Good afternoon. I'm Jonathan Feeney of Bravium Partners. I'm the co-chair of CAGNY, three of them. It's my pleasure to welcome our longtime sponsor, Sysco. With us today are Chairman, President, and CEO Kevin Hourican, Chief Financial Officer Kenny Cheung, and Vice President of Investor Relations Kevin Kim. Sysco is the global leader in marketing and distributing food and other key products to more than 730,000 food service outlets. That includes restaurants, hotels, and amusement parks. Almost anywhere, friends, family, and colleagues are out having a great time. Sysco is serving them while providing outstanding long-term shareholder returns. Here to tell us more is Chairman, President, and CEO Kevin Hourican. Kevin, welcome. Take it away.
Great. Thanks, Jen. Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to be with you back at CAGNY. This is actually my sixth time presenting at CAGNY, but my first time presenting after the Mondelez snack station. That is a tough thing to follow. Hopefully, everybody makes it into the room. So Kenny and I are here today excited to talk about our presence, our performance, and our future. So without further ado, let's jump in. As was just said a moment ago, Sysco is the industry leader in the food away-from-home space. Let's start with what that means specifically from what we do with and for our customers. We describe ourselves as 50% a food sales and marketing company and 50% a cold chain organization with trucks that have three temperatures and bringing that product to our customers in a temperature-controlled way.
force with culinary expertise, supply chain with cold storage, cold chain expertise. At scale, global scale, advancing food service and our capabilities while innovating our supply chain. When we talk about our customer profile, we run the gamut from entertainment venues to hospitals to education facilities, businesses like the one we're in today that happens to be a Sysco customer, and restaurants from big to small. Our delivery partners are the face of Sysco, representing our brand in front of our customers on a daily, weekly basis, working hard, bringing product on time and in full to our customers. We've invested to make that experience better for our delivery partners, to make it better for our customers, and we will talk about that today. These are customers, as I mentioned, big and small.
From Maine to Manhattan, from Paris in the picture to the Super Bowl and everything in between, we bring food to those special life moments that happen outside of the home each and every day. So let's talk about Sysco at a glance from a numbers perspective. Let's start with top-line revenue. We'll do approximately $82 billion this year in an industry where size and scale have meaningful advantages. We have number one market share in the vast majority of the countries that we compete within: United States, Great Britain, Canada, Ireland, the Bahamas, just to name a few. Most importantly, with industry-leading profitability margins, a substantial competitive advantage. We have a diversified customer mix, something you'll hear more about from Kenny in a moment.
Two-thirds restaurants, from White Table Coffee to QSR, and one-third non-restaurants, a sector that tends to be more resilient regardless of the economic conditions of a given marketplace. Those are things like our government business. We are a large government contractor in the healthcare space, in the education space, just to name a few, excuse me. We are the number one industry-leading player in the vast majority of the businesses and customer types that we compete within. When you take a giant step back and you look at our company being 55 years young in the track record of durable, sustainable CAGR from a sales perspective, approximately 12%. There's only three years in our company's history where we didn't grow our top line.
That was the 2008, 2009 financial crisis, one year, and obviously the first two years of COVID when the food away-from-home industry was meaningfully compressed. Step those two back, regardless of the economic climate, Sysco grows and we grow profitably. We are the leader in the large national space, like the customer Hilton that we are in today. We are the leader in the small local space, and we are the leader in what we call the specialty business, which are bespoke, custom, unique products that a discerning chef wants to serve on their menu. We will talk about each of these things in more detail. We have meaningful growth opportunities in front of us at Sysco. We will talk about them. International as a meaningful growth vector. Specialty as a growth vector.
We will talk about specialty and what it means, as well as M&A, both tuck-in and foundational capability building. All of this, as I said a moment ago, at industry-leading profitability ratios as the most disciplined operator in the space. So let's talk a little bit more about the space. This chart is just the U.S. business, a $370 billion TAM total addressable market. We, Sysco, represent 17% share within that space. What we like most about this chart are two things. Number one, the pie itself gets bigger each and every year. Why is that? Food away-from-home has been taking market share from the grocery channel each and every year, with the exception of COVID, for the last 30, 40 years in the United States. The pie gets bigger every year.
