Hello, and welcome to our 2022 Mondelēz International Investor Update. We appreciate your taking the time to join us, and we thank you for your continued interest and investment. Today, we'll share an update on our strategy to advance our global snacking leadership and walk you through the next phase of our company evolution. We hope you'll walk away with a deeper understanding of our opportunities and growth priorities. We've allocated a good deal of time for Q&A with our senior leadership team. We'll start with an overview of our plan to win from Chairman and CEO, Dirk Van de Put. Dirk will take you through our performance since launching our growth strategy more than three years ago and explain why we're confident that Mondelēz now is poised for even stronger performance in our second decade.
Our Chief People Officer, Paulette Alviti, will join Dirk to share her perspectives on how our winning culture will serve as a key engine to accelerate this growth. After that, we'll dive deeper into our growth strategy in our key categories. First, we'll discuss our plan to achieve global chocolate leadership with Martin Renaud, our Chief Marketing and Sales Officer, and Vinzenz Gruber, our EVP and President for Europe. Next, Vinzenz will be joined by Gustavo Valle, our EVP and President of North America, to share our plans to advance our position in biscuits while expanding to the fast-growing baked snacks segment. We'll then pause for Q&A and take a short break. After the break, Martin will return to the stage alongside Maurizio Brusadelli, our EVP and President for Asia, Middle East, and Africa, as well as Sandra MacQuillan, our Chief Supply Chain Officer.
Martin will cover our progress and plans around marketing excellence, while Maurizio and Sandra will share insights on our initiatives to further improve sales excellence and supply chain. After that, my colleague, André Gevargiz, will host a fireside chat with CFO, Luca Zaramella, and Christine McGrath, our Chief Impact and Sustainability Officer, to discuss the critical role of sustainability in advancing our strategy. Finally, Luca will discuss our strategic priorities to unlock further value creation. We'll close the day with additional time for Q&A and a few words from Dirk. Before I hand it over to Dirk, I would like to remind you that many of the statements that we make today will be forward-looking. Also, unless noted as reported, we'll be referencing our non-GAAP financial measures, and we provide our year-over-year growth on a constant currency basis, unless otherwise noted.
You can find our statements around forward-looking statements, comparable GAAP measures, and GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations, and more information in our presentation and on our website. With that, let's get things started with Dirk.
Hello, and welcome, everybody. We are excited to have you with us. On behalf of the entire Mondelēz International leadership team, welcome to our 2022 Investors Update. We appreciate you joining us today. This year makes the tenth anniversary of our company. While we have many brands that have been around for generations, our company is still quite young. While we are proud of all that we have achieved in the past decade, we are even more excited about the opportunities we see in the years ahead. Today, we will talk about that vision, sharing our strategic plans to build on our unique strengths, sharpen our focus, and accelerate our growth in the years ahead.
By mobilizing our teams globally around our three strategic pillars, growth, execution, and culture, we've step changed the growth of the company, strengthened our competitive advantages, and built a platform for sustained and attractive long-term performance. Our focus on profit dollar growth, local first commercial execution, high return investments, and clearly defined incentives has helped us to consistently meet or exceed our financial and operational commitments. As such, we're well-positioned to take our performance to the next level. Today, we will share highlights of our progress and demonstrate why we believe the next phase in our evolution will be the most exciting one yet. We'll start by recapping our actions and performance over the past three-plus years, which have driven our virtuous cycle of growth.
As a result, we have a clear winning position as a global snacking leader with a strong core business in the fast-growing chocolate and biscuit snacks categories. Looking ahead, we're reshaping our portfolio to further accelerate growth. We are increasing our focus on chocolate and biscuits, which we have expanded to include cakes, pastries, and snack bars, while expecting to exit non-core businesses in other categories over time. We're doubling down on execution to capture the sizable opportunities ahead of us. By strengthening our investments in key capabilities and enablers, including sales, marketing, revenue growth management, and supply chain, we're positioning the company to win for the long term. Let's take a look at our plan to win in more detail. To ground our go-forward conversation, we'll start with some perspective on our recent performance.
Since the launch of our strategy in 2018, we have consistently delivered against our long-term algorithm. Strong top-line momentum driven by brand and sales investment has enabled us to consistently deliver profitable growth, reinvest in the business, and return significant capital to our shareholders. Over the past three years, we've delivered and exceeded our long-term growth algorithm of 3%+ organic net revenue growth with a healthy mix of volume and price. Over the same period, we've consistently delivered high single-digit Adjusted EPS growth. We've also grown our dividend double digits on average over the past three years and achieved or exceeded $3 billion in free cash flow every year. We have achieved this step change in performance by successfully reimagining and repositioning the business since 2018. This encompasses five key elements.
First, we've shifted our focus from cost savings and percentage margins to delivering volume-driven profit dollar growth, which funds a virtuous cycle of reinvestment. Second, we've transitioned our portfolio from a collection of power brands and less supported smaller brands to a targeted focus on our core categories of chocolate and biscuits. Now, our full portfolio of brands in those categories is supported by increased and more consistent advertising spend. Third, we've evolved our organization from a centralized matrix to a simpler local-first approach with clear accountabilities. Fourth, we've focused on growth and improved our marketing and sales capabilities. Finally, to reward and drive the right behaviors, we've revised our incentive program to better align it to our growth strategy, driving ownership and accountability deeper into the organization. Together, these changes have step changed the trajectory of the company, creating a strong foundation for our next chapter.
Now that we've reviewed the company's progress over the past few years, let's take a closer look at our five key competitive advantages. First, our leadership in attractive and resilient categories like chocolate and biscuits positions us well to benefit from the growing consumer preference for snacking. Second, we have an advantaged footprint with more than 1/3 of our revenue base in high-growth emerging markets. Third, the strength of our iconic brands differentiates us and allows us to navigate inflationary periods such as the one we are in today. And fourth, our growing excellence in marketing, sales, and cost management allows us to drive demand and deliver profitable volume-driven growth. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our growth culture enables us to attract and retain the very best people in the CPG industry who can bring our vision to life through strong execution.
Let's dive deeper into each of these competitive advantages. First, our categories. Demand for our key snacking categories continues to grow. Consumer research validates our confidence that snacking plays an increasingly important role in consumers' life. Our annual State of Snacking Report, conducted in partnership with the global consumer research leader, The Harris Poll, finds that 64% of people prefer to eat many small snacks throughout the day, often replacing a traditional breakfast, lunch, or dinner. 86% of people around the world snack on a daily basis, on average, 3.3x per day. Additionally, 88% of consumers believe a balanced diet can include a little indulgence. This finding confirms that categories like chocolate remain very important to shoppers and their families, even as people seek to improve their overall health.
Finally, snacking is here to stay, and it's a behavior led by Generation Z and millennials, who snack on average 15% more per day than older generations. Taking together these consumer research trends both guide and reaffirm our strategy. We are confident that we are playing in the right categories and that we are well-positioned to win. We currently hold a clear number one global position in biscuits with 17% share, a very close number two global position in chocolate with 12% share, the number three global position in candy with 5% share, and the number two position in gum with 22% share. Growth in these snacking categories has risen steadily over the past few years from just shy of 3% in 2019 to 5% last year.
While we're at the point in the economic cycle where pressure on the consumer is increasing, our core categories of chocolate and biscuits have been historically resilient. Because they provide consumers with affordable moments of pleasure and fuel. As I mentioned, we are the undisputed number one in global biscuits and a very close number two in chocolate. When you combine our focus categories of chocolate and biscuits into a universe where the lines are increasingly blurring, we are a clear number one by a significant amount. Chocolate and biscuits are also very durable categories, performing well during economic downturns. Our second competitive advantage is our geographic footprint, with solid strength in developed markets, combined with broad exposure to the rapidly growing and demographically favored emerging markets. About 1/3 of our revenue comes from emerging markets, growing high single-digit %.
All of our geographic regions are growing at or above our top line algorithm. The strength of our iconic brands provides another clear competitive advantage. We're proud that consumers all around the world continue to reach for and seek out our trusted and beloved brands. In fact, our brands are the market leaders in our core categories of biscuits and chocolate in numerous markets around the world. To name just a few, Oreo is the world's favorite cookie. Cadbury Dairy Milk is the number one chocolate brand in key markets like the UK, India, and Australia. We are the world's leader in savory crackers. During COVID, consumers demonstrated their preference for brands that they know and trust, while private label share declined to 5% in chocolate and 10% in biscuits.
The fourth competitive advantage that fuels our confidence is our commercial capabilities, including marketing, sales, and cost management. Our purposeful marketing strategy, which you'll hear about later, is becoming a differentiator as we've improved across every aspect of this area. Similarly, we're investing in best-in-class sales capabilities and activations with an emphasis on emerging markets. We've added distribution to more than 700,000 stores in China and more than 500,000 stores in India since the start of 2019. We are continuing to invest to sustain growth in digital commerce, which has doubled as a percentage of our reported revenue since 2019. Additionally, we are advancing our revenue growth management capabilities with investments in technology and talent. This will be important for both the short-term inflationary cycle and our long-term ambition of strong top and bottom line performance.
We're also confident in the strength of our ongoing cost efficiency by driving down controllable input and conversion costs, advancing customer service, and streamlining logistics. Cost discipline is embedded throughout the organization, as evidenced by the fact that we were able to reduce overheads in 2021, even while growing revenue more than 5%. Of course, one of the most important enablers of bringing these four competitive advantages to life is our people, the very best people in the CPG industry. Our nearly 85,000 employees love our brands and our consumers, and that is the engine and driving force of our company. Now, I'd like to invite our Chief People Officer, Paulette Alviti, to share a bit more perspective on how we are continuing to enhance our growth culture to further drive success. Paulette?
Thank you, Dirk. I'm happy to provide additional context in how we have built the foundations of our growth culture and what I'd call our unique strengths here at Mondelēz. When we redefined our growth strategy back in 2018, we knew a key enabler for our success would be cultural, and we united behind a common purpose underpinned by newly adopted shared values, driving local empowerment in a local-first operating model, and putting our brands and consumers at the forefront, aligning our rewards and locally driven strategic KPIs, and providing rich career experiences for our colleagues, all driving a laser-focused mindset around growth.
These shifts allow us to get closer to the consumer, increase our speed to market and agility in driving solutions, unlock our robust collaborative spirit, where we work to support each other around shared goals, and excite our talent around the opportunity for a career in sought-after general management roles. Our culture has become a unique competitive advantage, and we have a clear culture strategy with robust programs and metrics designed to continue that momentum. We are taking our talent and culture strategy to the next level, aspiring to be the most engaged culture with the best talent among CPG companies. To reach this vision, we're focusing on three key areas. First, building a team of deep and diverse talent will remain a critical enabler to growth.
We're doubling down on programs in diversity, equity, and inclusion, including mentorship for leaders and early career diverse talent recruitment, expanding investment in top talent programs, and rigorous processes on succession planning, career, and development that will unlock internal sufficiency so we can. Confidence is underpinned by the progress we've been making against our key priorities, while headroom remains for further growth. As we strive to achieve diversity representation commensurate with our markets, in 2021 alone, we increased Black management representation in the U.S. by 60%. Since 2018, we've increased women in senior management by 15%, with women now holding 39% of our leadership roles, positioning us to reach our 2024 target of 40%.
Year over year, we continue to expand the number of global markets where we are recognized externally as a top employer. Together, these efforts build our brand as a career destination for top talent while driving local retention. We continue to build robust talent management processes with more planful development actions for our people. Our depth of talent results reflect this rigor with succession readiness for top leadership improving every year, up 16 percentage points since 2019. We continued to extend our strategic talent review processes, last year adding another 4,500 more colleagues globally, covering our entire manager and above population with robust career dialogues and career development plans that ready our future generation of leaders. In summary, we will build on the cultural foundations we have honed since 2018, being choiceful about the people investments we make.
From Kraft Foods. The next several years, from 2014 to 2017, focused primarily on cost transformation and improved margins. After embedding a culture of cost discipline, our focus shifted to step changing our top line growth performance. Now we are ready to accelerate our growth and focus our portfolio on the very attractive chocolate and biscuits categories. We are pleased but not satisfied with our track record in delivering consistent growth over the past three years and believe the best is yet to come. In support of this, we are evolving our strategy, enhancing our long-term algorithm. Our strategy continues to prioritize excellence in growth, execution and culture. At the same time, we recognize that we must invest in making our growth, execution and culture more sustainable for both people and the planet. That's why we are elevating sustainability to the fourth pillar within our strategy.
We call this approach sustainable snacking, and we believe it is critical to win in both the marketplace and in the hearts and minds of consumers. The competitive advantages and evolution that I've described give us confidence in adjusting our long-term algorithm. We are enhancing our long-term algorithm to 3%-5% organic net revenue growth. Our long-term algorithm continues to include Adjusted EPS growth in the high single digits and free cash flow of $3 billion-plus. Our focus areas within each strategic pillar are in line with the mega trends defining our sector and broader environment. Snacking continues to grow, and our approach to a more focused portfolio around chocolate, biscuit, and baked snacks will help us to capitalize on this trend.
Our investments in digital commerce and a more consumer-centric supply chain will position us well for the rising digital revolution and move to more local supply chains. Our focus on engagement, wellbeing, and flexibility will help attract and retain employees in a post-COVID environment, and our focus on building the right capabilities will be critical in a highly competitive talent environment. It's important to note that our strategy remains relevant and appropriate in spite of the currently challenging macro environment. There are certainly a number of challenges in the near term that will make it even more important to execute well, whether it's a stretched global supply chain, inflationary conditions that we haven't seen in decades, or the significant geopolitical uncertainty presented by the war in Ukraine.
Although we face headwinds from all of these dynamics, we are confident that we are taking the right actions that will deliver strong financial performance and sustained momentum. We believe the strength of our brands, the resilience of our core categories, and our affordable price points will enable us to continue to grow volume, especially in emerging markets. At the same time, we believe our relentless pursuit of productivity and supply chain simplification, as well as the pricing power of our brands, will enable us to offset many of the profitability risks. We are confident that through our strategy and execution, we will successfully navigate near-term volatility and accelerate long-term profitable growth. We're taking actions in four key areas to sustain and accelerate profitable growth. First, we are continuing to increase our focus on the core of chocolate and biscuits.
Second, we are taking both organic and inorganic steps to fill geographical white spaces. Third, we are expanding distribution in high growth channels where we have clear headroom to grow. Fourth, we are increasing our presence in underrepresented segments and price tiers. Let's walk through each of these actions in detail. First, we are doubling down on our core categories of chocolate and biscuits. Chocolate and biscuits are attractive and historically durable categories in both developed and emerging markets, and they still have significant headroom in terms of penetration and per capita consumption. Our revenue from these two core categories combined grew nearly 6% on average over the last three years, compared to a decline in our revenue from other categories, in part due to the COVID-related disruption of the gum category.
Over the past 10 years, we have been reshaping the business from approximately 60% chocolate and biscuits to almost 80%. Our long-term vision is to generate 90% of revenue through these two core categories. As we continue reshaping our portfolio, we will drive value through targeted acquisitions that expand our presence in chocolate and biscuits by filling geographical gaps and extending into underrepresented segments and price tiers. The 8 acquisitions we've completed or announced since 2018 add $2 billion in annual revenue and have an average growth rate in the high single digits. Our acquisition of Tate grew our presence in the premium biscuit space, and we successfully transitioned that business to direct store delivery.
