Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, Andrew. And it's great to be back here at CAGNY. And thank you for spending this session with us. So before we get started, the usual reminder that we're going to make forward-looking statements and use some non-GAAP metrics. So please refer to this slide. I'm sure you have time to read through all of it as a disclaimer. So today, we are here to share with you an update on our strategy to create value at Kenvue, as we continue to transform from a segment of a large healthcare conglomerate, primarily focused on cash, to an independent leader in consumer health focused on profitable growth. In 2024, we have made progress in strengthening our foundations and our capabilities both commercially and operationally. We have delivered on our guidance for margin and EPS.
But as many of you heard from me two weeks ago at our Q4 earnings call, our top-line growth did not land where we expected and wanted it to be. So today, we are going to share with you what we are doing differently in 2025 and what are our plans to deliver a stronger level of performance in 2025 and beyond. So this year, we are squarely focused on carrying profitable growth. To do this, we are leveraging and amplifying what we call extraordinary powers to drive faster brand growth. So Charmaine, our Chief Growth Officer, will share with you a number of examples of how we scale this throughout our portfolio. Paul, our CFO, will share a financial overview.
And you will see how our outlook for 2025 contemplates an acceleration in our organic revenue growth, asset-neutral EPS growth outpacing organic revenue growth, and stronger free cash flow generation. So as we advance on our journey to become the undisputed leader in consumer health, and as we transform our organization and rewire it differently to deliver accelerated top-line growth in a profitable way, everything we do is in service of our purpose as a company, which is to help everyone everywhere realize the extraordinary power of everyday care. And this concept of extraordinary power is something that we are going to talk a lot about today. So we are a pure-play in consumer health. We are focused on consumer health categories that benefit from tailwinds. Think about the aging population.
Think about the fact that more and more people around the world, emerging and developed markets, want to take their health in their own hands. Our categories are exportable. They are underdiagnosed, undertreated, and undersubstituted, which provides ample opportunities for us to grow our categories. And they have a very attractive profitability to create the right platform for us to drive profitable growth. And within this exciting space of consumer health, we have curated a world-class portfolio of iconic brands. You heard from Andrew that more than a billion consumers trust, love, and choose to use every day. And I'm sure it has been your own experience with our brands. Our brands are usually introduced to you at a moment where you are vulnerable. It's your fever. It's your first bath. It's your first kind of sickness, first kind of crisis.
And at this very emotional moment, somebody you trust and who deeply cares about you introduces a Kenvue brand to you. It can be your mom, your dad, a doctor, a nurse, a friend of yours. This is a very emotional moment. So we take this emotional bond to our brand. We marry it with the unbeatable efficacy of our product. And that's what creates lifelong loyalty for our brands. And when you look at our portfolio today, that's why we have 37 number-one positions in the categories and geographies where we compete. That's why many of our brands are synonymous with the categories in which they compete. And that's what makes us very confident in our future as Kenvue. By the way, as you exit this room, you will see a number of products that are waiting for you. I hope that you will enjoy them.
Thinking about 2025, we enter the year focused on a number-one goal, which is to deliver profitable growth. And for us, it's all about engaging more consumers and doing it at scale. To do that, we are freeing up resources in our business to invest in our brands. And we are revamping our teams to create a culture of performance and impact. And that's what allows us to engage with consumers in a differentiated way and to complete every shopper online and offline. So since becoming an independent company, we have done quite a lot to strengthen our foundations. We have exited over 2,000 TSAs from J&J over the past 18+ months in over 50 countries, all of that without any disruption to our business. We are about 90 days from completing this part of our journey, which will mean that we'll be fully independent from an operational perspective.
As a result of that, we now have more streamlined, more effective systems and processes that are more fit for purpose for a consumer health company and also allow us to operate with a more cost-effective base. Second, we have a healthcare P&L with a more efficient cost structure that we are continuing to strengthen in 2025. And these savings that we are generating, we are investing them in our brands. And 2025 is going to be year two of us reducing our costs and investing in our brands. So we are going to start seeing the compounding effect of this flywheel, if you will, with a clear eye to volume growth and share gains. And in addition, we are working differently in our new, more effective, more efficient, simpler operating model with clear roles and responsibilities for our teams around the world.
