Hello, and thank you for joining us.
On behalf of Yum! And the KFC team, we are excited that you're attending our virtual KFC Investor Day today. I'm Jody Dyer, and I lead Yum!'s Investor Relations team. KFC is Yum's largest brand with more than 25,000 restaurants in over 145 countries, and as of Q1 twenty twenty one, accounts for approximately 48% of Yum's additional operating profit. KFC is the global leader in the chicken category and one of the largest QSR chains in the world, and it continues to grow.
The impressive unit economics fueled by strong franchise partners leads to, on average, a new KFC restaurant opening every six hours across the world. In addition to net new unit development, digital growth has been a meaningful driver. The brand added nearly $4,000,000,000 in system sales from digital channels last year alone to grow the KFC digital business to about $10,000,000,000 in system sales. To put that in perspective, if the digital business were a country, it would be KFC's largest country in its diversified portfolio. The KFC leadership team is excited to share this impressive global growth story with you today.
They plan to take you on a tour of the KFC business so you can begin to appreciate the brand's global reach. KFC is truly a distinctive brand fueled by well capitalized franchise partners with a proven development track record and great momentum as evidenced by their Q1 twenty twenty one results. Before I turn it over to Tony, a few housekeeping items. You will first hear from the KFC leadership team, followed by a brief break before we enter the Q and A portion of the event. We are broadcasting this event via our website, and it is available for playback.
Please be advised that we will not provide any brand specific or young level forward looking guidance in our prepared remarks today. Please reference the disclaimers included in the playback of this event and accessible on our Investor Relations website for important information regarding the use of forward looking statements and adjustments to operations during the COVID-nineteen pandemic. Now I'll turn it over to Tony Lowings, KSC's CEO and the KSC Global leadership team. We will begin with a brief video. Thank you, and enjoy
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We are making our finger licking good chicken available We are united by the bucket and stand on the shoulders of an iconic founder and iconic brand that will always be original.
Welcome to the KFC Investor Day. It is a real pleasure to have you with us today to learn more about our industry leading global brand. We are incredibly proud of the business we have and are excited to share our plans to continue driving rapid growth across the world. I'm Tony Lowings, CEO of KFC, and I'm here to tell you the story of nearly 1,000,000 team members, franchisees and operators around the globe. If there is one fact that defines KFC versus many other restaurants and QSR brand, our business.
We operate more than 25,000 restaurants across six continents, over 145 countries and are well on our way to delighting the entire world with the Kernel's delicious recipe. I have been with the brand for more than twenty six years, working in finance, operations and general management roles across many parts of the world. My home country is Australia, although I was born in South Africa and currently live in The United States. I ran the Latin American and Caribbean business for Yum! For a number of years and also lived in Singapore, where I was responsible for the Asia Pacific region, which, including China and Australia, accounts for roughly half of all KFC outlets.
I've been in my current role as CEO of the KFC global business for two point five years. I've seen the power of the KFC brand firsthand in more than 80 countries that I've traveled to. And having met thousands of KFC employees, it is certainly an honor to represent them today. Today, we'll explain how our team members and franchisees bring the world's best tasting chicken to much of the world, which is our theme for today, delivering buckets of growth. Delivering is obviously a reference to the massive growth that we've experienced in off premise sales through our drive thrus, click and collect and home delivery as well as our continued commitment to drive steady growth in our base business.
But in the context of delivering buckets of growth, the real focus for today is on the growth aspect of this statement. We have been successfully and steadily growing, particularly in those markets that are emerging from the depth of this global crisis, and we will continue to do so. The reasons that KFC have such a phenomenal runway and potential are threefold. Firstly, we have the most delicious finger licking food at attractive price points. Secondly, we are the leading QSR brand in the hottest growth markets in the world.
And thirdly, we have tremendous ability to execute and expand worldwide, thanks to our phenomenal base of franchisees and team members. Have you noticed how everyone these days is trying to get into the chicken game? Chicken is the protein of choice in many countries and continues to be the fastest growing segment of QSR. Fortunately for us, that is what we do. KFC is incredibly well positioned geographically for growth.
We are a true international brand and have been from the beginning. Just three years after the initial KFC franchise was founded in The U. S, Colonel Sanders opened his first restaurant outside The U. S. In 1955.
Being the chicken experts with a global footprint positions us better than most for strong growth. We have a first mover advantage in geographies such as Asia and Africa, and our existing footprint in developing markets is strong and accelerating. 90% of our growth over the last five years has come from outside of The U. S. 70% of our profits come from outside The U.
S. And China, and 95% of the restaurants we've built in the last five years are in emerging countries. Our massive global footprint also means that the KSC team is vast, diverse and growing. We and our franchisees employ over 800,000 team members, and every day, they serve 20,000,000 pieces of chicken to customers from all corners of the earth. Every year, KFC adds over 30,000 new jobs.
We also have a base of over 700 fabulous franchise partners who are integral to the success of KFC. Our future growth will be built on established track record of success. KFC has had an incredible growth trajectory since the last time we met in 2017. We have added over 4,300 restaurants to our portfolio, which is the equivalent of the entire Popeyes brand and then some. Our system sales reached CAD28 billion in 2019, a CAD5 billion increase in just three years.
We were poised to have our best year ever in 2020. Last year, of course, threw some curveballs our way but actually helped make our brand that much more relevant. It also demonstrated the resilience of our business partners and accelerated our digital transformation. COVID impacted our business differently in different geographies around the world. The markets with strong off premise capability and digital agility showed the most resilience.
We, therefore, focused our efforts and resources to rapidly maximize off premise capability in all of our markets and have been resolute in our determination to make digital part of our DNA. With the benefit of having such a vast and diverse portfolio of countries and restaurants, our brand weathered the challenges of 2020 remarkably well, as evidenced by the rapid recovery of our sales other than when physical lockdowns prevented us from trading as well as the continued strength in net new unit growth, adding close to 900 additional KFC restaurants to our portfolio in 2020 alone. Part of the reason behind our increasing brand success and the reason we can operate effectively in so many cultures and languages is that we have absolute clarity on our brand identity, every day becoming more consistent as to who we are and what we do and say. KFC is always original. Of course, this is a play on the colonel's secret recipe, but it is also the foundation of who we are.
We have an original founder. We have original food, and we celebrate the fact that every team member is a unique and original individual in their own right. As a result, we are unapologetically confident about simply serving up the world's most finger licking good fried chicken, done the right way, the colonel's way. This clarity as to who we are as a brand and the focus on our mouthwateringly delicious chicken at the core has ensured that we stay true to our heritage but also evolve with the times. This focus and consistency has translated into sustained growth and an unmatched investment opportunity.
Yum! And KFC's growth formula for shareholder value creation is simple. Firstly, a strong runway of net new units based on a strong economic model and secondly, same store sales growth fueled by expanded access channels, particularly digital access, resulting in strong profitability and consistent growth, even with the necessary reinvestment to fuel further growth. And to achieve these growth ambitions, we have to remain contemporary and relevant to our broad, globally diverse customer base and must, therefore, meet our customers where they are and increasingly where they are headed. We have seen the significant shift in customer preferences over the last twenty four months, partly due to COVID but also as a result of a natural evolution of demand.