The addition of Give & Go and Perfect Snacks enabled us to take advantage of growing demand for premium wellbeing snacks in the U.S., while the acquisition of Grenade enabled us to strengthen our presence in wellbeing snack bars in the U.K. Additionally, we expanded our presence in baked snacks with the acquisition of Give & Go in the U.S. as well as Chipita in Europe. In our most recent announcement of Ricolino, a confectionery and chocolate leader in one of our key priority markets of Mexico, which doubles the size of our business, provides strong route to market capabilities in the traditional trade, and gives us a platform to further develop our biscuit business. Looking ahead, we will continue expanding our exposure to growing profit pools in chocolate, biscuit, and baked snacks. Our M&A approach has three key components.
First, we prioritize finding the right opportunities with attractive, sustainable profit pools and rigorous return metrics. Second, we rapidly deliver value through strong integration and effective cost and sales synergies. Finally, we work to optimize growth through targeted investments with a focus on filling white spaces, delivering multi-category strength, and filling capability gaps. As we continue doubling down on chocolate and biscuits, we expect to exit non-strategic assets over time. Today, we have announced that we plan to divest our developed markets gum business after concluding a strategic review. In addition, we are also preparing to divest our global Halls business. These decisions free us to concentrate on our core chocolate and biscuit franchises and reinvest in those businesses. We also have sizable equity stakes in KDP and JDE Peet's, which provide significant firepower for growth, accretive snacking M&A going forward.
Another key action we are taking to accelerate growth is building strength across multiple core categories in our major markets. Today, the majority of our key markets are skewed to a single core category. For example, the majority of our revenue in the UK, India, and Australia comes from chocolate. By contrast, our Southeast Asia revenues are almost exclusively from biscuits. We are working hard to address this imbalance by leveraging our iconic brands and established distribution as well as strategic transactions. In India, for instance, we have 65% share within the chocolate category. Our strong relationships with local customers and our robust distribution network provide a great platform to grow biscuits. Similarly, in Southeast Asia, we're leveraging the global brand recognition of Cadbury and Toblerone to expand our presence in chocolate. We are complementing these efforts with strategic transactions to support organic growth.
For example, in Australia, the 2021 acquisition of Gourmet Food doubled our share in biscuits by enabling us to expand into premium crackers. Along with portfolio reshaping, we continue investing in both traditional and newer channels to reach additional consumers. We're investing more than $1 billion to become the digital commerce leader in snacks. We're building our talent and capabilities, integrating them deeper into the business and also increasing digital advertising. Digital commerce accounted for about 6% of our 2021 revenues, and we are targeting 20% by 2030. We are also strategically leveraging both direct and indirect routes to market to expand our distribution in emerging markets. We're closing portfolio gaps and leveraging s-channel specific activations to improve our share in European discounters, where our revenue has grown double-digit every year over the last three years.
Through brand extensions and acquisitions, we will play more and more across the full continuum of biscuit and baked snacks by extending our presence into a much broader range, including cakes, pastries, and snack bars. For example, our LU brand, already the well-established number one cookie in France, offers a growing range of prepackaged soft cakes and pastries. Under our Milka platform, the iconic European chocolate brand, which has expanded into new snacking occasions like cookies and brownies, and will partner with Chipita to move into croissants and pastries. While we primarily play in mainstream price points, we see strong opportunities to better penetrate opening price points while trading consumers up to premium price points. In emerging markets, we are currently underrepresented in low- priced products like small- sized single chocolate bars with less than 10% share.
We are continuing to introduce new offerings that allow more consumers to access our products and increase the penetration of the chocolate category. We're similarly underrepresented in the premium price tier across both developed and emerging markets. Increasing our premium focus, we're launching our largest premium offering, Toblerone, into this space, as well as developing local offerings and acquiring strategic assets such as Hu. To conclude, we have been consistently delivering against our 2018 strategy and long-term algorithm, driving volume-driven, profitable growth. We are extending our leadership positions in attractive and resilient snacking categories. We are leveraging our competitive advantages and investing in brands and capabilities to maintain momentum. Now we are advancing to the next phase of our company's evolution, acceleration, and portfolio focus. Now, I'd like to introduce Martin Renaud and Vinzenz Gruber to begin our deeper dives into our core categories.
Thank you, Dirk, and hello everyone. As Dirk explained earlier, chocolate is a great category to be in. In our most recent annual State of Snacking Report, 74% of consumers said they can't imagine a world without chocolate. We can't imagine such a world either, and we are well-positioned to lead the future of chocolate with our purposeful brands and superior products. In the next few minutes, we will walk you through our plan to become the number one player in chocolate, starting with another view of our already strong base, and then diving deeper into our three key growth drivers. Strengthen tablet leadership, win in seasonals, gifting, and sharing, step-change presence and performance in premium. Our $9.3 billion revenue chocolate franchise is performing well, growing at a very healthy 5.7% CAGR over the past three years.
We play in attractive geographies with strength in higher per capita consumption, developed markets like the U.K., Nordics, Australia, Germany, and France, complemented by emerging markets like India and Brazil with high growth potential and a rapidly expanding middle class. For branded products, the private label share is only 5% globally and is declining. Chocolate has historically shown resilience to economic downturns and pricing actions, perceived as an affordable indulgence and an important pick-me-up. We have strong momentum in this category, gaining share. Today, we are a very close number two in global share, closing the gap behind the number one manufacturer. Our clear aim is to become number one. We can achieve this by leveraging the power of our brands. Consumers all over the world trust our beloved brands to bring them great taste, satisfaction, comfort, and nostalgia.
Our iconic global chocolate brands, Cadbury Dairy Milk, Milka, and Toblerone, account for half of our annual chocolate revenues and are growing at a 6.1% three-year CAGR. All are very strong assets, with both Cadbury Dairy Milk and Milka over $2 billion in annual revenues, and the broader Cadbury portfolio over $4 billion. The other half of our revenue comes from local jewels, which represent the taste of the nation in many markets, growing even faster in the last three years at a collective 6.7% CAGR. Some of the largest and most widely recognized of these local jewels include Lacta in Brazil, Côte d'Or in France and Belgium, Marabou in Sweden, and Freia in Norway. Each of these distinctive brands is beloved in its market, whereas these names are literally synonymous with high-quality chocolates.
Building on our strong chocolate franchise, we have a robust plan to sustain mid-single-digit growth and reach the number one global position. The three key building blocks in our plans are strengthening tablet leadership, which is the largest opportunity for us in chocolate, winning in seasonals, gifting, and sharing, and finally, step changing our presence and performance in the premiums price tier. Let's take a closer look at each of these growth drivers. To start, let me hand over to the President of Mondelēz Europe, Vinzenz Gruber.
Thanks, Martin, and great to speak with you all today. The first step in our plan to sustain mid-single-digit growth in chocolate and reach a number one position is to strengthen our leadership position in tablets, which represents the largest segment of the global chocolate market. Tablets represent nearly 1/4 of the total global chocolate category. This format is the heartland of our chocolate franchise, accounting for almost 1/2 our chocolate revenues. Tablets are the fastest-growing segment outside the US, growing at a nearly 6% CAGR over the last three years in the key markets where we play. We have outperformed that market, growing almost 6.5% and gaining share. We are a clear leader in this segment with about 34% share globally.
We have extended that leadership since the launch of our strategy in 2018, with a 50 basis points cumulative share gain over the last three years. Let me speak a minute about the importance of tablets to consumers. Why is leadership in tablets so important? Because tablets are defining the signature taste of chocolate, what consumers declare as their preferred taste. So how can we extend our leadership in tablets? First, we will work to further expand our leadership in our core tablets, which satisfy everyday treat occasions. We already have the number one and number two tablets globally with Cadbury Dairy Milk and Milka. Both brands are over 100 years old and have evolved to remain contemporary, relevant, and in great health today, growing high single digits and mid-single digits respectively on average over the last three years.
We believe that sustained and accelerated growth starts with dialing up the purpose and the identity of our brands, like generosity for Cadbury and tenderness for Milka. We are, and must remain, the clear leader in terms of taste appeal. That is why we have invested in the Milka renovation. We're very proud of being able to develop the most tender ever tasting and melting Milka chocolate, which will retain current and win new consumers. As expected of segment leaders, we are evolving our core portfolio to include differentiated offerings, including vegan and reduced sugar products that meet new consumer needs. Second, we are working hard to step change the path of our tablet portfolio that meets the indulgent and pamper consumer needs state. Consumers in this motivation set are seeking mindful moments to satisfy cravings with simple rewards.
We meet that need through differentiated higher unit price line extensions, such as Milka Max in Europe and Cadbury Silk in India. We are excited about the opportunity to increase investments in these sub-brands to realize their potential. We believe we can double the size of Cadbury Silk in India, for example, from over $150 million today. We will apply the learning from these successful brand extensions to develop indulgent offers for other key markets, like the UK. The third key element of our tablet strategy is to invest and grow in dark chocolate, the fastest growing type of chocolate. We have built strong dark chocolate brands in Australia, Brazil, India, and France, and are now working to fill portfolio gaps in other major chocolate markets, such as the UK, while investing in accelerating our existing dark chocolate brands.
Now let's look closer at our second key chocolate growth driver, winning in the seasonals, gifting, and sharing segments. The seasonals, gifting, and sharing space accounts for approximately a third of the chocolate market, and these segments extend far beyond major holidays like Christmas, Easter, or Chinese New Year. Chocolate gifting is an everyday expression of thanks, celebration, or support between friends and loved ones around the world. These segments are attractive for a number of reasons. Firstly, they have a higher price per kilo than the average of the chocolate category. Secondly, they are highly incremental and expandable segments. Thirdly, they are increasingly relevant globally as demand for premium gifting grows alongside the rapid expansion of the middle class in emerging markets. We have very significant headroom in this area, with only 18% of our sales from these products in 2021.
We are growing faster than the market, and we are gaining share. These segments have averaged 4.2% growth over the last three years, while we have grown almost 6% in this space. We have a strong plan to sustain and accelerate growth in each of these important segments. First, we will continue to build a robust assortment of seasonal icons that are locally and culturally relevant, expanding upon our already strong footprint with consumers' favorites like our Milka Bunnies in Europe and Cadbury Creme Eggs and Shell Eggs in the U.K. Both of these strong brands are must-haves in Easter baskets. The same is true for the Christmas season, where we play a major role with Milka Santa and Advent calendars, for example, and a broad Christmas portfolio under Cadbury in U.K.
We are working hard to further focus our portfolio of seasonal offerings and enhance our marketing activations to expand seasonal chocolate consumption around the world. Second, we see exciting opportunities to expand our share in pralines. This is a segment showing mid-single-digit growth, and there are so many occasions throughout the year where gifting with chocolate is relevant. Alongside more formal gifting, there are many moments where people want to express their emotions or just simply send a message. That is the area where our brands are well suited to play.
We will accelerate our offer in targeting gifting with bundles like Say It With Milka, which is a range of chocolate messages like all the best or thank you. The personalization of brands like Cadbury or Toblerone for Mother's Day and Father's Day through our direct-to-consumer sites is another great example of how we can become more gift-worthy also through our everyday core brands. Third, we are stepping up our efforts in family sharing by renovating our successful Heroes and Favorites concept to develop a broader range of treat-sized chocolates, miniature versions of consumers' favorite brands across markets where we have a strong presence in chocolate category. With that, I will hand back to Martin to discuss the opportunity in premium.
Thank you, Vinzenz. The third and final chocolate growth driver that we will discuss today is a smaller but attractive one, accelerating our performance in the premium space. We are currently underrepresented in the premium price tier, but we have a growing number of brands we can leverage to expand our presence in this space. Let's take a closer look. Premium chocolate represents a sizable and attractive profit pool. As you know, our strength is in the mainstream price tier, which accounts for 83% of the total chocolate category, where we have a share above 10% globally. However, we see significant headroom within the premium space, which makes up the remaining 17% of the category where our share is only around 6%.
Premium chocolate is growing well, and as you would expect, the average price per kilo in the premium tier is approximately double the mainstream tier. We have a number of brands in this space already, and our priority is to unlock their potential over the coming years. This includes Hu in the States, which we acquired in 2021, and Green & Black's in the U.K. Both organic-led, high-quality mass premium offerings. We also have a unique brand in Toblerone, which has extremely high brand awareness around the world but has much more potential. We are relaunching the brand with a new purpose, expanding the portfolio and adopting a broader channel focus. In the near term, we see the potential to shift this $375 million brand to a half billion- dollar brand by 2025.
To get there, we are launching the new Be More Triangle purpose with a disruptive new visual identity, more modern and premium. This relaunch will be supported by a double-digit increase in advertising spend on a brand where we have historically spent considerably less than the company average. In keeping with the brand's new purpose, we are developing new gifting offerings and disruptive alternative seasonal icons leveraging the triangle identity. We are early in the process, but we believe it's time to act on the potential of this unique brand. To summarize our chocolate story, our strong chocolate franchise gives us the number two position in the category today, very close to number one, and we are driving towards that position with significant share gains and strong momentum. We have iconic brands with pricing ability when needed across both developed and emerging markets.
Our products are affordable treats, moments of fuel and pleasure that consumers love. We have been growing revenue almost 6% on average over the last four years, outpacing the category. We see a long runway of opportunities ahead of us to sustain and accelerate these growth rates. We are investing to drive that growth and extend our presence across markets, segments, and price tiers. With that, let me pass it over to Gustavo Valle, who will talk to you about our other core category of biscuits.
Thank you, Martin, and thanks to all of you for joining us today. Complementing our strategy to achieve the global number one position in chocolate, we have strong plans to further expand our leadership in biscuit, including both sweet and savory segments, while building strength in the growing baked snack segment. Capitalizing on our strong growth momentum over the past few years, we have exciting plans to strengthen our leadership in biscuit by accelerating our core growth and expanding our opportunity set by extending biscuit into baked snack. Our plan to win in biscuit is focused on four key growth drivers, expand Oreo by $1 billion over the next three years, grow local jewels, dial up Choco bakery, and expand baked snacks. Let's take a closer look.
Our biscuit franchise is performing well, generating $13.5 billion in revenue last year, and growing at a healthy four-year CAGR of 4.7%. The business currently is grounded in developed markets, which account for about 73% of our revenue and are growing nicely at 3.7% three-year CAGR. We see a significant opportunity to expand our presence in emerging markets, which currently account for about a quarter of our volume and are delivering robust growth of more than 10% on a three-year CAGR. Global brands, which account for about a third of our business, have been growing at 9.1% CAGR over the past three years, while local jewels are performing well, growing at nearly 4% CAGR.
Mondelēz is already the clear leader in the global biscuit category, holding the number one global market share by a sizable margin with share gains over the past three years. The biscuit category has been growing 4.5% over the last three years, and we are confident that we can capitalize on this momentum to accelerate growth and further grow our category leadership. We expect to grow mid-single digits in biscuit. To get there, we will deliver against four key drivers. First, we have exciting plans to advance our iconic Oreo brand. Second, we will step up investment in local jewels that represent the taste of the nation in critical geographies and have more runway to improve. Third, we will accelerate performance in our Choco bakery business.
Finally, we will significantly invest in rapidly growing baked snack segment, where we are uniquely positioned to grow this business as the only company that has both leading positions in chocolate and biscuit with our core brands and recently acquired assets to meet rapidly changing consumer needs and play across the full continuum of the biscuit category. Let's start by taking closer look at our plans to continue growing our Oreo franchise. Oreo is the world's favorite cookie and number one global biscuit brand, trusted and loved by families for 110 years. We continue to deliver strong growth in this business with high single-digit growth over the past three years. Looking ahead, we expect to build on Oreo's significant brand strength and heritage and grow global share by 1 point, taking us from 7%-8% over the next three years.
