All right. Good morning. It's great to be with you today. I want to welcome those in the room here with us outside of Boston, and also welcome those joining us via the webcast. It is great to spend time with you today and provide you an overview on our strategy. I have been with Mettler-Toledo for almost two years now. My impression when I joined the company was that Mettler-Toledo was an exceptional organization with great potential for future growth. My time here has only reinforced my initial impression, and I'm even more enthusiastic today than I was when I joined. We are very excited about the meeting we have planned for you today. I think you will walk away from today with the following key points. First, we are operating from a position of strength.
We believe we have furthered our already favorable competitive position during the pandemic. Second, we are primarily focused on organic growth, and the medium-term outlook for our end markets is very attractive. The key trends of our customers who seek more automation, digitalization, and compliance fits very well into our product portfolio and innovation pipeline. Next, we have proven growth initiatives to most efficiently identify and target growth opportunities and gain share. We are also able to identify and react quickly to capitalize on fast-growing sub-segments. Finally, we have a lot of runway in our margin and productivity initiatives that will allow us to continue to enhance margins and drive earnings growth. Our growth strategy is largely unchanged from what you have heard in the past, and we continue to double down on our strength.
However, we continue to evolve, refine, and update the initiatives that underlie the strategy, which positions us very well for the future. Now with this slide, I want to remind you of our safe harbor language with respect to forward-looking statements. We have a great track record of delivering strong financial results. This track record is built on several important factors. First, we have a strong organization with excellent competitive advantages, which provide an impressive foundation for growth. We have strengthened these competitive advantages over the last few years with our ability to continue to meet the heightened needs of customers despite the pandemic and other challenges. Second, we have a growth strategy that is well-developed, well-proven, and well-ingrained throughout the organization. The leadership team has seen the success of this strategy and is fully committed to continue to evolve and further develop the initiatives that support our strategy.
Third, who we are is why we win. We have a strong culture based on innovation, collaboration, continuous improvement, and agility. This has led to a high degree of operational excellence, which I think you will see and hear firsthand today. For example, you will hear from Oliver and the supply chain team demonstrate a tremendous agility in handling the supply chain challenges over the last few years. You will hear from Shawn how we are continuing to evolve our pricing program and how we quickly reacted to fast-changing inflationary pressures. These are only two examples, and throughout the organization, there are many more. Finally, the organization is laser focused on execution. In part, this is driven by our tremendous diversity, given the number of customers, products, and geographies we operate in. We must execute well to meet customer needs.
It is driven by our group of talented employees worldwide and a flat organization structure which allows us to efficiently execute on our initiatives. A focused growth strategy, which is underpinned by well-developed initiatives and a strong culture of execution, is what drives this track record. Probably most important to you in the audience today is that we have many opportunities and initiatives on the way to continue this performance. You will see this in the various presentations throughout the day. As we frame our discussion today, it is important to remind you of our breadth and scope of our offering. Our solutions cover our customers' entire value chain. That is, we have solutions from lab to production, Product Inspection, and logistics. Our laboratory solutions are critical for R&D and instrumental in quality control and scale-up.
On the industrial side, we support our customers in production, the inspection of packaged items, and in logistics for shipping of finished goods. Throughout the entire value chain, our solutions provide substantial value to customers by supporting their scientific innovation, helping to improve their productivity and the quality of the products, streamlining their processes, helping to ensure compliance, and reducing cost and waste. This is a good overview, and I now want to discuss our offering in a little bit more detail. Let me start with our laboratory offering, which I will highlight on the next three slides. Altogether, lab represents approximately 55% of our total sales. This slide highlights our laboratory offering, which helps customers accelerate their R&D efforts. R&D customers typically need a high degree of precision and flexibility, which we support with our high-end balances, analytical instruments, pipettes, and automated chemistry solutions.
As you can see on this slide, we sell benchtop or personal instruments, and we are well-known for our innovation, quality, and deep application know-how. R&D customers increasingly also seek productivity and automated workflows. An important offering is LabX, our instrument control and data management software. LabX is primarily used in QC labs and increasingly also now in R&D as a way to address productivity and changes around compliance to regulatory boundaries. LabX can speed up daily work through management of data and development of workflows. It reduces complexity as it manages data, assets, and workflows centrally and seamlessly integrates into laboratory data management systems such as LIMS. We have seen software become an increasingly deciding factor for customers in choosing a supplier for benchtop instruments and the way for customers to achieve full data integrity related to our instruments.
For certain global pharma customers, LabX has helped us to position ourselves as a trusted advisor. Our laboratory instruments are also very important in QA and QC labs. Our strong presence in the lab is evident in that we can provide approximately 40% of the bench instruments typically used in an analytical quality control lab. These instruments include balances and a wide range of analytical instruments. LabX is important in quality control as it enhances security and helps ensure compliance with data quality and data traceability. The final piece of our lab business is Process Analytics, which is focused on continuous monitoring and process control. Biopharma is an important end market for this business and also the chemical industry and fast-growing segments like the semiconductor manufacturing space.
We differentiate our offering through our intelligent sensor management solutions that provide the utmost reliability of measurement results, eliminate waste, and through predictive technology, can reduce very costly downtime. You will hear more about this business throughout the course of the day. Now, the previous three slides covered our lab business. This slide and the next one cover our industrial business, which represents about 40% of our total sales. This slide specifically is what we refer to as our core industrial business, representing approximately 25% of total sales. Here we provide solutions that support our customers in their manufacturing and production. Our offering includes terminals, scales, load cells, and logistics solutions. As we will cover later in the presentation, automation and digitalization is important for our core industrial customers.
Software is also important, and we have various software, including statistical quality and process control software and formulation software. While we refer to this business as core industrial, I want to remind you that we estimate that more than 60% of our core industrial sales are to pharmaceutical, biopharma, food manufacturing, and chemical companies. The other portion of our industrial business is Product Inspection, which represents about 15% of our total sales. In this business, we sell a variety of instruments primarily to food manufacturers to help them detect physical contaminants in packaged food. We also help to ensure accuracy in packaging by determining adequate weight and verifying the integrity of packaging. Our instruments help food manufacturers protect their brand reputation. Our service network and capabilities can be particularly important to these customers to prevent unexpected production downtime. We also have software for this business.
