All right, if everyone could take your seats for the next presenter. Next up, we're very excited to welcome Sysco back to the CAGNY Conference. Before I do my full intro, please join me in thanking the company for generously sponsoring tonight's dinner. I've seen the menu, and let's just say I'm excited. Thank you, guys. On to the intro. It's great to welcome Sysco back to the CAGNY Conference, a company that last year generated nearly $69 billion in sales with a market cap of nearly $40 billion. We're joined here by Kevin Hourican, President and CEO, Neil Russell, Interim CFO, and Kevin Kim, VP of Investor Relations. You know, three years ago, Kevin Hourican joined Sysco and was kind enough to present here just weeks into his tenure. At that time, he shared a platform for growth for Sysco.
Since then, Kevin and the team have proven just that. That platform, now recognized as the Recipe for Growth, has enabled Sysco to gain share and perhaps most importantly, do so profitably. Please join me in welcoming Sysco, and with that, I'll turn it over to Kevin.
Okay, great. Thank you, Andrew. Appreciate Andrew and the CAGNY board having us here. It's an honor and privilege for our opportunity to be here with you again. It's nice to be back in person three years since the last time we were together, or two virtual years in a row. It just does not replace or match the opportunity for us to be able to be in a room, and we look forward to the breakout that we have directly after this. As Andrew just said, we really look forward to dinner. Our culinary experts will be in that room. We've got cuisine stations from across our portfolio of products, and we look forward to having the opportunity to talk with you one-on-one this evening if you are able to make it. Without further ado, let's go ahead and jump in.
Many of you know a lot about Sysco. As I talk about Sysco and communicate who we are, to our employees, to our investors, I start with this, which is that we are 50% a supply chain organization, and we are 50% a food sales and marketing company. We need to do both, and we need to do both extremely well to continue to lead the industry. Today I'm gonna talk with you about how we are doing exactly that, the transformation that is happening within our supply chain and the transformation that is happening within our food sales and marketing group. Let's start with some of the most basic facts. We are today the leader in this industry. We have the most broad and capable supply chain with the most number of distribution nodes in the industry.
What that means specifically is that we are the closest to our end customer, which means we can get there at the lowest net landed cost and at an extremely high level of service. We have the largest sales organization on the planet from a food distribution, food away from home perspective, 7,500 sales reps strong, best trained in the industry, and statistically, they have the highest net promoter score by a wide margin in the industry. Robust, strong capabilities and the Recipe for Growth that Andrew just communicated a moment ago is how we're gonna take those capabilities to the next level. A little bit more about Sysco and who we are. Again, we are the global food service distributor. We call ourselves the backbone of the food away from home industry.
Some just fun stats on the chart from the overall size of the company to the number of countries we compete within. To be crystal clear on this component, we operate within 10 countries, but we do business in 90-plus countries. The difference between those two things is the food export business that we own called IFG, which is a nice little growth engine for our company based in Florida, but expanding its reach across the world. 71,000 colleagues, as I mentioned, 7,500 sales reps who are absolute experts in food. They are ex-chefs, they are ex-restaurant owners, they are culinary school grads. They have a tremendous passion for food. Our delivery partners are the face of this company. They are who is in our customer's place of business every week, and they create lasting relationships with our customers.
Our total addressable market is more than $350 billion. We are the industry leader, but yet we have only 17% market share. Highly fragmented market, a growing market, which I'm gonna get to in a minute. We have an opportunity to do really, really strong profit business growth in this space. I love this chart. The left-hand side is a 30-year span. The bottom line going upward is the food away from home % to total sales. The other line is the grocery store channel. It's been coming down over that same period of time. That huge dislocation was three years ago, one month from today, when COVID hit. We were all told to go home, stay home, don't leave your homes.
Obviously, you can see that had a tremendously negative impact on our business for a reasonably short period of time. The punchline here is the industry is back. We are back as a company. The industry is back. We are above where we were at the high watermark pre-COVID. If you look at that January statistic, January was particularly strong with a really strong performance. That's just not Omicron overlap versus 2019 January was a very strong month. A little bit about who we are as a company. I like this chart a lot. It shows the 10 segments of business that we operate within. As I mentioned before, we are fully diversified. We are the backbone of the food away from home channel. We are number one in eight out of the 10 segments that are on this chart.
For the two that we're not number one, we have a strong position. More importantly than that, 66% of our business is restaurants, but our ability to grow profitably, not just in the restaurant business, but across the food away from home sector, is robust and strong. Even in the sectors where we are number one we still have enormous headroom still to go. What I love about this chart is the diversification and the type of different business sectors that we serve from government all the way to single mom-and-pop operated restaurants. Many of you know us, Sysco, as a Broadline distributor, a Broadline range of products delivered on a tri-temperature truck in a timely manner, filled in full. What you may not know as much is that we are the leader in what we call specialty foods.