We have established global cross-functional brand development teams who are focused on developing strategy, communication, and innovation pipelines for the brands that I referred to before. And our local teams activate these plans with our local retailers and local healthcare professionals. So clear roles and responsibilities, it's more effective, it's more efficient, it allows us to move faster. We started piloting this model last year. And we saw the result in Europe, for example, where we are expanding our Aveeno brand very quickly using this new model. And finally, we are quickly building our new Kenvue culture, fast-moving, faster decision-making, more agile with deeper expertise in areas where we needed to build more muscle, with new talents joining our teams at scale. To give you a sense of what I'm talking about today, about a third of our employees are new to Kenvue.
That gives you a sense of the magnitude and scale of the transformation that we have been through and continue to go through. And this transformation has one goal and one goal only: it's to drive profitable, to accelerate profitable growth. And to achieve this goal, we are systematically, methodically, strategically, aggressively deploying a framework that is a new playbook we have created for Kenvue. We call it our Kenvue Extraordinary Powers formula. And we apply it to each one of our brands across our portfolio, starting with our top 15 largest brands. And in 2025, all our growth plans reflect the adoption of this framework. Each element is critical, but extraordinary growth happens when all five are executed simultaneously with the same level of precision and differentiation in the market. So let's look at each one of them briefly. Everything starts with science at Kenvue.
Each one of our brands builds trust with science. Science means efficacy. Efficacy means loyalty. That's how you drive sustainable growth. We have more than 1,500 scientists at Kenvue. They invent cutting-edge innovation and technology. Last year alone, thanks to this team, Kenvue was granted 761 new patents. And so what does that mean? It means that the innovation you are going to see in 2025, 2026, 2027, and beyond is going to be stronger, bolder, more differentiated, with many first-to-market in the pipeline. And this year, something we are going to do differently as well is to be much more visible with consumers in terms of science. You will see us talk much more about our science in a visible, relevant, easy-to-understand way for consumers with powerful science-backed claims that will entice instant trials. The second power is expert recommendation.
We use our science to strengthen our credibility, our partnership, and our level of recommendation by expert healthcare professionals, which is a critical element in terms of demand generation in our ecosystem for our categories. Today, many of our brands are already number-one recommended by healthcare professionals in the respective category and geography. In 2025, we are amplifying this trend in a much more visible way. You are going to see on social media many, many more healthcare professionals recommend Kenvue products. I told you in Q4 about our breakthrough collaboration with Dr. Shah and Dr. Bhanusali, the most followed dermatologists on social media. You are going to see them in a number of our campaigns this year. As we speak, in our latest Neutrogena campaign with Tate McRae, Dr. Shah is co-starring in this campaign. This is just one example.
In addition, our brands will also be much more visible in clinics. Just to give you a couple of examples, in the U.S., with our newly expanded sales force, we are going to call on more than 80% of practicing dermatologists in the U.S. And in the U.K., we have also expanded our sales force and are now going to cover 6,000 more pharmacists in 2025. So as a result of this effort, we expect our weekly recommendations for our brands to augment significantly in 2025, whether it's from dermatologists or dentists or pediatricians or other specialists. And we know that this recommendation is a very strong precursor and sign of tomorrow's purchase and long-term loyalty. For innovation, we've also changed the way we are working. We have shifted from a technology-centric model to a consumer insight-led innovation model. And we are reducing our time-to-market.
We strengthen connections between our marketing insight, R&D, and operations team, co-locating them to make them more collaborative, more consumer-centric, more outcome-oriented. In R&D, we are leveraging new AI tools to accelerate speed-to-market, and we are very encouraged by what we see. We piloted some of it in 2024, and for example, we developed a new Listerine product in Germany in less than five months. In the U.S., we went from development to launch of eight new products in cough, cold, flu, and sinus in just eight months, so in 2025, every brand will adopt this new consumer insight-led innovation model, and that's the reason why we are already bringing 40% more innovation in 2025 compared to 2024, strengthening our portfolio in different ways through premiumization, through extensions into adjacencies, but also through products that have attractive entry price points.
