the formula subside, we see headroom for distribution in the category. Retailers are seeking to diversify their formula offerings and satisfy consumer demand for natural and organic products, which continues to outpace the broader segment. We believe we are well positioned to capture that growth with Earth's Best.
In purees, we will close distribution gaps with grocery retailers, where we have been under-penetrated, and we will leverage innovation in our flavor range that will allow us to expand our shelf presence. In baby and toddler snacks, we will capture shares through innovation in baby finger foods, such as teethers and melts. As evidence of our brand-building capability at work, we recently launched our Good Food Made Fun campaign, which has been well-received with video completions and has started to contribute to momentum in sales and distribution in fiscal 2024. We are seeing strong growth, with sales up 20% year-over-year, and total distribution points up 19%, excluding formula in the last quarter of fiscal 2023. In addition to expanding our U.S. distribution, we have launched our snacks portfolio with national chains in Canada and have seen high acceptance rates across multiple retailers.
Ella's Kitchen is the other pillar of our global baby and kids platform. First, we are a certified B Corp on a mission to improve children's lives through developing healthy relationships with food. We are the clear market leader, leader in baby and kids in the UK, holding 31% share and close to 50% share in our core category of wet baby food. Ella's Kitchen also leads the category in key engagement metrics, with 85% awareness, making it We see this brand engagement and loyal consumer base translate to financial results and strong digital engagement base. Finally, we are implementing a focused plan to drive e-commerce growth, pivotal to be included in a national curriculum for all children in the UK under five years old.
This campaign culminated with a very successful event at the Houses of Parliament and has proven to be a simple way to encourage healthier eating habits in small children. Lastly, we see our e-commerce plan better positioning us for future growth. From our recent e-commerce optimizations, we are already seeing improved consumer engagement in our baby food segment. Now back to Ari to speak about our beverages platform.
Thanks, Wolfgang. Our third platform is better-for-you beverages, with a specific focus on tea. The Celestial Seasonings brand is a leader in the specialty tea category. It holds strong positions in the herbal and wellness segments and is margin accretive to our portfolio with consumers, with brand awareness of about 80%, which is 20 points higher than the category average. While growth in the tea category has moderated to pre-COVID levels, Celestial Seasonings is continuing to outperform the category in both dollars and units. We attribute our growth to superior quality, strong brand equity, and the ability to target key consumer needs. We are leveraging our strong starting position in tea and executing a share gain strategy with Celestial Seasonings, specifically with a focus on driving distribution and household penetration. In the near term, we plan to build on our success in wellness to drive further distribution.
We will leverage the strong velocity and productivity of Sleepytime to expand distribution across our retail partners, increasing depth of assortment and expanding to new doors. We also will drive focused growth in green and black tea, which are large segments of the market where Celestial Seasonings has relatively small share positions today. We will start by driving distribution in our high-innovation to drive leadership in the tea category and plan to continue to doing so by pinpointing consumer needs and developing products that specifically address those, much like what we've done with Sleepytime Melatonin to support better sleep. Longer term, we will also innovate around packaging and formats that address consumer needs for convenience. Finally, we believe Celestial Seasonings has a Circana report on a recent share gain in both dollars and units for bagged tea in the last quarter.
In Q3, we activated our Magic in Your Mug campaign that is contributing to our positive momentum. We are driving significant reach and engagement by leveraging our three wellness items in our portfolio in terms of velocity, and this is well ahead of the start of the hot tea season. In summary, we are excited about the better-for-you tailwinds and share gain potential in our growth platforms of snacks, baby and kids, and beverages. Now Wolfgang will speak about a few areas in our portfolio that we plan to stabilize.
Thanks, Ari. As Wendy noted earlier, there's a subset of categories in our portfolio for which we have developed stabilization. Longer term, we still believe that non-dairy remains an attractive category as consumers continue to seek healthier and more environmentally friendly alternatives to traditional dairy, food, and drugstore channels. To improve our velocity, we are optimizing our always-on promotional frequencies and launching new types of promotion offers. We are also leveraging our milk-like SKUs and Oat Barista innovations to increase our presence on the shelf. We will drive a pipeline of new product platforms that our natural channel consumers are looking for, including new packaging size to address single households and SKUs with varying fat content. We are already seeing stabilization in sales and margins in both our private label and branded segments.
In the private label business, we recently won new customer contracts in the UK and Western Europe, which drive top-line growth and capacity utilization in our production facilities. In quarter four of FY 23, our non-dairy brands grew 7.4% year-over-year in our core markets of Germany, Austria, and Hungary. Our premium brand, Natumi, gained drugstore distribution. We are planning to continue this successful expansion in drugstore in fiscal 2024. The recent momentum, combined with our focus strategy, gives us confidence that we will continue to stabilize our non-dairy beverage platform. The second platform that we will stabilize is our meat-free business. While the meat-free market has softened, and we continue to believe in the long-term growth of the meat-free category globally, as consumers continue to have health, environmental, and ethical concerns about animal proteins.
Meat-free still has just around 1%-2% share of global protein consumption, with significant headroom to grow. We have a strong global platform in plant-based meat alternatives, with leading brands in Canada and the UK. Linda McCartney is number two brand in the UK, with more than 20% share in the frozen meat-free segment. Yves is the number one plant-based alternative meat brand in Canada in the fresh segment, two times our next closest competitor and the highest brand awareness in the category. As the category stabilizes, we believe our brands are well positioned to continue to grow share. As part of our plan to stabilize this business, we are leveraging our global platform in meat-free to share consumer insights and product innovation, bringing successful launches across Linda McCartney and Yves.
As the category recovers, we are seeing distribution gains and will continue to benefit from the ongoing market consolidation. We also expect innovation to be an important growth lever for this category. We have three new product platforms in our innovation pipeline that will help us drive brand relevance with target consumers. We also view away-from-home as a potential stretch opportunity for the brand and are exploring opportunities in education, hospitality, and casual dining in the, Omni-channel marketing will be an important focus. We plan to leverage targeted digital ads and in-store promotion to drive awareness and fresh and two points of share in the frozen segment in the last year. We also secured exclusivity for Yves in the fresh segment with one of our key major retail partners and expect to begin to see results from this win starting October of this year.
With that, I will hand it back to Ari to discuss personal care.
Thanks again, Wolfgang. While personal care has been a challenged business in our portfolio in recent years, it remains an attractive category as the number of consumers interested in better-for-you personal care products grows. Products that are free from sulfates and parabens and are cruelty-free are continuing to outpace overall category growth. To stabilize our personal care business, we have conducted a robust strategic review of each of our brands, including how they are positioned and where they have a distinctive value proposition with consumers. We have made a set of where to play decisions to clarify the role of each of our brands with a focus on i n the U.S., Alba Botanica is a true leader in natural sun and skincare. Alba is the number one sun care natural body wash .
Clarifying the role for each of our brands enables us to streamline our portfolio and be more targeted in how we go to market, with the right offering, at the right price, in the right channel. This will also enable margin expansion in this part of our business. We have developed detailed plans to stabilize each of our personal care brands in their categories of focus. We'll highlight just one example, focusing on Alba. For Alba, we will target. We're increasingly researching, discovering, and buying personal care products online. And finally, we'll optimize our pricing and promotional strategy in each channel to drive profitable sales. As mentioned, we have created similarly detailed plans for our other brands, Avalon, JASON, and Live Clean.
We believe the work we've done to streamline our personal care portfolio, focus where to play for each brand, and create detailed plans to win, will allow us to successfully stabilize our personal care business, as well as drive margin expansion. To summarize, our plan will drive strong growth in three major platforms: better-for-you snacks, baby and kids, and beverages, while also stabilizing a few of the challenged businesses in our portfolio. We will drive growth in snacks, baby and kids, and beverages by both capitalizing on our exposure to better-for-you tailwinds in these categories and driving share gain with our brands. With that, I will hand it over to Ken and Steve to discuss Fuel.