We own and operate the largest specialty produce business in the U.S. We own and operate the largest specialty center of plate business in the United States, and we have supplemented that over the last year through the acquisition of an Italian distributor platform called Greco, and I'm gonna talk about that more in a minute. Sysco purchases more local fresh produce than anyone in the industry. 10 million cases of local produce purchased from over 500 local farms, and that matters. It matters because the freshness that we're able to bring to our customers, and it matters because restaurants desire to be able to have produce that's been sourced locally on their menu, and we are working to expand our local and our fresh assortment. Another key component of our growth and our profitability is Sysco Brand.
We really appreciate and admire the companies on the left-hand side of this page. Household names, foundation brands in our country and across the globe. On the right-hand side, you can see the cadre of Sysco brands, and on the top, if you look, $18 billion of sales, $18 billion of sales coming from Sysco brands. One brand alone, Sysco Classic, does over $5 billion per year, and it's more than 50% of the cases that get delivered to one of our local customers are from one of the Sysco brands that you see on the right-hand side.
As I mentioned, the Greco acquisition that I described earlier, we were able to bring to our family Bellissimo and its family of products as well as Greco and its family of products to significantly improve our Italian offering. You'll see those brands meaningfully grow over time. The importance of this component is the Sysco Brand case that gets put on that truck is meaningfully more profitable than a national brand case. We have growth potential in Sysco Brand even now, even though we are already at 50+%. I'd like to talk a little bit about national sales. National sales is about 50%, or CMU, as we call it, contract bid business, is about 50% of our business. It is a large and important component of what we do. The punchline is Sysco is winning meaningfully in national sales.
The why deserves a little bit of a discussion. Number one is a national reach and scale, the ability to go coast to coast. Many of these customers don't want to work with multiple distributor partners. They wanna have one partner. They wanna have deep integration with your technology tools, so there's frictionless ordering for their operators. They want reliability of on time and in full of a broad assortment. We at Sysco can check all of those needs. They want fulfillment strength. They want to never be out of stock, and they don't want for their restaurants ever to have to not have a product and do a substitution on their menu coast to coast. We're winning meaningfully. They also want dedicated sales reps who are knowledgeable about them specifically and what their needs are. We're checking each of those boxes in a meaningful way.
What is important is on the right-hand side of the page. We're meaningfully improving the profitability of national sales. How? Further penetrating Sysco Brand. We're working on introducing specialties, so perhaps they were buying frozen and dry from us for a long time. Now we're deeply penetrating in produce and protein, and those are higher margin, higher growth categories for us. We're working on each and every one of those contracts for margin optimization. We are pleased that year to date we are ahead of both budget in volume and in margin rate from our contract bid business. Let's talk about our total business across the entire enterprise.
As Andrew said, three years ago, we stood up on stage and talked about Sysco being the biggest in the industry and the by far most profitable in the industry from an EBITDA as a % of sales perspective, we wanted and needed to become a growth company. The best companies in the world are growth companies in the industries with which they compete within. This chart does all the talking that I need it to do. We are meaningfully outperforming the industry in total and have been doing so now for meaningful consecutive quarters. We are pulling away from the pack, and I'd like to talk with you about how and why. The how and the why is what this chart shows, which we call internally the Recipe for Growth. Yes, it's a play on words.
It's in our nod towards food, it literally is our Recipe for Growth for how we will drive growth. It starts with our purpose, which is at the top of the page, connecting the world to share food and care for one another. Those words, carefully chosen, motivate our employees. They motivate us to go the extra mile, to help a supplier, to help a customer, to do more than those we compete against, to provide what our customers and our colleagues need to be successful. Importantly, it's a growth wheel. Each of the five elements, which I'm gonna walk you through today, feed each other. They work in concert with each other, it's the aggregate of all of them working together that creates differentiation from those that we compete against, which is allowing us to win share.
I have a video I'd like to show that does a better job than I can of explaining this through the eyes of what our customers see. If you could roll the video, please.
How do you grow an already vibrant food service industry? With unmatched ingredients and the perfect recipe. This is our Recipe for Growth. Sysco is at the heart of food and service, and at the heart of Sysco, you'll find customers, our customers, the hardworking, the creative, the resilient, the leaders, partners, and friends. They inspire everything we do, every initiative, every offering, every single day. Because running a restaurant is hard, and we're here to help.
When we first started the business, we were driving to, like, three or four different places to get paper goods, to get produce, to get our cheese. Now with Sysco, it's pretty much a one-stop shop.
We were looking for something we can order daily, do inventory at night after we close. That way, it doesn't stop us during the day. That's where Sysco came in.
You took A lot of your time to sit down with me and walk me through the menus and show me the menus. You even offered your chefs to help me with it.
I don't think we would be here if it wasn't for the strong relationship and the understanding and the dedication that Sysco has towards us and our staff and our team. It's been a real pleasure.
