Next up, I'm excited to welcome the management team from Newell Brands back to the CAGNY stage. Here with us today, we have CEO, Ravi Saligram, President, Chris Peterson, and CFO, Mark Erceg. Over the last several years, Newell has made substantial progress transforming the business and readying it for the future, proving adept at navigating challenging market cycles while also working to simplify the organization, embrace new technologies to improve the supply chain, and invest behind driving profitable growth. As was announced earlier this month, this will be Ravi's final CAGNY presentation as CEO of Newell, with Chris Peterson taking the big seat in May. Please join me in thanking Ravi for all of his help and support for the organization and in congratulating Chris on his upcoming promotion. With that, I'll turn it over to Ravi.
Thank you, Andrew. I invite you to peruse the forward-looking statements. Without much ado, a very warm welcome to Newell Brands CAGNY presentation. As Andrew mentioned, this is my last one, but Newell, I think, is in far better shape today than it was. The messages you will expect to hear and the themes. Over the last four years, as we've turned around the company, we've significantly strengthened the company's foundation in all aspects and dimensions. We are taking decisive action to improve financial performance with a laser focus on cash, cash, making him back the billion-dollar man and profits. We're continuing to simplify the company, reduce complexity, and leverage scale. We are operationalizing the new organizational structure as a result of Project Phoenix and our new operating model that came out of Phoenix.
In an environment right now where consumer demand for discretionary products is constrained due to some forward acceleration that went on post pre-pandemic and during the pandemic, we are very focused on enhancing consumer value. We really believe that with the strengths that we have built up, we will come out stronger once macros improve. Newell at a glance, we're a $9.5 billion company. You may recall that we sold Connected Home last year. We have 25 brands that make up 85% of our sales. Our top 10 countries account for 90% of our sales. You know our iconic brands, be it Sharpie or Graco, Coleman, Yankee Candle, et cetera. Our top 10 international markets, which are highly developed from a GDP per capita, and then some emerging ones.
It's not surprising UK, Canada, France, Japan, but also Mexico and Brazil, where we have big franchises. We charted out a vision for ourselves to become a consumer-led innovation powerhouse and growth engine, and a force for good. Our brands, our beloved pan-friendly brands, which is our purpose, is about brightening consumers' lives and creating moments of joy, providing peace of mind and confidence to consumers. Let's take a look at our profile. The $9.5 billion with our new segments. The biggest one is Home and Commercial Solutions with over half of our sales there. The most profitable business is Learning and Development, even though it's less than a third. From a geographic standpoint, about a third of our business is international, with EMEA being the largest at about $1.5 billion, and LATAM getting close to $1 billion.
I'm going to spend some time on this slide because this really encapsulates the progress we've made in the recent years. First, we have made our brands more relevant and more modern and launched innovations that leverage COVID trends. I'll talk about that a little bit more. In 2021, we grew core sales by 12.5%. In 2022, we were down 3.5%. Interestingly, we are still above pre-pandemic compared to 2019. We're still up 7.5%. We're going through a difficult environment right now. As I mentioned before, we are positioning ourselves that once the macros improve, we should come out well. E-commerce is really a competitive advantage for Newell. 22% of our global sales is through e-commerce, and we've built omni-channel capabilities.
No matter where the consumer shop, how they shop, when they shop, we, through our understanding of consumer journeys, are there with consistent experiences. In this regard, we've really created a lot of focus and capability in content creation and content creation that is omni-channel. With that, what's happened is we've taken our e-design group and our packaging design created as communication design, and starting from an omni view rather than a brick-and-mortar translated to digital. What that has done is that we are really visually telling brand stories and making them come to life, which has allowed our content scores with our retailer dot coms to improve dramatically. At the same time, our ratings and reviews for all our key brands are up significantly.
We have strengthened, and we've started creating the first-ever Pan-Newell consumer and customer marketing campaigns, more on this later, enhanced our partnership with key customers and increased distribution in new channels, including grocery and dollar stores. Simplification, complexity reduction, the numbers tell the story. 102,000 SKUs down to 28,000 in 2018, a 73% reduction. 42 ERP systems down to 2 on 95% of our sales. Most companies have challenges just doing one big ERP. The fact that we've reduced it is testimony to our IT leadership. 7,000 applications down to 700. We've consolidated our real estate site count by over 35% since 2019. We've reduced our websites from hundreds down to 40 in the U.S. and now are pruning our international websites.