So more healthcare professional recommendations, more innovation, more marketing as well. As we invest more in our brands, we are not only investing more. We are also increasing the quality of our marketing, leveraging new next-gen marketing models to really make sure that we build breakthrough brand-building content across our portfolio. That's a new model for us. We call it our content factory. It's an entirely new ecosystem which develops cutting-edge content powered by audience intelligence and with optimization at scale. And with our new content factory that is now activated in 40 markets in 2025, we are drastically improving the quality of the content and reducing our costs. So we are moving from a pretty complex network of hundreds of agencies around the world to a simple but very powerful ecosystem where we have, on one hand, two world-class global agencies developing big idea campaigns.
Then our production lab scales this ID into locally relevant content with scale and relevance using GenAI and automation. So with our new model, we are able to produce better content faster at a lower cost. To give you a sense of what I'm talking about, we have reduced our time-to-market by 40%. And as we speak, we are bringing some campaigns from briefs to market in a matter of days. So that's very exciting. All our brands are going to adopt our new Content Factory in 2025. And we expect this to boost our performance. We just saw it in the last two weeks. With the Neutrogena campaign, as we relaunch Neutrogena Hydro Boost with Tate McRae and Dr. Shah, we saw the impact of the quality output of our new Content Factory. In the first 24 hours, we earned 1 billion impressions.
We did beat the benchmark in terms of video views by 40%. And more importantly, or as importantly, we were able to track sales on Amazon. And we saw a 700% increase in added attributed sales. And on our hero Hydro Boost job, a 25% lift in revenue. So that's what the power of content does. And we are going to scale that throughout our portfolio in 2025 and beyond. And finally, seamless commerce. Each one of our brands is strengthening how they show up in-store, online, in-store prominence, and presence. We did a lot of work in 2024. We are scaling it to a different level in 2025.
In addition, our teams will benefit this year from our new global center of excellence in revenue growth management that will allow them to make better-informed decisions with new technology and tools in terms of price points, trade stands, promotions of all sorts. And then you will also hear from Charmaine in a minute that we are introducing new AI tools to increase the in-store availability of our products. So in 2025, it will be easier than ever to find and shop our products. So as you can tell, in 2025, we are significantly increasing our performance in all five levels of our extraordinary power framework. That will be powered by stronger level of investment activated by renewed teams, focused on the right priorities. Across all five, we are going to be in a much better position this year than we were last year.
That's one of the reasons we feel very confident in our ability to accelerate revenue growth throughout the year. Now I would like to invite Charmaine up to give you some examples of how we are bringing this to life across the portfolio.
Thank you, Thibaut. And good afternoon, everyone. So Thibaut has outlined for all of you our five extraordinary powers. And I'm just going to give you a taste of how each of these are going to come to life differently for Kenvue in 2025. The first extraordinary power is extraordinary science, superior science. Science is in our DNA. And the example I want to give is the one you can see on the screen here, is actually how we are injecting the science we have and democratizing beauty through Neutrogena with our new innovation. You can see our new innovation there on the screen. It's a fully mineral foundation. It gives you SPF 70, gives you fully clear coverage without sacrificing any beauty experience. And so what we've managed to do is actually combine the opportunity we have with our science with a real unmet need.
For those of you out there that use sunscreen, finding one that actually goes on clear and gives high protection is unprecedented. This is an unrivaled product into the market. Not only that, we got it into the market in about half the time we normally would. And on top of that, today, I'm going to give you a sneak preview. This is a global world debut of actually the spot that we're about to launch with in April of how we're going to bring this to life in our new model. So I'll let you watch the spot. Okay. I can see a few smiles in the audience. So I'm going to now talk about our second extraordinary power at Kenvue. And that second extraordinary power is that of expert recommendation. We know that healthcare recommendations are incredibly important across our categories.
No less so than on one of our biggest equities, our over-billion-dollar equity, Tylenol. Everyone in this room, I'm assuming, knows Tylenol. But in 2025, we're going to leverage the expert partnerships we have to expand our category leadership. What's different? The expert partnerships we have are going to help us expand into new areas. You might not know it, but pain is still significantly undertreated. And we've leveraged insights from these experts to shape our 2025 pipeline in a very different way. This year, our innovation on Tylenol features exciting new formats as well as the expansion of Tylenol into drug-free formats that help muscles and help joints. And so by broadening the painkit toolkit, we extend the extraordinary power of expert recommendations to win more consumers and engage more consumers with our iconic Tylenol brand. Now, our third extraordinary power is insights-led innovation. You've heard from Thibaut before.