Thank you, Ari. So far today, you've heard about our plans for focus, grow, and build. Ari and Wolfgang shared more details about the strength of our global brand portfolio and how we plan to drive growth and share gain in our platforms. Steve and I will now outline the fourth pillar of our strategy, our Fuel Program, which is a critical enabler of funding these growth plans. While Fuel is critical to funding future growth, it is not a one-time effort to save costs. Based on where we are in our journey, we believe the time is now to execute an end-to-end transformation of our business that will set the foundation to maintain a better-run, more efficient company over the long term. Our holistic Fuel Program is intended to pull, that will unlock savings and release cash to fund our growth priorities and expand on capabilities.
Our Fuel Program consists of three primary levers: revenue growth management, working capital management, and operational efficiency. We'll walk you through the highlights of each of these initiatives. First, we are standing up revenue growth management teams in North America and internationally to improve the productivity of our portfolio. Second, improvement to working capital is a key unlock to Fuel our program. We see significant near-term opportunity to improve our cash conversion cycles through extensions to days payable and inventory reductions. Lastly, operational efficiency is a substantial contributor to P&L savings. Driving the full potential across planning, sourcing, organization will unlock savings opportunities and leverage our global scale. Wendy previously talked about focus as a core pillar of our strategy. Focus is also an enabler of our Fuel Program. First, we are exploring opportunities to reduce complexity in our portfolio and processes, harmonize components, and consolidate our supplier base.
Second, as part of our operating model, we are establishing global centers of excellence in areas such as sourcing and procurement, to bring together what have historically been siloed geographic teams. These centers of excellence will unlock value through globally standardized processes and synergies. In total, we expect changes made across these areas to unlock between 400 and 500 basis points of adjusted gross margin improvement by fiscal 2027 and over $165 million in working capital improvement. We looked across our entire cost base and end-to-end processes to identify significant opportunities to generate Fuel in our business. Out of this deep dive, we have identified over 15 unique initiatives that will help us drive efficiency and cost optimization across the P&L. These initiatives are focused on improvements in portfolio, payables, inventory, planning, sourcing, and manufacturing.
We will drive savings by optimizing the way we run our business and leveraging our global scale. In revenue growth management, we will transition from a tactical approach, where our focus has primarily been on pricing to offset inflation, to greater global discipline across pricing, mix, promotion effectiveness, and price pack architecture. Our working capital opportunities will bring us in line with peers for days payable outstanding and days inventory outstanding metrics. In operational efficiency, we will improve forecast accuracy, consolidate our fragment spend, build more strategic supplier partnerships, and drive improvements to overall equipment effectiveness. To do this, we will embed advanced analytic capabilities that deliver forward-looking insights and optimize costs across the P&L. Let's start with revenue growth management, where we are building out a global capability to deliver balanced year-over-year savings to our P&L. Until recently, we have had limited centralized planning and processes around price realization.
We believe there is ample opportunity to take a more holistic approach to revenue growth management in support of accelerating the brand growth highlighted by Ari and Wolfgang, and driving gross margin expansion. We have begun to formalize dedicated RGM teams globally to enable faster knowledge sharing as we learn and replicate initiatives across our RGM pillars. Moreover, we are building out a center of excellence to drive commonality with a Hain Global RGM playbook for a more integrated planning across strategic pricing, price pack architecture, promotions, and mix management. This COE will educate our commercial teams on RGM principles, install a common playbook, and drive adoption of new tools for effective and repeatable execution. For example, we are leveraging a trade promotion system within the UK to assess incremental margin and net sales volume delivery.
The AI engine in the trade system will allow us to model events to predict best-fit promotional plans to help us make better decisions in identifying true incrementality and return from our trade investments. We are making early progress in enhancing our revenue growth management capabilities. We are modeling pricing options and running trade optimization scenarios. We have also created price and promo playbooks and have optimized a significant portion of our trade spend in fiscal 2024. Finally, we built a promotional ROI evaluation tool to continuously optimize our trade dollars. In our international business, our list price actions in 2023 yielded strong results across our portfolio. We are doing this by implementing surgical promotional optimization plans for our brands.
In summary, we believe RGM is a critical contributor to our ability to drive sustainable growth and gross margin improvement in our P&L, and we believe we are setting the foundation for a robust RGM capability. Within working capital, we see payables and inventory as our key focus areas. I want to take a moment and talk about what we are doing on payables. It is an example of how we are leveraging our global business services to work together across Hain, and is an opportunity that we start to deliver Fuel in the near term. Our payable terms are currently below the peer median, so we are taking action to extend our payables to be in line with the industry and unlock working capital for our business. We are undertaking a number of key actions to achieve this goal.
First, by improving the efficiency of our internal payment processes to eliminate early payments. Second, by renegotiating payment terms with our suppliers, informed by a clear strategic segmentation of our global supplier base and a holistic look at value to Hain across contract terms. And third, enforcing new term standards in go-forward supplier communication and RFPs. We have already started to make a number of changes to deliver value in this area, both internally and with key suppliers. Our working capital levers can cumulatively drive over $165 million total improvement between fiscal 2024 and 2027, with the potential to unlock significant value in the near term. With that, I'll pass it over to Steve to talk about the improvements we are making in our supply chain.
Thanks, Ken. Let's continue with our third lever, operational efficiency. We have conducted an end-to-end review of our operations with a goal of building a global, integrated, cost-effective supply chain. Across our supply chain, we are identifying ways to better leverage our scale, embed digital solutions, and create more flexibility in our processes to support our Hain Reimagined plan. First, we see a big opportunity to improve standardization and consistency in our planning capabilities, enabled by next-generation tools, deeper analytics to support better forecasting, and root cause analysis. Secondly, we will evolve how we source to leverage better scale across our global business units and categories and develop true strategic partnerships with our supplier base. In manufacturing, we see big opportunities within our plants. First, to drive better productivity by putting technology alongside our production lines to reduce downtime and highlight opportunities where we can be more efficient.
Second, we are embedding automation in targeted areas where we can improve throughput and reduce waste in the system. We're already making good progress. For instance, across our sites, we've set up daily, weekly, monthly operational loss elimination process and rolled out technology at our facilities. These process improvements have already unlocked capacity for growth on one of our biggest platforms in North America, allowing us to repatriate volume at a much lower cost. We're taking a hard look at our logistics footprint and optimizing the system to be more flexible, responsive, and cost effective. We're in the midst of rolling out changes to our network design in the coming quarters, and expect to realize benefits beginning in the back half of fiscal 2024. And finally, the end customer is at the core of our supply chain redesign.
All these upstream moves will be focused on serving our customers more efficiently with products that are competitively positioned, both on physical and digital shelves. We're working closely with Ari and Wolfgang to ensure that we leverage our supply chain. Let's start with planning, which we see as a big opportunity. In the past year, we've kicked off a comprehensive assessment measurement across markets. Finally, we've created a roadmap to upgrade our technology in order to support end-to-end planning visibility. We've already made inroads in this plan. For example, we've recently implemented advanced planning technology, which allows us to have the latest digital capabilities to reduce inventory, improve our on time and in full, and lower our supply chain cost to serve. Optimizing our sourcing spend across direct materials, co-manufacturing, and indirect represents another significant opportunity in the Fuel Program.
We've identified opportunity to materially reduce complexity in our supplier base. Currently, we have a fragmented network of over 4,000 global suppliers and 70 co-manufacturers, contributing to inefficiencies in our supply chain. There's also an opportunity to better manage our indirect spend. In 2023, we stood up a North America indirect organization and procurement policy. These teams are developing strategic partnerships that better leverage our scale by consolidating spend across geographies, as well as implementing global procurement policies to ensure consistency across regions. In addition, we've reduced lead times in key ingredients in some of our categories, and taken steps to eliminate single sourcing arrangements, consolidate specifications for more scale buying, and reduce our costs in paper and corrugates. We know there's a lot of work ahead.