We've delivered $1 billion in productivity through our FUEL program since 2018, and it's reaching 3.5%-4% of cards at benchmark levels. We have significantly reduced overheads from 21% in 2018 down now to 16%-17%. Ovid, which has been a landmark program that has turned Newell into an inflection point, taking 23 supply chains, consolidating them into one with the vision of one order, one truck, one invoice, is now alive or has gone live and has been successful. At the same time, we have really modernized our factories and driven automation. We have 650 cobots and robots all over the place, and that's helped us with the productivity. Culture. We were a fractured and fragmented company with employee churn when I started, and the teams, we worked very hard to improve employee engagement.
We talked about our four values, which are about true, transparency, teamwork, and trust. With that, engagement was around 45 and 37 when Chris joined. When I joined, it was 45. It's gone up to now 75, and that was two years ago. Last year we were again at 75 at benchmarks of world-class companies. All of this has been driven with creating a one Newell mindset, focusing on diversity, inclusion, belonging, making our frontline champions. I am truly proud of a best-in-class leadership team. We really have great people who are team players, but also experts in what they do. We've tapped into the secret sauce of our employee camaraderie at our company. All of this has galvanized the employees into being a competitive advantage for Newell. Let me talk a little bit more about enhancing our brands and modernizing them.
Let's start with Rubbermaid. Rubbermaid has really we've got distribution into the grocery sector more, more distribution, launched new products, like Rubbermaid DuraLite and Scaled and innovation we already had launched, which is Brilliance, and Brilliance today in POS is more than $100 million. E-commerce penetration has increased. It's weathered the storm, and it's not just COVID, but last year in 2022, we grew share in each of the subcategories of Rubbermaid. Pantry organization, you name it, this has been become a very strong brand. Coleman had lost its way from being a really iconic brand to becoming more commoditized. Our teams have really revamped it with a lot of innovation, but great marketing and delivering on the messages of the outsider's calling and restored it to its former glory in its 120th year anniversary.
Sharpie, one of my favorite brands at Newell, this is an example of taking equity and launching into a category that is not, that Sharpie was not in pens, and it, Sharpie S-Gel has become a leader in the writing market. Mr. Coffee, always known for automatic drip, took advantage of COVID trends, and we launched Mr. Coffee Iced, and then we've created a platform by going iced and hot, frappe, and now the latest latte in fall. You can see that we have a number of innovations improving our brands, and more than half of our top brands, top 25 brands, top 30 brands are number one or number two in their categories. Let me come to a new idea that, you know, a number of you have always asked, "What is the connection between the Newell Brands?
You have so many brands, how do you think about them, and how do you think about your portfolio?" Really, when you talk to consumers and you say, "Newell," you may get a blank stare, but as soon as you mention our brands, they all say, "Oh yeah, I have that in our house." This led to this idea of consumer miles life moments and life occasions. If you think about it, there's 128 million U.S. households. We believe Newell Brands are in more than 100 million households. Together, this means $500 billion of opportunity. Let's go through some life moments. You know, you go to college, you rent your first apartment, you may get your first home, you get engaged or get married, and then you upgrade your home, support your second home, et cetera.
You start growing a family. You're expecting, you have your first child, second child. Like me, three weeks ago, you become a grandparent for the first time. You transition, you know, your kids start going to school, nursery, kindergarten, high school, college, et cetera. Each one of these represents pockets of opportunity, which are billions of dollars. Newell has the brands that cater to these life moments and occasions. Let me illustrate. Just look at on the left is the in the home and out of the home. So in the home, you think about the kitchen and cooking. So many of our brands come together: Oster, FoodSaver, Crock-Pot, Mr. Coffee, Calphalon. Or home organization with Sistema, Rubbermaid, Ball. And home offices, Sharpie, Paper Mate. Creative activity for kids with Elmer's, Mr. Sketch or to child development with NUK and Graco.