To get there, we will substantially expand geographical reach outside Oreo's current core markets of the United States and China. We also aim to reach the 100 million-plus revenue threshold s in four additional markets, bringing the total to seven by both strengthening traditional distribution and investing in digital commerce. We have a clear strategy to drive growth in Oreo by strengthening the core, capitalizing on emerging opportunities, and meeting distinct consumer needs. Our thematic activations, such as our recent highly successful collaboration with Lady Gaga, Pokémon, and Batman, have been consistently successful in driving incremental growth. We are also leveraging our revenue growth management tools to develop price spark architecture initiative that grow key channels, drive new occasions, and expand overall consumption, such as family sharing packs in developed markets and multipacks for the modern trade in countries like India.
Finally, we are innovating a wide range of new Oreo format and textures, such as thins, minis, gluten-free, coated, and wafers to meet new and emerging consumer needs. We are also broadening the Oreo brand beyond traditional biscuit with Unwrapped and expanding into areas like cakes, which we will discuss in more detail later. Our growth plan for Oreo in India encapsulates these approaches. In such short time, we have scaled this business to more than $100 million by deploying strong working media investment, executing thematic activations, expanding our distribution footprint, and growing occasions and channels. In addition to expanding Oreo, we have robust plans to grow our local jewel biscuit brand. Our local jewel brands such as LU in France and Belgium, Ritz and Tate's in the US, ORO in Italy, and Kinh Do in Vietnam today account for more than 50% of our biscuit revenue.
We have a strong portfolio of these local jewels, consisting mostly of everyday great recipes that consumers love and trust. Families all over the world turn to these brands for comfort and nostalgia. A kitchen or pantry in much of the world will feel incomplete without at least one of these brands. We have made solid progress taking this brand from nearly flat several years ago to well into low single-digit growth range in past years. Our aim is to accelerate these local sales into mid-single digit range through three clear priorities. The LU biscuit platform, ubiquitous in French and Belgian homes, among many other European countries, is a good example of our strategy to grow these local jewels. Our approach consists of three main drivers. First, we will activate the core through creative marketing and sales initiatives such as the in-store National Biscuit Day event.
Second, we will enhance and sharpen the brand purpose by incorporating consumer desires, such as sustainably sourced ingredients. The fact that we source the wheat needed for this LU biscuit under our Harmony Charter sourcing initiative is a great example of the ways that we are modernizing our recipes to address consumers' growing demands for simple, clean ingredients sourced from family farms that support the communities where they are grown. Third, we will selectively innovate to expand the LU brand into adjacent segments such as cakes, pastries, and wafers. Wafers are an especially compelling example of how we are extending local scale brands into new formats that are culturally and locally relevant. We will do the same thing with many of the other brands like Ritz and TUC. Now, let me turn it over to Vinzenz Gruber to discuss our ambitions around Choco bakery and Baked Snacks.
Thanks, Gustavo. The first key element of our biscuit expansion strategy is dialing up our Choco bakery business. Choco bakery is a highly attractive business and a segment where we have unique advantages in being able to combine our iconic and leading chocolate brands like Milka and Cadbury in a large and well-established biscuit segment. Our current Choco bakery business is a nice proof of that. In a short period of time, we have built this business from zero to approximately $500 million. We have clear priorities to deliver faster growth in this business with strong brand equity, superior product capabilities, and higher investments. In addition, we see opportunities in expanding our Choco bakery into either segment like cakes and wafers to excite consumers with new sensations.
Part of our growth agenda is to drive the geographic expansion with Cadbury in a number of developed and emerging markets, as well as Lacta in Latin America. In select markets where we do not have a chocolate presence, we will build out and lead with our Chips Ahoy franchise. The fourth and final element of our growth strategy is expanding in the fast-growing baked snacks segment. Baked snacks is an attractive market valued at more than $85 billion, which consists of two main snack formats, cake and pastries, a $70 billion-plus market growing at 4.5% CAGR, and snack bars, a $17 billion market that is also growing fast. With the cake and pastry segment, pastries like croissant designed for mid-morning occasions account for about 45% of the market.
Meanwhile, cakes consumed more in the afternoon breaks, making up the remaining 55%. Mondelēz currently holds the third share position in this fragmented space. Our leading chocolate and biscuit brands, combined with our recently acquired capabilities in fresh bakery and pastries, uniquely position us to compete and build significant share in this large segment. With the snack bar space, we have a fairly limited presence today, roughly 3% share. We see strong opportunities to expand both organically and through recent acquisitions. This highly incremental, fast-growing category addresses consumers' growing demand for snacks that help address physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Let's take a closer look at both cakes and pastries, as well as snack bars. Cakes and pastries enable us to play across the full continuum of biscuit and significantly increase our playing field as the cake and pastry market is nearly as big as biscuits.
Expanding our presence within the packaged cake and pastry market, especially in Europe, represents a highly attractive and highly incremental opportunity, covering new occasions. Our approach to this space will be grounded in a set of core brands with quality recipes that are country relevant. Within the cake segments, we will continue building our Choco cake offerings, such as Milka brownies and muffins, while leveraging other local brands like LU. On the pastry side, we will leverage the technology and distribution capabilities we acquired with Chipita to expand our presence in croissants and create delicious new Choco pastry offerings. In snack bars, we are building out this business through M&A and organic expansion. We recently acquired Grenade, the number one UK energy and protein bar, and its strong well-being credentials give us good foothold among young athletic consumers. This brand is growing double digits.
Similarly, our Perfect Snacks brand holds more than 90% share of the chilled bar segment in North America. We are rapidly growing distribution and selectively increasing our offerings to fuel even stronger growth. We also are leveraging our core chocolate and biscuit brands to further elevate performance in the snack bar segment. For example, by expanding belVita breakfast biscuits into snack bars in Europe. Let me also spend a moment talking about another great asset in our baked snacks lineup, which is Give & Go. Give & Go is one of the leading players within the in-store bakery segment in North America, which retailers have been expanding significantly. Our Give & Go business delivers a fully finished dough and sell options for everyday treats such as brownies and cookies, breakfast offerings such as muffins and pastries, and celebration such as seasonal kits and cupcakes.
This business has been winning through a differentiated customer value proposition with strong innovation, commercialization capabilities, and leading category insights. It also has the most comprehensive range of products of any in-store bakery supplier, which simplifies both the purchasing and supply chain for retail partners. Importantly, for retailers, it allows them to increase profits by reducing in-store labor and waste while offering brands and products that consumers really love. This business has demonstrated significant growth over the past several years, growing high single digit on average and approaching $600 million. Importantly, it also delivers solid profitability, which is the same whether we are offering one of branded options like Two-Bite brownies or Kimberley's Bakeshoppe, or whether it is under one of our retail partners' brands. Simply put, we are very excited and confident in our strategy to ramp and grow our baked snacks business.
It's a very large space that nearly doubles our opportunity in biscuit. It's a highly fragmented category that provides a unique share expansion opportunity by a global scale player as we are. It's large and found across all markets. It's incremental and complementary to biscuit and chocolate. In most cases, it represents a higher price per kilo than core biscuit. Most important, no other company has the same leadership in chocolate and biscuit to make it happen. We expect to build our portfolio over the next several years. I now turn back over to Gustavo.
Thanks, Vinzenz. In summary, we are confident that our plans to expand, innovate, and invest in the biscuit and baked snack space will further enhance our leadership in both existing and emerging product formats. Our track record of growth over the past four years is strong at nearly 5%, and we have a significant runway ahead. At the same time, extending into baked snacks is a natural place for us to leverage our chocolate and biscuit leadership and grow share in a large, highly attractive, and incremental space where we have a clear set of capabilities to win, while strengthening our partnership with key retailers by expanding our store presence into new aisles. We believe these clear focus growth drivers will enable us to significantly extend our leadership in biscuit and baked snack, and deliver compelling growth.
Thank you, Gustavo, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today for our first Q&A session. With me is Dirk Van de Put, our Chairman and CEO, Paulette Alviti, our Chief People Officer, Vinzenz Gruber, our President of Europe, Maurizio Brusadelli, our President of EMEA, and Gustavo Valle, our President of North America. We have roughly 30 minutes for this session. As a reminder, please press star one on your phone to get into the queue and mute the webcast once connected by phone. We request that you ask one question and no more than one follow-up to allow time to accommodate as many people as possible. With that, let's get started. Our first question comes to us from Andrew Lazar at Barclays.
Great. Thanks very much. Good morning, everybody. First off, Dirk, what kind of timeframe should we think about regarding the 90/10 split between chocolate and biscuit versus the rest of the portfolio, that I think you talked about on slide 26 in the deck? How much of that is simply the planned divestiture of gum and Halls? I think that's maybe a few points of it, but what type of timeframe are we looking at?
Well, it's difficult to get into an exact timeframe. We have obviously clearly declared that we want to increase the snacking percentage over time. Today, we've announced our intent to divest the gum business in developed markets as well as our Halls business. We are clearly going to continue to pursue additional bolt-on acquisitions who sometimes might come with categories that we don't wanna be in. I would say roughly you can expect us to reach that 90-10% in the next three-four years. I don't have an exact timeline. We will see how we go and what type of bolt-on acquisition opportunities we have. The most important part here is that we have a significant runway as it relates to biscuits and chocolates, where we have clear leadership opportunities.
We have room in terms of channels, white space, and geographical expansion. That's really where the focus is, and then we will balance that with gradually exiting some of the other categories that we're in. Andrew?
Right. Thank you for that. Paulette, you mentioned growth capabilities. I guess specifically, what areas would you say are most needed or the biggest areas of focus over the next couple of years? Thank you.
Yeah. I would say a couple core areas to highlight, and hopefully they came through as we were talking a little bit earlier. The first, I would say, is RGM. You know, the state of the environment we're operating in right now and our focus on profitable growth. We're spending a lot of time establishing strong local RGM skill sets, focusing on those teams and investing in the right data and tools to make sure that they're equipped to be successful. The other, I would say, definitely would be digital. We've been making significant strides on our enterprise digital strategy.
One of the things we have coming up, the second half of this year actually is launching a new digital hub that's helping thousands of our colleagues actually have access to new content that is very core to the consumer and customer vantage point that we're driving through digital. We're very excited about that to increase the acumen of the enterprise. Lastly, as we were just talking a little bit around M&A and our focus on integration, specifically being able to use the learnings that we've had across the enterprise already and some of the markets that we've been very successful in, and making sure that we've got the teams and the workforce plan set up in our business units to be ready for that.
Being smart about it so that we're not in a position to, you know, detract from the efforts on our core business. Those would be the three main areas I'd probably highlight.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Great. Thanks, Andrew. Our next question comes to us from Ken Goldman, JP Morgan. Ken?
Thank you, Shep. Two questions from me, if I can. First, I didn't hear necessarily, and I know the day is not over yet, but a lot of talk about innovation, you know, other than maybe sort of leaning into dark chocolate and the migration into adjacent categories. Specifically, I wanted to ask, you know, historically, Mondelēz has talked about pushing a little bit into healthier snacking. Is this still a focus for the company? And is there a reason it was, you know, at least so far, sort of on the back burner today and sort of in your discussions about chocolate and biscuits?
Well, first of all, hello, Ken. I would say the innovation part, there's a second part in the presentations today where you will see Martin, our CMO, in the question and answer, and I would maybe refer that part and overall view on innovation to those questions and answers. As it relates to wellbeing is still a big focus for the company. We're trying to make a contemporary interpretation of what does wellbeing really mean for the consumer today, and that has a whole evolution, and sometimes they mix it even up with wellbeing for the planet as part of a whole wide wellbeing thinking. We wanna make sure that whatever we do, the evolution that we see in our portfolio is in line with what the consumer sees as wellbeing.
Second, we believe that education of the consumer and explaining how to eat healthy is a big part of what we need to do. Not necessarily new products or so on, but more mindful snacking or portion control. We think that will play a big role, and we are planning to do things on pack to get that message across and gradually having more portion control options in our range. Then, of course, there is renovation and there is innovation. So we wanna make sure that under our existing brands, we wanna offer the right options. Still the brand, but in a healthier version. For instance, Oreo Zero, zero sugar that we launched in China in Q3 or the Cadbury Plant Bar, which is a vegan bar.
Those are two examples of how we could do that. We're also working very hard in this area of renovation and innovation on improving our nutritional profile of our products. We're trying to reduce constantly sugar, sodium, go to simpler ingredients. We also are very focused on wellbeing acquisition. It's not really innovation or renovation, but it also helps us to get a more balanced portfolio. I'm referring here to the ones we've already done, like Perfect Bar or Hu, or Gourmet Food in Australia. Those are really the ways we will gradually see a better balancing of our wellbeing offer product-wise.
We're also planning to communicate constantly with the consumer in making them understand that yes, indulgence can be a part of a well-balanced diet, but you need to do it with moderation. That
Very helpful.
Ken?
If I can ask a very quick follow-up. Is there a way to quantify, Dirk, how we should think about the divestitures of developed market gum and Halls, and how that might sort of affect your long-term, sales algorithm? If you could just help us out a little bit with that'd be great.
Yes. Yes. Luca will talk about that later on. He will be in the second Q&A. It will, from a top-line perspective, probably make a difference of 0.3%-0.4% growth rate for us. Then the bottom line will largely remain the same algorithm as we currently have. Luca can go a little bit deeper into the details in the second Q&A on that.
Thanks, Ken. We'll go now to Alexia Howard from Bernstein.
So much for the question. My first question is really around the outlook for margins. I know you don't typically talk about margins, but I think the formula for the first five years was whatever growth in gross profit dollars that we get, we'll reinvest half of that in the business and let the rest of it fall to the bottom line. I guess by definition, that would imply some margin improvement, but it's been fairly flat while you've meaningfully improved the top line, and that's worked really well. I'm just wondering, as we look out over the next five years, is the expectation that we might see more leverage and maybe faster profit growth on the EBIT line than the top line organic sales growth? I have a follow-up.
Okay. Dirk, maybe start, and then you know, we'll also have Luca here for a session too.
For the second Q&A. Yes.
To delve into a bit more of that.
Yeah. I would say that in normal circumstances, the algorithm does allow for a small percentage increase of our gross profit year after year. We try not to be super focused on the net revenue, gross profit relationship. What we are really focused on is how many gross profit dollars can we grow year-over-year. You know, probably our focus there is 4%, and we hope over time to gradually improve that to 5%. In the current environment, to get to a 4% gross profit growth, you need to do a lot more net revenue. The relationship between net revenue and gross profit is a little bit off because of the inflation.
That's why it's not gonna be easy from a percentage gross profit margin in this year and next year to see a substantial increase. As long as we keep on delivering that 4% gross profit growth, our algorithm works. We can reinvest half, we get our high single-digit EPS growth, and that's really what we're after here. Gradually, those percentage gross profit margins will come back, but in the current environment, I think our focus needs to be how many gross profit dollars can we really add.
Great. That's really helpful. Quick follow-up on chocolate. You talked a lot about seasonal gifting premium. I'm curious about low ticket price items in emerging markets, particularly with the idea that with global food inflation, those lower-income consumers might not have the personal disposable income to really pay up for treats and snacks. Are you pushing on that? You know, I'm just curious about why that wasn't particularly focused on this morning. Thank you, and I'll pass it on.
Thanks, Alexia. Maybe we take that over to Vinzenz.