We're constantly listening to our customers, transforming our business to better serve their needs. We've completely reimagined how they shop, how they order, how they receive the products they need. With improved digital tools, we're making it easier to do business with us. We've increased delivery frequency and made order cutoffs even later. While we've always had the most robust offering in the industry, it's now fresher and more local than ever before, with highly competitive prices. In fact, Sysco sells more locally sourced produce than anyone else. Plus, we're growing our industry-leading team of product specialists while introducing new solutions and technologies to better serve our customers. We're just getting started. Always evaluating our offerings and improving them for our customers, expanding upon our successes, scaling programs nationally and globally. Through all this growth, we're not losing sight of what matters most.
That's why we're doing our part to protect our planet with sustainable practices. From the produce we help grow using indoor farming techniques to the growing fleet of electric trucks we drive, Sysco is committed to reducing our impact on the environment.
It is undeniable that Sysco is the leader in the food away from home industry. Our Recipe for Growth has made us more agile, more innovative, and more customer-centric. We are building unprecedented momentum as Sysco becomes a true growth company. Looking towards the future, we will continue to push the industry forward as we expand our current offerings and innovate new ones, because that's what our customers have come to expect from us at Sysco. We're delivering success for our customers through industry-leading people, products, and solutions. Our vision is clear, our purpose is strong, and our time is now. Okay, great. What I love about that video is it brings forward the ethos of who we are as people, what we are as a company, and what we're doing to better serve our customers.
From experts in food to experts in supply chain, to going the extra mile by having a later in the evening order cut off and doing what's necessary to earn every last case from every customer we serve. In aggregate, that's the Recipe for Growth. I'd like to take a quick turn through each of the five pillars, highlighting one or two things from each of them that can help you understand the full spectrum of the story that we are building at Sysco and why it's winning in the marketplace. The first is digital. The reason we started here is our digital tools going back three years ago did not meet our expectations for how we wanted to serve our customers, and we have made remarkable progress across the past three years.
Our goal here is to improve the purchase experience, remove friction, make it easier for our customers to do business with Sysco, inspire them to buy more products from us, most importantly, personalize their experience. Because our website is a one-to-one B2B website, it can be customized for each and every customer we serve. The emails they receive from us are customized to the type of cuisine they buy. The pricing they see on our website and in those promotional emails is unique to them, understanding the elasticity of that item for them. As I said, we made substantial progress in digital over the past few years. The second is products and solutions. We're in the food business. Tonight, we'll be able to enjoy many of our best products. We wouldn't be who we are without having the broadest assortment in the industry.
The improvements we've made over the last year is we've put tremendous effort, especially in the face of stiff inflation, to improve our partnership with our suppliers through what we call strategic sourcing to create value, to be able to pass that value on to our customers. No one in the industry that we compete within should be able to buy food at a better cost than Sysco. Second is advancing Sysco brands. We're making meaningful progress in the penetration of Sysco brand cases. Why is that important? Retention of that customer is higher, profitability is the case of the higher, and their trust in Sysco goes up, more Sysco products they make. One of the things I'm most proud of is the next sector down, which is the growth in cuisine segments.
The purchase of Greco and Sons and the expansion of that platform across the country, we have doubled our Italian share in the last 18 months. Doubled our Italian share. I'd like to go on to supply chain. This is a core strength of our company. As I mentioned, we have more distribution nodes than anyone we compete with across the globe. We are closer to that end customer than anyone, but we're not satisfied with where we are. We are innovating our supply chain to allow us to efficiently have a late in the evening order cut off, deliver six plus days per week, and to do so in a more flexible manner to meet our customers where they are. We recently launched our first what we call omni-channel pilot, which is to separate the front end from the back end of our supply chain.
Let the customer be delivered from the closest distribution center to where that restaurant is, but stock the inventory where we find it to be most optimal. Essentially, cross-docking merge-in- transit is what we now have. It will lower transportation costs, it'll increase product availability to our customers, and it'll lower our networking inventory capital investment. It's a win-win-win. This is a relationships business. I hope you saw that in the video. Neil's got a great video that he's gonna show that's gonna bring it to life even more. This is a relationships business. 7,500 salespeople strong, we are increasing the penetration of what we call specialists. That's in produce, that's in center of plate, and that's in Italian.
We are investing to grow each of those three sales force presences and then combining them with what we call the generalist who owns the account to do team-based selling. We have a team that sits above those professionals that essentially is the quarterback that allocates that talent to the right restaurant at the right time with the right skill set. Imagine a customer that's been buying from us for Broadline for years and has not bought producer specialty protein. Our ability to have a targeted visit with a targeted reason to buy from Sysco today is what we are doing better than ever at Sysco, and it's paying big dividends. Last but not least on the five Recipe for Growth tours around the wheel is what we call Future Horizons, and it's a combination of three things. First and foremost, it's structural cost out.