Health and wellness with Yankee Candle and WoodWick, Contigo or sleeping with Sunbeam. You go outside the home for camping, obviously Coleman, but Stearns. School and teaching, you have again, EXPO, Prismacolor, Elmer's, working Sharpie, DYMO, Paper Mate. Then on mobility, as you move from one place to another, Graco car seats or strollers, and Yankee Candle auto air fresheners or exercise Baby Jogger, where you can run with your kids or take Contigo on the go. This gives you a sense that we're really about life moments and life occasions. If we can capitalize on this idea and build on it, so for the first time, we're actually doing promotions connecting our brands, whether it's on Amazon Prime Day or Target's Deal Days or Walmart promotions, we're bringing our brands together. We are trying to display them together.
We just launched something called the Newell Creative Kitchen in Hoboken, which is a live theater where we use each of our brands to tell stories, and it's a great social media platform that is really taking off, showing our brand connections. Let me turn to our operating model, which we came out with Phoenix. The life moments is what triggered this as we were thinking about our food and appliance business and saying, "Hey, they really reside in the kitchen." We were thinking about our customers. The merchants are the same for many of these categories.
We said, "Look, we're taking an internal focus of these businesses, the external focus from a consumer and customer point, how do you bundle them, and at the same time, reduce duplication and create the synergies which allows us to distort resources to our top brands with the highest margins?" That's what led us to coming out with three segments: Learning and Development, Home and Commercial Solutions, and Outdoor and Recreation. I'll go into that in a second. We also came out with a second tenet, which was all about one Newell International go-to market. On many earnings calls, I've spoken about this. International has outpaced the U.S. How do you capitalize on this? The third is the one Newell sales model, and fourth is the unified supply chain. All of this is about leveraging scale and efficiency of our portfolios.
We've now promoted three of our people who came in two, three years ago and have done a terrific job for us. Mike McDermott is the Segment CEO for Home and Commercial Solutions, Kris Malkoski for Learning and Development, and Jim Pisani for Outdoor and Recreation. Three great leaders who work with Chris to take Newell to the next level. Let me spend a minute now on Home and Commercial Solutions. You can see that each of our brands here that are represented, Rubbermaid, number one consumer brand in food storage in the U.S. Rubbermaid Commercial Products, number one brand awareness in commercial refuse and material handling. You may have seen Root, our gray trash can, which is almost indestructible all the way in parks and our yellow pails in airports. FoodSaver, America's number one vacuum sealing brand.
Ball, over 86% in the category, in the U.S., use this. Strongest brand, high shares, we've been increasing penetration into users beyond food preserving. Believe it or not, heavy users of Ball have more than 80 Ball jars in their home. A lot of opportunity as we drive penetration. Spontex, our European brand of sponges. You go to France and go to Leclerc or to Carrefour, and it is just incredible to see eight-feet sections of Spontex. Obviously, the French must love their sponges, this is the strength of the brand that we've really driven there. Next, let me talk about Learning and Development and the natural progression from babies onto school. In this, we've got Graco, number one baby gear brand in the U.S., number one car seat brand in the U.S.
Sharpie, number one brand in writing in U.S., Canada, and Australia, number one permanent marker and number one highlighter in the U.S. and Canada. Expo, number one brand in presentation markers, again, in North America. In Outdoor and Recreation, our most international segment, 44% of the sales are outside of North America, with brands like Coleman, number two tent share in the U.S., number three hard cooler, number 1 stoves. Contigo, number one thermal share in the U.S. and number three kid shares. Campingaz, very popular brand in Europe with planchas and stoves and so on. Now, let me talk a bit about our international go-to market. As I said, international has been outpacing the U.S., but there's been a lot of fragmentation. How do we consolidate?
How do we look at countries as one Newell create sales forces that can leverage our total sales when they go to customers? That's what we started doing. We just appointed a general manager for Newell for all of Canada, same for Mexico, same for other countries, and in Australia and New Zealand, in Japan. Now we're looking at working with workers' councils in Europe to see when we can do that in Europe. We think that this is really going to leverage our scale, as we go forward. Then on Newell sales model, when I started and went and did a tour with customers, you know. They were really not very happy with Newell because they felt there were so many people from businesses going to them. They didn't have a view of One Newell, and they didn't feel our service was that great.
There were a lot of issues. Today, we've gone from a four-letter word, hopefully, to the four-letter word of love. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but really, our partnerships with our customers is really very strong, where we've become a strategic partner, whether it's JBPs or ASPs. I think we've created a lot of traction with them. We created this by creating a chief customer officer role, having heads for each of the customers. Now, with the new model, we're actually putting that all on a P&L basis under our chief customer officer. Whereas the segments can now focus on their specialty customers. Writing, for instance, the writing sales force can focus on Staples and Office Depot, whereas on a consolidated basis, we'll go after the top four customers under a centralized umbrella.