Customers increasingly want KFC to come to them as opposed to them coming to us. And related to this, our customers are becoming ever more reliant on digital for their entire journey, choosing KFC as an option to eat, order and collect. And because of these trends, we're seeing different performances in different asset types. The great news is that KFC is ready for these changes and has the right team to address it. Let me quickly introduce you to my leadership team.
The experience and quality of our executives is unmatched, and it is the perfect balance of KFC experience and outside perspective. Dyke Ship serves as both our Chief Development and Chief People Officer and has nearly thirty years of experience with KFC. Dyke is Texan by birth and current location, but has lived in five different cities whilst with Yum! And traveled to over 70 different countries. Catherine Tan Gillespie is our global CMO.
Originally from The UK, she spent almost twenty years in Australia before moving to The U. S. Three years ago. She has been with KFC for almost six years and chairs the Yum! Marketing Committee.
Prior to KFC, she had spent the majority of her career in food and beverage consumer packaged goods. Saba Sami joined KFC over twelve years ago as General Manager for the Canadian business, with subsequent roles heading up our Turkish and Middle Eastern businesses. He is our Chief Operations Officer and also oversees the Asia region. Saba has lived in a dozen countries across most continents and prior to Yum! Worked for P and G, The Coca Cola Company and Reckitt Vankeiser.
Shannon Hennessy is the newest member of our leadership team, becoming our Chief Financial Officer in February. Prior to KFC, she worked at McKinsey and Company for sixteen years, where she led the Dallas office as managing partner, with much of her client work in the consumer space. Nitin Chatterverdi is our Chief Digital and Technical Officer who joined us from Google, where most recently, he was leading business and operations for Chrome. And prior to that, he was an associate partner at McKinsey. Vinod Mabubani is the Chief Legal Officer of both KFC Global and PeatSite International.
He has been with the company for twenty five years, with five of those years spent in business development. Vinod speaks five languages and has lived and worked with the organization in Hong Kong, Singapore, New Delhi and currently, Dallas. Now that you understand how well we are positioned for growth, this team will talk you through how we will capture that growth with an abbreviated version of our strategy. We'll focus on five key areas. Firstly, people and culture are the foundation of our business, and Dike will explain how we elevate our culture, grow big leaders and support our frontline.
Subsequently, Katherine will share how KFC is becoming a more relevant, easy and distinctive brand or red brand across the world. Nitin and Saba will then share with you our technology and digital strategy. Saba will explain that using technology to make the team member experience easier is fundamental to improving customer experience and how KFC is deploying technology to facilitate that. Nitin will explain that if KFC digital sales were a country, it would be our largest KFC country by far, and we'll therefore talk about the tremendous growth we're having in digital, the exciting headroom that lies ahead and the many efforts underway to capture that headroom. Dyke will then come back in his development role to provide encouraging news on how we intend to regain our industry leading new unit trajectory this year and how we will build a new KFC restaurant every five hours.
And finally, Shannon will speak for a few minutes about the team that makes it all happen, our world class franchisees. She'll share information on franchisee health and liquidity and explain why we feel confident our franchisees are on a strong footing and poised to accelerate growth. So to move on to our people and culture section, I'll now hand over to my friend and colleague, our KFC veteran of thirty years, Dyke Schip.
Thanks, Tony. What you just heard was that our growth architecture puts the customer experience front and center in everything that we do. And the starting point for a great customer experience and building our brand is our people and culture. At KFC, we know that the secret ingredient is a heart led, high performance culture that allows us to attract, retain, grow, and inspire big leaders. Leaders hungry for growth, hungry for impact, and leaders who know that culture isn't real until it's real in a restaurant.
98% of our system employees work in a restaurant. And if we want our culture to ultimately impact the customer experience, it must first impact that restaurant population. Brand building is an inside out endeavor. Inspiring culture creates big leaders who unleash the potential of hundreds of thousands of team members to delight our customers, touch their communities, and in so doing, elevate the brand. It is a powerful and proven formula.
Now under each of those three pillars, culture, people, restaurant experience, we've got a host of tactics and initiatives underway to deepen our impact. But like so many companies, 2020 put a bright light on our areas of opportunity. So we are redoubling our efforts, adding new work streams to ensure that we're creating the workplace that KFC team members and people deserve. Under each of those pillars, I wanna give you one example. On culture, we know that inclusivity is the right thing to do, and we know that it drives results.
When there's a diversity of experiences, backgrounds, style, and thought around the table, we have more robust discussion which leads to better decisions and better decisions drive better results. As such, inclusivity has long been a part of our journey with employees from 148 countries around the world represented in our restaurant. But while we may be globally diverse, we're not naive to the work that we have to do in individual countries. In The US, we want more black leaders in our above restaurant ranks. In South Africa, we want more black South Africans on our leadership team.
And in India, we wanna be pioneers of gender equality. In fact, our India team recently went public with their commitment to doubling the number of women in their workforce and their continued advocacy of the specially abled. Have a look.
India is a country of huge diversity, but this diversity is not always represented or even encouraged in the workforce. It's often considered actually a limitation. As one of the largest mainstream brands in the country, at KFC, we believe it's our responsibility to lead by example. And therefore, we have launched our signature program for diversity and inclusion called KFC six Samatha. Samatha literally translates into potential Sanskrit.
We are focusing on two underrepresented communities in the workforce, women and the specially abled. KFC already leads the category with over 30% women representation in our restaurants, significantly higher than the 20% national average. But our ambition is much bigger. We want to double the women representation in our restaurants and provide multiple opportunities for women to grow into big leaders. We are also powering up our signature specially able program where we recruit, train, and provide meaningful employment to more than 200 deaf and mute team members.
We want to more than double the number of special restaurants to 70 by 2024. Our fantastic franchise partners are fully committed to KST Sarvatha, a really comprehensive yet hugely ambitious program to truly feed people's potential.
48% of India's population is women, yet they form only 24% of the country's workforce. KFC India resolved to change this.
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also took the lead progress to set up all women KFC stores. Another first in the industry, KFC hired women in diverse roles like riders. In the next four years, our ambition is to have 40% of team members and 20 of restaurant general managers as women. KFC is committed to be the employer of choice for women in India. Today, KFC India touches the lives of two thirty six specialty members like Indrajit across 32 special stores.
12 special shift managers lead teams of regular and specialty members. The brand is nurturing their growth through industry leading practices like Yum! Academy amongst many others. Our initiative has also garnered recognitions externally. Over the next four years, we are committed to double our footprint to 70 special stores, seven brand building stores and grow seven restaurant general managers.
That is such an inspiring example of our commitment to culture at Cave City. Now moving on to people. We believe so much in investing in our people that last year, Yum acquired our preferred partner, Heartstyles, who for years has been helping us cultivate leaders up and down the organization from the CEO to the team member. And Yum made that acquisition so that they could provide Heartstyles to all of its franchisees at a price they wouldn't be able to get otherwise. And the results in the restaurant are tangible.