It's about being relentless, relentless at taking out cost to invest into growing. Number two is tuck-in M&A to help grow our ability to better serve our customers or expand into adjacent businesses or expand into white spaces from a geography perspective. We've done good work over the last few years in acquisitions. There's plenty of great work still in front of us with Joel Grade leading the charge, running business development for Sysco. Last but not least is sustainability. Neil is gonna talk a lot about sustainability when he comes up, so I'm not gonna steal any of his thunder, but we are proud to be the first in our industry to make a science-based commitment goal to re-reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. We're pleased and proud to be doing that work.
This is my last slide, and as I go to wrap up, my key message here is it's only at Sysco can you expect all of these five things coming together, working in concert to create the differentiation. It's differentiation that creates a durable, sustainable, competitive advantage, and that is what we are building at Sysco. We're already the largest and by far most profitable on an EBIT DA % of sales. When you combine growth orientation on top of that bedrock foundation of financial strength, we have the opportunity to pull away and gain even more share in a highly fragmented $350 billion business. We have the opportunity to continue to expand our assortment. I mentioned our expansion into more local fresh. We talked about being right on price, using best-in-class technology to provide each customer item-specific pricing.
We talked about taking our supply chain, already a robust strength for the company, and increasing the number of distribution nodes we have, which Neil will talk about. More importantly, meeting the customer where they are. What they've told us is they want a later in the evening order cutoff. Think about on how basic that is. If the evening was busier than they expected and they run out of salmon, they wanna know that Sysco has their back and that we're gonna be there tomorrow morning to bring them fresh fish to keep their business running. We're gonna talk about that in detail as time goes on. The best proof point of that project is what we call Sysco Your Way.
Sysco Your Way is a program that we rolled out this past year, and it is creating a step change level of customer service to our customers. Late in the evening order cutoff, six plus day per week delivery, dedicated driver, dedicated sales partner. We are posting double-digit increases in top line and bottom line growth in the Sysco Your Way neighborhoods, we have launched more than 300 of those neighborhoods since the pilot began a little over a year ago. The second example is a program that we have called Sysco Perks. Sysco Perks is for a customer that is outside of a Sysco Your Way neighborhood, they have a profit profile that is rich to us. It's a VIP, invitation only, loyalty program, loyalty club.
We launched it in the fourth quarter of last year. We have enrolled more than 10,000 customers in Sysco Your Way in less than 90 days. Why? Because it meets exactly the needs that they have. We are extremely pleased with the lift that we are posting in top line and bottom line with the customers that we have enrolled. For every other customer that we serve, it's about being right on price, having the broadest assortment, having a relationship with them and being there for them by delivering on time and in full. We are pleased and proud of the progress that we're making, that we have become a growth company. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Neil, our Interim CFO, who's doing an outstanding job and my partner in helping run the company. Neil, come on up.
Thank you, Kevin. Appreciate that. To all of you listening to us on the webcast, either live or on a recorded basis, thanks for joining us. Glad to have you. For those of you in the room, it sure is great to be back live at CAGNY here with you today. I know if you're in the room, what you're thinking, "Wait, are those two speakers different heights?" The answer to that is yes. I'm actually stalling for a minute here to give Mark and team some time in the back to lower the camera. Are we good? Okay. Let's go ahead and dive into some financial information here. I'm gonna do my presentation in two parts. Let me talk to you about the first half of the fiscal year for us.
For those of you that don't know us that well, we're a fiscal year company. When I say first half, I'm talking about the six months that ended December. As Kevin said, I'll spend the second part of my presentation talking to you about sustainability and DEI at Sysco and why that is so important to our long-term future and growth. Starting with the financials and looking at the slide that's in front of you, we had a tremendous first half of the year. Sales growth was more than 15% for the first six months compared to the prior year. Volumes in the U.S. for us grew 6.3%, and local volume increased 4.3% for us. Very healthy top line, very healthy volume growth for us throughout the first half of the year that we're very proud of.
That led to gross profit dollar growth that was very strong for us for the first six months of the year as well. Gross profit dollars grew nearly 17%, and gross margin as a percentage of sales gained 24 basis points despite relatively high inflation, growing to nearly 18% or a little more than 18%. Inflation did moderate as we went through the first six months of the year. It's still fairly high single digits for us, and we would expect that to continue to moderate just a little bit further as we work through the end of our fiscal year. We've done a very good job as a company continuing to pass the inflation through both with the CMU type customers that Kevin talked about, as well as those local independent customers. Our teams have done a very nice job managing inflation throughout the process.
That leads to very strong profit growth for us. Adjusted EBITDA grew nearly 15%, and earnings per share grew about 26% for the first six months of the year. The second quarter for us was the most profitable second quarter we've ever had in the company's history, and that's going back 53 years. The company is performing very well, and we've had tremendous profit growth. Let's go ahead and talk a little bit about expenses and some of the drivers that are alluding to that strong profit growth. We've talked to you about three different key expenses we've had in the business. Snapback costs, which were generally costs related to the great resignation and the recruitment and staffing of the operation like we and many other companies have faced.