Sysco has grown our market share within that pie each and every year during that same stretch of time. Bigger pie, bigger slice of the pie, enabling us to profitably grow our business. And there's a lot of room still to grow. And here's a key point. The Big Three in our industry have less than 40% market share in total, which is actually unusual when you look at most major business segments. There are thousands of small, mostly family-owned, independent distributors competing in this space. Size and scale matter in this space. And as we look out over the next couple of decades, we believe that our ability to grow market share profitably will accelerate over time. As was mentioned, we are the industry leader from a global perspective. So let's talk a little bit more about that.
This chart on the left-hand side shows four of our countries in the Americas. On the right-hand side shows four of our countries in Europe. As I mentioned a moment ago, we have the number one market share leading position in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, Costa Rica, and the Bahamas, to name a few. What we have in common in every country that we compete within is that we are running what we call the Sysco Play. So what does that mean? The Sysco Play means bringing a modern suite of systems to bear in the industry. That's warehouse management systems, inventory management systems, transport management systems, and selling tools in each country. What it also means is bringing our selling model to each country we compete with.
That means putting boots on the ground on the street, calling on local customers to grow the important independent local business, which is something we're doing extremely well internationally. It's about expanding our product range. In each and every country that we have gone into, we started with a more narrow range, and we've expanded it over time to represent our full breadth and capabilities across all three temperature zones. It means leveraging our purchasing scale, partnering with our best suppliers, many of whom are here at this conference, to bring their products to customers worldwide. It's important to them. It's important to us. It helps them profitably grow, and it helps us together take market share. But equally important means Sysco Brand, bringing that Sysco Brand product to our customers in each country to improve our profit ratios and also, as importantly, help that end customer save money.
When we say run the Sysco Play, that's what we mean, those wrapper of activities in each country. That also means having a robust supply chain. In many of the countries we've entered through acquisition, there were limited capabilities from an order tonight, deliver tomorrow morning perspective. And as we work to advance our capabilities in each of those countries, that's exactly what we do: create the ability for our customer to order late in the evening for delivery tomorrow morning on a tri-temperature truck with products they trust and deserve. Put all that together, the green bar on the chart for each country is our market share in 2019. The blue bar is our 2024 market share. And in each and every country that we compete within, we've grown our market share profitably. And in most of these countries, we have number one share.
So as I transition, I can talk a lot with words about how we're doing. I'd love to show you a video. Through this video, we see what our customers have to say about Sysco, what they are looking for from their food service distributor directly from their voice. So if we could run the video, please.
Every year, Sysco helps open thousands of restaurant doors, making millions of deliveries to over 725,000 customer locations all around the world.
Hey, Sysco.
Yes, Chef?
I know you're everywhere, but I want a smaller footprint. Can you get me local fresh produce?
Yes, Chef. How about a whole farm for it? We source the most local fresh produce thanks to our many farming partners within 100 miles of your kitchen.
My name is the person who changes often. Can I get everything I need from Sysco?
Yes, Chef.
From apples to aprons, we have everything you need. We offer the broadest assortment in the food service industry, including our best-in-class Sysco brand products. And if we don't have it, Sysco Marketplace will, with an expanded assortment from vetted third-party sellers seamlessly available through Sysco Shop.
What about specialty meat and custom cuts?
Yes, Chef. We offer dry-aged and hand-cut to your specification.
I need 80 lbs of onions for brunch tomorrow. Can Sysco do it?
Yes, Chef.
With Sysco Your Way, you can order until 9:00 P.M., six days per week, and with no order minimum. My morning starts early. Could Sysco help me get ahead of the day?
Yes, Chef. Our digital tools are available 24/7.
Personalized with offers, recommendations, and content just for you, from everyday staples to new inspiration.
That's great for the state, but what about Paris?
Yes, Chef. We support customers all around the world, and we can even help you expand your concept internationally.
Sysco leads with trust, offering a people-first approach to help businesses of all sizes take advantage of our international network. Because when our customers grow, we do too. With a clear purpose in mind, connecting the world to share food and care for one another so we can greet the future with confidence, optimism, and a 74,000-person strong.
Yes, Chef.