The data shows that leaders who lead with more humility, encouragement, and compassion, and less fear, ego, and pride, better galvanize their teams, who better serve customers, and they deliver better results. Our team in Africa has been using HeartStyles for several years. Have a look.
As the Africa team, we have truly embraced HeartStyles as the leadership development tool in our business. Over the past eight years, we have ensured that not only do each of our above store leaders go through this program in their first six months of joining the business, but that each of our new franchise partners as well as each of our restaurant general managers in every restaurant undergo this transformative journey of self awareness to drive their own effectiveness as well as the success of the businesses that they look after. So far, we have put over 700 RGMs through the program. And whilst these are exceptional numbers given this is almost our entire RGM population, what is even more impressive are the changes in behaviors that we have seen in our number one leaders, which have continued to drive business results. And HotStyles continues to reinforce the culture within our business, a culture of making a difference.
To tell us more about her experience, I would like to introduce you to one of our many phenomenal restaurant general managers, Yanga, as she takes us on the amazing journey that she's been on with HeartStyles.
My journey at KFC started nine years ago when I joined the business as a team member straight from school. When I joined KFC, it was a means to an end for me, a job that could ensure I could sustain myself and my family. Little did I know of the amazing journey of transformation I was about to embark on. The HeartStyles program has now become a lifestyle program for me. My levels of self awareness around when I'm being effective and being ineffective has made me a better mother, sister, friend, and a restaurant leader.
By understanding my below the line and above the line go to behaviors, that equipped me to be more cautious on how I show up. As a mother of three, navigating a very demanding career, like running a restaurant with all its complexities and challenges, this can all be very daunting. But because of hard styles, I have now a proven mechanism to deal with day to day issues. Hard Styles is a development program that is changing not only my life, but of those around me because as they interact with me, they also get to benefit from the changes that I've experienced. The business also gets to benefit from the effective leadership, which keeps my KFC Steel Degel team highly engaged.
It keeps my customers coming back for more, and it drives business results. So when I came to KFC to find a job nine years ago, I actually discovered myself and my best self at that.
And finally, that culture must thrive in the restaurants. We know that the customer experience can never exceed the team member experience, so we want that experience for our team members to be as rich as it can be. At KFC, we promise them and all of our employees that they can be their best selves, make a difference and have fun. And while that is a remarkably simple statement, who doesn't want a career where you are accepted for who you are, have the opportunity to connect with communities and coworkers, and then work hard even as you're having fun? Like so many companies, 2020 brought clarity to the experience, struggles, challenges of our frontline workers.
And we are taking meaningful steps to improve the experience for our RGMs, who are our number one leader, and for our team members. We're offering employee assistance programs to help with mental health and well-being, training on inclusivity, personal growth, and life skills, and ultimately lots of opportunity for people to connect and enjoy our celebrated recognition culture. Have a look at what they're doing in The UK.
Looking out for our teams has always been central to the way we run our restaurants, but this has never been more important than now. And our CareFirst approach to supporting our teams through the pandemic has been a significant contributing factor to our current position of strength. We expanded our equity efforts and set up a one system franchise facing employee assistance program, giving any employee of KFC access to a confidential, free to use 20 fourseven support program that provides professional counseling services and resources to address any issues that our teams were facing. We also set up our well-being hub, a collection of online practical resources that all our teams can access to support them with their emotional, mental and physical well-being. And engagement is the highest it's ever been in history.
The correlation between employee engagement, increased guest experience and sales growth is clearly demonstrated in our market. And we are in no doubt that our focus on the team member experience is not just the right thing to do, but it's paying dividends for our brand's performance. To put it simply, this success comes from our care first mentality, listening, actioning and putting our RGMs and teams at the center of everything we do.
Despite the impact of the pandemic, our brand health in The U. K. And Ireland has never been higher. In fact, our progress in 2020 was so strong, we were the number one most improved brand in the out of home sector, and this continues to skyrocket today. What this represents is the culmination of many years of focus and commitment and consistency from the 27,000 plus people that would consider themselves part of Team KFC UK.
We know our formula works. A great culture creates great leaders, who create inspired teams, who ultimately run great restaurants. And we're using the lessons of 2020 to sharpen our focus and deepen our resolve to make KFC a workplace where everyone can be themselves, have a huge impact, and deliver great results. A people company who serves the world's best chicken. Now let me hand it off to Catherine, who is the mastermind of our brand positioning.
Thank you, Dyke. One of the great benefits of our heart led high performance culture that Dike just spoke of is that it enables us to attract and retain great talent. In marketing, it is our talented teams who execute our red marketing strategy in a highly decentralized structure across all of our markets that fuels buckets of top line growth. And when we talk about growth, we play the long and the short game with a two speed marketing approach we like to call Sobo. Growing our longer term brand equity over time, BO, which we leverage to shore up shorter term same store sales growth overnight.
So, as a result of the comprehensive plans we have developed for this two speed Sobo focus, we are delivering strong growth. In terms of sales overnight, before the global pandemic hit, KFC had consistently delivered 18 consecutive quarters of positive same store sales growth and in Q1 this year, this growth performance continued. Regarding our brand over time, this continued to strengthen even through the pandemic, where KFC outpaced the competitors to add four points of brand equity globally, firmly securing our position as a top 100 global brand and one of only three QSRs. The third metric I really want to call out is market share. Over the last year, KFC grew share in nearly all of our top 20 markets, adding a point of market share globally.
And in our international non U. S. Business, which represents over 80% of our portfolio, we truly earn our red and white stripes, owning a top three QSR position in the majority of these key markets. As I mentioned earlier, a key enabler of our growth is our globally executed RED marketing strategy. And by RED or RED, we mean being relevant functionally, emotionally and culturally to as many QSR customers as possible, making it easy for those customers to think about us, access us and order us and experience us, and doing everything in a distinctive unmistakably KFC way.
Being red is a proven penetration strategy and we know from modern marketing sciences that this is how brands grow. How KFC shows up as a red brand across our multitude of markets is guided by our global brand positioning. What we do to stay relevant and easy is to serve up finger licking good food done the right way. And how we distinctively do that is in the spirit of the kernel. I'll now share how we're executing against this red marketing strategy, starting with relevance.
We keep KFC relevant first and foremost through our legendary Kentucky Fried Chicken, our core product that has ubiquitous appeal. Chicken is the number one consumed protein globally and that we make affordable and available for everyone. We have many competitors trying to muscle in on our fried chicken dominance, but no one comes close to us on taste, which is a key functional purchase driver of the category. Our food has this wondrous superpower of igniting all the senses, making people salivate, lick the screen and genuinely crave KFC. Whether it's our iconic original recipe chicken, invented by Col.
Sanders over eighty years ago with its aromatic crispy juicy cuts of chicken served up with mashed potatoes and gravy, seasoned fries, or contemporary sides like this stunning slaw that we're testing in Australia. Or our original recipe tenders, succulent, boneless cuts of chicken with double the crispiness and flavor that appeal to nearly everyone. Whether it's our hot and spicy chicken, beloved across The Caribbean and Asia and recently launched in Russia, or hot and spicy wings which appear in almost half of all the orders in Thailand or our range of unrivaled fried chicken sandwiches successfully sold in all of our top 20 international markets and launched recently to widespread acclaim in The US. Our food is simply impossible to resist. And back to The US, as I'm sure you know, the fried chicken sandwich wars have been raging.