We're harnessing the scale of the portfolio and domain expertise to win as One Newell. This new sales force of Newell, we're really all about thinking about, hey, category captains, category leadership, all about helping our retailers grow their categories. We're looking into driving more and more omni-selling and activation, building operational financial acumen amongst our sales teams so that both customers and ourselves are winning on margins and simplifying the One Newell go-to-market and creating that One Newell culture. You can see with what I've shown, where we were and where we are going. We have a great team. I really think that the best days of Newell are ahead of us. With that, let me just show you three commercials which personify some of the innovations and brands. You'll start with Sharpie, then you will see a commercial.
A lot of this is used in social media, on YouTube, and so on. It's on Squishies. Hopefully, you'll start singing that song. We'll end with Graco Turn2Me, which really addresses a pain point for our consumers and is a great innovation, and it's now become the fastest-growing Turn2Me car seat in that category. Let's hit the commercials.
Nothing quite as useful and versatile as a Sharpie. You don't have to be an artist to make something cool. Let your imagination run wild and get away with some stuff. Think differently about what a Sharpie can do for you. Draw on stuff, scribble. The key is to let go and have some fun. You may surprise yourself and turn something ordinary into extraordinary. From idea to impact. With Sharpie, the world is your canvas.
Elmer's Squishies are characters you mix to make. You've got to mix it, pour it, play it. Squish it. Show it, collect it, trade it. Squish it. We got hippos, dragons, bunnies. Squish it. Monkeys looking funny. Squish it. You gotta find it, toss it, share it. Squish it. Hide it, stretch it, bounce it. Squish it. We got foxes, owls, frogs. Squish it. Cute and cuddly dogs. Squish it. Collect them all and find them in the Elmer's glue aisle.
Now Chris Peterson, my friend and partner, to talk about supply chain and all the other improvements. Chris.
Thanks, Ravi. Good morning, everybody. It's great to be back here in person at CAGNY. It's been a few years. One of the key strategies that we've been pursuing as a company has been around building operational excellence, and I thought I would start there today. This slide shows in the supply chain, in particular, there are four planks to our strategy that we've been pursuing. We're focused on building a scaled One Newell supply chain. We are focused on driving scale and strategic relationships across the enterprise with our key suppliers through our procurement organization. We are reimagining our operations, which is really about automating and digitizing our manufacturing plants and our distribution centers and turning them into a compelling best place to work for our frontline workers.
We wanna become the reliable retailer partner of choice across general merchandise categories, all of this based on the foundation of having the right people, process, and technology. To help enable this, we've been focused, as we've been talking for the last few years, on simplification and complexity reduction. Ravi talked a number of the statistics on what we've done to simplify the IT systems, but we've done more than that. We've also simplified our legal entity structure. We've rationalized manufacturing plants and distribution centers. We've got Ariba now in place, which is a procurement system that gives us full spend visibility across the entire enterprise, so that we can leverage the scale of the company with our suppliers, and more. Perhaps the biggest project that we've done in this regard has been COVID.
Two years ago, we had 23 independent, unique supply chains in the US, that was very complex, did not leverage scale, and frankly, when we went and talked to retailers, they would tell us we were the most complicated company to do business with. We had a vision of saying, "We wanna integrate that into a single Newell Distribution Company. We wanna standardize and simplify our processes.
We wanted to move product closer to our customers and consumers, and we wanted to drive scale through transportation to both improve service and lower our cost with a vision of being able to accept a single order, ship on a full truck, and invoice on a single invoice. Happy to report that we started this project about a year and a half ago in concept stage in the middle of a supply chain disruption, and we've delivered pretty much on the original timeline throughout the project. We had our first go-live, as you'll recall, in July of last year, where we converted about 40% of the business into the new network. On February 1st, just a few weeks ago, we moved the balance of the business into the new network.
That conversion has gone exceptionally well ahead of plan, and we are now fully operating in the new model. I want to just give you a little bit more about why we're excited about being in the new model. As part of the new model, we had to stand up two new distribution centers. One is in Newville, Pennsylvania, the other is in Gastonia, North Carolina. These are big facilities, 1.3 million sq ft in Pennsylvania, 1.5 million sq ft in North Carolina. The company did not have distribution capacity on the East Coast of the United States, north to south. Most of the company's distribution centers were either West Coast or Midwest. We needed these two facilities to expand and create a nationwide network.