So that video does a great job of highlighting our capabilities, the breadth of our assortment, our digital tools, our sales reps, and how they bring those capabilities to market around the globe. How that converts from a financial perspective, and I'll do this very quickly because Kenny will talk about it in more detail, is the financial algorithm that we released to the market in April, excuse me, May of last year at our investor day. Top-line growth of 4 to 6%, adjusted earnings per share growth of 6 ot 8%, and a TSR of 9 to 11% when you include the robust dividend that we pay on a per annum basis. Let's talk about how we're going to deliver those financial results. The left-hand side of this chart we call our recipe for growth. The customer and our colleague is at the center of the wheel.
The why is when we improve the service that we provide to those colleagues and our customers, everything about our business improves. The five things that circle the wheel are the activities that are in place to improve that customer experience, from the tech tools we use to the assortment breadth to our supply chain getting smarter, faster, and more efficient, our sales colleagues and how we evolve them over time, and last but not least, what we call M&A through Future Horizons, which includes also cost efficiency. I'd really like to talk about the right-hand side today. There are three blocks here that are going to be the focus of the rest of my time with you this afternoon.
What we're doing to drive local growth, select growth vectors that we have for our longer-term future, and just in general, a progress report on how we're doing over the last year since we were last together in CAGNY. So let's jump in. Let's start with local growth. In aggregate, our company is doing very well from a growth perspective. We're doing extremely well in international. We're doing great with our national business, and we're doing really well with our Sigma segment. We're not satisfied with our growth in local, and I'd like to talk a little bit more about that through this five-part plan. It starts first and foremost with our sales force investments. We have the largest workforce in the industry, but we were flattish from a headcount perspective for the last four or so years, mostly because our digital tools were advancing.
We've grown our book of business to a degree that we need to increase our selling capacity so that our sales colleagues can be in front of our customers on a weekly basis, which is our expectation. We're on track this year to add 400 to 500 net new incremental sales headcounts. And the important thing to note here is that these colleagues are moving up their productivity and maturity curve at the pace we expect. We can track them on a hiring class basis, and each of our hiring classes is hitting our expected targets. The bucket next to it. It's been talked about a lot within our space, and that's an update we made last summer to our compensation model.
The headline here is we lowered base pay, put more at-risk pay through bonus and commission, and the change curve that we went through to adopt that new model is now behind us. We did see an increase in turnover at the beginning of the fiscal year back in July. That has completely stabilized. Our sales force retention is at all-time historical levels. And importantly, our colleagues are making more money in this new program because they're driving the behaviors that we're looking for them to exhibit through the compensation model. That model will optimize and tweak over time as we see necessary, but the majority of that change is now behind us. Importantly, the middle of the page, capacity enhancements. Kenny and I have approved facility expansion projects over the last two, three, four years that are now coming to life in the market.
These are places like Allentown, Pennsylvania, and the population-dense Northeast Corridor, Tampa, Florida, Sweden, Ireland, and our Greco-Italian platform, just to name a few. Each of these projects is specifically done to increase our throughput capacity so we can drive commercial activities that drive comp sales growth. Total Team Selling is the opportunity you saw the specialty businesses on the video: our produce business, our protein business, our Edward Don business, and equipment and supplies that come through that Edward Don portfolio. Bringing our sales team together to introduce those specialty capabilities to a broadline-only customer is what we call Total Team Selling, and we are growing our business profitably through that program. On the far right, selling initiatives like Sysco Your Way and Perks continue to perform, and it's about driving even more growth through those programs.
Last but not least on this page is something we call price agility, and it is something we're working on at Sysco. We have a very disciplined pricing program that is the most disciplined in the market. With that said, our customers have the opportunity to price shop digitally, and we have got competitor sales accounts, excuse me, competitor sales reps in our accounts on a regular basis. We need to equip our colleagues with the ability to be able to react in the moment within guardrails and be responsible with how they price, and we're going to call that price agility. That's something we're working on, and it's something we can talk about more in future periods. So let's talk about topic two, which is vectors of growth. We have compelling vectors of growth at Sysco, starting first with our Sysco brand portfolio.
Roughly 50% of the cases that we sell at Sysco, a 4% CAGR over the time horizon on the page, $18 billion worth of top line, bigger than many companies in the industry that we compete with them, saving our customers time, saving them money. On the middle bucket is international. We are extremely pleased with our international business, growing top line and bottom line faster than the overall company. Our profitability rate is steadily improving along with that growth, and we will achieve in international the profit rate that we currently produce in the United States. The why is that Sysco Play that I talked about earlier? There are no structural barriers that are going to get in the way from a profitability perspective. It's simply longevity and time to get each country to that targeted profitability rate. And last but not least, the specialty.