ProdX is instrument control software that helps manage product inspection instruments in a facility. In addition to ensuring instruments are operational, the software also helps maximize productivity and ensure data integrity. Complementing our products, we also provide a broad range of services which are very important to our customers. We believe we have the largest and most global service network of our direct competitors. We have seen over the last two years our ability to continue to service our customers during the pandemic has led to steady increases in customer satisfaction. Service keeps us close to customers, builds trust, and customers are much more likely to purchase additional products if they utilize our service offering.
Our service offering is focused on value to customers in terms of maximizing their uptime or optimizing performance, ensuring compliance and the highest quality. Well, that covers an overview of the businesses, and I now want to discuss our key competitive advantages which provide a strong foundation for our growth. We believe we are coming out of the pandemic in an even more favorable competitive position than ever. I know there's a lot on this slide, but let me break it down for you. Let's start with the top row of advantages as they are also interrelated. We are a market leader in the majority of our businesses in which we compete. However, many of these markets are fragmented and therefore provide ample opportunities for organic share gain. This leadership position stems from our other two advantages highlighted in the first row.
We have an excellent brand and a very sizable install base. Our brand has been reinforced over many years with our long history of innovation, and as a result, we have an excellent product portfolio. The second row of advantages are also interrelated as they focus on how we sell and service our products. We have a direct sales network with product specialists with deep application know-how. As we will discuss shortly, we have unique and, we believe, first-class service and sales and marketing programs that allow us to identify and direct our sales specialists to the best growth opportunities. Finally, customer contact and support are reinforced with our superior and extensive global service force. The final row of advantages reinforces the strength of our global operating position.
We have an excellent market position in China, and we can leverage growth opportunities, manufacturing and sourcing in this country. Our global supply chain and manufacturing presence are enabled by Blue Ocean, our process and system harmonization program. The importance of our supply chain in Blue Ocean was particularly evident during the last few years when our ability to deliver to customers became an increasing differentiator. Finally, as I mentioned in my introductory comments, we have a strong culture of execution, driving operational excellence, and continued improvements. We serve very attractive markets and estimate that approximately 70% of our sales are to life sciences, food manufacturers, and chemical companies. Our medium-term outlook for our end markets is very attractive as these markets are focused on automation, productivity, digitalization, and compliance. This is true for both lab and industrial customers.
We are ideally positioned to capitalize on these customer needs. Our solutions with the focus on value to customers are in the sweet spot of these market trends. I have mentioned diversification when talking about the number of products and geographies. We also have tremendous customer diversification as no end customer represents more than 1% of sales. Let me talk a little more in depth on customer market trends, as I am sure it is important as you think about our outlook for the medium term. As mentioned, both lab and industrial customers are facing an urgent need for automation and productivity, safety, and digitalization. We have long focused on how we can make our customers more efficient, productive, and help them with their processes. Therefore, our solutions offering plays very well into these prevailing trends.
Our lab customers are under increasing pressure for automation to drive efficiency and effectiveness in gaining more and better information more quickly, while at the same time facing labor challenges. Biopharma customers are increasing their R&D investments and demanding greater level of accuracy and reproducibility. Automated solutions can increase their productivity of workflows, minimize errors, improve user safety, and lower cost. Later today, you will see firsthand some of our products that support our customers' need for automation in the lab. These trends in the lab impact not only our biopharma customers, but others as well, including semiconductor, battery, etc . Lab customers are also facing greater digitalization needs. On one hand, as part of achieving automation and in addition to help with increasing levels of required compliance, an important priority is the need for faster time to filing regulatory submissions.
This trend was accelerated by the pandemic as companies needed to achieve approved drug status for vaccines in record time. In addition, increasing needs surrounding data integrity is driving consolidation of data management systems. The breadth of our bench instruments, combined with the overarching software LabX, positions us very well to help customers with these needs. Now, turning to industrial. The trends for automation and productivity and digitalization and compliance are also very relevant for our customers in manufacturing or production. Labor shortages, higher output targets, and more recently, nearshoring in higher cost countries to mitigate supply chain risks continue to accelerate the demand for industrial automation to enhance productivity on the shop floor. Automation is thereby twofold.
Automation of manual workplaces to semiautomated processes call for easy-to-use, strongly guided solutions that drive tangible productivity improvements, such as improved and consistent quality, maximized yield by higher throughput or fewer or no bad batches. We speak about real industrial automation when we fully integrate into customers' control systems. High-speed data transmission, data accuracy, and smart alarming with live device status and real-time control are key and require modern, comprehensive interfaces and easy integration into customer control systems. Now, irrespectively of the level of automation, compliance needs to be guaranteed throughout data traceability and process control, and we see a convergence of automation and IT systems. Our applications know-how and ability to easily and safely integrate a broad portfolio into IT and operational technology systems position us well to accompany our customers in their automation journey.
As we look to the next several years, we only see these customer trends becoming more dominant and relevant, which supports our positive outlook for our markets. Now that we have covered the background of our offering, competitive advantages, and market trends, let's turn to our growth strategies. As a reminder, we have ample room to capture market share. Our strategy is primarily centered on organic growth. For our strategies to be effective, we continuously refine and update the initiatives that underlie them, which I mentioned earlier. We are constantly building on our initiatives, making them more effective and enhancing them for better outcomes. We couldn't embark on the initiatives today, whether in sales and marketing, supply chain or pricing, without the years of foundation building that we have done in the past. I can't emphasize enough the importance of this aspect of foundation building.
It stems from our priority on innovation, continuous improvement, and operational excellence, which is really at the heart of our culture. Let me cover some of the specifics of these, starting with an update on our sales and marketing processes. We have a strong foundation for our go-to-market strategy. As already mentioned, we are a leader in the fragmented markets we operate in, with ample room for additional market share gains. We have approximately 25 different strategic business units, each representing a major product category, such as balances, pipettes, etc . We typically have different competition in each category, with no one competitor that competes with us across the majority of our businesses. We continue to gain market share in most of the segments we serve. In order to do this, we need to effectively utilize our direct front-end sales organization.