If you look at where we are today, we now have a multi-node network with mixed delivery capability that's fully operational, our distribution centers are located in places that allow us to have full coverage across the country. Let me try to give you an example of what does this look like. If I start with the map on the left, this is the baby gear business, which is the Graco business. Graco, prior to the AVID network, shipped out of Southern California. If you look at the dark green, we could get there within about a day. Anywhere in the red or the purple, it would take us a week or more to get there.
It would ship on a less than truckload shipment, it would transfer trucks multiple times on the journey and probably arrive damaged a good part of the time. If you look at where we are today, which is the map on the right, That Graco car seat is now in three mixed distribution centers. We can get to the vast majority of the population centers on same-day delivery or one-day delivery and cover 85% of the country in two days. Not only that, we're moving from less than truckload shipments to full truckload shipments so that the truck goes directly from our distribution center to our retail partner, which gives us an advantage in terms of reducing damage, improving our on-time performance, et cetera.
Effectively, we're moving from what I would classify as a poor service, high-cost network to a low-cost, high-service network. It took a lot to get this done. We had to stand up a unified face to the customer. We created a consolidated new legal entity, which is the US Newell Distribution Company. We had to go and renegotiate our payment terms and our receivable terms and transportation terms with every retailer in the United States to harmonize them so that we could basically invoice them and ship them on a single truck. We simplified our customer count. When we looked at the customer base, we were servicing directly over 7,000 retail customers. We moved the tail to a distributor wholesaler type model to simplify our operation.
We have now centralized our transportation network. We expect to drive significant cost savings by doing that. This model also has the benefit of diversifying our ports. We had 85% of our port exposure to L.A. and Long Beach. We're now 50/50 between the East Coast and West Coast. We've improved fulfillment times, as I showed with the baby gear example. We're starting to see already enhanced results from a service standpoint. The products that are shipping as part of the new network, we're seeing our fill rates improve by almost 10 points, our on-time performance is up by more than 10 points in terms of delivery. Our retailers are very excited about this.
Finally, from a sustainability standpoint, and I would say this is both sustainability and cost related, we expect to take a significant amount of miles driven out of the network as we move from parcel and LTL shipments across the country to full truckload shipments much closer to where the delivery points are. AVID has been instrumental because it's involved a lot of people in the company. If you think about 23 unique supply chains going to 1, we've had over 1,000 people in the company involved in this transformation. What's important about that is people have been involved in the project, the project has gone well, and we have now a proof point that we can leverage scale across the company, and it can actually deliver a better outcome.
We think that this gives us permission with the employee group, and we're gaining momentum on this one Newell mindset. We are driving simplicity, standardization. We think we have the ability to leverage resources and scale. We think this is gonna create enhanced opportunities for our people. Importantly, it sets the foundation for us to then take the next step, which is to begin to leverage scale in our go-to-market strategies, centralizing manufacturing, which I'll talk a little bit about, unifying customer fulfillment and our enterprise customer teams, which is the next step in the scale journey. Ravi showed this chart, which are the four key tenants of the Project Phoenix we announced last month. I wanna spend a little bit of time on where we're headed from a unified supply chain standpoint.
This is the journey we've been on. In 2017, we had business unit independent operated supply chains. Where many of the people who were operating in the supply chains in the business unit had never met the people in the other business units. There was no scale leverage. We started over the last several years by creating a hybrid capability where we staffed a center of expertise with best-in-class capability and began to implement things like automation across the enterprise. We began to simplify all of the things on IT systems. We've executed now Project Ovid to effectively operate as one company across distribution, transportation, customer service in the U.S. We're now taking the next step to move to the green going forward, which is a fully integrated, pan-Newell supply chain.
We think there's big opportunities in this. As we look to take the next step, our focus is on driving operational excellence through common standards, technologies, process skills, and a highly engaged workforce. We think there's an opportunity for us to leverage scale that is a competitive advantage opportunity for us going forward versus the companies we directly compete with who don't have the scale that we do across general merchandise categories. We're already seeing opportunities to significantly remove duplications and redundancies as we're moving to this new model. One example is if you look at our manufacturing footprint today, which is the next leg of the journey, over 90% of our manufacturing plants are still single node or single business. If you look in the U.S., for example, we have 20 manufacturing plants in the U.S.