As I mentioned, our produce business, our protein business, our Italian business, Asian foods, and equipment and supplies. Today, these businesses are important, and they're at scale. Tomorrow, we have the opportunity to drive over $10 billion of growth through those programs, and we have a pathway to be able to make that happen. So my last page before I bring Kenny up is just kind of a progress report over the past year. Some highlights, if you will, on the progress that's been made. First, compelling and profitable growth, as I mentioned a moment ago, in national sales, in our international business, and our Sigma business. Each of those three major business sectors is doing extremely well versus the market, taking market share and profitably growing.
We're not satisfied with our local business, as I mentioned, and we have a strong plan in place to make the improvement necessary in that environment. We have international profit rates improving steadily year over year, and that's something that will continue over the time horizon in our future periods. We're going to leverage AI to improve our selling efficiency and our operational costs, tangible proof points, leveraging smarter tech. How that's showing up for our customers has improved Net Promoter Scores, and we know that improvement in Net Promoter Score results in future periods' sales growth. We're accelerating our Total Team Selling capabilities, removing barriers that got in the way previously to selling and getting more collaboration from our sales teams. We've delivered meaningful improvements. We're still much more work to be done. Proud and honored to be a part of this team. Our future is bright.
I'd like to bring Kenny up now to go into more details in our financial models. Kenny, over to you.
All right. Thanks, Kevin. Hello, everyone, and good afternoon. It's great to be here with all of you again in Orlando. So Kevin talked about several exciting initiatives and items happening in our business. I'll try to summarize and recap in three areas. Number one, we are the leader in a growing space. Point number one. Number two, Sysco has a strong track record of growth. Point number two. And number three, this is a really important one. We have competitive advantages, what I call ingredients, pun intended, to drive our business forward and to achieve our financial algorithm. So in my presentation today, I will add color and insights on how we translate those three things into a financial expression from a P&L standpoint, balance sheet standpoint, cash flow standpoint, as well as ROIC. So let's get going. On this page, you'll see a couple of charts.
But before I go into the details, I want to first take this time to reiterate our FY 2025 guidance across both sales and EPS. Just to remind everybody, this includes sales growth of 4% to 5% year-on-year and EPS growth of 6% to 7% year-on-year. As seen on the slide in front of you, we've achieved strong performance in the past four years. This is across both top line and bottom line, and we are on track to achieve another record-setting year. Taking a step back, since FY 2021, you can see that our CAGR for sales is about 13%, and our CAGR for EPS is approximately 34%. Sysco has proven to be resilient and able to grow in any market conditions. As you can see as well, positive leverage. That simply means GP, gross profit, is growing faster than expenses.
This attractive profile includes number one market share position in a growing industry. As Kevin talked about, size and scale really matter for us. It renders five things for us, actually, that's structurally greater than the industry. Point number one, industry-leading sales. Number two, industry-leading margins. Number three, industry-leading free cash flow. Number four, industry-leading ROIC. And the fifth one, last but not least, my personal favorite, investment-grade balance sheet, the only one in our industry. These industry-leading metrics are a position of strength and help illustrate our quality of earnings. So let's double-click into the industry itself. More specifically, our superior performance versus the average core peer that participates in our space. You can see on this page, on the income statement side, last year, we did 18.5% on gross margins, and that is 1.3 times higher than the average core peer, driven by our size and scale.
As I guide your eyes to the middle part of the page, you can see our operating margin line, which is 1.6 times higher than the average core peer. And the driver is Sysco specific. Let me give you a couple of examples. On the gross profit line, we have items such as strategic sourcing. We also have Total Team Selling, which we sell higher margin specialty products. And we're also driving, as Kevin talked about, international growth, which has a higher GP attachment rate. Moving on to the right side of the page, you can see that on the balance sheet side, we have not only the only investment-grade balance sheet, and we have the leading cash conversion from EBITDA. Let's take OCF, operating cash flow. Operating cash flow currently sits at a 70% conversion from EBITDA. Let's take free cash flow.