We primarily utilize a direct sales model of sales specialists organized by a strategic business unit, and we identify and guide our sales specialists to the most strategic accounts. These are either new accounts or customers that have cross-selling potential. Other sales opportunities are more efficiently handled by our inside or telesales resources. Our Spinnaker sales and marketing strategy utilizes unique data analytics to leverage external data sources and our substantial internal data, including that of our installed base, to identify the most attractive and profitable growth opportunities. We have the organizational structure to pursue these opportunities through our sales force guidance initiatives. Our TopK program and our cross-selling efforts are prime examples of these initiatives. We have also developed an extensive set of digital tools for our sales force that improves their effectiveness.
We accelerated the development and adoption of these tools during the pandemic, which we believe contributed to higher customer satisfaction and market share gains. Let me highlight our TopK program in a little bit more detail. Our TopK program uses data, proprietary data analytics to identify and pursue customer investments, activity, and cross-selling opportunities in our most attractive market segments. The program identifies potential actionable opportunities across our broad product offering. The starting point is detailed research to identify attractive customer sites, significant investment projects, and specific context within those sites. Using our internal installed base as well as external databases, we use data analytics to generate what we refer to as smart profiles, which summarize the opportunity with all relevant information. This includes, for example, customer site, contact info, product potential, and other activities with this customer. All relevant information is summarized in one easy-to-grasp document.
These summaries are provided to sales organizations throughout the world, who then qualify and prioritize these opportunities. The structure of our sales organization allows us to most efficiently follow up and guide the teams to these opportunities. Over the last year, we generated more than 150,000 of these Top K alerts and are continuing to penetrate these potential opportunities at customer sites. I mentioned earlier the importance of building on our foundation, and this is a prime example. With our strong foundation in our sales organization, without that, we would not be able and would not have the expertise or bandwidth to handle the quantity of these alerts. We have launched several Top K waves this year.
Target industries for these waves include, for example, pharma, food and beverage, and chemicals, and we also identified opportunities in fast-growing markets of lithium-ion battery and semiconductors. Other examples include vaccines, plant-based foods, and advanced materials. We are convinced that our unique ability to quickly identify growth opportunities helps us to adapt to shifts in customer demand, which we have all seen can happen very quickly. Now, given the tremendous diversification of our products and customers, cross-selling is an ideal opportunity to capture growth. Because we utilize a specialized sales force, cross-selling techniques are different than what you might hear from companies that use a more generalist sales approach. Our goal is to use our Spinnaker data analytics and identify customer sites in which we have low cross-selling penetration so far.
We use context and references to develop warm and hot leads for other product categories. It involves data and qualification analytics, and these leads have proven to be very effective in converting into sales. Key to the success of cross-selling is well-developed training, sales tools, customer communication, and a culture that encourages cross-selling. We continuously expand or enhance our digital sales enablement tool library that allows our sales reps to be more effective in value selling. Tools include front-end software tied directly into our CRM, providing our sales team dashboards, prepare for upcoming site visits, and quickly handle follow-up requests. Our sales enablement tool also provides our sales teams enhanced application information and value-selling guides, which helps us enable cross-selling with new applications in target accounts we have not penetrated yet.
These tools greatly improve the effectiveness of the selling process, thereby enhancing the customer experience and improve order conversion rates. Another technique we are using to stay fully engaged with customer is greater use of webinars and e-demos. We have substantially increased the use of webinars to help overcome the limitations we can still face with customer interactions due to the pandemic. We have professionalized the delivery of the webinars and have expanded our topics to include items such as compliance, productivity, Industry 4.0, and data integrity. While we are very happy to be in front of customers again face to face, from a customer's perspective, digital approaches like webinars are very cost and time efficient, while still allowing for interactions with experts from our various businesses. We view service as an important competitive advantage that keeps us close to our customers.
We believe our service organization network of approximately 3,000 is the largest and most global as compared to our direct competitors. Service and consumables represent about 1/3 of our total revenues, of which service is about 70% of that. Looking closer at our service revenue, approximately 50% is contract and more than 50% is value-added services. In addition to being an important competitive advantage, service is also an excellent growth opportunity. Over the medium term, we would expect service to grow even faster than product sales. Similar to products, we are constantly developing service tailored to customer needs. In particular, as software becomes a more integral part of our solutions, harmonized services for software are becoming also increasingly important.
We saw nice improvements in our Net Promoter Scores, which measure customer satisfaction at a service event during the last few years. We are able to overcome challenges of COVID and still provide necessary service. This was especially important to customers in regulated environments. We are a strong and trusted partner for our customers. We see further potential in penetrating our installed base for service opportunities. Given the strength of customer satisfaction levels, we can continue to increase the percentage of our installed base under service contract. Service is a clear differentiator, and we use the same data analytics approach to identify service opportunities within our installed base as we do for product sales. One final point on service and consumables. Operating margins are above company average. A core part of our strategy is capitalizing on fast-growing markets. Faster-growing emerging markets represent approximately 36% of our total sales.
We have an excellent track record of growth in China, which represents more than 50% of emerging markets or about 20% of our total sales. We have a long history of operations in China and a very strong local management team. While we still see strong demand for our industrial solutions, we have seen our business shift more to our laboratory offering, which now accounts approximately 50% of China sales. We see lab continuing to be a growing portion of China sales, given the government's commitment to research and development. We also see the benefits from various other strategic governmental priorities that create opportunities in health and safety, in microelectronics, lithium batteries, and advanced materials. As GDP and GDP per capita grows, customers have greater need to improve quality and drive higher productivity with automation. We see this both in our lab and industrial business.
We are uniquely positioned to capitalize on these trends using the same Spinnaker sales and marketing processes and tools that I described earlier. Our growth initiatives in China are supported by our portfolio that includes products and applications tailored to the local market in terms of cost, application areas, and also being entry-level. Conditions can change quickly in China, and we fully recognize that market conditions can be choppy. However, we remain fully committed to capitalizing on the significant long-term growth opportunities that exist. Likewise, we want to capitalize on the strong growth opportunities in other emerging markets, which represent approximately 16% of total sales. While the individual markets here are smaller for us, they represent excellent growth opportunities, and our long-standing presence in these regions provide a strong base to grow from.