Now we have somebody who is the head of North America manufacturing. We're gonna start looking at those manufacturing plants to say, how do we better utilize them, increase the asset utilization, drive the next wave of rationalization, and leverage scale even further. We think there's a big opportunity. It's not gonna happen overnight, but we think there's a big opportunity to further reduce our cost, improve speed, and improve service for our consumers and our customers. The journey we're on is to create a world-class supply chain. We have three objectives as a company. We wanna drive top-line growth, we wanna drive margin improvement, and we wanna drive cash flow. If you look at the supply chain priorities, they are very much tied to those 3 Newell objectives.
In terms of top-line growth, we wanna be the preferred partner of choice across general merchandise, and we're starting to take the journey to get there. We wanna support growth in the business, whether it's innovation, regions, different channels, to support the top-line growth. On margin improvement, we're focused on accelerating productivity. This is both through our FUEL productivity program, automation, the network design that I mentioned, and continuing the journey on simplifying the operation, whether it be SKU count, systems, data, et cetera. On cash flow, we're focused on platinum planning and inventory management to reduce our working capital, reduce our days on hand, and begin to turn the company back to a very strong cash generator.
Let me shift gears a little bit and talk a little bit about the financials that we reported two weeks ago and the outlook we gave for 2023, what our priorities are specifically for 2023. When we reported results two weeks ago, we were coming off a period in 2021 where the company had 12.5% core sales growth. That 12.5% core sales growth benefited from stimulus money that brought consumers into the category and COVID demand for some of our categories that led to peak demand levels, particularly in the home and outdoor categories. That strong core sales growth in 2021 continued into the first half of 2022, you can see in the second half of 2022, things changed.
Effectively, we wound up in the second half of 2022 down 10.1% on core sales growth. There were a couple of drivers of that. The first is consumers became more under pressure as inflation in food, housing, and energy put pressure on consumers in discretionary categories. The second is some of the categories that had experienced COVID peak demand, particularly in home and outdoor, began to normalize back more to pre-COVID levels. Given those trends, retailers, and an improving supply chain situation, retailers began to reduce inventories that I think you're all aware of. Those three trends effectively resulted in this trend shift that we saw in the second half of last year.
We gave guidance two weeks ago for 2023, and we called 2023 core sales to be a range of -6% to -8%, as we expect those trends to continue into 2023. I will say we expect those trends to be more pronounced in the first half of 2023 and significantly less pronounced in the second half of 2023. If you look at operating margin, we drove operating margin improvement in 2021. We continued in the first half of 2022. In the second half of 2022, we took a pretty big step backwards. The reason for that is because we pulled back on our supply plan significantly to right-size our inventories to get our working capital back. That leads to the cash flow piece here, where you see we had strong operating cash flow in 2021.
In 2022, we took a step back because of the working capital, but we very much expect to be a strong cash contributor in 2023. If I go to how this shapes our priorities for 2023, we basically have five priorities we're focused on for 2023. First and foremost is strengthening cash flow in the balance sheet. We expect to right-size inventory, carefully manage the forecasting process, and return the company to being a strong cash generator. The exciting part about this is. If you look at what happened to our inventory when we made the intervention sort of late summer on the supply plan, we've already started to see progress. In the fourth quarter, our inventories were down by over $400 million from the end of the third quarter, and that's a leading indicator of cash flow progress to come.
It doesn't show up right away because when you first see the inventory reduction, it's offset by payable reduction. As you go forward, those normalize and you start to get the cash back. We're also focused on driving gross margin improvement this year, accelerating FUEL productivity savings, continuing our automation initiatives. We took out almost 1,000 jobs out of our supply chain last year through automation, and we're on track to do about the same number again in 2023. We think we've got a big opportunity to operationalize Project Ovid now that we're fully in the model. As I mentioned, we are pricing internationally for currency, and we're driving greater financial discipline on our innovation.