We're taking this to new levels in 2025, where we will introduce 40% more innovation to market. If I pick one of the many we now have to talk to you about across our portfolio, what's better brand to share an example on than Band-Aid? Who doesn't love Band-Aid? In 2025, we're accelerating our innovation to develop a new market for something that just didn't exist before, and that is a real unmet need, a truly waterproof bandage. We all know why. Up until now, a superior product just didn't exist. Who's been through a dip in a pool, washed their hands, and their bandage just slid straight off, but we've created an amazing 100% waterproof Band-Aid, and again, what's new for 2025 is we have done it in half the time we would have done it traditionally. Easy to apply, and it's 100% waterproof, so it stays on.
Handwashing-proof, shower-proof, sweat-proof, swimming-proof, you name it. This month, we shipped it to trade in the U.S., and we're excited to see it land in all of your baskets. And we're also excited about how this faster-led approach to insight-led innovation will apply across our entire portfolio in 2025. The fourth extraordinary power we have is breakthrough brand building. Shoot that stuff. And what's different in 2025 is we've strengthened our muscles. We've strengthened our muscles in data. We've strengthened our muscles in creative and media to ensure we're engaging more consumers with the right messages delivered by the most influential voices, having the agility to move at the speed of culture. A fantastic example of this is the way we're driving reach and relevance with our number one allergy brand in the U.S., Zyrtec. Zyrtec pioneered proprietary data to optimize reach in the allergy category.
This work helped us sustain our leadership position, which we hold to this day and continue to grow, but it doesn't stop there. In 2025, we're advancing our AI capabilities, allowing us to move even faster to tailor content to not just specific retailers, specific regions, but specific consumers, so if you've got a dog allergy or if you've got a hay fever allergy, we'll be able to use that AI technology to target you specifically. And in the U.S., we've still got 26 million sufferers who aren't treating their allergies, so there's huge headroom to grow this category, and on top of that, we're flipping our marketing model. We're flipping the traditional OTC marketing model on its head, starting with lifestyle TikTokers, Instagram stars, and our own scientists through our Zyrtec platform, so we plug that into the content factory that Thibaut talked about.
We do it quicker, and we roll it out globally, something we just did not have the ability to do in 2024. And this is one of many examples of the breakthrough brand building you'll see from us in 2025. And to our fifth and final extraordinary power, some might say even the most important, seamless commerce. That's the moment of truth when consumers actually choose our products. We know consumers now have many different ways to shop. There's an ecosystem. It's non-linear, whether it's digital, whether it's online. It's channel-less, and it's seamless. And we have done a lot in 2024 to improve across both in-store and online. So first, we started with the fundamentals, and we've made significant inroads. We've got stronger partnerships with retailers and continue to build those fundamentals like Thibaut spoke about of revenue growth management.
Through tech, through discipline, we're really enhancing our processes to ensure we're maximizing the power of our investment and actually really strategically unlocking our growth. We're also in the process of dramatically improving our onshelf availability, our prominence, and our execution. But we know we've got opportunity to improve, and we've always got opportunity to get better. To improve, late last year, we introduced a proprietary AI platform which optimizes onshelf availability. We rolled that out across a number of our North American customers. And it looks not just at store level, but at item level. Not only is it driving strong results, and it's above industry benchmark, we're planning to roll that out across our North American customers in 2025. So that's what we're doing for our in-store environment. But we know that consumers are not just shopping in store. Increasingly, they're shopping digitally.
And in these channels, feed is what matters. And in 2025, we're tackling this head-on with another proprietary new AI commerce tool. And in our first week of piloting this with Neutrogena in the U.S., we saw immediate gains based on the strategies that we employed through this new technology. We'll expand this pilot across our entire North America business throughout 2025. We really believe these initiatives will set us up for strong growth in 2025 and into the future. So let me bring that together for you because actually, extraordinary power comes when all of these five powers are executed well and systematically together. Systematically deploying these five powers is built into our plans for 2025. And I'll give you a quick snapshot of how this deploys across each segment. So I'll start with our strongly performing self-care segment. And on the chart behind me, you can see Tylenol.