No, no, I'm gonna give that to Maurizio maybe, and Vinzenz, if he wants to jump in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you. Maybe I start with the low unit price. Obviously, in emerging markets, it's crucial, as you said, to keep the right price points, and this is what we are doing. We use the LU as a penetration driver for the category. Then we gradually trade up our consumers, and I think the best example of this strategy is India, where we have a 65% share of market in chocolate, and there is a constant trading up while building penetration and consumption of the category. Still, in India, we are talking about grams in terms of average consumption, while in Europe we talk about kilos. Maybe Vinzenz can talk a bit about the seasonal part of the business, as you asked.
Yeah, definitely, Maurizio. I think in developed markets, I think season is a fantastic. I would say highly accretive segment in chocolate. You may have seen in the presentation before, gifting, sharing, and seasons is 1/3 of the total chocolate category. The beauty of that is it's really a different moment in consumers' life, where in the course of a year, those moments are coming up, like Easter and Christmas as the biggest one. Also during the year, think about Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, a birthday, you know? Chocolate is really magic because it's a really nice gift for consumers. The good thing from a business point of view is it's highly accretive, as I said, in two ways. One is in revenue, but also in revenue per kilo.
Because consumers are less sensitive on the weight they're getting. It's more about the emotionality the brands can express. I think we are very well suited here in most of the markets with the power brands we have. Think about Cadbury in the U.K., think about the Milka in Germany, think about the Côte d'Or in France and in Belgium. I think it's a highly accretive, and you have seen in the numbers we are outperforming the market growth by literally 50%.
Maybe I can add that also in emerging markets, we started to exploit the opportunity of the seasonal business. We have many local opportunities like Diwali in India or Hari Raya in Southeast Asia, and we have a great portfolio. We are learning from the developed and big brother to make sure that we develop the business as well in the seasonal market in emerging markets.
Great. Thanks, Alexia.
Great. Thank you.
Let's go to our next question. Chris Growe, Stifel.
Thank you. Good morning.
Morning.
Good morning. I had two questions if I could as well. The first one will just be, and it's a bit of a follow-on to an earlier discussion about like opening price point products and premium products. Is there any margin trade-off with those products? I know a premium product has a higher price per kilo, but in many cases, they're not necessarily a more profitable product for you on the bottom line. Just curious how you're thinking about that in terms of a margin, you know, goal for some of these new areas you're gonna be moving into.
I think as you said, I think if you look back on seasonal, but also gifting and sharing, the revenue per kilo you can generate in chocolate, as an example, is up to 40, 50% higher. Even if the margin would be on average than the other chocolate, you know, the uplift in $ you're getting, it's quite substantial. The incrementality is super high, as I said before. I think there are two ways of premiumizing the portfolio. The mix element of a seasonal and a gifting portfolio is accretive and mix enhancing to the whole business. The other thing is how to play in the real premium in terms of premium chocolate, which I think in the second part, Martin Renaud will show a bit more where we go.
I think premium itself is one is the perception of a premium box. The other thing is the revenue per kilo, which is adding highly to the total net of the business. Yeah. I would say, Vinzenz, roughly it's a percentage-wise same, roughly the same margin.
Yeah.
Dollars per kilo that you add in gross profit is much more important.
Absolutely. It's a 50% higher per kilo and-
Yeah.
on an average margin, that means, more dollars.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Just a quick, maybe a similar type question, but as I think about the movement into and we'll use the India example of you having such a dominant share in chocolate and moving into biscuit, for example. Is that. Is that this next phase of moving into some of these white space, you know, categories, maybe not necessarily a white space market. Is that a much more expensive endeavor for the company than, say, the last several years? Is there an increase in investment required or more resources to push into some of these new areas of focus? Thank you for that, your response.
I'll kind of set it up, and maybe you guys wanna jump in.
Yeah.
I would say it's always been a focus area for us, but we had to catch up on our core businesses around the world, increase our investment, and we will still continue to do that. That algorithm we were just talking about allows us to reinvest every year the half of that 4% growth, profit growth. At the current size of the business, that's about $200 million extra A&C investment every year. That will gradually go more in establishing those white spaces that we have. The main thing I would say is to stick with it. Maybe in the past, we've sometimes tried and then left again.
The main thing, the reason for the success of Oreo in India is that we stuck with it for 10 years, and now it starts to be really important for us. What we're declaring is, yes, more investment, but it's not gonna significantly alter the algorithm of the company at all. We're gonna stick with it and make sure that over the years, that second or third category we're getting in is becoming more and more important for us. Go ahead, guys, if you wanna add to that. Yeah.
Yeah. I think, Dirk, you said well, and, in India or in China, for gum, I mean, we launched those Oreo in India and obviously Stride in China, most more than a decade ago. Now we have the scale, and it's self-funding, so it's not that we need additional resources. Obviously, at the beginning, you have to do a little bit of investment to establish the brands, but now we are generating great gross profit, and that is self-funding the top line. As you know, overall, India and China are accretive as well for the margin of the company. Scale, volume and the continued growth, it's a benefit for consumers and obviously also for all of us.
If I may, we are expanding in those white spaces with proven platforms. In the case of Oreo, where we are doing the same in other emerging markets, where Oreo is growing almost double-digit. We are gonna have four new countries exceeding the threshold of the $100 million net revenue a year. We are applying those market what we have already proven in other markets. This is a wide space in a platform that we have already test and prove in other markets.
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Great. Thanks, Chris. Let's move to John Baumgartner of Mizuho. John?
Thanks, Shep. Just to follow up on Chris's question. You know, in terms of the biscuits, whether it's India, Brazil, Mexico, it sounds as though Oreo is a big contributor there. But when you think about the relative balance between building biscuits in these markets where you have larger confectionery share already, to what extent do you feel like you have to acquire local biscuit brands relative to accelerating entry, you know, be it through Oreo or launching Choco bakery through your existing confectionery brands that are there now?
Not sure if anybody wants to jump in right away. But what I would say, John, is in developing markets, we need presence in the market. As a consequence, we need to make sure that we have the right distribution, we can have the presence there. If you have to do that for an Oreo, for instance, it's gonna go very gradual. If you make a local acquisition with some local brands, it's yes, it's about having more market share and more critical mass, but it's largely about having much more access to the market through their distribution system. That's one of the key things that we wanna look at. I'll let maybe Maurizio, Vinzenz, and Gustavo add, if you want.
Yeah, I think Dirk said well. Maybe I give you an example. In Vietnam, we were not present a few years back, and then we acquired the leader in both biscuits and snacks. This gave us the opportunity to become the leader in those segments and also to make sure that Oreo became much more relevant. In my region, we have 40% of local brands, and they play a great role. I think we have a good balance already between global and local. As Dirk said, if we see any opportunity in, I would say, in every country to further strengthen the portfolio, this is what we are doing.
As we all know, the biscuit market is a relatively wide market as it relates to brands. Oreo can be important, but in best case scenario, Oreo reaches about 10% market share in the U.S. That's as far as Oreo can go after years of presence. For us to be an important player in the biscuit market, we will need more brands than just Oreo to take up a position of 20%-30% market share.
Okay. Thanks for that. Just to follow up on chocolate, great detail on the renovation in the discussion there. But can you speak geographically in terms of your focus area? I mean, there wasn't much discussion about China after you had launched a few years ago in chocolate. To what extent does your growth plan sort of rest on just sticking with your core markets and renovating, you know, in Europe and Asia, ex-China, relative to, you know, gaining new white space growth, whether that's, you know, a greater push in China or a larger push into the U.S. with a Toblerone or a Milka? How do you think about the balance there, new markets versus existing markets?
Yeah, thank you. If I talk about China, I mean, I would say chocolate there is kind of different. It's more on celebration and as you said, we tried. I think we have much more opportunity to continue to focus on biscuits and gum, and now entering as well in cakes in China. This will be the first priority for us. We have a lot of headroom to continue to sustain China double-digit growth while continue to evaluate in the longer term if chocolate will become again an opportunity or not.
As it relates to other markets and expansion of our chocolate business, for sure we see an opportunity with some of our global brands like Toblerone still has, although a very known brand and present in many, many markets, we believe that it can play much bigger role in premium. That's, for instance, a way that we can do chocolate. Another way we do chocolate around the world is Hu. The acquisition of Hu in the U.S., which is a vegan brand that allows us to start carving out our part in the chocolate market.
I would say compared to the big launches we had in the U.S. and in China, it's a little bit more targeted approach, making sure that we go for certain aspects of the chocolate market and that we can win there versus trying to launch immediately a brand that has to stand next to the big local brands. Of course, we will continue to evaluate acquisition options of local chocolate brands. That has been a big driver in the past for us, and that will not stop right now.
Those are on their geographies, packaging and brands that you're looking there? Those are my two questions. Thank you.
Okay. The algorithm at the moment, I would say on the lower side is organic, on the higher side would include some M&A. It's about a point difference. If we do in M&A what we have mapped out for us, it's gonna make a point difference for us. We already have acquired about $2 billion in net sales in the past three years, which is growing almost 10%. That gives you an idea how much it's adding to the top line for us. Imagine that we're gonna expand that $2 billion over the years to come, and we're aiming for a high single digit growth rate on those new acquisitions. That will give you an idea how it starts to contribute to our top line. That's the way we are thinking about it.
As for the second part, which is about the entry price point and what are our opportunities around the world, maybe Maurizio-
Yeah.
You can talk a little bit about different markets that you have, where you see an opportunity.
Yeah.
Gustavo, you've done Latin America.
Yeah.
You can talk a little bit about that too.
Thank you, Dirk. I mean, obviously LU, as I said before, are a great opportunity for us to build penetration of our brands. As you're well-known in markets which are traditional trade dominated, you have to play in the right price points and making sure that we give consumers the opportunity to enter in the category and then trading up. In my region, the biggest opportunity is coming from demographics. We have a young population that will continue to grow and then will continue to become richer, and our brands are very aspirational. Among Southeast Asia, India, Africa, the Middle East, we have a clear strategy to play in the right price points, and we do this in both biscuit and chocolate, I would say in a good way.
I mean, we grew share constantly in the last three years, so that's the strategy that we have. I think it is a strategy that is working because if we are not present in traditional trade with the right price points, then it's difficult to compete locally. Yeah.
Yeah. The important thing in many of these markets is that we have a robust route to market that allow us to not only access the different trade formats, but also give us the expertise to understand the right price point for the different shopping missions. In the particular case of biscuit, for example, the entry price points is done with global brands like Oreo, where we have solutions, for example, in countries like Mexico, Brazil, with a four-count unit that is addressing this entry point. Also with some of the local brands. In Latin America, for example, we have Club Social.
That is added value cracker that was built around low unit price and on the go, which is very customized for the local consumer. The idea that it's a premium brand is not a contradiction with the entry price point, because it can be done with brands that at the end of the day create value and deliver good margin too.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Great. Thanks.
I appreciate that.
Do you have a follow-up, Ken?
No, I'm done. Thank you.
Okay, great. Thanks. Let's go to Rob Moskow at Credit Suisse. Rob?
Hi, thank you for the question. I was wondering if you could give me a little more detail about the rationale for making acquisitions in fresh-baked snacks and the strategy. Do you feel like you have to be a market leader in any of these geographies where you're making these acquisitions? Like, for example, on Chipita, maybe you can give us more detail about where you are now in the market, Peter. Or is the strategy just to become better skilled at it and therefore leverage some of your trademarks in markets like the U.S., for example, you know, putting the Oreo brand on a fresh-baked product? Do you have to be a market leader to succeed, or do you not have to be a market leader to succeed in these geographies?
Well, there's a big difference between the two. In fact, Chipita is a packaged bakery snack, while Give & Go is a fresh bakery, and so there is a difference between the two. I would say if I go first to fresh bakery, it's a separate aisle in the U.S. where the consumer goes for particular occasions, for particular needs. It's considered as the name says itself, as fresh. Consumer is prepared to pay a certain price for that. It has a whole supply chain that is unique to deliver that, and there is an opportunity to bring branding to that. You don't have to need.
be the market leader, but you do need to have the right size of production capacity so that you can deliver and distribution capacity, which allows you then to deliver that product at the highest quality at the right price. That is critical. Don't need to be the market leader overall, but you do wanna be the leader in certain segments of that fresh bakery, which allows you to have bigger plants. If I talk to Chipita, I'm sure that Vinzenz will jump in. Chipita is completely different situation. That's a separate shelf in Europe. Cakes and pastries, packed cakes and pastries are in a separate shelf. It's a very big shelf, and Chipita is a key player in many markets in Europe, in Eastern Europe, particularly Eastern Central Europe.
For us, it's important to have that presence there in that market to learn how to be there, but it offers us an extension of our brands into that shelf, basically. We don't need to be the market leaders. It happens to be that Chipita is a market leader, but that's not the intent. The intent is to bring our other brands into that shelf, and the vehicle was an existing brand that's very strong, which helped us a lot. Sorry, Vinzenz, I may have-
No, I think what really personally excites me in this cake and pastry extension is that if you look at the size on a global base, it's a $70 billion category. Biscuit is $100 billion. Think about, you know, the new playground we are getting by going into cake and pastry. To your point, Dirk, it's about the capabilities in which segment we wanna play. Staying for a second with Chipita, it's a way of capability to produce that type of croissants, but it's a scalable business. It's a very, you know, from a portfolio point of view, very slim, but very broad, going into new occasions for the consumer. Again, for us, it's about the incrementality of the growth we see for our company.
It's a territory we have been not so much playing in the past. It's a new capability we are acquiring with Chipita and Give & Go. It covers occasions which chocolate and biscuit are not covering at the moment to the full extent. Chipita, for example, the croissant is a mid-morning occasion where we in Europe are not so strong in the categories we are. I think if we put all that together and add the brands we have, think about a Chipita croissant with a Milka chocolate on or with a Cadbury on. You know, you see that the synergy is not just in scaling production or scaling route to market, but also scaling our brands becomes really, a nice box of growth.
I think you said it well, Vinzenz. It's not about the product format or if it's fresh or packaged. It's what consumption occasion is the consumer looking for and how are we going to fulfill that. Plus, it sells at a higher net revenue per kilo. It has very nice margins. That's all the benefit. But it allows us to extend our brands in more consumption occasion. That's really what drives it.
Great. Thanks.
Mm-hmm.
A follow-up on that. You know, Oreo has extended into a chocolate bar several years ago, and now it's extending into snack cakes. I don't think the chocolate bar is on shelf today. Are there any learnings from that experience that you're taking as you launch Oreos into snack cakes?
Yes, that was a very different strategy. The thinking was, we are not in the chocolate market in China and U.S. How do we get a foothold there? Starting with a brand new brand is gonna be difficult, so let's use Oreo because there is this segment in between chocolate and biscuits, which we call cocoa bakery, which is basically biscuits with chocolate in it or around it. We usually use our chocolate brands to do that. A Milka or a Cadbury cocoa bakery is a big, big segment in Europe. Since we didn't have chocolate brands, we decided to get into that segment by using Oreo. The negative of all that was that we had only a very small presence on the shelf. The cocoa bakery segment is not that big in the U.S. and in China.
That caused us not to really be able to make something significant happening. This now in cakes and pastries is completely different. We have well over $1 billion, $2 billion now presence in those already. This is really a different consumption occasion, and it's an extension of existing brands in markets where those brands are very big. This is, this has nothing to do with the chocolate experience, I would say. The size already, the speed at which it's moving and the opportunity it has will be a big success for us, while the other one was trying in a clever way to enter the chocolate market, which is a different approach.
Great. Thank you.