We're, we're already working on initiatives across the three Fuel levers to unlock value that we can reinvest in our business starting FY 24. As we've mentioned, we've established a global center of excellence for revenue growth management, stood up special teams within our commercial vision divisions that are focused on optimizing pricing and promotion levers across the globe. We're well underway to implement the new tools and playbook, and are already seeing initial results in, in North America and internationally. For working capital, we've already made progress for both payables and inventory. We've mobilized our payables initiative and seen meaningful total improvement, total inventory improvement from changes in our integrated business planning that we recently rolled out. Under operational efficiency, we've launched transformational initiatives in our integrated business planning, logistics, and manufacturing divisions of the business.
We see an exciting journey ahead, and we're well on our way to delivering value for Hain and our shareholders as a more efficient company with industry-leading supply chain operations. We expect to see benefits in FY 24 from each of the initiatives we laid out. These savings will allow us to begin investing in our business in order to Fuel our long-term financial algorithm. By 2027, we're targeting 400-500 basis points in adjusted margin improvement and working capital of over $165 million. Now I'll pass it over to Chris, who will walk us through our financial algorithm.
Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Ken. The Fuel program is a critical part of our broader long-term financial algorithm, which we'd like to provide more detail on now. Today, we've shared details on our Hain Reimagined plan, focusing our business and operating model, growing in our core platforms and geographies, building critical capabilities required to win, and unlocking Fuel that we will use to self-fund our plan and expand our margins. Hain Reimagined results in an attractive and achievable long-term financial algorithm and leading total shareholder returns. I'd now like to provide more detail on how this plan can deliver value over the next few years. We'll talk first about the drivers of top line, then where we're making investments to drive growth, the Fuel to fund our growth and expand margins, and finally, how we'll deploy capital.
We expect to drive growth in our core global platforms and geographies, as well as expansion into new channels. The majority of our growth is expected to come from three of our platforms: Better-For-You snacks, Baby and Kids, and Beverages, where we are distributing our resources to drive share gains. We expect the bulk of our growth to come from North America, with a top-line CAGR of at least 4% over the period. Our international business is expected to grow at a greater than 1% CAGR over the long term, with the potential for faster growth in the early years of the plan as we stabilize the non-dairy and meat-free businesses. Our channel expansion plans and away-from-home and omni-channel e-commerce will be critical contributors to our growth plan, evolving our business to a more margin accretive channel mix over time.
To deliver our top line plan, we will make focused investments in a number of critical capability areas across brand building, channel expansion, and innovation. While we are investing incrementally, we're also optimizing our capabilities and processes to get more productivity from our existing resources. We will focus our investments and resources on the platforms and geographies where we expect to drive share gain. Our investments align our spending more closely with peers as a percent of net sales. These investments build to a run rate of about $50 million annually by FY 27. We will also carefully monitor the return on investment and pace our investments to ensure we can drive Adjusted EBITDA growth each year. We've spent time today sharing our Fuel Program with you in detail.
Our holistic Fuel program is intended to pull levers across the business that will unlock savings and free cash flow from the business in order to self-fund our growth and drive margin expansion. We expect Fuel to primarily come from revenue growth management, working capital, and operational efficiency. In total, we expect the Fuel program to unlock approximately 400-500 basis points of adjusted gross margin improvement by FY 27. We also see a significant opportunity to improve our inventory position and cash conversion cycle, representing over $165 million in working capital improvement by FY 27. Our Hain Reimagined plan delivers significant Adjusted EBITDA growth and margin expansion over the planning period.
The combination of our Fuel program and the impact of mix and operating leverage from growth more than offset the investments we will make in building critical capabilities. We expect to realize at least a 10% Adjusted EBITDA CAGR over the period and achieve at least 12% Adjusted EBITDA margins by FY 27. We will deploy a disciplined capital allocation strategy with a near-term focus on paying down debt and reinvesting in strategic capabilities. The cumulative free cash flow from our Fuel program will be an enabler of our ability to pay down debt in the early years of our plan. As part of our Fuel program, we will be increasing our payable terms to optimize our working capital, and we will make improvements in our inventory position. Longer term, the transformation of our P&L will contribute to strong free cash flow from operations.
The Hain Reimagined plan will drive bottom line through the initiatives we have laid out today to expand our margin and drive SG&A savings. We expect to improve our debt levels year-over-year, targeting a long-term leverage ratio of 2x-3x. As we approach the latter years of the plan, we will have greater flexibility to allocate our capital as is best for the long-term value of the business. Based on the bold strategic choices we have made, the Fuel we expect to fund our growth and expand margins and improve the underlying momentum of our business, Hain Reimagined delivers a compelling financial algorithm that represents a significant transformation of our P&L through FY 27. Our plan significantly inflects top line growth versus our recent historical performance. We expect to deliver at least 3% organic sales CAGR over the period.
We expect our Adjusted EBITDA to grow at least 10% CAGR, driven primarily by 400-500 basis points of adjusted gross margin improvement from our Fuel program, which will more than offset our investments in capabilities. By fiscal 2027, we expect our EBITDA margin to improve by approximately 300 basis points. Our expected exit velocity and exit margins from Hain Reimagined at the end of this period will set us on a path for long-term, sustainable growth and shareholder value creation. Our investments are instrumental in driving our top-line ambition of at least 3% growth per year and double-digit Adjusted EBITDA growth by fiscal 2027. But we also recognize the need to pace and sequence investments in accordance with our business performance and to ensure margin expansion over the course of the plan.
We will closely monitor return on investment to determine when to accelerate or pull back across our categories and areas of investment. We anticipate that savings from the Fuel program will more than fund our capability building before the end of the plan. To help fund our transformation and provide flexibility during this pivotal period, we are initiating a formal restructuring program. We expect to see annual run rate benefits from this program of $130-$150 million by fiscal 2027. To achieve these benefits, we expect the total cost of the program to be about $115-$125 million over two years. This will include one-time costs related to redesigning our brand portfolio, transforming our global operating model, and implementing our working capital transformation. I'll now hand it back to Wendy for closing remarks.
Thank you, Chris, and thank you all for taking the time today to join us for Investor Day. I really do feel like this is sort of a—it's either a family reunion or a, or a, an opening party. I'd like to spend a few minutes summarizing the key messages that we want to leave you with. Today, we shared the pillars of our Hain Reimagined plan to drive long-term sustainable growth and attractive shareholder returns. A reminder that we're focusing our business on five consumer-centric global platforms in five core markets, and we're aligning our operating model to our scale and our global footprint. We expect to drive share gain in three of our core platforms: better-for-you snacks, baby and kids, and beverages.
For each of the platforms and brands, we have clear plans to win, some of which we've already previewed with you today and are showing early signs of momentum. Importantly, we're building critical capabilities that will enable our growth plan. These consist of brand building, channel expansion capabilities, and away-from-home and omni-channel e-commerce, and importantly, innovation. We will Fuel our plan through a holistic Fuel program that will deliver savings from within the P&L and the balance sheet with a focus on revenue growth management, working capital, and operational efficiency. This will be a multi-year journey to transform Hain to achieve our full potential. FY 24 is the first and foundational year in our plan. In this year, we will focus the business.
We will reset our global operating model, kick off our Fuel program, invest to jumpstart critical capability areas, and pivot to growth. In FY 25 and FY26, as the Fuel program delivers more savings to the P&L, we will continue to invest for growth. We will begin to see our investments in channel expansion, brand building, and innovation, more meaningfully contribute to our top line and margins during that time. By fiscal 2027, we expect to be operating in a sustainable, profitable, consistent growth model. We will reap the benefits of a reimagined end-to-end supply chain, a modern digital infrastructure, and a leading talent and culture model that can deliver consistent top-line growth and profitability. I want to thank you for spending time with us today. We are extraordinarily excited about the journey ahead, and we're ready to take on this new chapter.