So we took our time to perfect a sandwich that is deserving of our fried chicken fame. To tell you more about it, I'll hand over to our KFC US President, the amazing Kevin Hockman, to share more.
Thanks, Catherine, and hello, everyone. In The U. S, KFC is a brand known for buckets of chicken on the bone. But to continue growing our business, we need to attract younger customers who primarily eat boneless products like tenders and chicken sandwiches. Boneless chicken represents over three quarters of chicken servings, and chicken sandwiches are by far the largest segment at 40% of the category.
And we spent $20.20 with multiple recipes until we perfected our Kentucky Fried Chicken sandwich with a 30% larger fillet than our previous sandwich and significantly upgraded our pickles and brioche bun. We then kicked off 2021 by rolling out our new chicken sandwich across the country. We quickly doubled our sandwich business in soft sell, and that means there was no out of store marketing support. And then in March, when we had national distribution, we targeted younger customers by launching the chicken sandwich on TikTok and on national media starting with NCAA March Madness tournament. After turning on national media, we saw another sales lift to our sandwich layer, and now it's become almost 10% of our business.
34 year old customers are buying a significant percentage of those sandwiches, making this launch highly incremental. We're confident we now have a beachhead and sandwiches, the biggest chicken segment, and it now has enough scale to continue to support with national media, which will allow us to continue to grow this sales layer over time. Thanks for allowing me the time today to talk about how we're making our menu more relevant for our customers.
Thanks, Kevin. Sorry, I couldn't resist. Our iconic core products that I just spoke about account for the majority of our sales and appeal to the largest customer base, so we focus most of our innovation and promotions on core. That said, there are times where our brand does benefit from on trend food innovation around our famous flavors, formats and fried textures. Innovation that gives customers something familiar yet new and that breaks into culture generating significant brand buzz and cult followings.
Like Double Down, All Chicken No Bun, which was launched in The US in 2010 and has gained fame in more than 30 other countries, launching in Spain just a few weeks ago. Or Chizza, a pizza chicken mashup, invented in The Philippines back in 2015 and since launched in more than 20 countries to rave reviews. Or Lay's Barbecue Tenders, a buzzworthy collaboration with Pepsi in Canada in 2019, which engendered many new KFC fans and grew our contemporary bonus tenders by 20%. Or our launch in The US last year of plant based Beyond Fried Chicken, which first sold out in less than five hours and set the course for us rolling out plant based food around the world, bringing the incredible taste of KFC to those who may not choose chicken today. As you probably sense, we are immensely proud of how good our food tastes.
But more importantly than what we think, our customers consistently rank us as having the best tasting food. And we see our growth trajectory continuing as a result of more and more people discovering our finger licking good food for themselves. Hungry? As well as making food that tastes good, we're making our food and brand emotionally feel good too. By doing things the right way, with our food, for the planet and with people, inside and outside KFC.
Come with me into the kitchen, and I'll explain more.
Here we are at the
KFC Global Innovation Kitchen, where we'll give you a taste of how things are done the right way around here, which is key to remaining emotionally relevant as a brand. Come on in. KFC has impeccable food credentials. And around the world, we regularly open our restaurant kitchens to the public to reveal how we do things. But maybe there are some parts of our story you didn't know.
For example, did you know that in almost all the world, we cook with fresh, not frozen chicken, often sourced from local farmers that meet our stringent global chicken welfare standards? And maybe it's a surprise to you, too, that in every one of 25,000 restaurants, our team members cook our chicken from scratch, hand breading it in ingredients that everyone would recognize, still following the same recipe and cooking process that was created by the colonel back
19
competitors. As well as doing the right thing with our food, we're doing the right thing for our planet, too. For example, cooking our chicken in sustainably sourced oil, serving our food in increasingly sustainable packaging like this bamboo bucket, which we've been trialing in Canada as well as working towards delivering against our global sustainability commitment to have all plastic based consumer facing packaging used in our restaurants be recoverable or reusable by 2025. Doing the right thing with our food and for our planet is key to remaining emotionally relevant, keeping our food permissible enough to be enjoyed as a treat in our restaurants, out and about and in people's homes. We know that doing the right thing with our food and for the planet is quickly becoming table stakes for the category.
So where we think we can truly stand out and make a difference is with people inside and outside of KFC. Partnering with our franchisees, we want to feed people's potential through developing impactful programs that help break the cycle of inequality that we too often see across the world. Programs such as Harvest, which for over twenty two years has provided a pathway to prevent hunger from limiting people's potential. Taking and freezing leftover chicken each day from our kitchens and donating it to local food charities who desperately need this type of high quality protein to feed their people in need. People who are in similar situations to that of the colonel, who at the age of seven also faced food insecurity and had to forage and cook for his family whilst his single parent mother went out to work.
We're also investing in programs that provide pathways to opportunities and skill building, so that everyone, regardless of their background, can find and perfect their own personal secret recipe. It's well known within KFC that when the colonel was trying to commercialize his secret recipe, he was told no 1,009 times before someone finally said yes. We believe that our 25,000 restaurants around the world can take chances on people and say yes, providing jobs and broad life skills vocational training to underserved populations who may otherwise be overlooked. Whether it's our Dame Rider program for females in Saudi Arabia, our specially abled run restaurants in Japan, Pakistan, Malaysia and India, or our immigrant and refugee focused hiring programs in Canada and Germany. We're using our global resources in Restaurants for Good to feed people's potential.
The final part of building brand relevance is being an active part of contemporary pop culture. This
is
where our decentralized marketing teams have a huge advantage finding creative ways to tell our brand story in a culturally meaningful way in each of our countries through activations that get our brand talked about and make people feel good about associating with KFC. Branding culture activations such as these.
The KFC big bucket's very exciting. Good energy. Good vibe. I have the best chicken that I'd ever put in my mouth. I
am in awe of KFC. Their work is sensational.
I've talked about how we're remaining relevant as a brand, both functionally, emotionally and culturally. And I'll now talk to the next element of our RED marketing strategy, which is how we're becoming even easier for our customers to get their fingers on KFC. We make our brand easy by being easy to think about through reaching as many QSR customers as possible with our communication, being easy to access an order through expanding our brand into new markets, new trade areas and new channels, and being easy to experience, which Saba will talk to you later. Talking first about how we make KFC easy to think about. This is achieved primarily through leveraging our global scale and optimizing the circa £750,000,000 we invest in media each year to ensure that our share of voice is greater than our share of market, which industry studies have proven drives growth.