In addition to China and emerging markets, we also pursue other fast-growth vertical market segments. While rather small, these market segments represent outsized growth potential. Segments include battery, semiconductor, advanced materials, and plant-based food, just to name a few. What is important for these segments is our ability to identify the opportunities early and to quickly shift resources to capitalize on them. We have the processes in place that have proven to be successful in identifying these opportunities and an organizational structure that allows us to guide the sales force to them. The components of these faster growth segments will change as the various markets develop, but given the breadth and scope of our product offering, there will be other subsegments that will then emerge and which we then will focus on.
I want to now turn to the important topic of innovation and our technology leadership. Innovation is fundamental to Mettler-Toledo and was one of the key qualities that attracted me to MT. We are constantly coming to market with new products and solutions that provide concrete value to customers. There are two factors that distinguish us in terms of innovation. The starting point is a thorough knowledge of our customers' processes, applications, and market trends. We fully understand how our products are used and what value the customers is getting from us. We work to constantly introduce new products that further improve our customers' processes or reduce their pain points. It is deep customer, product, and process knowledge that forms the basis for our innovation. Second, we have R&D teams throughout the world.
We have core teams in Switzerland, in China, in the United States, in the U.K., Germany, and in India. The teams work together seamlessly and are therefore able to leverage our global resources and their competencies. We spend approximately 4.5% of our total sales on R&D and benefit from our ability to leverage R&D on a global basis. I mentioned earlier the important trends facing our lab and industrial customers in terms of the need for greater productivity, which drives demand for automation and digitalization solutions. The two products that are on this slide are great examples of innovative products we recently launched that help to meet these needs. On the left is our automated titration solution. Titration requires fast and precise handling of samples for analysis.
This instrument allows for automated sample preparation, precise dilution, and delivers highly accurate dispensing, thereby allowing for continuous processing of complex workflows. Our industry-leading software, LabX, ensures that all data generated as part of the workflow measurement are recorded in real time with strong level of data integrity. For those with us in Boston today, you will have an opportunity to see the product later in the morning. On the right is our IND360 compact automation weighing indicator. The instrument seamlessly feeds weight data and system status from any of our scales and sensors into an end-user automation system and also runs self-optimizing algorithms close to the sensor, thereby allowing for faster and finer process regulation. This is helping customers automate very precise processes like, for example, pharmaceutical filling. We also have this indicator on display for you later this morning, and these are just two examples.
We have many more launches that we will undertake over the course of the year. Altogether, they are an important driver of organic sales growth as they help to trigger replacement, accelerate the replacement cycle, and add to our install base for subsequent services. Now, that covers our growth strategies, and now let's turn to our margin enhancement initiatives. We have an excellent track record for margin improvement. More importantly, we see very good runway to continue this track record. Margin enhancement starts with our organic growth focus. Sales growth is the single most important contributor to margin improvement. Our pricing program and Stern Drive productivity programs are important drivers as well. Finally, our business mix also contributes to margin expansion. A central corporate philosophy is to reallocate resources to our most attractive businesses.
Our fast-growing and higher-margin businesses and product lines receive a disproportionate share of R&D and sales and marketing investments. Over time, this also contributes to margin expansion. In addition to contributing to our top-line growth, pricing is a key contributor to our margin growth. I won't go into detail here, as Shawn will cover it shortly. However, I want to quickly emphasize that we have a very solid foundation for our pricing program. It is built on our technology leadership, strong value proposition, as well as selling lower-priced instruments, often directly to the end user. On top of this foundation, we have developed a very strong program based on in-depth analytics, tools, and training. Execution is key, and the team has demonstrated great agility in their ability to react quickly to changing market dynamics. Most recently, higher inflation being a prime example.
Similarly, I will keep my comments on Stern Drive brief, as Oliver will cover the topic in more detail. Operational excellence is ingrained throughout our manufacturing and back-office operations. Several hundred Stern Drive projects are underway at any one time to improve productivity and continue to drive operational excellence across the organization. They are making great contributions to our productivity and margin improvements. As we think through our various growth and margin initiatives, it is important to recognize that Blue Ocean, our global process and system harmonization program, is a key enabler to our quality, to our ability to further evolve these initiatives and successfully implement them. We consider Blue Ocean the foundation and enabler of many of our corporate programs and initiatives. Blue Ocean also provides meaningful real-time information that has become particularly important given the rapidly changing markets over the last few years.
Agility has been a key ingredient of our success. It would not have been possible without the data and transparency provided by Blue Ocean. Oliver will have some additional comments on Blue Ocean in his presentation. I discussed earlier in the presentation our strength in our digital go-to-market approach and digital solutions that we have implemented. Now let me summarize here the overarching strategy and different layers that enable our strategy. On a corporate level, we have made tremendous progress with Blue Ocean, which empowers us to drive synergies and harmonization in our business processes across the company. We have full transparency of our business processes and can use automation, including AI-supported approaches, to become even more productive and agile.
We also have a centralized shared service business model, which individual businesses can leverage for cloud-based offerings, for software licensing strategies, and shared applications and mobile computing approaches. The middle layer symbolizes how the customer interacts with us with e-commerce solutions for digital stores and punch-out solutions for larger customers to simplify their purchasing processes. We also offer customer portals where customers can directly manage their products they bought from us with tailored content like manuals, software upgrades, and guided support for manual services, among other approaches. We will continue to build this out with smart solutions and instruments that can schedule or propose services depending on the use model or consumables reordering based on calculated consumption, etc . On the top, the top level here reflects the digital innovations on the product level itself.
Our connected devices strategy with flexible interfacing capabilities empowers our customers' IoT strategies, software solutions turn data into insights, and of course, new software usage model like pay-per-use and software as a service are topics our R&D teams are driving forward. Now, while our core growth strategy is centered on organic growth, we also think we can expand our offering through selected acquisitions. We are a strong platform for small and medium-sized companies who are facing an inflection point in terms of manufacturing scale-up or the need for international expansion. Since our strategy is predicated on organic growth, we can be very selective in pursuing acquisitions. We will look to continue to expand our product portfolio in strategic adjacencies. I think you will most likely see this in our lab offering, and our recent PendoTECH acquisition is a very good example of this.