Thanks, Derek. Thanks, Paulette. Thanks, Vinzenz, Maurizio, Gustavo. That wraps up our first Q&A session. We'll now take an 8-minute break before starting up our next session on execution. Thanks.
In order to drive our strategies across chocolate, biscuits, and baked snacks, we need to execute with excellence, and that starts with driving a high quality, consistent, and impactful marketing agenda. Our plan is simple. Continue to build excellence in our marketing, a clear brand investment strategy, and driving improved innovation. Let's take a closer look. We have significantly transformed our marketing approach over the last few years. First, we have modernized our consumer research to deeply understand our categories, embracing, for example, a new demand spaces methodology across snacking to maximize the potential of our brand portfolio. Second, we have shifted our investment posture from fewer brands and lower spend to higher spend levels on a focused portfolio of both global and local brands, breathing new life into our brands.
In parallel, we have fully renewed our brands' creative strategies, creating more meaningful and lasting connections with consumers centered around specific brand purposes. Fourth, we have adjusted our advertising from a traditional and mass approach to one that is highly digital and personalized. Fifth, we have upgraded our talent. Today, we are more diverse and have brought in new capabilities, in particular to accompany our digital acceleration. Finally, we have changed our organization structure consistent with the overall company, pivoting from a centrally focused approach to one that is more business unit driven, supported with a strong global center of excellence. Together, these changes have better positioned our marketing teams to help execute on the significant opportunities that lie ahead. Thanks to these evolutions, our marketing effectiveness has made significant progress over the last couple of years, and that can be seen across a number of key metrics.
This includes growing penetration, as 88% of our measured 2021 revenue grew or held household penetration. Brand meaningfulness, as 91% of our 2021 net revenue held or gained brand meaningfulness versus 2019. Media ROI, which has increased 25% versus 2019 and is in the top quartile globally for food and beverage companies. Creative effectiveness, where more than half of our creative assets are in the top quartile, representing a seven point increase versus the past two years. As we move forward, we really want to lead the future of marketing, and we have a clear picture of where marketing can make an impact and help drive superior growth. First, lead with purpose.
We want to continue to reinforce our amazing portfolio of brands, staying very focused with brands which have strong purposes as their lighthouse, sharp growth strategies, and the right level of investments behind them. Second, products made right. We are obsessed with making sure that we have the right products, ensure we deliver superior product quality, keeping our recipes contemporary, and launching targeted and incremental innovation. Third, we need to continue to deliver leading-edge creative that connects our brands to our consumers and brings them to life. This includes, in particular, the expansion of our personalization and scale program to make sure we deliver the right message for the right consumer at the right moment. Today, 30% of our assets are personalized in digital media. We aim to quickly move to more than 60%. Finally, we want to monetize data.
We have now a full ecosystem of partners and technology to build more direct relationships with our consumers to generate even better return on investment and, at the same time, enable data-driven insights. Now let's take a look at our brand investment strategy. On top of having the right marketing approach, it is key to make sure we are focusing the investments behind the right brands. We have a clear strategy and segmentation that drives our prioritization in each market between brands in which we invest, brands that we just aim to sustain, and those that we call transition brands. After a few years of continuous improvement, we now expect approximately 75% of our net revenue to come from invest brands. Invest brands have strong profitability profiles and the potential to grow share. They are our priority in terms of investment.
Our sustain brands are those brands that can play an important role with medium investment and where we are looking to retain market share levels. Finally, transition brands are those that do not represent a strategy growth opportunity and receive little to no investment. Over time, these are expected to be reinvented or divested. Among those transition brands in particular, we have further potential for portfolio rationalization. On top of having a very focused brand portfolio strategy, we have been increasing our working media spend by double digits over the past two years, and we plan to continue that level of increase. This has been possible thanks to an increase in total A&C, but also through rigorous prioritization to increase the weight of working media within our total A&C spend, which was 53% in 2021, up from 45% in 2018.
At the same time, we have significantly improved our media ROI, reaching now top-tier performance versus our food and beverages peers, thanks to both efficiency and effectiveness improvement. The combination of increasing media spend and improved ROI is driving an important part of our growth acceleration as a company. What is exciting is that there is much more opportunity to invest behind our brands. When we look at our media sufficiency across biscuits and chocolates, you can see we have a long way to go. We are still far from reaching our point of saturation, in particular with our invest brands. This is very encouraging as we look at our potential for the future.
With more investments, our teams have the responsibility to deliver even greater execution to continue to drive ROI, and I'm quite proud to see that the quality of our brand strategies and plans is continuously improving. All our key brands have now a very clear purpose around often very important human values, like tenderness in the case of Milka as an example here. They are also embracing sustainability through the lens of their unique purpose, like LU in France, showcasing our sustainable wheat program, Harmony, as a key proof point of the brand giving proofs of love purpose. Let me close with a few thoughts on our approach to innovation. We have been working quite a lot on how to maximize the impact of innovation, and we feel good with our first results.
Two years ago, we decided to reduce our projects portfolio by more than 25% and to rebalance, to rediscover what we call core innovation, and in particular, the core innovation behind our most important brands and products. Thanks to that refocus, we have seen the results of our projects improve significantly, and we are now above benchmark in contribution to growth and incrementality. Our focus now is to maximize the incrementality of what we call beyond the core innovation with a few important levers. First, drive even more focus in the business units behind a few priority projects. Second, enhance our capabilities to develop even better consumer-centric ideas with new methodologies and continuing to leverage fast test and learns to quickly iterate with consumers. Finally, continue our open innovation approach with SnackFutures CoLab.
We are encouraged by a few recent innovations which are promising in some of our key strategic priorities. OREO Gluten Free in the US, Oreo Zero in China, Lacta Intense, which already took the leadership of dark chocolate in Brazil, Oreo Chocolate Pie in Vietnam, and Caramilk, a new chocolate mass launched in Australia and the UK with strong incrementality for our core tablets. In summary, marketing at Mondelēz International is having a great momentum and is a great engine for growth. We have a very focused portfolio approach. We are increasing our investments and driving better effectiveness with great execution. We have the potential to still drive more incrementality via beyond the core innovation, and we are accelerating our digital consumer strategy.
Thank you very much, and I will now leave the space to Maurizio Brusadelli, President of our EMEA region, to discuss sales excellence at Mondelēz International, another critical area for our future growth.
Thank you, Martin, and good morning, everyone. I'm here to talk about how our sales engine has contributed to delivering success, and how we plan to make it even better. Our iconic global and local brands across markets give us a unique competitive advantage to win in store. Deep shopper understanding and our strengths to execute with excellence in store has helped us to win consistently across markets and channels. This strength in sales and distribution was tested during COVID, with local lockdowns, movement restrictions, trade disruption, and consumers behaving and shopping differently. Our resilience and ability to pivot helped us emerge as winners, and we grew share in 75% of our revenue base. We doubled down on capturing more ground in high- growth channels.
E-commerce contribution doubled during this period to make us strong leaders in the lead categories in our large markets like U.S. biscuit, U.K. chocolate, and China biscuit. We have a strong presence in traditional trade, especially in emerging markets, where we have continued to expand coverage, adding more than 1 million stores in priority markets over the last three years. We remain leaders in the fast-growing discounter channel in Europe. As we flex our strong sales muscles, we have also been building new ones. We advanced revenue growth management, which I will talk more about later. In addition, digital data and analytics is steadily emerging as another of our competitive advantages via use of artificial intelligence, image recognition, and cloud solutions. As we continue to further build sales as a competitive advantage, we have narrowed our focus to four priority areas.
Be omnipresent across all key channels and continue driving up our visibility and availability. Be the indispensable partner of choice and a top-tier supplier with all partners. Take a comprehensive approach to revenue growth management and embed the data across all our markets. All these initiatives are underpinned by being digitally enabled to keep growing coverage, improving cost to serve, and executing with excellence. Let me bring this to life along with some examples. A great example is our discounter business in Europe and the US. We are achieving strong progress against a large addressable market of nearly $2 billion in the EU discount channel by driving deeper presence and visibility and focusing on the right products and formats. We are the biggest branded contributor of discounter growth in snacking, driving share gains in the channel.
Over the past four years, we have delivered a CAGR of 11% and driven share gains in the EU. In the US, we are also making progress, for example, with a strong multi-year joint business plan with Dollar General to drive biscuit growth. As we execute our discount strategy, our focus in the EU and US will be to continue driving distribution and store growth. Given the opportunity in this channel, we expect double-digit growth and share gains. Another great example of our strategy to be omnipresent across channel is traditional trade in India. Affluence is growing both in urban and rural India, and our opportunity is to be present everywhere that consumers seek snacking. We are present in 3 million stores, of which 500,000 were added in the last few years.
There are now over 500,000 Mondelēz-owned Visi Coolers placed in stores to deliver the best chocolate experience in the hot Indian climate. Today, 800,000 stores are managed through suggested order artificial intelligence, driving digital efficiency and higher sales per store. With more than 100,000 villages directly covered, we are among the top three FMCG companies in rural India and have an aspiration to be the number one snacking player there. We will continue to drive this strategy in the future, expanding distribution in new stores, cold chain capabilities, driving our leading position in snacking in rural, and increasing investment in our 100,000 top stores for greater execution and growth. As we described at CAGNY, the opportunity is huge, with a universe of approximately 9 million stores in India.
Moving beyond brick-and-mortar stores, we have expanded our scope from e-commerce to digital commerce, building a strong leadership position and driving incremental growth. Business to consumers has become our area of strength in key markets, as we have consistently applied our digital flywheel approach. We will continue to accelerate the activation across many markets. Direct-to-consumer will focus on gifting and bundles, including personalization to accelerate growth. We are leveraging and shaping the emerging e-business-to-business landscape to drive growth in underserved outlets and channels. Digital commerce will continue to drive growth, and we expect it to account for 20% of total Mondelēz net revenue by 2030, up from 6% in 2021. China is a great example of our digital commerce strategy in action, with a diverse landscape and multiple platforms and business models.
In some of our categories, digital commerce accounts for more than 20% of our revenue already. We have sized the China opportunity by leveraging digital commerce for marketing and innovation, increasing investment, and moving with speed and agility to learn as we go and improve our approach. The results have been rewarding. We have the number one biscuit brand online with Oreo. We have built Stride into the top gun brand on Tmall Super, and we have become the number one new category recruiter, leveraging our brands with the use of data and analytics. We aim to double our business in three years based on superior consumer experiences, driving eRGM targeted marketing activation and omni-channel efficiency. Moving to revenue growth management. You will hear us talk more about RGM as it has become a fundamental part of our strategy.
We have traditionally used pricing and price pack architecture, but we are now focused on using all the levers available to drive top and bottom line growth, which also includes more efficient promotion management, driving trade terms, and managing mix. We currently have activated or established RGM programs covering 65% of our revenue base, with 30% at activated status and 35% established. In the next three years, we expect to have implemented RGM excellence in all our markets to varying degrees, reaching advanced status across 70% of our revenue base with more advanced skill sets, embedded predictive analytics, and integrated digital tools. We have started to see strong results in a few markets. 2021 was an incredible year for Brazil, growing double digits, where RGM played a central role in unlocking value. We priced to offset inflation using rigorous analytics.
We coupled it with an occasion-based portfolio design, drove smart pricing, set the right incentive course, and supported it with strong brand programs and rigorous execution. We will continue strengthening RGM fundamentals in Brazil as well as around the world. Moving to technology. Leveraging the power of technology in sales is and will be a critical differentiator for Mondelēz. We want to be on the leading edge to enhance our performance across all stages of the selling process. Before the seller gets into the store, technology helps identify the right store, the right range, and the right frequency to sell to help improve the efficiency of the call. Once the person is in store, image recognition helps review the shelf and algorithms help direct targeted tasks in store, leading to greater efficiency, time management, and impact of salesperson during the time in the store.
Analytics diagnose issues and help discover opportunities for sales planning and resourcing. With our global partnership, we are elevating our capabilities in selling and driving digital to accelerate growth. To close, we are building on our position of strength, making clear and bold investment in high growth channels, improving key metrics with a focus on customer and shopper-centric category growth plan, increasing capabilities and executing against an ambitious revenue growth management roadmap, and investing and leveraging digital across our organization and processes. Now, over to you, Sandra.
Thanks very much, Maurizio, and very happy to speak with you all today. At Mondelēz International, we're building a top-tier consumer-centric supply chain. I'm gonna share some insights into that evolution and explain how we've created a clear set of work streams to take us to best-in-class delivery across service, safety, quality, cash, and of course, to deliver continuous productivity in partnership with our business units. Our overall focus is to do it right from shelf to field in service of our global growth acceleration agenda. I continue to be amazed, appreciative, and very proud of the resilience, perseverance, and unflappable spirit shown by our supply chain teams and colleagues, particularly how they've responded to the challenges around COVID, inflation volatility, and even more recently, the awful war in the Ukraine. I deeply thank every single one of the 53,000 supply chain employees we have around our Mondelēz world.
The investments we've made around our capabilities, systems, and infrastructures have created a stronger, increasingly flexible supply chain that is delivering industry-leading standards for people and food safety, as well as product quality. It's leveraging economies of scale in procurement while utilizing the competitive advantage of in-market manufacturing in both developed and emerging markets, and bringing us closer to our consumers and our customers. That's the strong base we're building from. Now, let me share where we're headed and our vision of what a top-tier consumer goods supply chain looks like. First, it is a supply chain that is geared towards value creation in all phases from shelf to field. A top-tier supply chain creates value through the procurement processes, the manufacturing processes, and customer service and logistics.
It sees best-in-class service, quality, and safety as enablers to best-in-class delivery of cash and productivity to provide fuel for growth. Therefore, we are taking an end-to-end view of what our actions at each stage of the supply chain ultimately mean for the consumer as we shift from a manufacturing- centric to consumer centric supply chain. Second, we've shifted from a focus on restructuring, zero-based budgeting, and the installation of high CapEx lines of the future to a more agile investment strategy with a focus on automation and digitization to increase efficiency and reduce cost. For example, we now have flexible packaging facilities in China, where Suzhou meets growth demands by maintaining line throughputs with more flexibility, particularly in packaging. This facility is now at phase four of our integrated Lean Six Sigma journey. We are employing cobots, automatic guided vehicles, and virtual reality technology in several sites across all regions.
We are underpinning this with the implementation of our manufacturing data strategy. In Europe, over the last few years, we have very successfully upgraded the performance of Bournville in all aspects of performance. Third, on the fundamentals of safety and quality, we've pivoted our focus to best-in-class performance benchmarks versus a historic focus on internal targets. This shift is already yielding results. We have moved to measuring right first time for quality at the buy, make, move, and sell stages of our supply chain, and are seeing some SKU supply chains exceeding our target of 98%. On safety, while continuing to measure total incident rate, we started to include the more granular and actionable metric of severity. As a result, we have seen all our safety metrics, including TIR, move to top-tier performance.
Finally, building on our very successful creation and strong evolution in the last three years of integrated Lean Six Sigma in manufacturing, we're stepping up our investment in capabilities to unlock the potential of our existing talent and attract new talent in strategically important areas like logistics and procurement, areas where we may have historically prioritized less and behind manufacturing for investment. Underpinning all of this is digitization, which enables better transparency that is critical to realizing our sustainability goals, including empowering our people, improving supply chain delivery, and ultimately reducing our operating cost and driving up our cash delivery. We have already brought transparency for our consumers in our traceability from shelf to field on SKUs in France, which is LU, and in North America, which is Triscuit. Now let me talk more about our productivity agenda to continuously reduce supply chain costs.