I want you to think about sign-on bonuses, retention bonuses, recruitment fees, advertising fees, marketing fees to get jobs back into the business. That is what we call snapback costs. We've also had productivity costs as part of the business, 'cause think about the large wave of new colleagues we have in the business and their relative productivity compared to the average tenure associate and what that means in terms of cost for our business. We also have what we call transformation costs, purposeful investments into the long-term growth of the business. You can see on the chart here that across the last couple quarters, we've had more than $60 million decrease in those expenses. In fact, those snapback costs that I mentioned, they're now eliminated in the business. We've worked through that process.
The productivity costs, as you can see, are now about half of what they've used to be. The productivity is increasing throughout the operation, and we feel very good about the trajectory there. You can see a small decrease in the transformation costs, and that's planned and purposeful as part of our trajectory. We will always have some amount of those transformation costs because as Kevin just walked you through that Recipe for Growth, we're gonna continue to invest in the long-term health of our business, and these costs are coming down in the right trajectory that we like to see for the long-term health. We're very pleased with what we see across these three specific costs. While we're on the topic of costs, let's talk about what we call cost out across the business.
Now I wanna pivot to more of a structural cost conversation. Different from those three categories I just spoke to you of, structural costs that we've taken out of the business have now totaled more than $750 million across the business. What kind of costs are structural costs that we've taken out? I want you to think of things like administrative staffing positions, back office type support functions, where we've gotten better at automation using AI and other things to permanently take staff out of the operation and reduce our costs even lower. I want you to think about things like supply chain efficiencies that we've improved on, invested in, digital technologies that we've invested in that are driving costs lower on a permanent basis.
We've also done things that we call regionalization across our U.S. business and across Canada, where we've taken groups of sites and put a group management team over instead of a singular management team. That's been very successful for us. Not only has it helped us reduce cost, it's helped us improve the flow of decision-making and the accuracy in which we're handling the operation. Those are examples of things that we mean when we say structural cost out. We've delivered this goal earlier than planned. The team has done a really nice job managing these costs for us. What are we using this to do? We're using this to fund our future.
When you hear us talk about the Recipe for Growth, the supply chain transformation, the digital technologies, things like Sysco Your Way that Kevin just described, we are funding all of that work through these type of structural costs out, which is not only allowing for near term but long-term profitable growth for us. We're very pleased with the numbers that we have here, the pace in which we've done it, and any guidance we provide to you, all of this is included within the guidance. We are funding our long-term growth. It's part of our guidance, and we're very pleased with the trajectory that we have here. What does that mean in terms of profitability for the business?
This is a chart that we're very proud of because we'd love to show EPS charts that have a trajectory up and to the right, and that's what you see here. Now, we offered guidance at our last earnings call just a few weeks ago, and that's what you see on the far right here. It's an annualized number and the guidance we gave. We gave a range for earnings per share for this fiscal year of $4.00-$4.15 per share. Let's call it the midpoint that you see here on the $4.07, and we're here today to tell you that we remain on track for that, and we feel good about the trajectory of the guidance for this year. You can see how that compares to the prior years. Obviously, the dip related to COVID.
Looking back over time and comparing to the prior year, 25% earnings per share growth. That number will also represent 15% earnings per share growth compared to the all-time high that Sysco had in 2019. This is gonna be a very strong year for Sysco. Tremendous growth, not only compared to prior year, but compared to all-time high with the earnings per share. What do we do with that earnings that we generate as a business? We have a very balanced approach to capital allocation and the priorities in which we speak to. Let me talk about each of these, and I'll give you some examples of a couple of these as well. First and foremost, as you can tell based upon the comments Kevin and I are giving you today, we are investing in the business.
We are investing in long-term growth. Think about our fleet, think about our facilities, think about the technology that's needed to continue to advance the business and growing over time. That is the first priority for us. Included in investing in the business are things like what we'll call the smaller tuck-in acquisitions. That's common in our industry. We have a full pipeline of good opportunities. Kevin mentioned Joel Grade, who's running that part of the business for us, doing a fantastic job with different types of specialty companies, smaller Broadline companies, different geographies that make sense for us. Investing in the fleet, the facilities, the technology, and the smaller tuck-in type acquisitions is a first priority to grow the business for the long term. Second is to maintain that strong balance sheet.
We have a targeted leverage ratio range, net debt to Adjusted EBITDA of two and a half to two and three quarters times, and we ended in that second quarter at right at three times. We've taken debt down meaningfully over the last couple of years and are very much on a path and trajectory to fall within what we feel is that very appropriate and good range for our balance sheet. Speaking of debt, and on that debt side, we have a lot of confidence and feel very good about where we are because 95% of our debt is of that fixed nature. Even though we're reducing debt and reducing that risk on the balance sheet and bringing that down to this really good range, what debt we do have is of the fixed rate variety, so we feel good about that.