We now have what we call full funnel media, which synergistically sees us using mass media to build wide reaching brand awareness, coupled with targeted performance marketing to drive acquisition, conversion and ticket, along with CRM to engage directly with our customers to drive retention. This full funnel media approach is enabled through leveraging partnerships, such as with TikTok, where our recent campaign in Germany reached 1,800,000,000 views. And through awaiting our Martech and data capability, such as leveraging the recent Yum! Acquisition of Quantum Data Sciences, whose consumer insight AI and marketing performance analytics led us in our Asia business unit to understand the power of using media to accelerate transaction growth. The next part of being easy focuses on being easy to access, specifically standing up e commerce channels and trading these channels.
Nitin will talk more about this, but in just one short year, we've increased our digital channel mix from 20% to 43%. And KFC now has numerous new channels spanning the gamut from aggregators and owned platforms to car side ordering and conversational commerce, making KFC finger ticking easy for our customers to access anywhere, anyway. Within these new e commerce channels, we have recently uncovered growth upside in how we trade these channels through centrally facilitated experimentation and a new agile way of working. Over the last six or so months in six of our lead markets, we've run over 400 tests, such as changing the UX of aggregator merchandising in Canada or taking upsell to the next level in Russia or using paid media more effectively for conversion in Thailand. We are super excited about the growth potential from scaling this new agile approach to channel marketing and have already delivered a point of same store sales growth in each of those six test markets.
The final component of our RED marketing strategy is being distinctive. This means ensuring that everything we do is unmistakably KFC, to ensure that all the £750,000,000 media investment I talked about earlier is fully attributable to KFC. We are blessed with one of the most distinctive brands on the planet, and the Colonel in particular is one of the most famous faces in the world. Over the last three years, we've diligently evolved our brand identity into a sharp suite of distinctive assets, which help KFC show up as an iconic instantly recognizable global brand across all 140 plus countries across every customer touch point. A standout example of us showing up as a highly distinctive brand was during the pandemic last year.
Leaning into the fact that KFC all of a sudden had possibly the world's most inappropriate tagline, It's Finger Licking Good, we created our first global campaign which ran across almost 100 countries, achieved reach close to 2,000,000,000, and most importantly, resulted in us staying top of mind through the crisis. Let's take a look. Okay, to sum up. I've shared how we're keeping KFC relevant, easy and distinctive around the world through focusing on promoting our contemporary core Kentucky Fried Chicken to new QSR customers through new channels in order to drive both long term brand over time and continued short term sales overnight growth. As the custodians of a sixty nine year old brand, which is a far cry from Mature, we believe that this focus on RED, along with digital transformation, will guarantee our continued top line growth.
Speaking of digital transformation, I'll now hand over to the inimitable Nitin Chatterverdi to tell you more.
Thank you, Catherine.
One of the biggest drivers of same store sales growth for KFC has been and will continue to be our digital customer and team member experiences. To put KFC digital in perspective, if it were a country, it would be our largest by far. 43% of our transactions are already digital. The pandemic has accelerated the customer move to off premise, but we've pivoted our operating model and our technology footprint at record speed, 72% growth last year, more than $10,000,000,000 in sales in 2020. In twenty twenty one Q1, we've added another $3,000,000,000 So lots of strong numbers across the board.
I've spent my career in the Valley, but the last year at KFC has felt like a hyper growth tech firm. The formula behind this growth is all about easy. Through digital, we make KFC easy to access, easy to order and easy to experience, all of which in turn drives higher same store sales growth. And before I provide you additional color on this formula, I did want to highlight that while our digital growth has been incredible, our growth headroom is even more exciting. One of the unique advantages of KFC is that we can learn from our best markets and take it to accelerate others.
On digital, China has been our North Star. Their business is largely digital. They continue to innovate at record pace. And what we've learned from our best markets is that at about 5% mix, digital becomes normal, but at about 20%, it goes from normal to mainstream and it creates this accelerating growth flywheel effect. More than 80% of our markets have crossed this 20% threshold, which is why we are extremely bullish about their growth headroom.
So now on to the first part of our formula, easy to access. As customers shift off premise, we are enabling commerce everywhere to meet them at their point of hunger. Historically, you could get KFC by walking up to the front counter or going through the drive through, but now we are scaling every access point to meet customers wherever they are. A few examples, we've grown click and collect and delivery to about 20,000 stores each. We've launched creative new ways to fulfill demand such as white glove curbside in our Middle Eastern markets or walk up windows in our Italian markets.
We've achieved 80% plus penetration with aggregators globally across all our markets. We've set up nontraditional channels for accretive growth in our business, platforms like Google food ordering and WhatsApp ordering as well as integrations with Asian super apps like Paytm and Lazada and Gojek, which get a lot of customer traffic on them. Canada is one of our markets that's leading the way and blazing the trail on digital. They have more access points than any other QSR out there. I'll now turn it over to Niveera Wallani, who's our GM in Canada, to share a few highlights from Canada's access expansion journey.
Niverera, over to you.
The digital off premise sales disruption has been coming towards our industry for years, and it's expected that by 2025, digital sales will be 10x compared to 2016. With the bold aspiration to be the number one digital restaurant brand, one of KFC Canada's key areas of focus has been to create additional ease so that guests can access our brand across the country. We started by reducing friction and creating additional ease on our own e commerce platform, kfc.ca. And since then, we've rolled out multiple digital access channels across the country. This includes Google ordering, Amazon Alexa one word ordering, expanded penetration across aggregators, the rollout of Click and Collect in 2019 and the most recent launch of our KFC Canada app in 2020.
We've continued to see double digit digital sales growth over the last several years. And in 2020, our sales growth was 110%. Today, KFC Canada has more digital access channels than any other QSR in the country. And with each channel we add, it's accretive as we continue to see new guests coming to our brand every single day.
Thank you, Nuvera. That was terrific. Another good example of how we are expanding access is Yum! Recent acquisition of Ticktook, which we, as KFC, have been heavily leveraging in our system for years now, starting in Latin America. With TikTok, ordering is simple, it's fast, just a few clicks, and we are seeing tremendous success with TikTok as we scale it across the world.
For example, in some of our sub Saharan African markets, we are seeing 60% conversion on orders coming through TikTok. And now that it is a part of the Yum! Family, we plan to scale it even faster in our international markets. The second part of our formula is easy to order. Once consumers opt into the KFC brand, we're using digital to make the buying process friction free and simple, which in turn drives up conversion and tickets.
This simplification starts underneath the hood with modern and scale technology platforms. A few examples of what we've done here. We've launched a new modern e commerce engine in The U. S. We've implemented a global platform for many of our international markets.
Both of these platforms par new web and app experiences and these are helping our markets like KFC U. S. Reach all time record highs in digital in Q1. We are also standardizing and modernizing our entire global restaurant and marketing technology footprint. For example, systems such as point of sale, back of house, CRM, which gives us both the scale and the speed to grow digital faster.
So that's what we are doing underneath the hood. Above the hood, we are relentlessly taking out friction in three ways. Number one, always on optimization on our digital assets to lift conversion. Thailand is a great example of this through this always on approach, they've lifted their conversion rates by 14 points in less than one quarter. Number two, through new feature rollouts, things like one click reordering or faster refunds on our digital properties and number three, through advanced data to personalize experiences.