Our productivity agenda takes on increasing importance at times like this when we are in a challenging environment of high levels of inflation. It's in our DNA to pursue supply chain productivity year in and year out, as you'll have seen even in recent tough times. Our ongoing long-term goal is to realize approximately 4% gross productivity and 2% net productivity. We've been delivering close to those levels the last few years in strong partnership with our business units. We are currently carrying out a re-examination of our supply chain from shelf to field, recognizing today's economic situation to meet these productivity goals, and also to achieve the top-tier service levels while balancing inventory levels and obviously cash delivery. Let me now walk through the initiatives we are pursuing across the entire supply chain to realize these ambitions.
It all starts with enhancing our supply and demand planning processes and outcomes. Our key initiative in this space is the global transformation of how we plan, which at its core is the implementation of statistical forecasting using machine learning. We expect to increase our forecast accuracy by as much as 15% in some regions and will enable us to improve our customer service, inventory KPIs, and waste reduction to best-in-class levels. In procurement, we're deepening strategic supplier partnerships and enhancing supplier performance management processes to reduce costs and share the benefits, and at the same time, reducing our reliance on single source suppliers to mitigate the risk of supply disruption. In 2021, we introduced the design to consumer value approach to better align costs with consumer benefits. By asking what matters to the consumer, we can realize cost efficiencies without compromising consumer value.
In 2021, we over-delivered by 50% on our goal for the year and have strong plans moving forward in our strategic plan for the next three years. In manufacturing and logistics, with the creation in 2020 of our central analytics team, we are now using end-to-end digital modeling to continually reevaluate our network to better serve customers and consumers. We are increasing growth CapEx investments to reduce bottlenecks and increase capacity in key strategic areas like India, China, and Oreo Supply globally. Ultimately, we are looking to be above 50% of CapEx spend, enabling volume growth. In manufacturing, we're building towards our first data-powered and remotely operated lights out factory, which will step change productivity.
In consumer service and logistics, we're better connecting all phases of the product journey and leveraging investments in technology to optimize warehouse management, route planning, and truck fill. Finally, we remain focused on the safety of our people and quality of our products, which underpin everything we do and are huge value drivers in engagement, retention, reduction of waste, protection of our brands, protection of our reputation, people, and delivery of our growth agenda. You've heard a bit about what we are doing to evolve towards a top-tier supply chain. We acknowledge the last 12 months have presented a lot of challenges in the U.S. in particular. Let me address that for a minute. At the start and peak of COVID, the resilience of our network, including our DSD organization, allowed us to outperform competition, demonstrated by leading levels of on-shelf availability and significant share gains.
Sector-wide challenges emerged with trucking and container supply lagging demand and unprecedented labor shortages at third parties. There were also supply inventory management through improvements in data visibility and control towers. We're deepening our partnerships with strategic suppliers, where interdependence can be a strength, as well as onboarding new suppliers where appropriate. We are also investing CapEx where needed to support our turnaround. Finally, we're improving the cross-functional planning process, as I mentioned previously. We expect to see service level improvements in the coming six months, with the full effects of our remediation actions felt in 2023. With that, let me wrap up. We're building from a strong base, leveraging our competitive advantages and continuing to evolve the end-to-end supply chain from shelf to field, underpinned by safety and quality and investments in digital and sustainability.
We're driving towards best-in-class service delivery and quality in support of the company's growth acceleration agenda. We are relentlessly pursuing productivity this year and every year. Thank you for your attention today.
Thank you, Sandra. Hi, everyone. I'm joined today by our CFO, Luca Zaramella, and Chief Impact and Sustainability Officer, Christine McGrath, for a discussion about sustainability at Mondelēz International. We hope you'll find this segment both engaging and insightful. For further information on these subjects, please look out for our latest Snacking Made Right ESG Annual Report, which will be published later this month. With that, let's start our discussion. Hi, Chris. Thanks for joining us today.
It's great to be here.
Firstly, how would you describe the company's ambitions in the area of sustainability? Where do you think we can make the most impact?
Sure. For us, it's sustainability is very much about building a sustainable snacking company. It's core to our business growth. It helps to create value along the value chain, and it also helps to make our business more resilient. For us, we're very focused on leading in the areas where we know that we can make a significant impact, like cocoa and wheat, being one of the world's largest chocolate and biscuit companies, and then also driving change where the world needs it the most, so areas like climate change and packaging waste. 2022 is really a significant milestone for us because it marks not only 10 years as a company, but 10 years on our sustainability journey.
We've been able to scale our signature programs and importantly, learn what's working and what else we need to go focus on as we move forward. We have clear roadmaps to take us to the future.
That's great. Thanks, Chris. What do you believe really differentiates Mondelēz from other companies in this area?
Our approach to sustainability is about focus, innovation, and collaboration. Focus is really those areas where we can make a significant impact, and bringing innovation to come up with new programs that really get at tackling root causes versus just sort of settling for what might be on the marketplace. Also measuring. We bring a business discipline in measuring the impact of the programs and then sharing that information at a sector level in terms of with our peers and working with industry groups, other peer companies, suppliers, governments, et cetera, to drive more change at scale. Cocoa is a great example. We're one of the world's largest buyers of cocoa.
We used to buy certified cocoa when we weren't satisfied with what we were seeing in terms of the kind of data and the kind of approach, 'cause it wasn't addressing all the issues. 10 years ago, we launched Cocoa Life to get at an integrated solution. We measure the impact and we share that information at a sector with others in the cocoa industry to help them learn and be able to scale solutions and change faster.
Thank you, Chris. Turning to you, Luca. As CFO, how do you think about sustainability?
Thank you, André. As I always say, any good business needs to be sustainably run for its long-term potential and sustainability over the long period of time. In that regard, sustainability is not any different than any other type of investment we make. I know it is the right thing to make the business thrive over the long period of time. As a leader of a company, I also know I'm making decisions that impact many stakeholders, many people, not only in the company, but outside. It is a great recognition of responsibility, the one that I have.
I always make sure that caring about the planet and making sure that well-being of our consumers and those that work for the company is always top of mind, not only for me, but for everyone within the company. Clearly, sustainability comes at a cost and not similarly than any other investments. I want to make sure there is a return on these investments. We prefer spending money and investing money behind big challenging topics, but really making a difference for the planet and for our key stakeholders.
Thank you, Luca. Back to you, Chris. We focus on four key areas within sustainability at Mondelēz, ingredients, social impact, climate, and packaging. I'd like to double-click on ingredients first, please. Most of our audience will be familiar with Cocoa Life, but I'd love to hear in your words what is it and what impact is it having.
Cocoa is the most important ingredient that we buy, and as I mentioned, is a challenged supply chain. Just a bit of context of why we focus so much, it is our most important ingredient, pivotal to our growth, and it's important to us to make cocoa right. You know, and we wanna make sure that means that the farmers, as Luca said, the farmers that are growing have a good standard of living. The second thing is that it's important to understand cocoa is grown by smallholder farms, smallholder-owned businesses.
Children and women are part of the family and we wanna make sure the children are protected, and we wanna make sure that we tap into giving women economic empowerment because we know that women play an important role in the cocoa supply chain. They're often overlooked. When they have their own economic independence, they invest more in children's education and the welfare of the household and the community. It's also important for climate change because for us, cocoa is the number one source of our CO2, and that's another reason why it's been a big focus for us for many years in terms of helping to eliminate deforestation and also teaching farmers how to grow more cocoa on less land.
We launched our Cocoa Life program 10 years ago, as I mentioned, in 2012. We now are at the point 10 years later, we've scaled. We're working with over 200,000 farmers, and 75% of our chocolate volume today is sourced through the program. Importantly, not just the size, what we're really excited about is the impact that we see the programs having. It's an integrated program. We work on three areas, farming businesses, empowered communities, and the environment. On farming businesses, farmers continue to have increased incomes, but importantly, it's driven by improving yields. We know that farmers are earning, growing more on their farms, and that's how they're able to earn more income. The second thing is the community.
Almost all of the 2,500 communities where we're working have community action plans. Think of it as a strategic plan they develop together to talk about the future viability of the community. They've also been able to. 70% of those plans are funded by the local governments, which again is another important part of sustained, you know, health of the community. We've put a big effort on scaling our child labor monitoring and remediation systems. We more than doubled it since last year. We're at 61% and well on our way to full coverage by 2025. On the environment side, we map and satellite monitor about 198,000 farms, about 80% of the farms we're working quite a bit.
We're really excited to see that there's been very little deforestation in the last few years on those farms. Net-net, our integrated approach is working, and we have very good information about what else we need to do, where we need to take the program, and later in the year, we'll be sharing the next generation of what we'll be doing on Cocoa Life to take us to 2030.
Thank you, Chris. Luca, what role does your finance organization have to play in delivery of these ambitions and goals?
I start by saying that everyone in Mondelēz has a role to play with our ambitious sustainability agenda. It clearly starts with our suppliers with people that interact with those suppliers, with our factories, et cetera. I think good ideas, as we know, start everywhere in the company, but importantly, we need the commitment and understanding of the whole organization behind it. As it boils down to finance, the number one priority for us, I believe it is about ensuring that we hit these programs in terms of commitments and that we make sure that funding is obtained to make progress.
In that regard, one of the things we did last year, which was very important to me, was the first green bond, which was an overwhelming success with investors, and that has helped us fund those investments. We also need to make sure that we have viable plans. As someone that deals with a lot of stakeholders, I have one key asset, which is my word. When we make a commitment, I want to make sure that we know what we're talking about and that we execute well that agenda. We also want to ensure that as we report our progress to the outside world, we report it in a way that is high quality.
Measuring a lot of this impact is quite challenging at the moment, but I want to make sure that over time we make progress and that finance gives the seal of approval. When we tell investors or any stakeholders this is what we are doing and this is what we have done, it really is what we have done.
Very clear. Thank you, Luca. Chris, back to you. Let's pivot to climate. We've publicly stated our ambition to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. What will it take to get there as an organization?
Climate change and helping to tackle it are something we've been working on since the start of the company. Our first focus has always been to make sure that we have our own house in order, so looking at our own operations, and we've made great progress there, reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by about 300,000 tons since 2014, for example. We do that by using more efficient energy systems, using renewable electricity where we can, et cetera. It's also important to understand our environment, our greenhouse gas footprint, about 70% of it comes from ingredients. It's cocoa, as we've discussed, wheat, dairy, and oils. Those are the primary drivers of our CO2.
In cocoa, in addition to the deforestation, we've been doing a lot of work to help farmers learn, training about 300,000 farmers in good environmental practices and providing shade trees. We've planted over 4.5 million shade trees to date, and we're still going forward with that. All of that helps to shrink that greenhouse gas footprint.
Beyond that, we're also, as we look to net zero, part of the shift that you're asking of what it will take is really bringing, I think, sort of the carbon lens and the greenhouse gas lens to all the business decisions that we make, whether it's thinking about a new piece of equipment that we're putting in and what's the footprint, designing a new logistics route, and thinking about, you know, working with suppliers and farmers on ingredients. We've got a clear roadmap of what it will take us to get there. There's some innovation that's still required, but we know that we'll be able to switch. As our ovens become obsolete, we'll switch them from gas to electric.
We'll do things like take our fleet and switch it over to electric vehicles. In the ingredient side, one other area where we've made great progress is on regenerative agriculture. In Europe, we have our Harmony Wheat Program, and today, all of our wheat biscuit volume is sourced through that program. We're taking those practices and now working with suppliers and farmers to scale the regen ag around the world. We're really encouraged. You know, we've put a lot, as Luca said, we did a lot of work to put very specific plans in place and understand what it would take and what the building blocks would be. You know, we're gonna continue with five-year goals and interim steps along the way to measure our progress.
Thanks, Chris. Back to you, Luca. You know, these initiatives clearly cost money. How do you think about that cost? How do you plan for that?
We have clear short and long-term goals, and I engage with the broader organization to ensure that we know exactly what we have to do and subsequently that we know the economic implication of all the things that we are committing to do. I believe some of these initiatives will result in a cost reduction. If you think about sustainability, I believe it is first and foremost doing more with less and particularly using less water, using less gas, using less packaging will result in cost savings. I think that is obviously beneficial for the planet, but also for our overall P&L. Many of these initiatives, though, will result in incremental cost. They're not resulting in incremental cost. Some of them are already into the P&L, but there is definitely more to come.
Particularly as it relates to new technologies, the entry cost of this technology today is quite high, but I expect, as there is a broader adoption, as there is a broader understanding of the fact that that is the way to go, costs will come down over time. For ongoing costs that hit the P&L directly, obviously, we try to make space into the P&L to plan for them and ensuring that we have the necessary funding. I have also to be very clear here that some of these initiatives will have to be paid by our consumers, because eventually we will be providing more value to them. I think it is important from anyone that buys a certain product to know that that product is made sustainably.
If there are costs, those are the right things to do, and eventually consumers will be more willing to pay for products that are sustainably sold.
Understood. Thanks. Chris, one topic we haven't discussed yet is packaging. We see a future of net zero packaging waste and a circular economy by 2050, and we're taking significant action to make our packaging more recyclable. But recycling rates are still quite low globally for some of our key materials. How do you think about the journey from today up until a circular packaging economy in 2050?
Packaging is an area we've been working on for a long time, and I think just to set a little bit of context, because here again, we're dealing with some systemic challenges. Our packaging footprint today, about 20% of it, we use plastics, flexible films pretty much. What we know is that that is a really efficient from and in terms of delivering high quality and food safety and reducing food waste because, you know, it keeps the products fresh. We wanna continue all those really good things, but the systemic challenge is that there just really isn't infrastructure today in the world to collect and recycle plastics. About 25% of the world's plastic today is recycled in the world, and particularly for flexibles, because only 3% of flexible film is recycled today.
That's what we're working on. We have a comprehensive packaging strategy we call Pack Light and Right. It's about using less packaging, better packaging, and helping to build better systems. Less packaging, you know, that's been a focus for us for a long time. We've taken out 68,000 tons of packaging since the start of the company. And that's a continued focus for us. It saves money, as Luca said, and it's also great for the environment. The second area in terms of better packaging, we're well on our way to getting all of our packaging to recyclable. We're at 95% today and getting to 100% by 2025, and that's essentially basically changing the materials over to fit design rules that make them recyclable. Single layer films versus multiple layers, as an example.
The other area in terms of better packaging is when we can substitute plastic for paper, like some of our biscuit trays or some of the flow wrap on some of our chocolates, that's something that we're pursuing as well, and also reducing our virgin plastic. We have a 5% virgin plastic reduction goal by 2025. This year, we're starting to put some recycled plastic in our Cadbury wrappers in Australia. We're working to have more with our suppliers to get more availability of that type of material. Then that leads to better systems. Better systems mean we've been very strong advocates for extended producer responsibility. It's a mouthful, but essentially it's the fees companies pay to help build infrastructure.
We are working at an industry level in coalitions and working to advocate with governments to make sure that that money goes into really investing in sustainable systems that will collect and recycle flexibles as part of the equation and also provide the incentives for people to collect and recycle the materials. Lastly, we're making our own investments. We have our Sustainable Futures Impact Investment Fund. Last year we invested through Circulate Capital and started an Ocean Fund. They're investing in small entrepreneurs in India and Southeast Asia who are building some of these new collect kinds of ways to collect materials and recycle them. If we're really encouraged, we'll be able to take as much plastic as we put into those markets out and have it be circular.