Third, importantly, is our ability to return value to shareholders. As we think about this, we think about it really in two forms: the dividend, which I'll speak of, and also share repurchases, which, as you know, for this year, we committed to up to $500 million worth of share repurchases for this fiscal year. I'm proud to announce today that we're actually active back in the market, working our way towards that goal. We're actively buying back our shares as I speak to you right now. Looking at that first priority of investing in the business, also glad to announce today that we actually have seven new buildings underway for us to expand Sysco. That's across the business segments and portfolio that we have that you can see on the bottom of the slide.
Those are broadline facilities, those are Sygma facilities, it's Greco facilities, some of our specialty meat companies, and even our business in Sweden. Of course, because of that, you can see it's across geographies. Across the United States, we have different locations where you see those Sysco labels and Sweden and then Ireland, all new buildings going into place for us as we speak. In addition to the seven new buildings, we also have expansion underway in several other facilities. This is growth that's concentrated really in high potential markets and cuisine segments that we feel very good about. We've analyzed specifically where to put these new buildings. They're gonna help us reduce costs. We're gonna reduce our cost to serve, we're gonna reduce stretch miles, and we're gonna get better at how we're operating.
We're bringing down costs, we're bringing up the opportunity to serve our customers more with these types of expansions. We're prioritizing these investments. This doesn't particularly mean a large increase in capital spending. We're falling within the ratios that we've set and that we've guided you towards over time. This is not incremental increase, it's prioritization of the choices for the right long-term growth for Sysco. As we think about that return to shareholders, and as I said, it's a balance between the dividend and the share repurchases. You can see another nice up into the right chart here with over time, the amount of value that we've returned to shareholders. Over the last nine years, over $14 billion returned to shareholders through both of those forms of share repurchases and dividends.
We remain committed to the share repurchase, as I've said, and the dividend is a priority not only to pay, but to increase over time with the board. Speaking of dividends, Sysco is a member of the Dividend Aristocrats, and that's a pretty exclusive club. To be a member of this club, you have to increase your dividend for 25 consecutive years. Now, Sysco has actually more than doubled that. We've been increasing our dividend for 53 years. To increase your dividend more than 50 years, there's only eight consumer stocks that can say that, and there's only another four that are actually here at CAGNY this week. We're very proud of our commitment to return value to our shareholders through the dividend and its increase, and we're proud to be a member of the Dividend Aristocrats.
The commonality across these companies is you need to have a very resilient business model, which is what we have. You also need to be able to generate a lot of cash in order to make that type of commitment, and we also have that. It's a fantastic opportunity for Sysco to have such a strong, resilient business model that generates as much cash as we do, and to be able to share that return with you along the way, and to have the commitment to continued increases as we do that. Why is that important? I'm sure, as you know, if you were to look at the grouping of companies that are the Dividend Aristocrats and compare that to the performance of the overall market, the Dividend Aristocrats perform more than 700 basis points better than the overall market in just the last year alone.
Again, a very exclusive club to be part of and something that we're very, very proud of. Now let me pause for a minute here and change gears and talk about sustainability. Why do we spend so much time talking about sustainability at Sysco? Well, simply put, and I could just stop after saying the following sentence, it's the right thing to do. We take that further. It actually is obviously very important to all of us and important to where we go from here because we know that environmental, social, and governance issues are important to the long-term health of your company and the ability to continue to grow. Not only is it the right thing to do, it's good for business. That's why we're committed to it, and that's why we spend so much time on it.
Now like Kevin did, for me, there's gonna be a video that I'm gonna show you that can do a better job describing how this plays out in our business than I can. Let me set this up for you a little bit. I wanna introduce you to Marnie. Marnie is a sales consultant of Sysco. She works up in Oregon. She's so good at supporting her customers that one of her customer locations, the owners wrote her a letter to thank her for their support. I wanna introduce you to Dimple and Sumesh, immigrants who had a dream to come to America, open a restaurant, and live their dream of sharing their food and their passion for cooking with others. No sooner did they open their restaurant than the next day in Oregon, a forest fire ravaged the town. All around them was destruction.
You can stand on the front porch of their restaurant called Gather and see nothing but destruction. Somehow, some way their facility survived. They relied on Marnie to help them figure out where do they go from here, what tools does Sysco have, what product does Sysco have, how can we help them in such a time of stress that they never would have imagined would be part of their portfolio, and how can they help their community? That's why that purpose that Kevin spoke of is so important to us. We are going to drive the business. I'll take you back to the line chart that Kevin showed you and showed Sysco growing at a certain pace and a gap to the market. We're gonna continue to do that.
We're gonna continue to outpace the market with our growth. We're gonna do it the right way, thinking about the long-term health of the enterprise and the future generations that are gonna follow us. I think this video does a nice job showing that to you. Mark, let's cue the video.