We're also focused on driving overhead savings through Project Phoenix, continuing the work on SKU count reduction and complexity reduction, and operationalizing the new organization and operating model. On cash flow, you can see in 2019, 2020, and 2021, we had very strong operating cash flow as a company. I think when I stood here in 2019, shortly after I joined the company, I said our cash conversion cycle was the worst in the industry. We have made very steady progress in improving that and significant progress to 2021. I mentioned we took a step back in 2022 because of the sudden change in top line trend, but we are very committed to getting back on track to be a strong cash generator, and we've got good line of sight to do that in 2023.
We're also continuing to focus on complexity reduction. Also in 2019 when I was here with Newell for the first time, I reported that we had 100,000 SKUs, and I thought at the time we could get to 50,000, not because I knew anything, but because it seemed like a good number. We got there. Then we set the bar even more aggressively to 30,000. We beat that bar as well and ended last year at 28,000. We now still think we've got another round to go. I suspect that we will continue to drive improvement there. What's, what's important about that is not that we're reducing SKUs, it's that it's the right hand of this chart that we're increasing revenue per SKU.
If you look at our revenue per SKU, our revenue per SKU has more than tripled since we started this program in 2018. That's important because that revenue per SKU is what allows us to create significant consumer value. It enables us to drive productivity across the supply chain. It enables better automation. It enables a, and it enables a better cash conversion cycle. We're continuing to drive productivity as we head into this year, and in fact, this year in 23, we expect to be an all-time record high productivity year for Newell. So we've started the productivity program. Prior to 2019, the company was delivering productivity that was less than 1% a year.
Since we started the FUEL productivity program, the automation initiatives, we've been between 3% and 4% each year. We expect this year to be above 4%, and that's because of the FUEL productivity program's automation in addition to the Ovid program coming to life this year. We're expecting a very strong year. Let me just show you a little bit of the automation that's happened in the company over the last couple of years. Let me end where Ravi started, which is we believe that we have significantly strengthened the company's foundation over the last few years. We are taking decisive action to improve our financial performance starting in 2023 with a focus on cash and profits, given the external environment. We're continuing to reduce complexity and leverage scale.
We are focused on operationalizing the new organization structure and operating model, we're also focused on enhancing consumer value so that we position the company to come out stronger once macros improve. With that, Ravi?
Thank you. As Andrew stated, I announced that I'll be retiring May 16th. It's been a great journey, and one of the highlights of that journey for me, has been building an amazing leadership team and an incredible partnership with my friend here, Chris Peterson. He's truly ready. He's the right person with the right temperament and the right skill sets to take Newell forward to the next level. That's why I feel it's not just the strengthening of the company, but we'll have the right leader going forward and the right leadership team, and that's why I feel Newell's best days are truly ahead of us. The transition has gone very smoothly. Our employees have accepted, Chris. We've been a very deliberate, Working this so there's no surprises. He's well-liked, well-accepted. With that, Chris?
Yeah, I'll just mention that it's been a real pleasure, Ravi, working with you, and we've had a great partnership. I also want to welcome Mark to the team. Mark and I worked together at P&G for many years, and Mark has been with us about two months, and I echo Ravi's comments. I think the company is much stronger today, and we're very much looking forward to the future. With that, we will open for questions. Bill.
Thanks. Congratulations on the transition. On that note, Chris, you and Mark come with a P&G background. Your chairman of the board comes with a new chairman P&G background. P&G, obviously, has been a great company over the past few years, great piece of stuff, great stock. That would seem like a fantastic combination except for like 10 years ago, there was a big company CEO who came from Unilever to run Newell, and it didn't work out so well. Before him, somebody from P&G came to Newell to change things around, and that didn't work out so well. Help us understand how-
Yeah.
the P&G experience helps, you know, how it might be different, you know, and how you look at kind of the changing. Ravi's really led a great transition out of some pretty dark times. You know, as you get to more normalized environment, you know, how does that look?
It's a great question, and it's something that I have thought a lot about. It's interesting. If we try to turn Newell into P&G, we will fail. That is not our strategy. I think that the P&G experience is very helpful and very instructive because a lot of what you learn at P&G is designed to get the fundamentals across all of the different things that are required to win in consumer products. You understand what best-in-class capabilities look like. Both Mark and I have spent a lot of years outside of P&G at other companies that are smaller, that are not P&G. I went to Ralph Lauren, I went to Revlon, I came to Newell. Mark has been at Masonite and a railroad and Tiffany and Cerner.