We will also look for technologies to complement our offering. These will likely be rather small, such as the software acquisition we completed for our automated chemistry business, which provided us additional scale-up capabilities. Finally, we will look for acquisitions to expand our distribution channel. A few years ago, we purchased Biotix to expand our pipette offering in the indirect channel. Biotix also provided us with cost-effective manufacturing as well. We have long been committed to sustainable development across broad environmental, social, and governance aspects of our GreenMT sustainability program. We believe it is our responsibility to act in a manner that considers future generations. We have great accomplishments in ESG, including achieving carbon neutrality with respect to Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, and sourcing 100% renewable energy.
We focus on five key areas, environmental, sustainable products and services, responsible supply chain, engaged employees, and good corporate governance. While we have an excellent track record in ESG, we have set further ambitious targets for the future. Importantly, earlier this year, we committed to absolute emission reduction targets consistent with the criteria issued by the Science Based Targets initiative. This will cover Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. We also have set a target to reduce our waste intensity by 20% and achieve zero waste to landfill by 2025. To reinforce the importance of ESG, beginning in 2022, executive management compensation incorporates specific ESG targets. Our sustainability efforts gain wide recognition by rating agencies such as CDP, EcoVadis, ISS, MSCI, S&P Global, and Sustainalytics.
I think ESG is a great example of how Mettler-Toledo focuses on the long term to enhance the value of our franchise. Let me summarize our key points from this presentation. We have clear differentiation in our markets with leading positions, an innovative product portfolio, extensive field force, and a strong culture of continuous improvement and focus on execution. We have first-class go-to-market strategies, and we are confident that we can capitalize on growth opportunities and faster-growing markets. We will continue to bring innovative products to market, and we believe our margin and productivity programs will continue to yield strong results. We generate a strong level of cash flow and have balance sheet capacity for selected acquisitions. We will continue to return capital to shareholders via our share repurchase program. Now, that concludes my comments.
I want to thank you for your attention and look forward to further interacting with those in attendance in person throughout the day. Let me now introduce Oliver Wittorf, who will provide an update on our supply chain, and how it has proven to be a competitive advantage over the last three years. Oliver has been with Mettler-Toledo for 18 years and is responsible for our global supply chain, which includes our Stern Drive productivity program. He's also responsible for information technology, which includes our Blue Ocean program. He and the team have done a remarkable job over the last two years, handling many challenges that we encountered with COVID and the subsequent supply chain challenges in the aftermath of the pandemic. He will cover more of this topic, and I will now turn it over to him. Oliver?
Thanks, Patrick. Good morning. Happy to be here. Mettler-Toledo's supply chain is an exciting place. It covers the full spectrum from low volume, high mix of our instruments to the high volume mass production of things like pipette tips. The key to our success to manage this complexity in an efficient and productive way, Blue Ocean, our program for process and system harmonization, and Stern Drive, our program for operational excellence and continuous improvement, are the foundation of how we do this.
We are convinced that this foundation is a competitive advantage, and our agility in navigating the global supply of the last three years has reinforced this. On many occasions, we were able to continue to serve our customers without disruptions despite the wide-ranging challenges. This has contributed to our strong results and market share gains over the last few years. I am excited to provide an overview of our unique setup and how we want to leverage and enhance it for the future. When we talk about supply chain management at Mettler-Toledo, we talk about the end-to-end process from planning over procurement, production, all the way to fulfillment to the end customer. We operate a strong manufacturing footprint with 20 factories around the globe. This is an advantage and different than much of our competition.
Most of our factories have technology focus, like, for example, MT-Pro here in Billerica, is specializing on products and production requiring expertise in optical sensors. As you know, our franchise has a big product and service portfolio. We sell over 100,000 products and accessories. In general, we have a relatively high vertical integration. We want to control the production of all key technology and intellectual property that allows us to differentiate versus competition. The diverse portfolio ranges from low to very high volumes. It is supported by approximately 3,000 suppliers that supply everything from commodities to highly specialized components. Because of our efforts to sell direct wherever possible, we interact with more than 1 million customer contacts in many geographies and markets.
To effectively deliver this broad portfolio in short lead times to customers, we have established and continuously invest in our order fulfillment capabilities via the three logistics hubs in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. We strive to deliver fast and on time. Throughout this presentation, I want to highlight how our supply chain efficiently and effectively deals with the complexity that comes with our business. We are proud that our supply chain has evolved to a competitive advantage for the company. We have a resilient global footprint that we can operate cost efficiently thanks to our absolute size. Site consolidations of the past years, as well as additions of new manufacturing sites in Tampa, Zhengzhou, China, Royston, UK, and Switzerland, set a solid foundation for capacity for growth. Ongoing investments for expansion in Mexico will further support that.
Besides footprint expansion, continuous Stern Drive investments allow us to increase the output from existing sites. This was a key lever when we significantly increased output of our Rainin plant for pipette tips in Oakland, California during COVID. It also was a major enabler to increase capacity and output of the Billerica site, which you will visit later this morning. Full data integration and transparency enabled by Blue Ocean allows us to seamlessly and quickly control and balance the end-to-end processes of our supply chain setup. The initial goal of Blue Ocean was to completely harmonize business processes, data structures, and systems. In the supply chain, this rollout is complete, and we are very actively leveraging this tremendous asset. Data processing back office jobs have evolved to data scientists that drive daily decision-making and prioritization with facts and intelligence. In addition, we standardize on Blue Ocean.
In addition, the standardization of Blue Ocean is a perfect platform for integration and collaboration with key technology partners and suppliers when it comes to shop floor and back office automation. Integral for our success is our Stern Drive culture and operational excellence, continuously pushing ourselves for both incremental improvements and innovation leaps. These continued incremental improvements compound to significant cost savings, agility, and quality gains. We have a bias for action. We never compromise on quality and measure ourselves on the hard results visible in KPI and financials. In particular, how we performed during the global challenges of the last three years has convinced us that the long-term investments in Blue Ocean and Stern Drive are yielding significant benefits. Let me now give you an update on the two programs.