Importantly, we're confident in the foundation we have to deliver on our Hain Reimagined plan, because we have an exclusive focus in better-for-you products with a purpose to inspire healthier living. Our exposure to growing categories with better-for-you tailwinds provides tailwinds for our business. We have a strong portfolio of brands with key positions and attractive categories and share gain potential, and we have a clear financial algorithm to deliver sustained shareholder returns. Probably most importantly, we have a capable and energized global team that's aligned to our mission and committed to the changes required ahead. I hope today you have a deeper understanding of our vision for Hain Reimagined. You're excited to join us on this journey.
I personally could not be more motivated, more energized, and more excited that our Hain Reimagined strategy is the path to realizing our full potential, and I look forward to a future where we fully live up to our purpose: to inspire a healthier planet, healthier products, and healthier people. Thank you. I'm going to turn it over to Alexis.
We're going to take a short break before we do Q&A, so enjoy some snacks, have some tea, and we'll be back in 15 minutes.
Welcome back, everyone. It's time for the Q&A session. We have two mics in the room, so if you have a question, please raise your hand, and either Heather or Kristen will bring you a mic, and so we can make sure that your question is heard both in the room and online. Please introduce yourself and then ask your question. And then for online viewers, remember, the question box is in the lower left-hand side of your screen. I've already seen a number come through, and so I'm going to start with one of the online questions. How does Hain Reimagined differ from Hain 3.0, and what gives you confidence in the categories you're focusing on today and your ability to take share?
Yeah, for those that have been following the company for a while, which I think everybody in the room, when you saw Hain 3.0, that was predicated on really a transition from a lot of company portfolio shaping through divestiture from 2.0. And then it was a pivot to growth, predicated on three primary growth categories. Those categories were meat-free, non-dairy beverage, and snacks. And it was also specifically about those were high growth categories, and Hain would participate in the growth of those categories. There was also an intentionality around investing behind capabilities, specifically around gaining distribution and innovation. And a couple of things have changed since then. One is that two of those three growth categories slowed down. As we talked about earlier, both non-dairy beverage and meat-free had category challenges. So we've relooked at the categories that we've chosen.
We've also chosen categories that not just because they have tailwinds, but we have to have an intentional growth strategy that doesn't just rely on participation in the category. Where and how will we grow share? Where and how will we drive volume in dynamics within the category? There were also dynamics within Hain and the broader marketplace that prohibited really the investments behind some of those capabilities. So the intentions around innovation and around distribution gain, we really weren't able to lean into those because there were a variety of supply chain disruptions and inflation, et cetera. You've all heard those over the last couple of years that prohibited the Fuel for Hain to be able to invest behind those capabilities. We know that what we need to do is have a very detailed action plan that we can execute against.
We need to choose the categories that not only we believe in category growth, but that we can disproportionately grow inside those categories. So I think we've revisited the categories. We've chosen our snacks category in baby and kids, as well as in beverage, tea, in particular in the North America business, and non-dairy beverage in Europe, both because those are large categories, but they have nice tailwinds, and we have a really nice starting position. More importantly, we needed to make decisions about and very specific growth plans. You saw some of that laid out with Ari and Wolfgang, as well as where we talk about capabilities, but we need to invest behind those capabilities and put in place the right detailed action plans. We're already beginning to see action against those, so we're not starting from scratch.
We're leaning into the areas that we know will deliver share gain, distribution gain, and good, strong velocities. I think the biggest change for us is a very robust end-to-end review of our business. And you've heard me talk about we need to get better before we get bigger. We need to get better in how we spend before we spend more. We need to get better in how we operate our business so that we can earn our place in market, but also with our customers. So you'll see a lot of this focus around focus, discipline, process, and leveraging the synergies of our markets. You also would have seen in the Hain 3.0, you had two very disparate businesses, international set, very separate from the North American business. We've taken the time to really identify where we see synergies across those businesses.
We've got two global platforms that we could and should be leveraging, and we've seen that play out in baby and kids. In meat-free, we've got two leading brands, but we've not been leveraging the insights across those two businesses to win in both of those markets. That's an opportunity for us. We also see an opportunity where, you know, when I talk about outsmalling the big and outbigging the small, it also means that we are too big to operate this discreetly, disparate businesses or functions, but we're also too small to invest giant capabilities that you would see from global companies. So how do we take the best of both? A nd our global functions and driving centers of excellence is a way of doing that. We launched a global supply chain council in this last year, a global procurement council in this last year.
Externally, it allows us to really leverage synergies across the markets in our business. Internally, it creates opportunities for our people, opportunities for people to be able to punch at a bigger, a bigger scale business, and opportunities for us to leverage learnings across our geographies. So you will see us leaning into where we can drive synergies and how we work, where we operate, where we spend, how we spend, and then insights that help us win with the consumer. We're the only player that really leads only in better-for-you, and that needs to be an ownable position that we leverage, and so you'll see us leaning into that more. So I think the challenges and the changes for us in Hain Reimagined is a holistic reimagining of our business. What didn't change is we believe in growth.
What did change was a very intentional focus on the categories we'll focus on and how we will go after it.
Thank you. Ken Goldman, JP Morgan. You know, if I'm reading your slides right, you're not expecting a lot of EBITDA growth until fiscal 2026. That yellow line seems kind of flat for 2025. Yeah, I appreciate you're keeping a relatively low bar for 2025. I think that's helpful, but can you walk us through some of the reasons why the algo may not kick in, if I'm looking at it right, until after 2025? Just given that, you know, many of the factors that drive the gross margin higher and, you know, Wendy, you just mentioned you're not necessarily going to spend a lot till you optimize the business itself. So just trying to get a sense of the pacing there, and if I'm reading that right.
Yeah. So it, and you're reading that exactly right, Ken, and, and it's really about getting the flywheel spinning. So, 2024, the foundational year, and as we guided to 2024 a few weeks ago, you know, we've got the one-time headwind in fiscal 2024 as we reset the bonus plan, and that, that, you know, creates, creates a little bit of a headwind in 2024. And then in 2025, you kind of see the Fuel kicking in, in the early part of the investment. So, that's sort of the flattish line from 2024 to 2025.
And then, to your point, the inflection now, as you get the flywheel spinning much faster in 2026 and 2027, still continuing to build to that $50 million run rate investment by fiscal 2027 that we talked about in the prepared remarks, but now you've got the full benefit, the output, the offset in 2026 and 2027.
You know, and I'm gonna just add to that a little bit. One of the things that, that I've heard from you all, but also I think we've been very consistent, that we wanna be a promises made, promises kept business. So I think we have appropriately layered in an outlook that assures what our, what our commitment is. It's not our target. So our commitment is the shape of what you saw. We are targeting something better, so it would be great if we start to see the Fuel deliver faster. It would be great for us to start to see the growth initiatives deliver faster. We need to give ourselves the ability to throttle forward and back, and that's what we've built in there. But I believe this is the shape that we'd say this is a promises made, promises kept, but that's not our target.
Okay, thanks. Anthony Vendetti, Maxim Group. I just wanted to focus on the 400-500 basis point improvement in gross margin. It was brought up a couple times, I guess, on the slides, and it was by FY 27. So it's either in three years, you'll be at that, which would be the, by the beginning of fiscal 2027, or you, Is, is it more open-ended? That's a, that's a goal by the end of fiscal 2027, which would be kind of four years. And then, and then maybe dovetailing that is, can you do that if your private label business continues to grow? What percentage of sales is private label right now?