It's all of those pieces together, less packaging, better packaging and better systems that we need to continue to work on. Again, with suppliers, other peer companies, et cetera, to really get to a whole fully circular packaging economy by 2050.
Thanks, Chris. Final question from me today, staying with you.
Yep.
Could you just talk a little bit about your interaction and the interaction of this agenda with the leadership of the company and also with the board of directors?
Sure. Since Dirk has been with us, I've been meeting with him quarterly to talk about our progress and our journey. Where are we in terms of our KPIs and talking through strategic initiatives. Then the board, this is a very big priority for the board, and so I meet with them twice a year to discuss the progress and again, roadmaps. Well, before we take any of the big commitments that we make, we fully discuss it with them as well. A lot of oversight and engagement by our directors as well as the C-suite, and I meet with Luca regularly as well.
Clear. Okay, that brings our discussion to an end. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Luca. As I said earlier, please look out for our upcoming Snacking Made Right ESG annual report.
Thank you, André, and good afternoon. I'm very happy to be here today to talk about the next phase of our company, which is about accelerated growth and earnings. My presentation will revolve around three topics. Our P&L levers and operating discipline, what we have accomplished and how much there is still to do. Second, capital allocation priorities and results. Finally, a review of our outlook for 2022, near-term operating dynamics, and an updated long-term algorithm. Let's start with our P&L drivers and results. As we move into the next phase of acceleration and focus, we start from a much stronger base of reliable and sustainable growth, underpinned by strong commercial execution and higher amounts, as well as quality of investment.
We continue to focus and strengthen our portfolio by doubling down on our core chocolate and biscuits, exploring growth accretive adjacencies, and exiting businesses that are lower priority. Free cash flow generation has also been a key priority and output of our strategy over the past several years. Our deployment of capital has been a strength as we have prioritized growth investments in our business, added growth accretive acquisitions, and returned capital to shareholders, both through dividends and opportunistic and price sensitive repurchase of our stock. Looking back over the past three years, we have shifted to a more attractive and more balanced as well as sustainable financial cadence. Revenue growth rate has accelerated from sub 2% to more than 4%. Profit dollar growth has increased in order to invest for growth at higher levels, with much improved and more efficient level of agency spending.
We have consistently delivered high single-digit EPS growth, both at constant currency and in US dollars. Finally, volume leverage, better profit dollar growth, and superior management of working capital have allowed us to deliver material cash. We have also seen great strength across a much larger part of our portfolio. Core biscuits and chocolate, which now make up nearly 80% of our total sales, have delivered combined growth of more than 5% over the past three years. We have step-changed our local brands growth after years of underinvestment, enabling us to grow nearly 4% over the past three years, while our global brands continue to outperform the categories. The key unlock for our local brands was incremental investments and core renovation. While we are happy, there is more to do, and we aspire to grow these brands in line or above categories.
In terms of geographies, we have seen high single-digit profitable growth across emerging markets, while developed markets continue to post solid growth and generate good cash. Turning to our portfolio focus, we plan to continue reshaping the portfolio in a thoughtful and disciplined way by doubling down investments in our core chocolate and biscuit businesses, where we can have significant opportunities to unlock more growth. Expanding close-in adjacencies, where we can further develop attractive top- and bottom-line opportunities. Reducing our exposure to slow growth, non-core snacking categories. Adding growth-accretive acquisitions where we are the natural owner who can apply our competitive advantage to further enhance growth and profitability. Turning to our sustainable growth model, which gives us increasing confidence in our ability to deliver ongoing earnings power. This model begins with driving operational efficiencies through strong overhead cost management and productivity.
We invest these savings back into the business where we can get the best return, including working media, route to market, and digital. This in turn allows to deliver volume-driven top-line growth and generate strong free cash flow, which we deploy in a value-enhancing way back into the business and in the form of cash to our shareholders. Next, let me talk about our efforts around productivity and overhead management. Strong productivity remains an ongoing ambition for us, and we have made solid progress over the past several years, despite a number of challenges in terms of inflation and supply chain constraints. Going forward, we are targeting a few key areas that you heard from Sandra, including the implementation of Lean Six Sigma and digital across the entire network, as well as statistical forecasting to drive out waste.
In terms of overheads, we continue to make strong progress in driving down our costs in a methodical way. Moving forward, we will increase our use of digital tools and analytics to drive further efficiencies into the business, and we are taking additional steps to focus and simplify our processes while managing our cost packages for further efficiencies. These efficiencies and our savings, along with our focus on profit dollar growth, give us the room in the P&L to continue to make growth-oriented investments. We have made significant increases in our A&C spend to better support our brands through high return and efficient working media spend, and we have more room for further improvements. Moving forward, our priorities are clear. We will continue to target A&C in excess of top-line growth.
We will continue to allocate more spend to working media, and we will further support our brands and accelerate digital. Our sustainable growth algorithm is predicated on balance and on our focus on volume, profit dollar growth, and reinvestment has resulted in high-quality EPS, both on a constant currency basis and in U.S. dollars growth, with both growing + high single digits on average from 2018 to 2021. As we move forward and increase our focus on chocolate and biscuits and deploy our balance sheet firepower to synergy accretive acquisitions, as well as unlock savings through digital, we are increasingly confident that we can continue to sustain these results with room for some improvement over the long term. Strong cash conversion is another key to our algorithm. We have made significant progress, improving 35 days our cash conversion cycle since 2015 and delivering best-in-class levels.
There is more room for us to go further as we implement digital planning tools to improve our demand forecasting and drive down our days inventory. We also feel good about our CapEx plan, which we expect to run at about 4% of net revenue over the next five to 10 years. These plans call for a higher percentage of growth CapEx and will be able to fund our initiatives, including emerging market capacity growth, specifically around proven platforms like Oreo, Cadbury and Milka. These areas of focus and initiatives should continue to translate into continuous free cash flow improvement. Next, I'll spend some time on our capital allocation priorities and why we believe they are and will continue to add value. Our capital allocation priorities remain the same. Our first priority is reinvesting in the core business. Second, we will prioritize growth accretive acquisitions.
Our third priority is capital return through dividend growth and share repurchase. Paying down debt is a lower priority given the strength of our balance sheet. Let me spend a moment on each. We know one of the best returns we can make is continuing to reinvest into our current business, where the core opportunities remain large and attractive. This includes an increase in more impactful A&C, increasing our omni-channel presence through route to market investments, and investing in new capabilities around RGM, integration, and our digital agenda. M&A is our next priority.
Our approach is disciplined and consistent in terms of how we identify and evaluate opportunities, focusing primarily on bolt-on acquisitions and snacking assets that can benefit from our competitive advantages, scale across multiple geographies, and take advantage of our existing brands and commercial expertise. We also have specific strategic and financial criteria, which include expanding our core portfolio or filling key gaps, identifying assets that align with emerging consumer trends, and applying rigorous return metrics that are risk-adjusted based on the business and geographies. As you can see, our last eight acquisitions have enabled us to fill multiple gaps, including wellbeing, premium, some category-wide spaces in certain geographies and adjacencies. Together, they add more than $2 billion in revenue. Let's take a closer look at some of them and how we have helped improve or accelerate performance.
Starting with Tate's, a well-known iconic cookie brand that enabled us to enter the premium cookie segment. We have been averaging around 20% growth over the past few years by increasing household penetration and adding significant distribution. One of the big unlocks has been putting this brand on our DSD network, which gives it significant growth potential. Going forward, we expect more distribution gains, incremental innovation, and the ability to go into other geographies. Perfect Snacks is a premium brand with wellbeing credentials that is unique given its significant leadership position in the chilled high-protein bar market. We have driven high-quality growth in this business despite the temporary setback from COVID in 2020, and have seen a significant increase in household distribution points and share.
Now we're working to expand the brand in a targeted way with new formats, such as the recently launched snack-sized portions offered in outlets like Target. One more acquisition to highlight is Give & Go. Give & Go is a leader within the large and fast-growing in-store bakery segment. We have been able to provide more capital to help unlock capacity and expand distribution and launch in new categories. We are seeing great results with strong growth over the past two years. There is an application in the category of our brands and cross-fertilization of know-how between our portfolio and Give & Go. Finally, profitability of the platform is good, and through volume growth as well as deployment of capital, there is still room to improve. Let me spend a minute on our portfolio announcement today.
As Dirk said earlier, our vision is to continue to move the portfolio closer to 100% snacking. We believe exiting the developed gum business is an important step in this direction, given our view that it is more appropriate for us to invest incremental dollars towards chocolate and biscuits. In terms of net revenue, these businesses represent $450 million and will come exclusively in North America and developed markets in Europe, including brands like Trident, Dentyne, and Hollywood. We will continue to invest in our attractive emerging market gum business as it provides scale and distribution access. We are also announcing our intention to exit our global Halls business, which is $470 million in annual revenues. We expect to start the marketing process in Q3, and we'll keep you updated as appropriate.
Turning to our most recent acquisition of Ricolino, that we announced just last month. We are very excited about this business as it doubles our size in a priority market like Mexico, with strong positions in confectionery and chocolate. It significantly expands our route to market capabilities with more than 2,100 DSD routes, including over 420,000 mom and pop stores. It provides an excellent platform for us to expand our biscuit presence in this country. Turning to capital return, we continue to build on our strong track record of returning cash to shareholders. This includes consistent double-digit dividend growth over the past three years and opportunistic share repurchase capabilities that give us flexibility and the ability to act in times of market dislocation. This disciplined approach, along with our virtuous cycle, has helped us deliver strong TSR results.
Let's now take a look at our coffee investments and the financial flexibility they provide. JDE Peet's and Keurig Dr Pepper have both been great long-term investments, and we expect both businesses to drive more value going forward. Although great investments, these are non-strategic assets that give us great flexibility and also provide ample firepower for future growth, accretive M&A. Finally, we continue to take action to reinforce our balance sheet. We have taken actions over the past couple of years to issue debt at a very attractive rate, improve the average length and spacing of maturities to ensure we have strong liquidity and the right amount of leverage to continue to fund our M&A agenda.
Turning to our long-term algorithm, we are now expecting 3%-5% topline growth in light of our recent performance, with potential to accelerate beyond these with further portfolio reshaping. We continue to expect EPS to grow high single digits over the long term, while the free cash flow trajectory should continue to improve. We remain committed to growing our dividends in excess of Adjusted EPS. This algorithm is based on current portfolio today. In terms of 2022, there are no changes to the updated 2022 outlook that we recently provided on our Q1 earnings calls. Although we are quite confident in our ability over the long term to deliver our new algorithm, the current operating environment may result in a wider range of outcomes and cause the shape of our P&L to look different than what we have come to expect.
These ranges have been reflected in our 2022 outlook. These factors include higher inflation, higher and more frequent pricing, more volatility around sourcing and currency, and the current war in Ukraine. We expect material cost inflation to remain a dynamic in our sector for the remainder of this year and into 2023. We remain confident in our ability to drive productivity and manage overheads. The net result might be gross margin dollar growth that is lower than top line. We also expect higher and more frequent pricing. We will continue to take a targeted approach that focuses on offsetting costs, but also utilizes all of our RGM levers. Although elasticity has been quite low, we do plan for it to return to more historical levels. The impact might be a higher top line growth with a higher contribution for pricing than volume.
We will continue to manage our sourcing, both for continuity of supply, but to also ensure we take appropriate action to hedge our commodities to get the best sustainable cost structure. To close, we believe we are better positioned than ever to accelerate growth, earnings, and cash flow over the next several years. We build off a position of strength and a proven track record of results. We have a strong, growing, and highly durable sets of categories in our portfolio, superior brands, and an advantaged geographical footprint conducive for growth. We are continuing to make high ROI investments in brands, capabilities, and talents, and we are focused on taking steps to reshape our portfolio with growth-accretive assets in our core. With that, let's move to our final Q&A session.
Thank you, Luca, and welcome to our second Q&A session. With me again is Dirk, Luca Zaramella, our CFO, and Martin Renaud, our Chief Marketing and Sales Officer. It's a good opportunity to have both of them, so let's make good use of their time. Unfortunately, Chris McGrath could not be with us today. Similar to our last Q&A, we have around 30 minutes slotted for this session. As a reminder, please press star one on your phone to get into the queue, and mute the webcast once connected by phone. Please limit your question and no more than one follow-up so we can accommodate as many people as possible. With that, let's get started. Our first question comes to us from Bryan Spillane of Bank of America.
Thanks, Shep. Good morning, everyone, or good afternoon, I guess. Hey, so just two quick ones. One, Luca, you know, in terms of the algorithm, can you just talk a little bit about how the gap between sales and earnings per share might be different, you know, between now and, let's say, 2025, than it was between 2018 and 2021? And I guess what I'm thinking is share repurchases probably are still part of the equation, but it doesn't sound like there would be much leverage from net interest. Just trying to understand where the growth, the EPS growth versus the sales growth, where that leverage is.
Yeah.
how it's different.
Yeah. Okay. First and foremost, the algorithm is predicated on continuous volume growth, and I'm sure you appreciate the fact that now we are moving up the algorithm in terms of of top line. As we make more acquisitions, obviously, there will be more accretion. I always mention the importance of assets like Chipita in terms of contributing to EPS growth in the years to come. Reality is an asset like Chipita, we financed it at 0 cost, and it is obviously gonna give us an incremental business that to start with was $600 million-$700 million in revenue. Importantly, it adds both in terms of revenue and cost synergies.
The EBIT, the way you have to think about the EBIT is 5%+ growth under normal circumstances. Obviously we want to invest in A&C. I just finished saying that, specifically around local brands, we still have a long way to go, and I truly believe that it will be very beneficial for the algo to continue to invest in those brands and step up that growth in line with the categories. Below the line, at this point in time, we factor in $2 billion of share repurchases on a going forward basis.
We just finished telling you, though, that there is an opportunity to initiate a process for gum developed market and holds, and that will contribute, you know, to the funds that are available either for acquisitions or share buybacks. Then in terms of interest, we want to keep obviously a low interest cost. Today, we are best in class, I believe, in terms of interest cost, and the idea is to really leverage that, keeping the right balance and tapping, particularly in those markets where interest costs are lower, namely Europe, to make sure that we keep these interest costs in control.
I think you will be pleased with EPS growth in the years to come because it will be high quality, and it will be predicated on continuous volume leverage, cost savings, and investments in the company in areas like A&C and digital.
All right. Thanks for that, Luca. Just one follow-up to that in terms of growth. You know, I think if you pick through the presentation and there's gonna be an increase in the percentage of CapEx that goes to growth CapEx. More of the A&C spend is gonna go to working media. There's also a mention of investment in supply chain, but into really into faster growing channels. I guess as we kind of think about the message today and those three pieces, fair to say that whether it's capital investment or P&L investment, more of it is going to be supporting growth than maybe has been the case in the last three years. Is that the message we're to take away?
I think the way you have to think about that is that we will never leave cost efficiencies alone. I think you saw in the presentation that we are striving for 2% productivity with no restructuring program. As you think about cost savings, obviously digital is a big unlock for executional excellence. We are investing heavily in key processes of the companies like supply and demand planning using statistical forecasting. There are cost savings to be attained. On top of that, don't forget the cost synergies that we're gonna get. If we put in place a continuous M&A activity going forward, that adds. I can't tell you how much every year because obviously it's unpredictable precisely. There will be cost savings and leverage coming out of that tool.
Reality is Oreo, Cadbury, Milka, all these brands have tremendous potential. We have proven propositions where we know that investing more is gonna be beneficial for the long term of the company. It is revenue, but not revenue only. Importantly, we want to keep on gaining share and propel Choco Biscuit that hopefully you are as excited as I am about, those categories.