Hi.
Hi.
Good to see you.
Good to see you.
We have something to tell you.
I've written it down.
Okay. Dear Marnie, when we moved here from India three years ago, we came with a dream of building a table big enough to bring the world together. For us, food is a language that needs no translation. It speaks caring, speaks connection, and says family. No sooner had we hung this sign on Gather, the next day the wildfires came, and the entire town was forced to evacuate. This one was an amazing antique store. Beautiful pieces from all over the world.
It's all gone.
Man, oh, man.
Fire just came right up to the.
Right. Yeah.
Our restaurant survived. When we met a few days later, the path forward was clear. You, Marnie, were ready to make it happen. We had to open. The people needed most was hope. We grabbed everything and tried to feed as many people as we could. You and the community rallied behind us. Dimple, I think you should do this if you are ready.
Without delay, you were there, upgrading our online ordering, extending our reach with social media, drawing our attention to safety updates, and helping us in every possible way. We could never imagine that a company as big as Sysco would treat us like the family we have become. At every turn, you were there to drive us like partners, help us craft our.
Menu. Give us a seat at your table. It's people like you that remind us every day how much better we all are when we work together, people like you who make new immigrants from half across the world feel at home and feel looked after, people like you, Marnie, who forge such strong relationships. Thanks for your love and care. You are an important part of our growth. For all you have done and that you are for us, we say thank you.
You guys Like, you make my job amazing.
We never imagined a company as big as Sysco could treat us like the family we've become." That's why we do that work the way we do. As we think about sustainability, there are three primary pillars we think about and categorize the work: people, products, and planet. We have categories of work within each of those pillars, and there's a lot of details within it. This work is important to our customers, of course, as you just saw. It's important to our colleagues. There's not an interview I have with someone joining the organization that doesn't say to me, "I read your sustainability report and have a question about this." It's important to our communities, of course, and it's important to our planet. If we wanna continue to source the produce that we're sourcing, there is no planet B. There's no other choice.
We have to do this work. At Sysco, there's one table, and everyone has a seat at Sysco's table, which is why I'm proud to announce today our new sustainability platform and our North Star of how we think about our work going forward for the next generations to follow us. That's One Planet. One Table. That's a North Star in which how we're going to think and make decisions going forward. Sysco sits in the middle of the supply chain, transitioning a bit to the importance of the business aspect of this work. We have customers who have set their own goals to make progress in this area. They need a distributor partner, a supplier, who has also signed up for those goals and can help them advance their own business. We have supplier partners that have set their own goals and want to grow.
They need to grow with a customer who has also set their own goals to help them, and that's how it's gonna work across the supply chain. You're either in or you're out, and the long-term growth is if you're in, and that's a tremendous opportunity. We're happy to take that leadership position. For others that will follow in our footsteps, we're glad to have them join us on the journey to make everything better for all of us. A few examples of some of the work that we've done. We've partnered with Cargill on some fantastic work in the southern grasslands in the United States, and 10 ranchers who are moving their herds around and actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions with the work that they're doing relative to that. We have solar facilities going in place across our enterprise.
There is one on the example screen here, in the GB for us, and we have Canada and United States facilities underway. Think of the really cool future for us, where our electric trucks, which we have an LOI for more than 800 of them out there right now, to be charged by solar on our roofs. Really cool, at dinner tonight, in addition to the awesome food you're gonna have and the fantastic chefs and the interaction you're gonna have, that electric truck is here with us tonight, and it's parked outside, and you're gonna get a chance to see it. We're excited to be able to share that with you. What I'm most proud of is what's on the far right, and that's how we set our goals. You can see it's by 2030.
We could have chosen 2050, we could have chosen 2040, but we chose 2030 'cause it's gonna be this management team that's gonna make it happen. It's not a hope and a wish, and it's not a problem for a next management team to solve for. It's this team that's gonna get it done. DEI is also extremely important to us. We want a workplace where our differences are valued and celebrated, and we're creating that inclusive culture. Our customers need to see themselves in our products, in our colleagues, and in the way in which we operate. Again, everyone has a seat at our table, and we're holding ourselves accountable to this. We're setting goals, and we're publishing updates against that. We published our first ever DEI report. It's available on the website, and I encourage you to go see it.
One small example is we had a gender and diversity goal set for 2025, and we've already achieved that goal. Now we're hard at work setting what the next goal is gonna be for us 'cause we need to make continuous progress in this area. Speaking of diverse, I just wanna spend a quick minute on our board of directors. This is a diverse, independent, and experienced board. The last three directors we've added have added strong capabilities in each of those areas to us. They're highlighted in blue on the chart. We have a 10-year policy for our board, which is rare for public companies. Our board is relatively refreshed. Think about restaurant experience, consumer experience, retail experience, technology experience. We've got all of that on this fantastic board.