I know that's it, it's a bigger percentage in the U.K., for example, but do you see that growing in the U.K., growing here in the U.S., or are you gonna focus more on the higher margin brands to get to that gross margin? How, how are you juxtaposing those two, as you look at your gross operating gross margin improvement and operating margin or EBITDA improvement?
Okay, let me start, and then I'm gonna tag team with Chris here. Part of the plan is predicated not just on overall driving the Fuel, but it's also around the mix of the business and where we want to disproportionately drive growth. So part of what you see in the shape over that is us being, I think, fairly prudent, again, to a promises made, promises kept. What do we need to see happen in the Fuel initiatives delivering in the short term? How do we conservatively invest around the growth initiatives? So trying to pace those out a bit, that's part of what you see in that. As it relates to private label and brand, it's sort of a unique difference between the two markets.
In the US, we see very little private label penetration in the categories where we play. So private label isn't as much of a factor, and you've heard us say before, what's nice about our Hain portfolio, we play in better-for-you premium, but we play in largely an entry price point into the premium sector. So as consumers are trading around, they're not trading out of our brands while they're looking for something that is both available and affordable and accessible to them. So and we've maintained those price gaps and curves as we've taken pricing over the last couple of years to assure that we are positioned in the category where we want to be. In the European business, it's different. The consumer is different, and private label is as important as brand.
We're in a unique, and I think actually, an enviable position in that we play materially in both. The marketplace, I believe, is about 50%, private label and brand. We're actually seeing the private label part of our business recover faster than the branded part. And Wolfgang can share specifics, but I, I believe that we're both in meat-free and in non-dairy beverage, have seen significant recovery in the private label part of it. But we're also seeing brand start to recover as well. So the fact that we're in both is a benefit to us. So our intent isn't to be a large private label supplier in the U.S., nor do I think we will need to be. In Europe, it's a benefit to us, but we want to make sure that we're managing the price curves appropriately.
But I'll let you speak to the margin curve specifically.
Margin curve. Yeah, so, so, Anthony, on the 4-5 points of gross margin improvement that we see, that's, that is our target for fiscal 2027. It's not the exit rate, but where we expect to be throughout, 2027, with the normal seasonality that you'd see throughout our, throughout our fiscal year.
Hi, Jim Salera with Stephens. When you guys talked about the top line growth algo, obviously, the snacks portion is kind of the engine there. Can you maybe talk about what gives you confidence that your brand specifically are going to be able to take an outsized share of that better-for-you category? You know, kind of a competitive moat you have from other entrants, and then maybe the message you're communicating to consumers that might just be kind of a casual, salty snack consumer to induce them to maybe trade over from, you know, just a normal potato chip to your products.
Yeah. I'll, I'll start, and then I'll ask Ari to weigh in a little bit as well. The what we've built in around snacks isn't just based on category growth rate, and that's really a departure from prior strategy. We know snacks is a good growth category, which is great. Our share of the snacks category, in particular, driven by distribution, is lower than it needs to be. But where we have distribution, our velocities are very strong. That tells me that driving right core assortment into the right points of distribution and putting the right investments around promotions and marketing, we will generate velocity that earns our place in that point of distribution and allows us to pick up that share. So our share is less about promote very heavily in the places we are so that we win in that shopper decision-making moment.
It will be a lot about pushing our products out into the marketplace, because what we know is they love our brands. They just can't find them everywhere they want to be. So I would love for our brands to be within arm's reach of the consumer everywhere they happen to be. So if you're hungry, Jim, you could reach 18 inches anywhere you're at, and you can grab a Garden Veggie. That would be my goal. And so that's where I think we will disproportionately see growth is because we have this opportunity to drive distribution gain, but we are seeing both velocity and our brands breaking through. And as Ari said, Terra, when the consumer's buying Terra versus traditional potato chips, they're actually not making the kind of trade-off decision that you would normally expect in a category where promoted dollars drives that moment of decision.
They want TERRA for TERRA. It is a unique product that's differentiated. It's just not available in all the places it needs to be. So we see an opportunity for us to both market and promote effectively. And let me just, and I promise I will let you answer. But, but, but I think the other thing is a reminder that for about 18 months, we went quiet. We went quiet in marketing, and we went quiet in promotions. The fact that we held some of our TDPs, it says a lot about the power of our brands, because we weren't pointing them out to the consumer and generating an always-on awareness, and we weren't doing anything to drive points of distribution or to encourage activity and in-aisle excitement.
We've gone to a consistent, always-on pressure with awareness with the consumer, and I think we're fairly surgical in our promotion investment, but we're at the levels we'd want to be, where it's breaking through, and we need to be monitoring the ROI of that. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna let Ari actually speak.
Thank you, Wendy. Yeah, just a couple of things I, I'll build on that. One, specifically on Garden Veggie. So as I mentioned just a few minutes ago, we've been focusing a lot on Sensible Portions and building that brand. Sensible Portions has about a 27% brand awareness. Garden Veggie, as I said, has 77%, and so that's a big focus for us as we really start to amp up the marketing and the brand building behind that brand. It'll be focused on Garden Veggie, and it'll also be focused around how do we make that fun? Sensible Portions is such a serious kind of brand, and so there'll be a lot of work around fun and how do we build that overall brand.
The second thing, much more broadly around better-for-you snacks in general, one of the biggest barriers to better-for-you snacks is the consumer's assumption is it's not going to taste as good as regular, not as good for you snacks. And so our big focus on all of our brands will be around taste and how you don't have to compromise on taste to have something that is better-for-you or better-for-your family. So those will be our two big focuses.
Good morning, Alexia Howard with Bernstein. Can you talk a little bit about the big insights and facts that you discovered along the way that informed the strategy that you presented to us today, and maybe the difference from Hain 3.0? I remember when you first joined, Wendy, the lack of marketing spend or the low marketing spend was a big sort of aha, but I imagine that maybe these 70 markets that represent less than 10% of sales were probably losing huge amounts of money. Maybe there were insights that came from why the EBITDA margin fell from over 14% back down to 9%. What drove that? Could you just give us an idea of what informed this set of choices? Thank you.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's been both an aha, but it's also been really wonderful to see where we have core capabilities within Hain. They're just not evenly distributed. We have great brands. They're just all, they, they were sort of all treated the same. We were either gonna spend or we weren't going to spend. So I think what we've identified through this is, we have some very good best-in-class capabilities in areas like technology and data systems, but they might be in one pocket. We have a really good sales execution, but it might only be in one market. We do really good with SKU rationalization and pricing and promotional analysis with a tool in the U.K. And because Hain was managed as multi-company, multi-business, the left hand and the right hand weren't speaking to each other.
So part of what we did was we stepped way back and said: What are the leading brands and what makes them a leading brand? And how much more could they be, and what would it take to go after it? And I don't want it to be things where it's, we happen to be in the market, so we're gonna participate in the value created in that market. I want us to be, to control our destiny, identify the places where we can grow, what are the actions necessary to do it, how will we measure the progress as we go, and deliver on our promises. So that became a big part of the what brands, what categories, what's our right to win in those areas to play?
Then, when we looked across our business, while we sell in 75 markets, 90% of our sales are in these core five. Well, let's determine what is the appropriate footprint to have in each of the core five, and then let's figure out a model to cost effectively go after the rest of the marketplace. I don't want to walk away from those, but there's a way to do it that doesn't require you to have physical assets, people on ground, et cetera, which also creates a lot of complexity in your business. I think the best part's been identifying the pockets of talent in our company, the pockets of technological capability and platforms we have, processes that might be really good in one place, but we weren't leveraging.
We need to operate like a scaled business and be better end to end, and that's where we've identified there were inefficiencies, there was duplication, there were hidden gems, and even in ways of working that we weren't leveraging. And a great example is the work that we did with Ella's, had this, this beloved brand in the UK and Europe, and they had this fantastic foray into with Melty Sticks into this children's teething as a snack. Well, we took that same product but positioned it under Earth's Best in a way that was market relevant, same concept, same idea, and it's in the first year of launch one of the top-selling, top-moving items.