Tylenol is growing very well, and it's using the five powers very well. I take the first extraordinary power of superior science. We designed last year a new-to-market solution, a pill with water-activated coating that makes it more slippery and therefore more easy to swallow. Putting our second and third extraordinary powers to work, we actually, through our close partnership with experts and through insight-led innovation lens, we knew that Tylenol Easy to Swallow, that we launched last year, would help the 40% of adults in the U.S. that find it difficult to take a pill or they find it uncomfortable to swallow. We then went to work with our breakthrough brand building power, leveraging high-impact digital and social content that connected our consumers with the consumer inside, some of which you can see on the screen behind me. With our key retailers, this launch has driven strong category growth.
It's enhanced the trust our healthcare professionals have with us. In fact, Tylenol grew nearly twice the category in 2024. And it also has the, think about this, the biggest pain brand in the U.S., we increased household penetration by 120 basis points. So when we have all these five powers combined, we see how they work. Tylenol is just one example. And this is the playbook that we are relentlessly deploying in 2025 across all three segments. I take you to our next segment, essential health. Aveeno Baby is a great example to share here. When we get all five powers working, we deliver very strong results. Aveeno Baby is growing three times the market in the U.S. And why is that? Starting again with our superior science. We're clinically proven oat science that actually soothes and moisturizes the most sensitive skin.
We're the number one pediatrician-recommended baby lotion in the U.S. for helping shape global baby pediatrician guidelines. We worked with our pediatricians to develop our new Aveeno Healthy Start range. It's this powerful-led insight, science, and bringing something to market that moms and dads really needed. For those of you that have had a newborn, everyone's really concerned, "What do I put on their skin straight away?" And this was an example of really answering this insight. It's safe to use on babies from day one and on babies with sensitive skin. And it's four times more moisturizing than our competition. And of course, our breakthrough powers of brand building come to life. It was a TikTok-driven launch, and we delivered incredible engagement of industry benchmarks in 2023, exceeding Salesforce. And for those of you that haven't tried it, it's got a 4.8-star rating by parents on Amazon.
So again, demonstrating when we deploy all of these five powers, we fly. As in our essential healthcare segment as well as self-care, when you see them deployed, which is our plan for 2025, all of the powers of the brands come to life. Now, finally, for our skin health and beauty segment, the same systematic approach is being deployed. And we are starting to see results. In Q4 2024, Neutrogena retained its number one face care position in the U.S. And we have maintained this position in the past three months in all measured channels. This progress continued with solid share growth in Neutrogena facial cleansing, which we know is an entry point into the category, gives us confidence we can continue this momentum. Why? Because Neutrogena has beauty down to a science.
Leading with superior science, we then team up extensively with our network of experts, in this case, dermatologists, to not only recommend our products, but we team up with to develop, amplify, and educate about our products. Our recent insight-led innovation, Collagen Bank, was a great example of this coming to life. And when you combine that with the fourth extraordinary power of extraordinary brand building, you've got super relevant influencer and celebrity partners like Nicola, Hailey, Tate come together in an even more seamless way. And not only that, this week, we are trying something entirely new, seamless commerce-wise. We are doing a unique TikTok live streaming event with Tate McRae as she launches her new album.
Look out for it on Thursday to do frictionless selling because we know that's where our audience is, and that's where we'll make the most impact in terms of bringing the five powers together. So again, we're not there yet, but we know when we have the five powers working together, we're confident it will engage consumers and start to win consumers across those new generations and return our brand to growth in the U.S. So to summarize, this gives us confidence in our 2025 plan. Last year, we invested at more competitive levels, and we began deploying these five powers across our segments. In self-care, we've been systematically deploying these five powers, and we continue to expand our leadership position with more than 80% of our revenue gaining share globally.