Stern Drive is our operational excellence and cost leadership program for our product-producing organizations and the supply chain overall. We launched the program in 2017. Since then, we have worked on significant enhancements and increased in sophistication. Let's briefly recap. Our cost of sales are over $1 billion, which includes material costs, shop floor labor, as well as back-office costs. Globally, we employ about 5,000 people in our plants and our logistics hubs. All of these 5,000 employees, as well as our R&D engineers and product managers, are an integral part of Stern Drive and live it as part of our continuous improvement culture. Since the start of the program, we have completed over 1,700 improvement projects. These projects range in size from savings of several thousand dollars to ones with savings of up to $500,000 and more.
The power of the program comes from the many small projects with clear targets and relatively short implementation times. The momentum we can generate by leveraging a broad employee base to own and drive improvement projects is remarkable. I am sure you will also feel the spirit later on during the tour. We started Stern Drive with relatively straightforward focus topics on material cost reduction, shop floor, and back-office productivity. You will see some great results of Stern Drive and our overall productivity drive when you visit our manufacturing facility later on. Through the productivity principles of Stern Drive, we have increased our capacity and improved our productivity in this facility without expanding our footprint or adding significant headcount. We have similar examples from all our other sites throughout the world. Stern Drive has now evolved to more sophisticated approaches around value engineering to reduce material cost by design.
For example, we were able to reduce the cost of our TOC analyzer via iterative design improvements. Further, Stern Drive has evolved in systematic disturbance tracking on the shop floor or in the back office to allow us for prioritized root cause elimination. This is a data-driven approach to generate the highest impact with the resources available. More recently, we rate project attractiveness also by the contribution towards our sustainability targets. The exchange and sharing of best practices across the group has been an enormous contributor to cost leadership and also enhances employee engagement. We are currently in progress to launch the third wave of Stern Drive with advanced approaches around value engineering, should-costing methodology, strategic make or buy assessments, smart manufacturing, back-office process automation, and others. All these approaches systematically leverage the tremendous data transparency which Blue Ocean is providing.
We are very happy with the progress we have made. As you know, Blue Ocean is the program that harmonizes the way we do business internally and with customers. We believe it is a significant competitive advantage and allows us to run our business processes fully digital. While it is 14 years since we started with Blue Ocean, we are very proud that by now every business process from sales and marketing over service, supply chain, product development to finance and administration is harmonized. The rollout of Blue Ocean is close to completion with a handful of small units and acquisitions still to go. In these 14 years, the Blue Ocean template, both in process coverage and system scope, has grown. Still today, we continuously invest as opportunities around digitalization arise.
Increasingly, digital solutions we market to our customers require full integration between our products in the field, application software at the customer or in the cloud, and our ERP backbone. Blue Ocean is an excellent platform for us to scale these new business models. For the supply chain, Blue Ocean enables agility through transparency in many dimensions. Sophisticated analytics and data-driven decisions allow for fast implementation of changes when needed. Transparency allows us to continuously increase cost leadership, and it is a robust platform to leverage when we expand our footprint via M&A or organic. It makes us globally and end-to-end integrated. It remains a strategic undertaking to stay harmonized in our culture of local ownership and continuous improvement. We are convinced that for many years to come, we can benefit from the clear advantages that Blue Ocean bring us versus competitors.
It is an excellent foundation to manage the complexity that comes with our business and in the supply chain in particular. Like for everybody, the last years were filled with surprises, disruption, and crisis. We want to continue to quickly adapt and learn from these challenges. To do so, we structured the overwhelming amount of incidents and data into five categories. The first learning is that Blue Ocean and Stern Drive have proven to be excellent enablers for agility during crisis management. We want to pursue this journey and strengthen these programs even more. We also learned that we can much better leverage our available global footprint capabilities that come with it. Our global reach allows us to compensate for disturbances in a plant or a supply chain somewhere else in the world. Material availability is of essence.
Blue Ocean provided real-time transparency, which allowed us to react fast to changing market conditions. It also allowed us to optimize and improve processes with our external partners. We were able to optimize and improve processes with the suppliers of our many components, as well as the systematic buildup of dual sources. The next learning was that we empower cross-functional task force teams with deep expertise and sufficient authority to take fast decisions. Lastly, global demographics and geopolitical developments require further standardization and modularization of our products and processes to enable automation. Let me now give you a high-level overview of the initiatives we are working on to translate these learnings into a next competitive advantage. As mentioned, Blue Ocean and Stern Drive remain the platforms which will help to drive the following initiatives. Regarding footprint, we will continue to increase flexibility among our plants and hubs.
In addition to improving our resilience, this will also help to reduce transportation costs and greenhouse gas emissions. When it comes to our supplier base, we also seek increased flexibility, and we will continue to establish more dual source suppliers. All our suppliers have been onboarded on our journey towards science-based environmental sustainability targets. In the back office functions of our end-to-end supply chain, we want to increasingly leverage automation of our streamlined processes. We are doing this via incremental Blue Ocean enhancements and also the leverage of bots. For the shop floor automation, we are planning pragmatically automated production lines. Our portfolio is diverse, and we believe that such automated setups needs to be tailored. We are continuously working towards smart automation. Smart manufacturing is an essential part of our future Stern Drive efforts.
As you will tour the production floor later this morning, you will see how, for example, time-intensive, highly repetitive testing and calibration processes are automated, while other assembly tasks remain machine-supported, semi-automated, or even manual. Leveraging systems and automation, we will further enhance our ability to effectively manage the end-to-end processes. Solid cross-functional expertise as well as instant access to data and analytics are essential. In summary, Blue Ocean and Stern Drive are key competitive advantages that have been critical to our success over the past years, and we have significantly increased our resilience and agility, allowing us to gain market share. As we look into the future, we are convinced that these programs will continue to be key pillars of our success. We believe we have quite a unique approach that allows us to benefit from opportunities for many years to come.
In addition, we see tremendous opportunities as we continue to pursue our digital journey and further optimize our global end-to-end processes. This will not only continue to increase our productivity, improve decision-making, and expand our margins, but it will also allow us to continuously increase the customer experience and benefit our business in the years ahead. With this, I close. I thank you very much for your attention, and I hand over to Shawn for an update on pricing and finance.