And isn't just driving growth because of dollars, but it's driving growth in units, within—which then puts us in a position to have conversations with our retail partners that we will help them bring in the more, bring in that better-for-you, shopper. We will help them win in the store because we know what the better-for-you shopper is looking for across the store. So I think it's us figuring out how do we, how do we leverage the best of Hain? And we just had a lot of things that were sort of in the, you know, hidden pockets.
I have another one from the online audience. Many of your competitors of similar scale play only in North America. Why does it make sense for you to continue to build your international business as part of your go-forward strategy?
Yeah, this was actually. It was a question many of you asked in my first couple of months. The way that we managed the business before, it would make sense. They were very different markets, very different businesses. We weren't leveraging the synergies. Along the line of what I was just talking about, there are, there are two global platforms we never looked at as global platforms. We are a leader in better-for-you, baby and kids. That's a great place for us to be with beloved brands, but we weren't actually talking across the markets to leverage that. We are a leader in meat-free, and while I know there's been a lot of bright, shiny objects and disruptors in the meat-free space, that created a lot of hockey stick noise in the category.
As somebody who's been in meat-free at a former company, there is a core consumer demand for meat-free that is not just vegetarian, but it's also flexitarian. But what that consumer wants is they want it to taste great, they want it to be convenient, and they want it to be affordable. So if we can, as a company, deliver veg forward, great tasting, affordable, and available products under these leading brands by leveraging insights across our markets, that's an ownable proposition for us. I'm not gonna promise you double-digit growth in meat-free because we're gonna suddenly bring 90% of the meat consumers into meat-free, but I will give you a realistic and attainable, consistent delivery as a core player in the category, and we think we can leverage that across the global platforms.
When we talk about our capabilities, we've operated separate functions across markets in very different businesses. That lack of synergy looks like there's no synergies. It wasn't that there weren't any synergies, we just didn't leverage those. So we believe very strongly in the international business. In fact, it's margin accretive to our portfolio in North America. There are categories that naturally play across both of our businesses, and there are insights that we can leverage across both of our businesses. And in some ways, it offers us a counterbalance to areas where we're making investments because it generates Fuel for us to make investments in other high-growth, either categories or markets.
But I'd love Wolfgang to talk about even some of the early signs of success that we're seeing in the recovery in international, which up until really just the last probably 24 months, was a core deliverer of both top line and bottom line to Hain.
Yeah. So especially on non-dairy. We worked hard the last 18 months to rightsize our organization, to adjust our offering, and worked hard to get new contracts. And we won some scale contracts in private label, and actually we start to see sales coming through with double-digit growth in the most recent months. And the good thing is we still have spare capacity, and we believe from this trend in Europe, in private label, we can actually benefit.
Rob Dickerson, Jefferies. So I guess, Wendy, you know, part of the original Hain 2.0 strategy, not even 3.0, was kind of addition by subtraction, right? There were, and we know there have been a lot of brands divested over the past five years. And when I kind of look at the chart, right, you know, grow, maintain, stabilize, you know, most of the brands in maintain and stabilize, or sorry, most of your brands are in those two buckets, right?
So as we think forward, you know, from today through 2027 and that 3%+ organic sales, you know, growth target kind of overall, how do you—like, how should we be thinking about go-forward divestment potential and kind of portfolio construct, you know, as we get toward the end of the plan relative to where we are today? And then also, secondly, kind of back to the international question, I believe, you know, the growth target was 1% relative to North America, 4%. So it seems like, like there could be opportunity for divestment to essentially kind of, you know, continue the addition by subtraction, so to speak. Thanks.
If you look at the history of Hain, Hain grew through M&A. Grew through M&A and then got healthier through M&A. We're not saying that M&A isn't a part of the strategy, but it's not gonna be the strategy. We need to drive the core of our business. We actually need to run an operating model that can sustain and prove that we can grow brands and drive scale. There will be pieces and parts. It's just not gonna be the core focus of our business or of our strategy. When we talk about stabilize, and I probably wasn't very clear about this, stabilize doesn't mean stabilize to divest, it means stabilize to decide. And we'll make decisions then based on those, where they fit in the portfolio. Do they go into maintain? Could they now be a growth?
Because if you think about it, back in Hain 2.0, two of the categories that are in stabilize were actually in growth. We've just, I think, appropriately placed them where they need to be in the portfolio now, so that we can prove out and then make decisions. So, and personal care obviously was in divestiture. There's pieces and pockets in personal care that we really like, actually, those brands. My goal is we identify a very clear role for each one of the categories and each one of the brands. We then identify how we get them as healthy as possible to then make some decisions about them going forward. And then, as I said before, internationally is while it may not be a driver of significant growth in the short term, keep in mind what I said earlier is there's a commitment difference than a target.
We see opportunities while we've got global baby kids, we've got global meat-free. We have a footprint of snacks in Europe, but we don't have a significant business in snacks yet. It's just not a focus in the short term for us to lean into that, but these are markets we feel very good about. And what I like about what we've chosen to do in the international business is not to be everywhere. Choose a core set of markets that we believe are highly developed, highly penetrated with better-for-you, offer us opportunities both for the existing portfolio there and more, and then we lean into that. So you'll see us driving growth from the core, deeper market penetration, channel expansion before we look at divestiture.
Hi, thank you. Matt Smith with Stifel. Revenue growth has been disrupted recently due to distribution and promotional event changes with large retailers. Can you talk about if you're in a position today with the supply chain and your RGM capabilities to win back some of that activity? And maybe as a follow-up, promotional activity has picked up in a few of your businesses recently. Can you talk about how effective that promotional activity has been relative to your expectations?
Yeah, let me first talk with sort of our supply chain capability, and I'll have Steve add as well. We went dark on marketing and promotion largely because we had significant supply chain disruptions. The last thing you want to do is promote and then poke your customer in the eye by not being able to keep it on shelf. So the team really focused on stabilizing the supply chain, adding capacity, capability, and contingency, so that we can consistently keep ourselves on shelf. And you guys will have to keep me honest, because I never actually quote this in the right way, but Circana, which is IRI, monitors on-shelf availability, and actually, for the last 12 months, Hain has been in the top tier of on-shelf availability.
So I think the changes we've made in the supply chain to stabilize our inventory positions has put us in a position to actually have a real conversation with our retail partners that we will consistently be available on shelf if we promote. Our focus, while on promotion, frequency, promotions overall, is much more frequency and less depth. What you're seeing in some of our categories are people promoting much more around depth as a response to consumers pushing back on pricing. We took pricing, we believe, at the appropriate level that still maintains the price gap to category, and we're not seeing consumers trade out, so we're not using promotions to drive pricing depth, we're using it to drive broader availability and an interest in the category to keep it top of mind. We're seeing good effectiveness with the promotions.
We're also, I think, still below category average, about 7% below of products sold, I think, volume sold on promotion in the measured channels. In our non-measured channels, which you can't see, we've used the promotion dollars to actually drive points of distribution, and instead of price discounts, using it to drive trial, which I think for our brands and our categories, is the right thing for us to do at our point in time. Revenue growth management, and the way that we're looking at it, is both, it's overall pricing, but it's much more net price realization. How do we make sure that we're not discounting back all of the pricing that we took? How are we making sure that we're helping our customers with mix, hardest working SKUs on shelf?
What you can't see, for instance, in Europe, Wolfgang's team cut 50% of the SKUs in one of our non-dairy beverage brands to get to the hardest working core, and that brand is up 10%. So there's a way for us to do revenue growth management that is smart holistically and helps our customers win and helps the consumer win as well. I don't know, Ari, if you want to speak to some of the specifics around what you're doing around promotional effectiveness.