Yum! Purchase of Quantum really helps us accelerate our capabilities in this space. We plan to leverage Quantum to go after high value data science problems like site selection, forecasting, but customer engagement and personalization is one such problem that we plan to target through Quantum. I'll now hand it over to Sabir Sami, our Global Chief Operating Officer, to talk about how we are using digital to make it easier to experience KFC for both our customers and team members, the third part of our formula. Sabir, over to you.
Thanks, Nitin. I'm delighted to join the session from my home as I'm under lockdown for the time being due to the pandemic. The third part of our formula is easy to experience. Our people first culture is built on the belief that the consumer experience will never outperform the team member experience. Therefore, we are investing in kitchen technologies to make life easier for our team members and our restaurant managers.
Now through the guest listing channels, we have learned that our top two focus areas need to be order accuracy and speed of service. Now these can be opposing objectives as the probability of an error increases when one is trying to rush an order and are both becoming significantly harder to manage as we opened up more access channels and our menus become more complex. To improve delivery order speed, we are rapidly rolling out a driver tracking system that enables our restaurant managers to track driver availability and location, and it also allows our customers to track their orders. This was first introduced in our Middle East business in Dubai, where we saw that our percent of orders that were achieving the thirty minutes promised time improved from 47% to 78% since we introduced the system. And it also had the added benefit of fresher and hotter product for our customers.
This is because our teams always knew where the driver was, and they only started packing the product when they knew the driver was five minutes away. On the order accuracy front, we have now integrated the aggregator ordering platforms with our in store POS systems, thereby eliminating the need to reenter the order, which saves time, but more importantly, it significantly eliminates the probability of order entry errors. As an example, in The United Kingdom, by integrating and enhancing our POS systems, we have seen a 20% improvement in our handoff time to drivers and a 60% reduction in order accuracy issues. The other examples of technologies that we are rolling out to optimize our kitchen technologies include Bluetooth sensors that ensure our product is always held at the right temperature and that our team members exactly know in case there is a temperature variation augmented reality glasses that provide a much more hands on and richer training experience for our team members virtual audit tools that reduce the cost of conducting audits around the world and also allows us to increase the frequency of audits where necessary advanced production planning software that improves product availability at peak hours and reduces waste and simultaneously, we are also testing futuristic technologies like computer vision and robotics for broad application and scaling potential in the future.
Best of all, we are bringing together all of these technologies onto a singular software platform that our restaurant managers have on their phones and tablets to proactively plan and run operations real time. Thus, our kitchen experience is rapidly transforming into an integrated, autonomous and more efficient future. I will hand back to Nitin now to close. Thank you.
Thank you, Saba, for that comprehensive read on how we are leveraging technology in our restaurants. So now let me sum up our digital story. One, we've seen rapid acceleration in our digital business, but we believe this is only the beginning. Two, our formula of easy to order, easy to access and easy to experience equal to SSSG isn't just words. We are making considerable investments behind it in new capabilities and new talent, and we are moving with speed to execute it.
And three, together with the growth headroom I spoke about earlier, we are optimistic that this will fuel a sustained growth trajectory over the coming years for KFC Digital. I'll now hand over to Dike in his development role to talk about new unit development. Dike, over to you.
Thanks, Nitin. Well done. When we last talked about net new unit growth at KFC, the brand had established incredible momentum, besting itself year over year from 2016 to 2019. In fact, in 2019, amongst traditional QSR brands, KFC was the fastest growing in terms of absolute net new unit cap. And we were poised to do it again in 2020, but COVID had other plans.
Nevertheless, many of our franchisees still leaned into growth and allowed us to deliver performance that still outpaced the competition. And that kind of growth trajectory at KFC is premised on four foundational elements. The first, customers love KFC. They crave our chicken, and in a 148 countries around the world, they have an incredible affinity for this iconic American brand. And as much as customers love our food, franchisees love our returns.
We typically measure return in terms of franchise payback, and KFC has industry leading franchise paybacks. As a result, our franchisees are hungry to grow. As investors around the world are chasing yield, our franchisees are eager for the returns they get from investing in KFC. And finally, we wanted to make sure that our franchisees had store designs and formats to meet every occasion, whether that be drive through, food court, hypermarket, transport hub. For every occasion, we have a design.
So while COVID certainly slowed the pace temporarily in 2020, those four elements remain the bedrock of our net new unit growth. Obviously, customers still love KFC. While sales softening in some markets soften the business model, our franchisees know that's temporary, and they remain eager to grow and eager to exploit the opportunities created by the crisis. And then finally, much like we had created store formats for every occasion, we've now done that for every channel. Delivery, click and collect, curbside, carryout.
So that customers can truly access KFC whenever and wherever they want. We've got a store designed for that. Now here's a great example of what I'm talking about in Africa, where KFC already dominates the competition. Our teams and franchisees are looking for creative ways to further penetrate difficult Sub Saharan markets.
Have a look.
Hello. My name is Dhruv Kol. I'm the general manager for KFC in Sub Saharan Africa. I come to you today from Johannesburg in South Africa. We are celebrating our fiftieth anniversary this year, a remarkable achievement.
We have 950 stores in South Africa, and we continue to grow in this country. But as we look to the next fifty years, the growth is gonna come from the rest of Sub Saharan Africa. We've been working really hard with our franchisees to find innovative ways to unlock opportunities across Africa. One such example is what we're calling the neighborhood concept. Now we want to be in new areas, access new consumers where we haven't been able to go before, and I think the neighborhood concept allows us to do this in a very compelling way.
What these do is enables us to tighten our CapEx, tighten the store footprint, and we are now building these assets about 40% to 50 smaller than a standard flagship asset that we might have on a high
street, for example, or in a mall.
We will continue to optimize the footprint, the menu, our consumer understanding as we scale it across East, West And Southern Africa. So lots to look forward to. It's a billion people, overwhelmingly young and a burgeoning middle class that is set to double in the next ten years. Lots of growth, lots of opportunity, and innovation such as this from Africa will continue.
2020 brought with it some very real challenges for development, but our franchisees know those to be temporary. Customers are coming back, sales are recovering, and they are eager to take advantage of the many opportunities created by the crisis. Obviously, they've raced into off premise that's been driven by restrictions and lockdown. We continue to work with them to sharpen our investment model to lower CapEx costs. And maybe most interestingly, as commercial real estate prices have decreased and as the restaurant industry contracts, our franchisees are eager to secure property at lower rates and are looking for opportunities to acquire and convert struggling concepts.
Now here's an example in India, where we have decades of growth ahead of us. I want you to hear how our franchisees are raring to go.
Our two large franchise partners, Deviani and Saphyr, represent two well capitalized and committed growth engines for the brand in India. They share a strongly held belief in the long term potential of this market. They chose to view the crisis as an opportunity, an opportunity to gain ground against competition, to solidify their position in the market, and to double down on growth. The franchises realized that rentals were at all time low, that sought after locations were freeing up because competition was shutting down. Basically, all the right ingredients to be able to lock in the most lucrative long term rental deals in hard to penetrate trade areas.