Free cash flow currently sits at a 50% conversion rate from EBITDA. All in, Sysco annually generates over $2 billion of free cash flow. That is almost three times higher than our average core peer, which again demonstrates the quality of earnings. Given our robust cash generation profile, we have the luxury, the flexibility, the agility to do both, invest in our business, and reward our shareholders today, tomorrow, and decades to come. So let's talk a bit more about our financial growth algorithm. So we are in year one, the first year of our three-year financial algorithm. We continue to have deep confidence in our ability to deliver consistently. Let me remind you what they are. On the sales line, 4% to 6%.
If you double-click, 1.5% to 3.5% is volume, roughly 2% is inflation, which we're seeing right now, and roughly 50 basis points is M&A contribution during the year. All in, if you move your eyes to the middle part of the page, the EPS guide calls for a 6% to 8% growth for our company. We've been improving retention within our supply chain ecosystem as our employees climb the productivity curve in the past few years. With increased retention, there comes with a basket of benefits, as I like to say. So obviously, you have increased productivity, but you also have lower hiring costs, lower training costs, improved safety, improved customer service levels, and the likes. Each of these elements positively impact our P&L and fall straight to the bottom line.
Furthermore, we are on track to deliver the annualized $100 million of savings that we spoke about during the earnings call. Annually, we target share repo of roughly $1 billion. However, recently, we upsized that $1 billion to $1.25 billion, with room to further flex up depending on M&A activity for the remainder of the year. Lastly, our capital return to shareholders via our stable growing dividend provides a yield of roughly 3%. Additionally, we plan to grow our dividends every year consistent with our Dividend Aristocrat status. Over time, you can expect dividend to grow at the same rate as our adjusted EPS. This supports the overarching goal of 9% to 11% TSR for our investors per year. Now, with this capital allocation framework, it's really important that we parlay this with an ROIC growth mindset.
This is what Kevin and I bring day in and day out across all activities of our business. This, combined with our investment-grade balance sheet, is a true key differentiator in our space and in our industry. That's a combination that's extremely powerful. This allows us to do four things. Number one, hit our financial commitment. Number two, invest for the long term. Number three, weather any storms or instability that we may face. And last but not least, reward our shareholders. Our approach is disciplined yet flexible across three areas. First, size and scale, leveraging our size and scale as the industry leader. This includes continual efforts with structural costs out and drive org and financial efficiencies. For example, driving top line through efficiency and scale network along with supply chain productivity.
Point number two, ROIC for us is not just acquiring assets and maximizing the value of that asset. It's also looking at your own book of business, right? The assets on your current books right now are strategically reallocating capital towards higher returning business and activities. And then last but not least is executing on long-term M&A. We here at Sysco have a strong track record of integrating and delivering a creative M&A with a focus on enhancing our global product portfolio with specialty capabilities and growing in markets with leading share positions. So Sysco's financial leadership position and strong ROIC have yielded industry leader in terms of ROIC, and you can see on the page, we are approximately roughly 400 basis points higher than the median of the consumer staple sector and two times of our average core peer.
Looking forward, our goal is twofold: drive value, maximize the value by maintaining our best-in-class ROIC while layering in on incremental growth that compounds over time. Now, let's use a real-life example here. International, as Kevin said, we couldn't be more proud of our international team who is delivering, and there's a lot of momentum, and it's early innings as well. So each element of the ROIC description I just went through is also demonstrated within our international segment. And the strong results delivered over the past several years is a result of it. For example, our decision to exit our JV in Mexico in roughly mid-December allows us to strategically reallocate time, resources, capital to higher returning assets that yield attractive financial returns. We're able to focus on driving momentum across our core markets, which is also building across our M&A acquisitions recently as well.
These efforts are driving strong performance in our international business. Let's take a look at the chart. You can see between FY 2022 and FY 2024, you have a sales CAGR of 10% plus, and you have an operating income CAGR of over 45%. That momentum is continuing into this year as well, most notably our last quarter. I'll reel off some numbers to give you an idea. The last quarter, international top line growth was 4%. Our local case growth within international was 5%. GP growth, gross profit, was 7% growth, and our operating income was up 27%. These strong results are mirrored across all markets. It's not just one. It's not our biggest one. It's not just Canada. It's not our second biggest one. It's not just GB. It's every market that's hitting its stride.