Sure, yeah. Just a couple other things that I would, I would add. First of all, in terms of RGM, this is not a new capability for us. The idea is becoming much more focused in how we do it across the overall organization. So we've been doing a lot of work on RGM, specifically around list pricing, promotional effectiveness, and right sizing or downsizing. So there's been a lot of that that's already taken place.
In terms of promotional effectiveness, specifically, one thing I think you also have to keep in mind is that you don't just see promo effectiveness, especially today, in terms of trade discount, because there's so many more vehicles out there now for us to invest in ways to drive consumer behavior and drive trial, as Wendy mentioned, through things like retail media. So think about, like, Target and their Roundel program. Most of our investment in baby isn't in trade promotion. It would be in a Roundel investment in retail media to drive moms to come to that category. We're constantly changing over. So, we've also spent a lot of time and focus in learning how to use those tools in much more effective ways to look at the overall marketing mix.
Hi, André Baladi from Rabobank. Thanks very much for the great presentation today. Just a couple of questions. First, on beverages, you know, you talked about growth being focused in Celestial Seasonings and the stabilization in the non-dairy sector. Could you perhaps provide a little bit of color on other avenues you see for potential growth in the beverage space? Secondly, the Greek Gods brand, how do you feel about that in the overall portfolio mix? You know, what are your thoughts in terms of future opportunities in the yogurt category as well? Thank you.
Yeah, great. So I'm gonna start with your second question, and then I'll go to your first one. Because what I wouldn't want is anybody interprets that the fact that we didn't go through a deep dive of any of the, some of those categories means that those brands aren't important. And in fact, hopefully, everybody had a chance to try, or get some of the Greek Gods, 'cause we had the yogurt out there this morning, which is, by the way, unbelievable. I love Greek Gods yogurt. There are brands that are in the maintain category that are still gonna be growth brands. They're just brands that don't require a disproportionate amount of resources and spend to be able to do so. You can look at the performance in the last 12 months, for instance, where Greek Gods has picked up share.
It continues to grow in top line. We continue to pick up distribution, and the velocities are really strong. But it hasn't required a significant amount of investment, but we can't have no investment. So when we talk about an always-on strategy, Greek Gods, Spectrum, MaraNatha are great examples of brands that can continue to deliver, but what we will do with them is make sure there is a consistent drumbeat of always on, and our focus will be on driving either broader distribution or usage. In fact, Greek Gods will be a focus in our away-from-home business because in the multi-serve, it's a great opportunity for us to take that into away-from-home multis, like you had out here, in catering, et cetera. So there's still a focus.
It's just when we talk about it, it's not what we expect them to do as much as it is as it is around resource allocation and what's required, but they won't go dark. So in beverage, this is a space that we've sort of again, when we think about categories, that we have a global platform, but we've never really talked about it. Beverage is a great example. We understand what the consumer is looking for in better-for-you beverages that have claims and benefits better than lots of companies, and everything we sell is better-for-you, but we've not really leveraged that and identified how do we win in that space. With Celestial, we've not leaned into convenience, literally in convenience as a factor.
You would have seen us launch this year the K-Cup pods for peppermint, which is one of our best-selling items, and then you'd see us launching tea with benefits, as Ari talked about, in Sleepytime Melatonin. Don't recommend taking that in the day, by the way, but before bed, it's great. But, but things like that, that create new news for the consumer in a part of the franchise that's leading. Sleepytime is a fantastic franchise for us in Celestial. We went dark on Celestial for quite some time. We also didn't do innovation in Celestial, and we've never really tried to penetrate the away-from-home occasions in tea. away-from-home is a very large category in tea. We are a winner in retail, in herbal, but we've never leaned into the occasion space to make it more available.
I want you in every hotel and every airport, and when you're sitting on a plane, that you've got a sachet of Celestial available to you. We've not really leaned into that space, but we feel really good about it. When we think about non-dairy beverage in Europe, it's market specific. So non-dairy beverage is a huge category in Europe, so we want to be there because the consumer wants better-for-you, and that's a format they want it in. We can deliver. And what we found, even though we had a loss of a very large contract last year, which you all know about because it impacted our, and deleveraged our plants, the team leaned into a combination of multiple private label contracts, so we're not dependent on anybody singularly, but also leaning into our branded business at the same time, and then looking at formats.
In your bag, you've got the barista in the tiny little pack, which Wolfgang talked about earlier, leaning into drugstores. Well, those smaller packs, that's a great place for us to be there. We've actually had customers come back to us where we had lost contracts because of our consistency, our quality, and the fact that we are consistently available. When we commit to somebody, we give them assured supply, assured quality, and affordable cost, and that's won us back customers who had left before. So I feel very good that we're in right platforms for what the consumer wants and better-for-you. But even more so, we've got some leading capabilities and leading brands that each that have opportunities for actions we can take, not just, well, you happen to be in the category, you're going to grow.
We want to do things that can execute to drive the growth.
I have one more, from online. What are the changes or investments you're making in people and culture, and how do you plan to build team engagement given the hub and spoke setup and hybrid work model?
This is probably one of the biggest unlocks for us, and for me, personally, is really important. I, you know, I believe that people take actions based on the beliefs they have. They set their beliefs based on their experiences, and if we wanted to create a culture of growth and performance, you have to give people the experiences that make them believe that that is possible. We have an opportunity to actually live into our purpose, and unlike most companies, including some that I've worked for, there's nothing in our portfolio to apologize for. And as a company, how we live into that is really important. Early in January, we announced to the team a change in the headquarters.
In fact, I think in my third day, I did a town hall and said, "So I know when we're moving, and I know where we're moving from, but I don't know when we're moving in or where we're moving to." But I wanted the team to be a part of the process. So we did a global survey. We asked people, "What would a place look like that would live into our core values? What do you want to see in our new location?" And it was both where we would be, but also what would be the amenities that would be there, and how did people want to work? I think Hain has an opportunity to actually demonstrate what does it look like in a post-COVID world for us to really make hybrid work?
Because if your company ethos is around healthier living, healthier living is not just what you put in your body and on your body, but it's also how you live and work. There's a way for us to actually help enable that and sort of live that out loud, and our employees told us that in spades. So they informed how we chose the location that we chose. We're excited to move into the new space. You'll see in the new space, there's an Innovation Experience Center . It allows our teams to come together and collaborate on ideation and concept development and product testing, where we're doing then product development out in our plant locations. So it creates culture back and forth from the hub to the spokes, both in development, in ways of working, et cetera.
We want to be the best place to source talent, and as long as people have a passport and a driver's license and a suitcase, and they're willing to come in for moments that matter to one of our locations, I want us to leverage that. It also, by the way, allowed us to cut costs pretty substantially in our real estate location, so it was sort of a win-win all the way around. We've embedded a lot of changes, so everything you saw around the core values and the mission, vision, and values is work that we did as a leadership team over the really first three months that I was there. Then we began to embed that in communications.
We had our first ever global town hall in Hain history and brought people together from around the globe just to share who we are, where we're headed, and what role they can play in that, and the response was phenomenal. We've begun internal teams. We talked about the Global Sourcing Council and the Global Supply Chain Council and the Global Innovation Council, especially around baby and kids. Teams are coming together to collaborate and share, which allows us, I think, to live into that talent and culture and, and be able to attract and retain the best talent, because we're allowing them to bring the best of what they can do, and we're creating opportunities for them to actually do great work, but also work together across the globe.
So a lot of the work that we're doing around talent and culture, place, people, purpose, even how we do our corporate branding, you saw all the new logo design today. All of that begins to get embedded into the company as we go forward because we really want it to be reimagined, not just what we sell, but how we sell and how we work. And we're really excited based on the feedback we're getting from employees has really been fantastic.