In essential health, leveraging these powers, and we've maintained our number one leadership position in all of our needs states. We know we're not yet pacing to category in 2024, but we recorded our strongest year of growth in six years, and we've seen growth in revenue and growth in volume. Then in skin health and beauty, we know we are not where we need to be, but we've taken swift actions in the past year to accelerate performance, and we're seeing positive signs of the playbook in action. In EMEA and LatAm , where we've been systematically deploying our playbook, we had high single-digit growth in 2024, and in the U.S., we are very proud of Neutrogena's regaining the number one position in face care and the improvements we're making in derm recommendation, where we are now number two, which we're really encouraged by.
Again, though, I will say we are not where we want to be in skin health and beauty, but we're encouraged by the improvements we've made thus far. We have robust plans across all of our segments, systematically developed using our five extraordinary powers. And we continue to make strong progress across these. I'll hand over now to Paul to give us the financial update.
Thank you, Charmaine. It's great to be back here at CAGNY with you today. As you heard from us, 2024 was a pivotal year for the company as we strengthened our commercial and operational foundations, and we put Kenvue on a much, much stronger footing. At the same time, last year was a disappointing year in that our sales growth was lower than we expected as we were impacted by low sun and also cold cough and flu seasons during the year and also distributor challenges in China that we are now addressing. At the same time, 2024 was a very busy year for Kenvue, where we stepped up our investments to modernize our systems, improve data to capture better and inform our decision-making in a faster and another manner. We became much more competitive in terms of brand support relative to our peers.
Importantly, due to the cost optimization efforts, we delivered on our operating margin and EPS outlook for 2024 despite softer than anticipated top line. Now, we have strong plans in place for 2025, both to accelerate organic sales growth and also to drive leverage across the P&L. A few weeks ago, we introduced our outlook for 2025, which you can see here on this page. Based on the strong commercial plans that Thibaut and Charmaine have outlined, we expect to drive organic sales growth of 2%-4% up from 1.5% last year. With an acceleration in organic sales growth and a relentless focus on driving leaner and more efficient cost structures, we are expected to adjust the operating margin to expand in 2025, even as we continue to increase investment behind our brands.
And for adjusted EPS, we expect to deliver mid-single-digit growth on a cost and currency basis. With over half of our sales coming from outside the U.S., a stronger dollar would have an impact on our results as it will have on many of our peers. Let me dive a little bit more into the expectations for 2025, starting with the top line. Within our organic sales growth guidance of 2%-4%, we assume 2%-3% weighted average growth in the categories where we compete, which is lower than the historical norm. But what gives us confidence that we will accelerate growth through the year and outgrow what we delivered in the past year? Five things. Number one, first, 40% more innovation is a very tangible building block that we're executing.
Second, we're expected to generate strong returns not only from a higher level of investment behind our brands, but more importantly, a much more impactful media investment and incremental trade spend. Number three, we plan to deliver higher volumes and distribution gains through greater presence and prominence in store and online. Fourth, as we realize benefits from our RGM capability, we expect pricing to be a net positive in 2025, even as we set up our trade promotions in the first part of the year. And lastly, all of our teams will be executing with a higher level of intensity throughout 2025 after adopting our new operating model. We expect organic growth to be volume-led in 2025, and we are confident that these plans are already in motion as we speak. Now, I would like to give a little bit more color into how we see 2025 evolving.
Breaking out the last slide into two halves of the year, I'm obviously not guiding now by building blocks, but this chart illustrates graphically that innovation, incremental media spend, and distribution gains are expected to contribute to growth greatly throughout the year. However, focused price resets in North America and trade investments in the first half of 2025 and disruptions in trade inventory are all expected to be a significant headwind to organic growth early in the year. We expect these headwinds to be behind us as we enter the second half of the year when our RGM efforts also start contributing to growth, which is why you should see a stronger organic sales growth in the second half. Switching gears to margins, we have been laser-focused on fostering a culture of efficiency over planned operational discipline, which has been evident in our gross margin results.
Since separating from J&J, our supply chain has stood up fit-for-purpose procurement capabilities, and we have been optimizing our manufacturing and warehousing network and rolling out our smart operations and further adopting digitalization and automation. 2024 showcased the benefits from the significant productivity improvements that we have implemented, and we grew gross margin 200 basis points versus the prior year to a very competitive 60.4%, which helped enable our increasing brand investment. Now, going forward, we do see plenty of runway for continuous gross margin improvements by driving even greater productivity and unlocking more opportunities for revenue and growth management, embracing value engineering, and continuing premiumization.