This is a meaningful proof point of how powerful the recipe for growth, Sysco Play that Kevin referenced earlier, is compounding growth platforms across multiple markets. Looking forward, we plan to expand our assortment, i.e., Sysco Brand, continue to leverage our global sourcing skills to buy better, to sell better, also investing headcount to continue to drive local case growth. And last but not least, unleash Total Team Selling there as well, given the new acquisitions in the past year around Ready Chef and Campbell's, which, oh, by the way, is off to a great start. Additionally, we continue to evaluate our operating model as well. For example, the shared services model that's paying dividends for us right now, and we plan to make even more progress in the coming years. This brings me to my last point for international.
We expect the momentum for international to step up even greater in the second half of the fiscal year. And more importantly, we believe the margins for international can double over time, which is more in line with our U.S. segment profitability. All of our efforts are supported by our balanced approach to capital allocation in which we are consistent and disciplined. And I'll say it again, we are consistent and disciplined. First and foremost, we will invest in our business and our people and invest for growth. We are planning for a CapEx spend of roughly 1% of sales over the long term. This consists of both growth and maintenance CapEx spend. Second, we plan on maintaining our strong investment-grade balance sheet and operate within that 2.5 times or 2.75 times net leverage ratio.
Lastly, we are committed to rewarding our investor with a steady return of capital via share repurchase and dividends. Rest assured, ROIC will be the rubric in which we use to ensure capital deployed yields optimal return across various asset classes. A picture is worth a thousand words here. Since 2015, as seen on this slide, Sysco is on track to cumulatively return approximately $20 billion back to shareholders through the end of this year, FY 2025. This is a meaningful number that represents more than half of our current market cap. This remains an important piece of the Sysco investment thesis. Our commitment to this practice is evidenced by the fact that we recently raised and upsized our share repo to $1.25 billion. Again, that number could flex up depending on M&A activity.
Said differently, between now and June, the second half of our fiscal year, we will spend $1 billion on share repo. Dividends. Again, picture is worth a thousand words here. We are committed to the long-term growth of our dividend. From a dividend perspective, we are proud of our 55-year track record of growth and payouts and our membership as part of the Dividend Aristocrat Club. You can see on the page, the decision ultimately resides with the board, but the idea of a continued dividend growth in April is likely given our historical cadence. Within our communicated payout ratio, within our communicated three-year algo, the payout ratio that we said was 40%-50% for dividends. And as such, I would naturally expect our dividends to grow in line with our EPS growth as we maintain our target payout ratio.
Again, we can deliver today, build for tomorrow, all while unlocking value to reward our shareholders. So in addition to what Kevin talked about in terms of Sysco being the only company with global scale, we believe Sysco is well-positioned structurally. Again, we have all of the ingredients to deliver compounding improvements over the long term. We are the only operator in the industry with investment-grade balance sheet, coupled with the highest margins and highest free cash flow. Our balance sheet affords us the financial tools and flexibility to make the right decision as we seek to grow our business and drive industry-leading ROIC, double-digit TSR for investors, and reward our shareholders along the way. This includes at least $1 billion of share repurchase annually for the next three years. This also includes $1 billion of dividends annually for the next three years.
We plan on not only delivering our three-year projections, but to consistently improve our financials over time. This is a great time to be at Sysco. As Kevin said, our future is extremely bright. We are positioned to win. We actually love our position currently. Thank you for your support today. With that, I'll pass it back to Kevin for closing remarks. Great. Thank you, Kenny. Clear as always. So let's wrap up. Before we wrap our presentation, I just have one last slide to talk about in summary why Sysco is an attractive investment. We view Sysco as a very attractive investment. Let's start with our positions of strength. The largest player in a growing total addressable market, just $370 billion in just the United States. We expand worldwide, leading position with leading profitability, a growing pie and a growing slice within that growing pie.
We have specific self-help activities within our one portion of our business, local case growth that needs to improve with a plan to move that needle, and we will do so. It's not a light switch. It's about progress and making progress over time. When combined with tremendous success we're posting in our other three business units, it gives us the confidence to deliver the long-range plan that Kenny talked about. Number two on the page is the resilient business model. We have hospitals and education facilities, government facilities, business and industry with companies putting people back to work five days a week. That's good for our business. That's more meals being consumed away from home. We are positioned to capitalize upon that. From a restaurant's perspective, regardless of the environmental conditions over the course of time, we have proven our ability to grow our business consistently.