Thank you. Good morning. I'm Andrew Lazar at Barclays. I'm curious, of the 3%+ organic sales growth target, to the extent you can think through this with us, how much is based on, let's say, purely distribution gains versus, you know, improving velocity, sort of like for like sales growth, if you will?
Well, Andrew, it's tough because not all brands are created equal, so it's going to be a little bit different brand by brand. But, and it's gonna be different for Wolfgang versus Ari. So, parsing that apart, you know, there's a lot of moving parts in it, but I think fair to say, equally distributed across the platforms, the ideas, the concepts that we talked about throughout today. I don't know if Ari or Wolfgang, you wanna provide more context on sort of within your individual segments, how you see that?
Yeah, I think what I would say is distribution will certainly be a big driver of that, not only in our core channels, but as we've talked about several different times today, in expanding into other channels. So distribution would probably a disproportionate amount, but continuing to drive velocity will also be a key part of our growth drivers.
And then you talked about, I think, building to $50 million of annual investment spend towards the end of the program. Where are you today around investment spend, and are you able to quantify how much, you know, incremental investment spend you can generate through just the more effectiveness, right, with the spending that you're currently doing? Thanks.
Yeah, well, and you've heard us talk before about, you know, our SG&A, as a % of revenue, is about where I believe it needs to be. We've looked at across the entire P&L, we've looked at industry benchmarks to sort of look at where we think we are advantaged, disadvantaged, et cetera. From an SG&A standpoint, the dollar spend is about where we need it to be. It's just not in the places that we need it to be. So what you'll see us do in the short term is some of this moving to make sure the resources are where they need to be. We today, from a marketing and trade and promotional dollars, we're not spending at the level that we would want to, but I wanna get better before we get bigger.
So we're focused, especially this year, on reinvesting back in the brands that we see for growth. You saw some of that starting in quarter three and quarter four of last year and actually started to generate for us, so that was the Magic in Your Mug for Celestial, Good Food Made Fun for Earth's Best. We did some work in the UK around Linda McCartney, so we're reallocating the dollars we spend today is a bigger part of it in fiscal 2024. As the Fuel program starts to deliver, we will be able to ramp up. In the meantime, it allows us to put in place these things like the Agile & Amped playbook, get the processes and the discipline around how we spend and how we monitor the return on investment of those spends before we fully go to bright.
We've also really embedded consistency around brand metrics, brand health metrics, how we're looking at household penetration, how we're looking at share, how we're looking at consumer awareness and reach. Already talked about the work that's been done around Garden Veggie, and why we will be amplifying and leading with Garden Veggie and not Sensible, because the brand awareness of Garden Veggie is stronger. So finding the effectiveness of our spend before we get to more is the focus in the short term. And of that, I should probably clarify as well, that $50 million isn't just marketing. So at the end of this run rate, I'd call it, keep me honest here, it's probably a third, a third, a third in those three pillars that we looked at, brand building, channel expansion, and innovation. It's about a third, a third, a third of that $50 million.
We have an opportunity to invest behind the capabilities to expand our reach and away-from-home and omni-channel. We have business there today. We have a team there today. That's an area of opportunity in both North America and the UK. Mr. Wolfgang spoke to picking up contracts in food service and meat-free in the UK. There's an opportunity for us with away-from-home there as well. So it's about a third, a third, a third of that by the time we get to 2027.
We have time for one more question.
Hey, good morning. Thomas McGovern with Maxim Group. So developing your away-from-home business seems to be a critical component of Hain Reimagined, and you mentioned earlier that you guys have established a dedicated team to evaluate this. You mentioned some of the products that you'll be focusing on. I was wondering if you could provide additional color on maybe some specific steps you intend to take to expand your presence in the away-from-home channel, and then maybe if you could provide a timeline as to how long you anticipate it'll take to see a material uptick in the expansion within this channel. Thanks.
Thank you for that. This, this is probably the space that I know the best of our business. I've spent my entire career, for anybody who's seen what I've done before coming to Hain, I spent my whole career in away-from-home, on-the-go, and immediate consumption channels for a variety of companies in both center of the plate and in packaged goods. This is a tremendous opportunity, but I know how to go after this. We've brought in experienced leadership to lead this initiative, especially in North America, 25+ year experience in away-from-home. It, it will require us to identify the parts of our portfolio that are fit for purpose there today, and it will require us to have fit for purpose packaging there.
Here's the great news: When we think about snacks, tea, yogurt across the away-from-home landscape, we already have the products. We, in many cases, we already have the pack sizes we need. We've just not gone after those points of distribution. So the biggest part of our work this year has been doing the kinds of things that you would do in any sort of customer segmentation model. Where the segments we want to go after, that we have a right to win in. Where are the major customers there? How do we align our route to market after that? We will have distribution partners, many of whom we already have relationships with, some of whom I've known for years.
They are a very effective way for us to reach the marketplace, and we need to have channel segment-specific marketing so that you're driving the right activity. We've already begun that. So like the National Association of Convenience Stores, for instance, we have a presence at the NACS Show, which is just in a few weeks, on a variety of our brands. That's first for Hain. So right products and right portfolio and the right pack sizes, we're on, pretty far on the road there. Right capabilities, we've got some opportunities there. Right people in the right place, going after the right customers, there's some pieces and parts to do that. You will see us have some early successes. We talked about some of them today, but we'll be able to talk to them in subsequent quarters because we do know that this and omni-channel e-commerce are big growth vehicles.
We want to be able to give you more visibility each quarter to where we're starting to see some of that run rate, because those are also not measured channels. Unless, of course, you—you know, there are some tools that you can get, which I think I've talked to a few of you about, that gives you visibility to reach into places like convenience stores and in vending and in airports and those locations. But we need to give you visibility to that. We've picked up distribution in snacks in some large c- stores. We've picked up distribution in some large on-campus for colleges and universities. We've picked up distribution in some other areas within, that you will start to see it generate some momentum.
I think what we've layered in, you know, when we sort of said we wanted to be promises made, promises kept, there's a commitment, and then there's a target. We're committing this year to beginning to get those things that you'll see in the back half of the year. I'd love to see it be faster. And frankly, I've seen it faster at other places, so we're gonna lean into it heavily, and you should expect to see it. From an industry standpoint, in general, away-from-home represents 15%-20% of a company's revenue. Any one of the CPG players that you look at, they, it's somewhere around 15%-20% of their revenue is from away-from-home. For us, it's less than 2%.
The opportunity for us to drive the right brands and the right points of distribution and go after those is a tremendous opportunity for us. What's great about away-from-home is it's not just about distribution and volume, but it's reach, and it's physical awareness to the consumer so that when the shopper is on their journey, our brands are top of mind. Because impressions of brands is both physically seeing it as well as all the sort of marketing assets that you see. We need to take advantage of that. We have some great brands. You look at the Terra packaging, that's packaging that breaks through, but it needs to be available on the shopper's journey so that we're generating that brand awareness. But we're super excited about it. I'm getting the nod from Alexis.
I just really want to thank everybody, and I'd first say I want to thank you for the last nine months. You know, you've asked me some really pointed questions. You've challenged my thinking. You've spent a lot of time with us to also tell me what you'd like to see from Hain. But the one thing I've consistently heard from you, but I've also heard from our largest customers, is a belief that Hain can be reimagined and that we have opportunities with our company. My goal is that we deliver into that potential, and I think we have a very clear and compelling plan to do so.
I'm looking forward to engaging with you in future quarters to show you the progress that we're making, and you have my commitment that we will be a promises made, promises kept, transparent team to be able to, to show you what we're doing. So thank you, and thank you for this morning, and I look forward to joining you outside for a little sort of impromptu. Please take your goodie bags, load them up with every product you can get a hold of. Take them to your family and friends, but really appreciate the time this morning.