Fueled by the brand performance and their well placed optimism, both partners have signed up to more than double their pace of growth over the coming years. Here in India, we believe there's a huge runway for growth, and we're really excited about it. There is huge headroom in the rapidly growing top 10 cities, cities like Delhi and Mumbai and Bangalore, where millions of people already reside, and there are many millions who want to move into these cities over the coming years. Our current footprint is across less than 20% of the potential cities that we could actually grow into. As one of the fastest growing mainstream brands in the country, there are still millions of consumers out there waiting to access our finger licking goods food.
It's taken us twenty years to be able to open the first 500. But on the back of the commitment of our franchise partners and our trust in the brand, I believe it should take us less than a fifth of that time to build the next 500 KFCs.
At KFC, it's often said that India is the next China. And certainly, franchisees like that and that kind of ambition for growth is propelling us in that direction. In other parts of the world, we have franchisees seizing the crisis as they look at failing concepts and they convert them. Tarun Lal, who heads up all of The Middle East and Africa for us, is going to tell you about Turkey.
Hi. My name is Tarun Lal, and I'm the Managing Director of the KFC business in The Middle East, Turkey and Africa. Now KFC had a dominant market share in this region. It is seen as a contemporary and aspirational brand that is integral to our community. Whilst we have close to 2,500 restaurants in this region, we firmly believe that we are still on the ground floor of tremendous growth.
One of the ingredients for our growth are our franchise partners, who in Yum! Language must be 3C, well capitalized, with the right operating capability and finally, partners who are committed to and aligned with our goal of whole restaurant development. One such partner who has recently joined the KFC family is Ilkum Sahin.
We have a very aggressive growth plan. We have been opening amazing locations throughout Turkey, and we've been opening them quite fast. But not only that, we have another strategy that we are trying to buy the competition. Until now, we have bought almost 20 brands. I think we are going to be a very successful team.
I think we're going to be a very successful brand in Turkey, and I know we will. In a matter of couple of years, we will be the leading brand in Turkey.
KFC is a brand born in The US, but whose footprint is now truly global. And you've just heard from three of our big global leaders. But I also want you to hear from The U. S, where sales are strong, the business model has gotten stronger, and after years of contraction, our franchisees are eager to get back to positive territory. Here's Kevin Huckman.
It's been a real pleasure to work with our U. S. Team who have delivered seven consecutive years of same store sales growth, and I'm excited to share our vision of how we'll build on that success with net new unit growth on The U. S. Business as well.
And while our development pipeline largely paused in the first half of the year as we supported our franchisees to focus on operations and their business performance, continued strength in the overall business model allowed us to ramp up the pipeline in the back half to get us back on track and working toward growth in 'twenty one and beyond. We have the largest pipeline of newbuild sites in over a decade and more franchisees than ever entering into development agreements. In fact, with the pipeline we have in place for the balance of the year, our projection is to be net new unit positive for the first full year in The U. S. Since 02/2004.
From there, our strategy is for sequential unit count growth in 2022 and beyond as the business model continues to strengthen and franchisees continue to see solid returns. We're excited about how our restaurant development plans will continue to transform and grow the business in the future.
Exciting times at the birthplace of KFC. One final note. At KFC, we believe that two thirds of our restaurants have yet to be built. Based on the way we look at our market planning data, we're only a third of the way to our potential. We will be growing this brand for years.
And we know that all of the basics are in place to bounce back strong in 2021. We've got customers who love us, franchisees who love our returns and are eager to grow, and we've got a store format for every occasion and for every channel. We've got a vision, We've got aspiration. But most importantly, we've got actionable tactics. We are incredibly excited, and you should expect big things.
Now let me hand you over to one of the best things that happened to KFC in 2020, Shannon Hennessy.
Thank you, Dyke. As you can see, we're incredibly optimistic about the future of KFC, but we're just a small part of the recipe that delivers buckets of growth. 99% of our 25,000 stores are owned and operated by more than 700 franchisees, a mix of operators who own a handful of stores to large partners who operate entire countries. Our franchise led model dates back to 1952 when Colonel Sanders saw the potential to partner with other entrepreneurs to accelerate expansion, making us one of the first global QSR brands. This model amplifies and accelerates everything we do.
For every bucket of chicken made in company owned stores, our franchise partners and their teams make a truckload. We saw huge benefit during the crisis as these local business owners were able to navigate and even shape local regulation to enable our restaurants to reopen and operate safely. Therefore, a critical element of our bucket of growth is thriving franchisees. We have partners who joined up with the Colonel in the early days of KFC, like the Harman Group in The U. S.
Sixty eight years ago, KFC Japan fifty years ago and PT Fast Food in Indonesia. We also have many newer partners. Since the beginning of 2020, 10 new entrepreneurs have entered our system. Our franchisees come to us because of our brand, our culture and our delicious food, but primarily they are business people who see the potential for an attractive return on investment, one of the most attractive in the restaurant sector. Many of our partners operate multiple QSR chains, yet they vote with their dollars and invest to grow KFC at a faster rate.
Some may wonder how the crisis has impacted our business and our franchisees. Put simply, our business is strong and our franchisees remain excited about our growth potential. The vast majority of our stores and our partners are profitable again and well over half of our partners are selling at or above the sales levels they enjoyed prior to the crisis. We've already shown strong momentum by growing our store estate by nearly 700 net new units in the last two quarters. We believe we have the strongest franchise base in the world.
The vast majority of KFC restaurants are now operated by partners we consider to be 3C, committed to the KFC business, well capitalized and with good capabilities to operate and expand the brand. Our strong, well capitalized franchisees are well positioned to take advantage of market opportunities. They're also investing to do the right thing to support their employees and strengthen our communities. But don't just take my word for it. Let's hear directly from two of our partners about their growth journey with KFC.
First, Premium Restaurant Brands in Mexico and then Sedema in Senegal.
Hi. My name is Francisco Robira. I'm President and CEO of Premium Restaurant Brands. Our company operates American restaurant franchises throughout Central America and Mexico. KFC Mexico is actually our biggest and most important business unit.
We've achieved great results by focusing on the basics of the business. We remodeled 80% of the stores in Mexico because assets are important. Second factor in our success has been focusing on the food. We want to make sure that every customer gets perfect product every single time because the secret of KFC is the food. We want to make sure that the chicken is finger licking good every time.
We make sure that we hire and bring in only people with the spirit to serve. And we make sure that we promote only the best leaders to managing the restaurants because each restaurant is a business. The success of the business depends on the success of each individual restaurant and the success of each restaurant rests solely on the shoulders of the RGM. The fourth factor and the one I'm most proud of is our management team. We can honestly say that we have a dream team in Mexico in our industry for every single function.
We have the best talent in the industry. We're incredibly proud to be part of the KFC family because of the opportunity it provides us to impact so many lives. We also appreciate the fact that we bring people together. KFC brings people, family and friends around the table to enjoy great food. And shared moments is the stuff of life.
So millions and millions of occasions every year in KFC Mexico happen around KFC.