While we expect the pace of gross margin improvements to moderate in the future to normal levels, we expect this to continue to be a source of funds over the long run to help our investments and also contribute to leverage of our model. Now, driving efficiencies behind our brands and turning to the middle of the P&L, as you can see here, in our second year for Vue Forward, we remain on track to realize $350 million in annualized savings by 2026. As a reminder, our Vue Forward is first about driving geographic footprint optimization, second, to simplify the organization to drive faster decision-making, and third, implementing new systems and automation to strengthen capabilities like consumer insights to respond in real time to market-changing dynamics.
Said differently, we are resetting our cost base directing from fixed infrastructure, non-working expenses, to increased brand support to levels more fitting for a standalone consumer multinational company. Last year, we also took a significant step forward in expanding our healthcare professional sales force and upgrading our capabilities and technology to modernize and automate across the organization. And in 2025, as I noted earlier, we plan to continue to invest more behind our brands, further build our capabilities, and leverage productivity. And importantly, beyond 2025, we will continue to expand operating margins as we remain laser-focused on freeing up more resources by driving productivity and optimizing the cost structure. Now, let me turn to cash flow. Consistent with our history, we are well-positioned to generate sustainable, durable free cash flow over the long term. We became a standalone company in May of 2023.
As a result of that, 2023 was an abnormal year for cash flow. The comparison between 2023 and 2024 free cash flow was impacted by a number of factors related to our separation, full-year standalone company costs, as well as the normalization in operational non-recurring items such as post-pandemic record low inventory levels in the prior year. Additionally, we stepped up our capital investments to exit the TSAs, and we introduced our View Forward, our two-year restructuring plan. Both 2024 and 2025 are investment years from a separation and transformation perspective, and TSA exit-related CapEx investments as well. We're offsetting some of these investments in our working capital improvement with working capital improvement initiatives, and therefore expect to generate $200 million more of free cash flow in 2025 compared to 2024.
As we look forward, post-investment phase, we have line of sight to about $2 billion and growing of free cash flow generation as we put the separation and transformation initiatives behind us to grow income and continue to improve working capital. Moving to capital allocation, we maintain our order of priorities and remain committed to maximizing shareholder value. First and foremost, we will continue to invest in our brands as we see the highest return on investment right there. Thibaut and Charmaine went into great detail around these efforts, and I will just add that I am very excited as well about our plans for 2025 and beyond. In both 2024 and 2025, we're also laser-focused on modernizing Kenvue, which is critical for our long-term success as a fit-for-purpose consumer health organization.
Returning capital to shareholders remains core to our capital allocation philosophy, which can be best seen in our attractive dividends. We're proud of our Dividend Aristocrat status. Q4 last year increased our quarterly dividend by 2.5%, and we expect to continue to grow it over time. We are committed and very well-positioned to maintain a strong balance sheet. We continue to target a gross leverage of two times, which is slightly below the current levels. We're always evaluating value-enhancing opportunities. We will remain very disciplined around portfolio management. And lastly, at this point, repurchases of shares to offset dilution is what we're focusing on, although there's potential to consider more at the right time. And with that, let me turn it back to Thibaut to close.
Thank you, Paul. So as you heard today, a lot happening throughout Kenvue. We are focused, as you heard, as we talked about on our long-term value creation formula, which is driving top-line growth ahead of the categories in which we compete, improving our profitability with constant currency EPS outpacing organic sales growth, generating strong and reliable cash flow, and maintaining a disciplined financial policy, always approaching our capital allocation decisions with a strong focus on ROI. So in summary, in 2025, we are laser-focused on accelerating profitable growth. We are confident in our ability to deliver on our financial outlook as we start realizing the compounding benefits of the structural changes we have implemented, as well as scaling across the portfolio of Extraordinary Powers framework.
And when we think about the future, 2026 and beyond, we can clearly see how we are going to build on this platform to grow profitably ahead of categories and springboard into value creation for all our stakeholders in a sustainable manner with a stronger portfolio powered by the appropriate level of investment and activated by a world-class team focused on growing our brands. So with this, we thank you for your time, and we're going to take your questions next door in the Q&A room.