It's a unique set of experiences and capabilities, and they give the management team challenges, good questions, and full support, which is the way how it should be with a great board of directors. Let me leave you with this as we think about our investment thesis. Going forward, we have tremendous growth opportunities across both the top and bottom line. We are a stronger company today than when we were here three years ago. Our Recipe for Growth transformation is working, as evidenced by the share gains we have relative to the rest of the industry. We are very much focused on the long-term growth opportunities across the business, and we're committed to returning that value to you with those strong shareholder returns that I mentioned. We've got a couple minutes for questions, so I'm gonna turn it over to Kevin Kim to lead us through that.
Great. Let's go with the first question over here. Lauren? Let's wait for the mic.
Thank you, guys. You've gained a lot of market share over the last couple of years in an environment that's been relatively favorable for Sysco, given their size and scale. You're looking to accelerate that market share. Now that the supply chain is normalizing broadly, can you just talk about your confidence in being able to accelerate that market share, given a relatively less favorable environment? Thank you.
Great. Lauren, thank you for the question. I think I'd start with the Recipe for Growth is a cumulative building platform. We stated a couple years ago what our goals were. We said we'd grow last year at 1.2 times the industry. We posted at 1.3
We said this year we'd grow at 1.35 times the industry. We're on track to be able to do that. We actually said next year, in the third year of the three year plan, we would grow at 1.5, and we're committed and confident in our ability to do that. the why, Lauren, is the Recipe for Growth is still in the very early innings. People ask me all the time in a baseball game, like, "What inning are you in?" Kind of calibrated this morning, probably the third-ish. omnichannel hasn't even been rolled out nationwide. Sysco Your Way is kicking in. We just launched it in Dublin. We launched it in Toronto. We're about to launch it soon in Paris. We're about to launch it soon in Stockholm. Sysco Perks just rolled out in November.
The good news here, specifically to the future of growth, each of these initiatives has been piloted, they've been tested, and we can see the very specific empirical outcomes. These are not hypothesis-based projects. They're specific projects with proof points backed by data, and we're in rollout mode right now. Yes, our strength of supply chain over the past 18 months has contributed to market share gains. The Recipe for Growth is what's going to create the share gains into the future years, and we're confident in our ability to hit our targets. Thank you for asking.
Great. Let's go with one more question over there, Jeff.
Great. Thank you very much. Just, Kevin, because you were here three years ago, and it was your pretty much first intro, obviously it's been an interesting three years, I'm just wondering if you could maybe briefly compare and contrast your outlook for the business today versus three years ago. What do you think is the greatest hurdle you're gonna face over the next 12-18 months in terms of the greatest headwind? Obviously, you faced plenty of headwinds over the past three, but what do you anticipate being the biggest headwind for the next 12 months?
Jeff, thanks for the question. Maybe I'll start. I'll toss to Neil to see if he has things to add. You know, I said on stage here three years ago why I joined the company, and that was my excitement to be in this industry. Food is a great space to be in. Supply chain is my passion and my work and in my career, and we are a growth company and a very large business with air quotes, only 17% share. Three years later, Jeff, I'm even more excited than the day I arrived. There's so much growth potential. We haven't talked a lot today about international. International is contributing meaningfully to us this year on a year-over-year profit growth and year-over-year sales growth perspective. Our ability to profitably grow internationally is significant. Bolt-on acquisitions growth opportunity is significant.
The work we've done with the Italian platform that we've doubled our market share in the past 18 months, and we're not even close to complete with that work yet. Largest, most profitable in our space with meaningful growth prospects and opportunities, and we're not even close to done, AKA inning three. By the way, halfway through the game, we're gonna come up with additional new growth ideas, you know, for the company. I'm even more confident than I was when I joined. It's a great company with great people, tremendous passion for our customers. Neil, I'll toss to you for additional comment.
Thanks, Kevin. Jeff, and actually Lauren, I'll build on your question, too. Three things real quick. One is that growth versus market. When you hear us talk about that, Lauren, I heard your question about the macro. It's relative to the market, right? Whatever you're gonna see the market doing, our growth is gonna exceed that. The market's up, we'll be up even more, et cetera. That growth versus the market is something that is important for us to measure and a key goal for us that, again, as Kevin said, we're on track for. Point two is that cost out program that I mentioned. We've got work to do, so there's more to come, in terms of our ability to take even additional costs out.
We feel good about the work that we're doing to identify those incremental opportunities. As I said, that's helping to fund all of this work that we're doing. We'll have a source of funding to be able to make those investments to advance the business going forward. Thirdly and importantly, our international business is performing really well, and I think that's part of the equation here to think of. International's had tremendous year-over-year profit growth, and we're seeing the turn there, with that performance. We're very pleased with where international is going for us.
I think we'll wrap it up there. Please join me one more time in thanking Sysco for their sponsoring the dinner tonight and continued support of our conference.