We have a resilient business model. Number three, compelling vectors of growth. From an international perspective, Kenny made the points multiple times. I'll just hit the point one more time. We have a minimum of $10 billion of growth readily available in international, in the existing countries we compete within. Longer term, perhaps broader than that. We have a $10 billion plus growth opportunity within our specialty categories. Reminder again, specialty is fresh produce. It's our premium custom cut meat business that you saw in the video, Asian foods, Italian foods, and Edward Don equipment and supplies. In each of those businesses, we have less than our fair share of the market. We have 17% share overall. When we get our specialty businesses to our fair share, it is at least $10 billion worth of growth.
There are no competitive barriers that will present challenges in our ability to make progress in that regard. It's about introducing those specialty capabilities to existing Sysco broadline customers. They're choosing to go to a specialty meat player because they're a discerning white tablecloth high-end steakhouse. We, Buckhead and Newport, have those products. It's about introducing them to that chef in the right way through total team selling. $10 billion of growth. Number four on this list is strong operational discipline. Kenny's charts told the story. We are, by far, the industry leader from a profitability perspective. Operating margins, ROIC, scale matters. It's our fulfillment scale because we have more distribution centers than who we compete with. We're closer to the customer from a last mile delivery perspective. In fact, by far the most expensive part of supply chain in our industry is that last mile of delivery.
Because we are closer, we can do it more cost competitively. In fact, because we buy more food than anyone in the world and food away from home, we can partner with our suppliers, as Kenny said, to buy better so we can sell better, help drive our profit growth, and also invest in the value of Sysco Brand so more customers save money so more customers buy those products from Sysco. We will expand our competitive advantage across the entire book of business. Reminder, 60% of the business is today being done by mostly family-owned small independent distributors. Number five, balanced growth with capital allocation. As Kenny said, we have the privilege of being able to invest in our business wisely through ROIC lens while simultaneously returning value to our shareholders. We're committed to the Dividend Aristocrat status.
Kenny just talked about our dividend for the upcoming years, [which] needs to be approved by the board, but if you track it in line with our earnings growth, the dividend will grow nicely in the coming year. We have the opportunity to do both simultaneously, invest in our business and return shareholder value to our shareholders, and we're the only distributor who pays the dividend. Last but not least is a strong track record of success across 55 years. We've grown the top line of this company in 52 out of the 55 years, and our ability to confidently deliver that 9%-11% total shareholder return is one that we stand behind with confidence. Our future is bright. We're happy to be a part of this enterprise, and we couldn't be more excited about our future and where we will go together.
So with that, I think we're going to turn it over to questions. Kevin Kim, are you going to help us manage that? We have time. We've got about six minutes left. Kevin, over to you.
Great. Maybe the first question over here from Jeff over at Barclays.
Thank you very much, Jeff Bernstein from Barclays. I cover the restaurant industry along with the food service distributors. So I had a two-part question. The first part is, it seems like after a strengthening trend to close out calendar 2024, there's talk of a slowing trend perhaps to the final month of 2024 and the first couple of months of 2025. And not looking too granularly, but there's been a lot of talk about weather and holiday shifts and whatnot.
I'm wondering whether you would attribute any or all of that slowdown to those two things alone or whether you think there's some underlying change in consumer behavior that might be part of the reason? My follow-up is just, if that was to be the case and your business was to see a slower sales trend with your fiscal 2025 guidance just reiterated earlier today, are there other self-help initiatives that you have to say, regardless of what the sales are, we're hitting the earnings, just trying to get a sense for your comfort around whether those two are married or not? Thank you.
Yeah, great question, Jeff. Mike's not on. I'll do one of these. Hold on. Can you hear me now? Yes, I think so. All right. We appreciate the question, Jeff.
And we understand the reason for the question given the extreme weather patterns over the last couple of weeks and what select restaurant names have said publicly. I'd encourage you all to look back at just the broader compendium of data. For 52 to 55 years, we've profitably grown our top line. That's a strong track record regardless of environmental conditions. We have the ability to profitably grow. Jeff, you implied self-help activities between the headcount we're adding, the supply chain enhancements that we're making, our ability to take market share profitably both domestically and globally. We're confident we can grow our business regardless of traffic conditions to restaurants. Yeah, the start of the year we said in our earnings call a couple of weeks ago has been choppy, mostly due to some pretty extraordinary weather events.