I think through those experiences, I think we've got sort of the best of both, which is we know how to operate in a scrappier, small company, maybe less developed set of capabilities company like Newell, but we also have the background of what best in class looks like. In my mind, it's about being choiceful about where do we want to dramatically improve our capabilities that's going to directly connect to the shareholder value equation. That's what we're working on. I think I mentioned on the earnings call that we're gonna take a fresh look with the leadership team, given the change in the external environment at the company strategy. I don't expect a revolution, but I do expect it to evolve, and I expect to complete that work over the next several months.
Lauren?
Great. Thanks. Chris, there was a lot of the information on Ovid and the mechanical pieces of it which are desperately important. I was curious, as you're starting to talk to retailers, this notion of leveraging scale and that being differentiated, 'cause I remember having that conversation with Mark Ketchum.
Yep.
Like, this should be really cool.
Mm-hmm.
What is it that changes sort of in the store, in your conversations with retailers besides it being easier to do business with Newell? Where do we get to the building the business part? Maybe any sort of early look into conversations you're having or how you expect it to evolve.
Sure. We were, I'll just mention, as an example, Walmart, who is our largest retail customer, they're about 14% or 15% of our business, we report in the 10-K. Ravi and I and a few others went to Walmart three weeks ago and met with their Chief Merchant and their key sort of leadership team. As part of that process, they asked us to be what's called a advanced strategic planning partner with them. They don't do that for very many companies. I think we're the only company in the space we compete in that they've asked to do that. That's a good example of leveraging our scale.
We almost had to get through Ovid and get the customer service improvements to get the conversation off of, "Why are you guys coming to us with 23 different supply chains and not good customer service?" We've now crossed that bridge, and now we're focused on how do we take our leading brand positions and our leading capabilities and begin to drive category growth and in our case, share growth across the enterprise and show up at retail, whether it's in store or online, with competitively advantaged value products to consumers. That's the next phase, and we're starting to see the retailers ask us to play that role more and more. The promise is still there, and we are focused on running through that and beginning to deliver against that.
One thing I'd add, Lauren, is Ovid just didn't happen overnight with customers. We co-opted them. I remember my first trip to Walmart with the previous chief merchant walking through, and one of his big complaints was Newell's supply chain, and he couldn't understand why each business had to be invoiced separately and all of that. As we did Ovid, we co-opted. We asked them to put their supply chain people as part of our teams to give us advice. They've been part of this. And the fact that we've unified all the terms, the payment terms for Newell, that's pretty historic. Whether it's customer service, whether it's terms, this is the backbone of the company is stronger now so that we can really focus on category growth, consumer, preference, et cetera.
Kevin?
Thanks. Kevin Grundy, Jefferies. We've got a couple minutes, I'll try to be brief with this. Chris, just maybe the scope of the portfolio review for historical context. I think a lot of folks remember the time of the merger, it was a $16 billion business. By the time of the portfolio shuffling, it was down to $8 billion-$9 billion and, you know, we're somewhere in that $9 billion-ish sort of range today.
Yep.
I think there was some level of concern, Ravi, from yourself included, around Outdoor Recreation appliances. It had a bounce during COVID and then as you guys spoke to, it's kind of having a little bit of a hangover now. Maybe just comment on the scope of the review and potentially for investors, what is considered and what's on the table here with the review. Thank you.
Sure. helpful clarification. When Newell Brands bought Jarden in 2016, the company, as you mentioned, was a $16 billion company. Since that time, the company has done 15 divestitures. Those 15 divestitures have really resulted in a portfolio that is much more cohesive relative to how we can leverage scale across the portfolio. The portfolio today can be characterized generally as leading brands that are sold through common distribution channels, where the capabilities required to win are relatively consistent.
The scope of the review that we're gonna take from a strategy standpoint, on M&A, I suspect you'll see us continue to evaluate tuck-in and tuck-out divestitures, but I do not expect us to look at significant major acquisitions or significant major divestitures, because we think we've got so much opportunity organically to drive this portfolio forward.
I think, Kevin, one thing, the whole operating model with the new segments, which are operational segments, not just accounting, really helps address the issue of appliances or Outdoor because we got the synergies. Now we can drive the brands.
I think we'll wrap it up there. Just join me one more time in thanking Ravi and congratulating Chris and Mark on their new roles. Obviously, we'll take it over to the breakout.