Thanks, Oliver. It's really great to be here today, and I just also wanna welcome everybody here and also to those of you on the webcast. There's two things that I'd like to cover in my presentation. The first is I'd like to talk about our pricing program, which has been particularly important as we've navigated inflationary headwinds. I'd like to talk a little bit about our financial results and our outlook that we provided last Thursday.
First, our pricing program. Our pricing program is an important strategic initiative that allows us to continuously reinvest in our business and helps us mitigate inflationary headwinds. Our program starts with a very strong business foundation. In particular, we provide innovative products and solutions with a strong value propositions to our customers, and we've seen our value propositions increase over the past few years as topics such as automation and digitalization have become increasingly important. As Patrick mentioned, our global service organization is also a competitive advantage that provides important value to our customers as we're able to assist them to maintain uptime in their essential processes and to help them meet stringent regulatory requirements. Our foundation is also built on a strong brand that reflects our long-standing reputation in the marketplace for innovation, outstanding quality, and customer service.
As a reminder, we're often selling personal instruments that are typically at low price points directly to the end user. This is especially important as our go-to-market approach is largely based upon a direct sales force of dedicated product and application specialists who can articulate our value propositions to an end user, who in turn understands and appreciates our value. Our pricing program reflects a journey we started over 14 years ago that is deeply ingrained throughout our global organization. Our program leverages our Blue Ocean platform and is based upon a combination of sophisticated data analytics and tools that support our end-to-end global pricing processes. I'm gonna talk more about this shortly, but it's worth highlighting that like all of our programs at Mettler-Toledo, our pricing team is very much focused on continuous improvement, constantly innovating and enhancing the program by adding new tools and technologies.
Most importantly, the success of our program is based upon our global culture of strong execution, agility, and continuous improvement. A key ingredient to our program is our sophisticated pricing analytics. We integrate global transactional data combined with market and cost information into our Blue Ocean analytical tool that provides users around our global organization to closely monitor their results and take necessary actions in a timely manner. This is especially important given the diversity of our business. For example, we have more than 2 million sales transactions per year across approximately 170 countries. Our tools transform and convert this information into actionable and easy-to-consume reports. We can then evaluate KPIs such as price realization, discounting, win-loss statistics, and profitability in a multidimensional manner by product, customer, end market, sales representative, and geography that enables us to quickly diagnose opportunities for improvement and take corrective actions.
Our analytics are also supported by regional pricing experts who closely work with and support our local sales and marketing organizations. As previously mentioned, the transparency our analytics have provided has been critical in our ability to monitor our business and respond to inflationary headwinds in a timely manner over the past year. In addition to our sophisticated analytical program, we have also focused on developing robust and agile end-to-end pricing processes throughout our global organization that are also enabled by our Blue Ocean program. Blue Ocean has allowed us to have centralized price administration and automated controls and workflows around topics such as discounting and price changes, which reduces price leakage that can occur without appropriate controls. After a Blue Ocean roll-in, we typically observe better price realization from reduced leakage via improved processes and controls. Our end-to-end processes starts with setting our prices.
Our approach is highly differentiated and is supported by tools that help our organization evaluate our value proposition and related market conditions by product category and geography. As previously mentioned, we optimize our pricing via our analytics and related processes. In addition, we have sophisticated tools that evaluate our relative market positioning via value price maps and pricing signatures that provide extremely useful insights by product categories in specific countries, and also helps us ensure a more consistent approach to the market. Value price maps plot a relative value score of our portfolio versus price as compared to competition. We also leverage these maps to help us optimize the positioning and development of our product portfolio, and they are particularly effective during a launch of a new product. Finally, we ensure our global front-end organization is properly trained and informed to effectively communicate our price increases to the market.
Our training is intended to ensure our sales organization can fully articulate our value proposition and rationale for our pricing. As we step back from our focus on end-to-end processes, it's also important to highlight that our processes and global organization are also extremely agile. Our ability to leverage analytics, our global price administration capabilities. In our organizational competence in execution and communication were invaluable during the unprecedented inflationary conditions that we have been confronted with over the past year. Throughout the history of our program, we continuously improve our processes and related tools. Similar to other Mettler-Toledo programs, each wave of innovation builds on the previous wave. Our most recent innovation is what we refer to as guided pricing.
In simple terms, we collect the data attributes of an order, and through automated analysis, sophisticated algorithms, and machine learning, our tool recommends a price with contextual information to our sales representative at the time of the order. This tool is fully integrated into our quotation process and would not be possible without underlying quality data and processes enabled by our Blue Ocean program. It is also especially valuable given the large amount of transactions and data sets that need to be evaluated. Throughout the development of guided pricing, we have taken a very methodical approach that has included data studies and various pilots. The results of these activities have been very exciting and are very well-received by our global organization. It also makes it easier to do business with us, as we can turn around quotations more quickly and facilitates future seamless e-commerce activities.
In addition, guided pricing helps ensure a more consistent approach to the market, and we have seen tangible results in our pilots that include improved win rates, price realization, productivity, and a faster order-to-cash cycle. As mentioned, the tool also provides contextual information that also educates and develops our sales organization, improving the effectiveness of our customer communication. Going forward, our pricing program will help us continuously reinvest in our business and navigate any ongoing inflationary headwinds. While we have been at this for some time, we continue to have a great deal of opportunity going forward and remain excited about the future. As previously mentioned, we have a strong foundation, and we will continue to drive innovation and evolve our analytical tools, processes, and enhance our program.
Finally, our program is deeply ingrained in our organization, and our strong culture, combined with our global expertise to leverage our tools and processes, enables us to remain highly agile as we continue to navigate the future. Let's now turn to our financial results, starting with our third quarter that we announced last Thursday. I'm sure you've had an opportunity to review the results, so I won't cover them in detail, but let me provide a few highlights. We had a very strong results in the third quarter. Sales increased 10% in local currency, with particularly strong results in the Americas and China. Our lab and core industrial businesses also had very good growth in the quarter. Our strong sales growth, combined with effective execution of our margin initiatives, resulted in excellent growth and adjusted operating profit in EPS despite significant foreign currency headwinds.