As it relates to other factors that may or may not be involved, tariffs and what's being said and written about them, Jeff, it's too soon to tell in that regard. We'll talk more about that on our earnings call. Nothing for us to report at this time. We are confident in our ability to deliver our long-term financial algorithm and to profitably grow the business consistently regardless of macro environmental conditions. Again, given 17% market share overall and a lot of business to be acquired profitably. Kenny, any additional points?
Yeah, Jeff. On the cadence for the remainder of the year, the reason why you sense confidence from me on stage is because, as Kevin said, most of the lift on EPS is self-help. Think about the $100 million of annualized savings that we are already executing starting in January.
At the same time, we also have portfolio diversification in our business as well. So restaurant, yes, it is an important part of our business, two-thirds, but one-third is actually non-restaurants. And we're doing really well in that space. Think about healthcare. Think about senior living. Think about education and the likes. We also have a very strong international business too that's growing double-digit as you saw earlier on the chart. That's point number one. Number two, in the back half right now, we're not expecting a severe market bounce back. Right. Again, we're expecting modest improvement in the back half of the year. But to your last question, if the market got worse, it got worse, what would we do? Well, the good news about Sysco is we have a lot of levers in the P&L, and we continuously flex muscles around the cost side as well.
We did it last year. We're doing it this year, and we have a robust pipeline in place to ensure that we achieve our four-year target.
Great. Maybe next question over here with Lauren.
Thank you. Lauren Silberman, Deutsche Bank. Building a little bit off of Jeff's question, can you talk about your confidence in reaccelerating local case growth when we should start to see some improvement and just how you're thinking about case growth across the rest of the business? Thank you.
Thank you for the question. We're confident in our ability to improve our local business profitably. That is the most important word of the sentence. We're not going to chase cases. We're not going to sell product below cost. We're not looking for a light switch improvement from off to on. What we are committed to producing is consistent improved progress.
And the chart that I showed, I don't have time to flip back to it, I don't think, but it's a five-part plan. It starts with the headcount growth. It's math. By growing our headcount, we increase the number of people that are boots on the street, out knocking on doors. The new people we hire are chartered to open new accounts, to open new business. The news of our earnings call, and I'm reiterating it today, is all of our cohorts of hiring over the past 12 months are hitting their productivity targets. And we're confident that will continue. And we will be always on from a hiring perspective going forward. As I mentioned on our most recent earnings call, we were stalled or flat from a hiring perspective for about three to four years.
The why behind that is our technology was significantly improving, increasing the amount of orders our customers placed themselves, and we didn't need to hire during that period of time. We are now in a mode where we will be consistently hiring, putting more boots on the ground, and again, it's not about us versus two names. It's our market share versus the 60% of the market share that is outside the big three, and we can compete very effectively against the other bigger names in this space as well, so that's the number one is the headcount. The second one that gives me the most confidence is the supply chain capacity expansions that I mentioned. The buildings that we are opening, both domestically and globally, are in extremely targeted, specific, target-rich environments.
I mentioned the population-dense Northeast corridor, the exploding growth that's happening in the Florida market, and the international cities that we have gone to are places with strong food service culture, huge market share opportunities, and what we needed was capacity. Throughput capacity, storage capacity so we can broaden our range, and our Greco business. I have tremendous bullishness on our Greco business. We've expanded and relocated two of their facilities, and we opened a net new building in Los Angeles, which is the second largest Italian market in the United States, but we have a small fraction of the Italian business that will change through Greco LA. So for time's sake, I won't name all the others. We're confident in our ability to improve local, and we will do so profitably.
We're equally confident that the other three business sectors that we compete within are going to continue their incredibly strong track record of success. And his numbers that he shared on international are impressive. Our national sales business, we've not just grown the top line. We've expanded our profitability rate within national at the same time, and our SYGMA business is growing nicely from a top and bottom line perspective as well.
I think that's all the time we have. Please join me in thanking Sysco, and let's take it to the breakout room.