All right. Thanks, Luca.
Thanks, Bryan. Let's go to our next question, Michael Lavery at Piper Sandler.
Thank you. Good morning and good afternoon, I guess, both. Just wanted to come back to the A&C. You're talking about growing that in excess of spending, which is I'm sure delighting all of your brand managers. How long of a runway is that? And is there sort of a target level, maybe as like a percentage of sales, that would be kind of the end game?
Martin, I think, this is in your alley.
Okay. Hi, Bryan. As we have shown in the presentation, we really feel we have a lot of potential ahead of us. We believe we can still increase year on year on the key brands and in the key markets, and we will do that as part of the algorithm. I think obviously we need to deliver results, and I'm sure Luca will be here to remind us that it needs to be really incremental. I think we have a long way to go. We have not defined an endgame in terms of percentage. I think we need to do that in a solid way and grow year on year.
We do know from some of the studies we've done around the world that we in most cases can still double our investment.
Yeah.
-in our brands and still generate, significantly incremental sales
Yeah.
As a consequence of that. The other thing I would say, Martin or Luca, is that we don't wanna. This is not an algorithm whereby we're certainly gonna invest more and that then goes at the detriment of the bottom line. It's the continuation of what we currently are doing. That doesn't really change.
The great news is that we really have potential both in global brands and local jewels. I think we have proven that we have an impact as we increase our investment. I think we can be very confident about delivering extra growth thanks to extra investments.
No, that's great color. I was gonna follow up on supply chain, but without Christine, you've teed up another one great here on the local jewels versus the global brands. Just wanted to come back to that. Obviously, switching to your current approach has been very effective at driving better top line growth. Just curious how you also balance keeping the scale benefits and learnings across markets and best practices for something like the global brands. They're clearly still working very well. As you point to Oreo, for example, as a huge component of the growth for biscuits or in an earlier presentation, how do you balance giving all the brands the support they need and deserve, but still having that global synergy for some of the biggest ones?
Yeah, great question. Thank you. It's a big part of my job, actually. We are working a lot with the business units all over the world to bring all those learnings together. Obviously, for the global brands, we have very clear global strategies, and we are accompanying each BU to really get to the next level of strategy and accelerate their growth. As far as local jewels are concerned, we have also very clear strategies by category. We have some platforms that can play across different brands. For example, we mentioned Treat Size in sharing in chocolate. We have Caramilk, which is a transversal platform that can go across global brands and local jewels.
We are really working to get to a common knowledge and leverage that knowledge across all the business units across the world too. That's really at the heart of our model, local first, but not local only, and getting stronger together.
If I may add, I think it is important to realize that our factories make Oreo and in many cases, local jewels. In the past, we were into situations where by not having the local jewels growing, we were forced to invest money to restructure some of these factories, which I always say it's better to invest money to grow rather than getting smaller. Those brands provide the scale in our factories, and importantly, the route to market is shared. They are important scale providers, and I truly believe the combination of global and local brand is what make our company magic in many countries around the world.
Great.
Okay, great. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Michael. Next question, let's go to Laurent Grandet from Guggenheim.
Hey, good morning everyone. Thanks for, I mean, first for sending me as a piece of France with the LU sampling. I've got a follow-up from the previous session first, and then a question. For the follow-up, margins. You mentioned in chocolate the seasonal and gifting or premium will be similar in terms of percentage margin to the existing range, but more accretive in terms of dollar margin. Now, regarding the cake and pastries, how should we think about margin versus biscuit?
Look, I think we have always to anchor ourselves in a couple of concepts. One, it is incrementality, and the other one is GP dollar growth. I can tell you right away, cakes and pastries, you know, this category that is very adjacent to our biscuits business, in many cases command higher percentage margins. But importantly, in terms of per pound or per kilo, it is a very solid category. I don't expect any major dilution in percentage terms. The reality is, as a company, I think it was an important shift, the one we made to move into gross profit dollars. I always remind everyone that that is really the way we look at things.
In terms of capital deployed and the amount of benefits we are gonna take out of the cakes and pastry, I think the benefit is gonna be material. It is going to be one of the best return on investment propositions that we have within the company.
Thanks, Luca. Yeah.
I was going to add that we are also really willing to build brands now in cakes and pastries. Seven Days is really an amazing brand. It's more than a product. Also, we plan to leverage our amazing brands like Cadbury, LU, that you mentioned. We really believe we can build unique propositions which have the power to price.
Thanks. And then my question is really more about the U.S. specifically. I mean, to us, I mean, the U.S. has been relatively underperforming versus the rest of your geographies in the past three years. Part of it seems like, I mean, it's still your underrepresentation in convenience stores and probably the route to market here. I mean, it was something you said you will try to fix because you know, as you were not leveraging your own DSD system there.
Could you give us where you stand in the U.S. specifically in terms of route to market, your DSD leveraging, including the new brands and some of them probably more single serve or, you know, small portion that would be fitting pretty well with the convenience store channel. Thank you.
Yes. I think if you look at the performance of the U.S. over the last three years, I would say last year was a very good year for the U.S. We had a very good performance in the U.S. Sorry, the first year of the pandemic, we had a very good performance in the U.S. Last year was a little bit off, driven largely by supply chain, not necessarily because of our presence in the convenience stores. Having said that, we clearly do have an opportunity in convenience stores solving that for that, and that has to do with the infrastructure of getting there, but largely also with the range of products that we can offer. As you can imagine, biscuits is a category, which is our core category for the U.S.
It's not that widely consumed through the convenience store. It's not like candy bars or salted snacks. There is a little bit less of an opportunity there. We have opportunity to progress, which we are working on and have been working hard. In fact, that whole channel has been growing much faster than the rest of our business. The real issue of the U.S. has been the supply chain, the sort of volatility that we've seen with labor, with trucking, with some of the ingredients, and that has played a critical role. Not to forget that in the second half of last year, we also had a strike in some of our plants, which knocked us off for a few months as it relates to service to our clients.
Those are the things that we are currently working on recuperating. In normal circumstances, that would have gone faster. In the current difficult supply chain situation, labor and trucking, that is taking longer than we would have expected. That's really the core of why you currently see the U.S. a little bit underperforming. We feel that in the second half of this year, it will be coming back, and we should be in a good position by the end of this year.
Great. Thanks, Laurent.
Thank you.
Let's move to our next question. Pam Kaufman, Morgan Stanley.
Hi, good afternoon. You highlighted criteria driving your M&A approach, but I was wondering if you can also discuss how you're thinking about the opportunity for divestitures. You announced that you're planning to sell developed market gum and your Halls business. Are there other areas of your portfolio that you're evaluating reshaping through divestitures? And would you consider selling brands that do fit in with your core categories but may not have as attractive growth prospects?
Yes. If you look at the business right now, 20% of our business is in other categories. Could be gum, could be candy, could be in meals, could be in powdered beverages. Over time, as we said in the presentation, we want to get to 90% of our business being into chocolate, biscuits, and baked snacks. That gives you a flavor of what those other categories are. Now, the percentage will also be influenced by the M&A that we do, and that will automatically increase the chocolate and biscuit percentage. Over time, we do expect that in certain geographies, this is not the same for all geographies. Emerging markets are very different from developed markets for us.
Over time, we will keep a close eye on these other categories and decide if they still have a future in the company. Overall, you could see us as a biscuits and chocolate company in the next three-four years. That's really what we are going to be. As it relates to the... What was the second part?
Brands.
Core categories.
Oh, the brands. The brands, yes. Sorry. Yes, in theory, we, if we feel that what we call the tail brands, we have three solutions for those. One is to really invest and make them a success, and that's what we've been doing with a lot of our local brands. The second one is what we call nesting, is to bring them in under another existing brand and make them flourish there. Or three could be a divestment. Yes, it could be possible that in some of those categories, we decide to divest the brand. It's rare. If we really see no future and we can't grow that brand, then we probably would seriously consider that.
Thanks. My second question is on your strategy to grow e-commerce to 20% of revenue by 2030. What capabilities are you investing in? Do you envision this going through retailer sites, or will there be any direct to consumer retail? What are the implications from this channel mixture on profitability? Thanks.
Okay, I'll take that one. Today, 80% of our e-commerce sales are in what we call B2C. We envision that to continue to be our biggest subsegment for e-commerce, and we are investing a lot of capabilities in digital tech, insights and analytics, supply chain, obviously also, new talents and new capabilities from a people point of view. We see a great future for that. We see two other channels with great potential for us. The first one is what we call direct to consumer, which is around 15% of our sales today. It's probably one where we still need to acquire even more capabilities because that's new.
We need also to adapt our offer from a consumer point of view, different price point, different offers. We see also very interesting potential here. Finally, the last one, which is B2B, which is only 5% and which we see growing very fast and probably will accelerate, which is allowing us to increase our distribution in areas where with our own system, we couldn't go. Also that's quite new for us, so obviously we are bringing new capabilities to build that. Overall, we are on track to deliver that vision. We are very excited. We believe it's really incremental and to answer the point on margin at company average.
Great. Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Pam. Next question comes from Ken Goldman, J.P. Morgan.
Hey, thanks. How would you characterize, I guess, the interest you've seen so far from potential suitors for both Halls and Gum? Or is it really just far too early to ask that? I was curious, I don't think you've said this, forgive me if you did. Can you remind us on what roughly the operating margins are on these assets in the context of maybe your total business?
Maybe I'll start. In terms of margins, look, they go above average. We mentioned many times that Gum and particularly Halls, they command a margin premium compared to the average of the company. The reality is that Gum in developed market before COVID, and obviously more impacted by COVID, it has been from a revenue standpoint declining. We truly believe now that the situation is improving due to COVID restrictions being lifted and people going back to normal, more normal lives, there is an opportunity really to invest in the category and step up growth.
Why believe the value of the business in someone that is committed to growing this category and this brand versus us, where we have huge opportunities in chocolate and biscuits is really what makes the difference. The margin itself can be diluted because of the divestiture of these two. It is important to say that the value creation that hopefully will be paid for by the interested parties and potentially we might even be part of a JV, for instance, or a construct that is in line with what you saw for coffee, for instance. We might still have opportunities to grab value creation coming out of it.
I expect this all in all to be potentially in a couple of years after we sanitize some standard cost, a situation where you will see higher top line growth and you will see higher EPS coming out of all of these. We just launched the process today, quite frankly. We are in the process of carving out financials for the two lines of business. We'll keep you informed about what comes out of it. We haven't reached out to potential buyers, but we have been approached by some buyers. I think there would be good interest in great brands and categories that can really deliver solid growth in the years to come.
Very helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Ken Goldman.
Thank you, Kim.
Let's go to our next question, Cody Ross, UBS. Cody.
Hey, good afternoon, folks. Thanks for taking our question. Can you discuss the white space opportunities you still have in emerging markets, specifically India and China? What percentage of doors are you in, and how does that compare to your closest competitor?
To start off with India, we would probably be at about half the percentage of possible doors. If I look at India, I would say it's a market where you probably can assume that there's 6 million stores, and we will now be in about 3 million stores with our biscuits. Sorry, I'm mixing up India and China. In India, we have 9 million stores. We cover about 2 million directly. In China, there's 6 million stores, and we cover about 3 million directly. That's sort of the order of magnitude.
In both cases, I would say, because not every door is the same door, but in both cases, I would say the opportunity for us to add to it is probably around 80% more business if we would be in all the stores, because those stores are obviously more rural or they are smaller. There is a whole infrastructure that needs to go with it, so there is investment that has to go hand in hand in it. But I would say in both markets, just through physical distribution in the years to come, we can see some significant growth. But it's gonna go step by step, 'cause you need to put in place that infrastructure. Plus you need to make sure that it's paying back and that you get the sales that you were hoping for.
It's not like, okay, turn it on and the sales will come. It's a very careful approach where you have to constantly measure and see what's going on.
Thank you for that. I just wanna talk a little bit about overhead. You reduced overhead by about 300 basis points in 2015. You plan to reduce overhead by another 100-200 basis points over the next 3+ years. That would still put you in the middle of the pack compared to your U.S. packaged food peers. Why is 13%-14% of sales the right range, and what is preventing you from making more progress? Thanks.
It is because we have a DSD system in the US. The DSD system with all the benefits that it entails in terms of capabilities and executions at point of sales, it comes at a higher cost. When I look at the sales, marketing and admin, excluding DSD, and considering obviously the fact that we are an international company, that we are in investment mode, particularly in sales and marketing, and particularly in emerging market, I think our overheads will benchmark quite well. Having said that, there is an element here of still opportunities to be untapped. Digital will be a key unlock of executional excellence around overhead costs.
I just want to give you the real assessment, which is, A, I believe we have done a tremendous amount of work around cost. We have the right balance between back office and outsourcing and insourcing. Many of the back office services are outsourced in our company. We just came out of a major transformation that implied the application of Workday around the world with the creation of shared services and self-service, as far as HR services are concerned. There is still a lot to go, but the foundation is very strong. I think if you ask, can you reduce the overheads further and touch DSD, I personally believe that is not the right way to go because DSD is a competitive advantage.
You might have seen what DSD has done to date, and there are still a lot of opportunities that we can tap into. Gustavo and the team are really making sure that we can digitize even more the sales force. I think you will see savings. Over time, ideally, we would like to get to a situation where A&C as a percentage of overheads and as a percentage of revenue and overheads as a percentage of revenue, they are much closer. That's the way you have to see about you have to think about us going after costs and investing in the business as well.
Great. Thanks. Let's go to our next question, Andrew Lazar at Barclays. Andrew.
Great. Thanks very much. Just this one. As you think about the organic sales growth range of 3%-5%, I guess what are the key factors to keep in mind that would get you towards, let's say, the lower end of that range versus the higher end of that range? Again, on an organic basis. Thanks so much.
The 3%-5% pretty much it is all organic. If you take a look at the categories before and after COVID, our categories, I think it's fair to say that our categories range in terms of growth from 3%-4%. On top of that, as Dirk said a couple of times this morning, we are aiming to adding share. I think you can envisage a situation where you grow around about 4%. As we make portfolio transformation and we invest more in the business, obviously the goal is really to get much closer to the 5%. The way you have to see the 3%-5% is for the most part organic. I think we have been proving to you that we can grow 4%.
The goal is through share gains and further portfolio transformation, we can get much closer to the 5%, which is the ultimate goal for us. We would like to get this company to grow in that range because we know that we have the brands, the capabilities, and importantly, the fuel we are gonna get through volume leverage is what is going to propel earnings and allow continuous investment in the company.
Thank you.
Thanks, Andrew. Well, I think that's actually a pretty good stopping point and concludes this Q&A session. Dirk, Luca, and Martin, thanks so much for your time. I'll now turn it over to Dirk for some closing remarks.
Thank you all for being with us today. You've heard about our plans to accelerate and increase our focus on core chocolate and biscuits. You've heard Martin and Vinzenz talk about our strong position in chocolate and clear plans to achieve the number one global position. Gustavo and Vinzenz gave you a view into our strategy to grow and further strengthen our leadership in biscuits and baked snacks. Martin, Mauricio, and Sandra provided you with some clear proof points of success and future plans to further improve our execution across marketing, sales, and supply chain. Chris and Luca discussed our approach to sustainable snacking. You heard Luca talk about how we bring it all together and create value through our enhanced financial algorithm. The passion of our people and the power of our brands make it both an honor and a pleasure to lead team Mondelēz.
I am excited to see our talented colleagues all around the world write this next chapter in our company's evolution.