Before I speak to our guidance, I thought it would be also helpful to look at our year-to-date sales growth by geography and product area. A couple points worth highlighting. First, we've had very strong growth in 2022, with year-to-date local currency growth of 11%. As you can see in this slide, this sales growth was on top of excellent growth in the prior year of 20%. Growth was relatively broad-based among the regions, with Europe a little lower than the Americas and Asia. European growth would have been 7% on a year-to-date basis in local currency, excluding Russia. One more point, China's growth year-to-date was very strong at 15% in local currency as our team continues to do a great job in terms of identifying and pursuing growth opportunities while also navigating challenges of the Zero-COVID policy.
This next slide provides an overview of our year-to-date sales growth by product area. Our lab business is up 13% in 2022, on top of 26% growth in the prior year, with good growth in almost all product lines. Favorable market trends, combined with our strong product offering and sophisticated sales and marketing programs, are driving growth in this business. Our industrial business has two parts. Our core industrial portion was up 12% on a year-to-date basis. Our core industrial business has strong growth in each region, particularly in the Americas and China, and continues to benefit from trends in automation and digitalization. We also benefit from our innovative product portfolio and go-to-market approach that has enhanced our ability to pursue fast-growing, attractive market segments and improve the underlying mix of our business.
Our Product Inspection business is up 7% on a year-to-date basis. Momentum in our business in the Americas has strengthened during the year, while we recently experienced somewhat weaker market conditions in Europe. Food Retail is the smallest part of our business at only 5% of our total sales. The business is more choppy and has been under pressure. We have recently experienced strong growth in the Americas, while China has had a difficult year and has been negatively impacted by their COVID lockdowns. Business activity, especially in the Americas and Europe, has been improving, and we expect to show growth in Q4 in 2023. With that as a backdrop, let's cover how we see the rest of the year playing out in an overview of our initial guidance for 2023.
We provided the details on Thursday, and I'd like to summarize a few key points. First, we acknowledge the uncertainty in the macro environment. There are challenges out there which we know require us to be agile and react quickly. We've demonstrated over the last few years our ability to respond to unexpected challenges and continue to believe this is an important part of our DNA. Second, while we continue to monitor these uncertainties closely and react and adapt as necessary, we feel very good about our business and factors we can control. We feel we are in a stronger position than ever with an innovative product pipeline, effective growth and margin initiatives, and an important business mix, improved business mix, and a very strong organization and culture. Third, foreign currency rates have moved against us significantly, particularly since early September, and we are facing greater than expected headwinds.
With that backdrop, we expect a solid finish to the year with local currency sales growth of 7% in the fourth quarter and adjusted EPS growth of 10%-11%. We're happy with this growth and expect to achieve it, despite a currency headwind to adjusted EPS growth of approximately 10%. The benefit of our margin initiatives will be evident in the fourth quarter, and we expect to show an excellent increase in both gross margins and adjusted operating margins. This translates into full year 2022 local currency sales growth of approximately 10% and adjusted EPS growth of 15%. We're very pleased with these results, especially as currency is a 6% headwind to full year earnings growth. These results reflect a three-year organic local currency sales CAGR of 9% and a three-year adjusted EPS CAGR of 20%.
As we think about 2023, one thing to keep in mind is that we'll be facing very challenging multiyear sales growth comparisons, which impacts how we think and forecast for 2023. Based on our assessment of the market today, we'd expect approximately 5% local currency sales growth in 2023. By product area, we expect good growth in our lab business and moderate growth in our industrial businesses. By region, we expect to have strong growth in China, good growth in the Americas, and more moderate growth in Europe. Our margin initiatives will benefit us in 2023, and we expect to have strong increases in both gross margins and operating margins.
On the bottom line, we expect adjusted EPS growth of 8%-9%, which includes a headwind of approximately 4.5% due to unfavorable currency. One final comment on guidance is our cash flow generation. We expect strong free cash flow generation in 2023, as we expect our inventory levels to return to more normalized levels. As you heard from Oliver, our supply chain has proven to be an important competitive advantage, but it also required us to maintain higher level of inventory due to challenges in the supply chain. As I wrap up our presentation today, I'd also like to talk a little bit about the future. Patrick started the presentation by showing you a slide with our long-term track record. We are proud of this track record that we have built up over many years.
Most importantly, we're confident we can continue this performance. What gives us confidence is what you've heard over the last 90 minutes or so. Our organization has strong competitive advantages and serves markets with favorable trends. We have well-developed and well-ingrained growth and margin strategies that we work to continuously improve. We have an organizational culture focused on innovation, execution, and agility. These factors have been the key to our success in the past and will be the drivers for the future as well. What does this mean over the medium term? We think over a cycle, we can achieve local currency sales growth equal to or greater than 6%. We'll benefit from market growth and also gain share through our Spinnaker go-to-market strategy in capitalizing on our global service capabilities and our leading-edge product innovation.
We also benefit from our improved business mix and will continue to reallocate resources to our fastest-growing businesses, which helps us further improve our business mix over time. With this sales growth, we believe we can achieve mid-teens adjusted EPS growth. We will continue to drive margin improvement through our productivity, pricing, and Stern Drive benefits. Our fastest-growing businesses are also our most profitable, which helps us improve margins. The other important ingredient to our medium-term outlook is our cash flow generation and how we use this cash flow. We have a very good track record for cash flow. Our business is not particularly capital intensive, and we continuously work to improve our working capital. I think a great story for us has been our DSO improvement over the years.
Through a focus on end-to-end processes, we have worked to continuously reduce the number of days sales outstanding. I think in the coming years, we'll also see improvements in inventory. Because we're fundamentally an organic growth company, we primarily use this cash flow for share repurchases. We repurchase shares consistently every day and therefore do not time the market. We are very pleased with the results of our share repurchase program, which is also an important element to our earnings growth. Having a well-proven strategy and a strong organizational culture that is focused on continuous improvement are key to our confidence about our medium-term outlook and our ability to continue our long-term track record. That concludes our presentation. We thank those of you on the webcast for joining us today.
On behalf of the entire leadership team here at Mettler-Toledo, we are very excited about the future and believe we will continue our strong track record. With that, we'll now close the webcast.