I'm Tababa Kaengomjak, CEO of SEDEMA in Senegal. We at SEDEMA are a big hearted organization. And through our franchise, KFC Senegal, we are able to create an environment that nurtures women equality and inclusion of people living with a disability. We launched in 2019 our first 100% female store in Senegal. We shed light on gender equality.
We shed light on our people's talents. We shed light on our women's courage inside our stories. These stands that we choose to take are much appreciated and respected by our customers and our local communities because they can identify themselves. They relate to us. They understand the vision and the passion behind it.
And somewhere, somehow, that also creates growth and sales. We are proud to inspire women leadership. We are proud to raise awareness on equality and inclusion. We are proud to be KFC Senegal.
Foundational to these success stories is a healthy business model that generates an attractive return. Our store paybacks remain very healthy. Averages are difficult in our diverse business, but we can say with confidence that we offer an attractive payback in diverse markets, both developed and emerging. Our store payback typically ranges between three and five years. For example, in Mexico, the typical food court asset has a payback just under four years with an average upfront investment of just $400,000 In one of our developed markets, a typical drive thru in The UK, there's also a payback of around four years, but in this case a higher upfront investment of a bit less than $1,500,000 We remain vigilant to keep our paybacks healthy and offset the rising costs of doing business.
We're pursuing several initiatives in this space. One win win has been menu simplification. It started when we needed to solve for social distancing in the kitchen and then accelerated as we saw the benefits of reduced operational complexity and lower supply chain costs. While it's critical to offer our customers variety and innovation, customers have responded positively to our easier to navigate menus that allow our core items to shine. We've implemented this approach in many markets around the world.
In Australia, we reduced food and nonfood items by 5% to 10% and saw lower cost of sales, reduced waste, faster speed of service and greater accuracy. All the while, our total business grew both ticket size and transactions. We continue to drive cost savings through procurement initiatives for our food and nonfood items. Our Spend Smarter program has delivered over $500,000,000 in total cost savings for our franchisees. We also have a program called Build Smarter that typically drives down the cost of building a new store by 5%.
And we partnered with many franchisees on this program, including in South Africa, Thailand, Brazil, Romania and Singapore. To bring this to life, I'd like you to hear from our General Manager in Russia, Raisa Poliokova. Russia has been one of the biggest contributors to KFC's rapid unit expansion over the last several years and they have quickly regained momentum coming out of the pandemic. Raisa, over to you.
I'm Raisa, General Manager, Russia and CIS. Ten years with KFC. Me and my team are responsible for KFC brand in Russia, CIS and Central And Eastern Europe. The opportunities for growth are big in Russia as we expand beyond the large cities as well as across Central And Eastern Europe. Our fellow colleagues call our team Red Machine.
We open different type of stores, huge drive thrus, cozy Optimas, tiny smart boxes, majestic inlines, and even innovative store of the future. We are one system team with franchisees. Our franchisees believe in brand and do breakthrough to overcome the crisis and assure strong basis for business recovery. Paybacks remain healthy, and much franchisees expansion is being funded through operating cash flow, which remains robust. We are more than just a business.
I'm very proud to be
attractive return to franchisees to compel them to continue to invest aggressively in the future of this iconic brand. I am sure some of you are hoping for new or more detailed financial guidance, but we won't do that today. What I can do is share our confidence that KFC is poised to deliver buckets of growth far into the future. First, we feel confident in our ability to continue to drive same store sales growth. As Tony mentioned, chicken is the largest and fastest growing meat based protein.
Everyone wants to be in chicken and we are the chicken experts. If there is one thing today compels you to do other than buy lots of Yum! Stock, it's to go enjoy some finger licking good chicken. Our RED brand with its rich history and heritage has grown even more relevant. We saw significant ticket growth over the past year driven by the shift to family dining occasions and off premise consumption and much of this has persisted as we have regained transactions.
We feel well positioned to continue to attract these home meal replacement occasions. We grew digital sales by $4,000,000,000 in 2020 and now have 43% of our sales that are digitally enabled, a stunning feat. We see further potential to continue to accelerate by making it easy for the customer to access us, buy and enjoy our food, expanding our share in less penetrated markets to match that of markets further along the digital journey. We opened nearly 700 net new units across the last two quarters. With our compelling and resilient economic model and two thirds of the world's KFCs yet to be built, We feel confident that we can remain the fastest growing traditional QSR chain.
Finally, we remain committed to capital light and franchise driven business model and G and A control. Before we turn to taking your questions, we'd like to close with video we think summarizes why we're so excited about the future of KFC and our ability to deliver buckets of growth long into the future.
Welcome back from break. We are now entering the Q and A portion of today's event. We have reserved thirty minutes for questions with our KFC global leadership team today. Tony, our first question comes from Gregory Francfort with Guggenheim. We have decent data on the industry competitive shakeout in The U.
S. Following the pandemic. But can you talk about what you're seeing in your biggest overseas markets on that same theme?
Thanks, Gregory. That's a great question. Let me start by saying that the KFC brand is just incredibly resilient. When we're performing very well in all of the markets where the restaurants are open, where we have a strong off premise component of our business, where our digital mix is strong as well. And you would have seen that in our Q1 results in places like The UK, Australia, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and of course, The US is also in that category as well.
Globally, it's not actually easy to measure our market share in every single one of our 145 plus countries around the world. But we do know that in our top 20 countries, we have gained market share, and we think that we probably added about a point of market share to our business globally outside of The U. S. So where we are closed due to it's largely because of government lockdowns. That's the areas that we have been most impacted.
And when we are open, we are performing very strongly. Back to you, Jody.
Thank you, Tony. Our next question comes from Brian Bittner at Oppenheimer. As you reaccelerate global unit growth to your annual goals, can can you give us a flavor of how that growth looks outside of China as it relates to new versus existing franchisees?
Sure. Good question. Thanks, Brian. And maybe I'll start broad and go a bit narrow. Obviously, I can't give guidance beyond what Yum!
Has shared, but I can certainly share with you our excitement and enthusiasm around net to unit growth. We're in an enviable position that we've got such a strong brand that customers love and a strong business model literally in countries around the world. And, you know, one of the things I would I would tell you is, you know, we know what this brand can do when it's essentially unconstrained by a pandemic. If you look at our numbers in 2018 and 2019, both in term absolute terms and percentage terms, That's what this brand is capable of, and that is absolutely what we believe and we know that we will ultimately get back to. We think of ourselves as the fastest growing traditional QSR brand in the world.
It's a standard we hold ourselves to because, frankly the brand warrants it and our franchisees are capable of it. As we think about specific countries, question was outside of China. It's like picking me up which of your kids is your favorite out of 146. But I would tell you that the ones that I'm most intrigued by, certainly India is an interesting business unit for us, notwithstanding the current challenges faced by that country and by our employees at the moment. We know that we will ultimately press through that.
But the opportunity for India is years and years long, and we've got lots of opportunity ahead of us there. You heard from some of our leaders like Tarun and Dhruv talk about the opportunity that exists in The Middle East and Africa. Again, we've got a strong business model. We've also got great franchisees who are who are pushing the business forward. And, you know, ultimately, you've seen what we can do in Russia, Latin America, Asia for sure.
So all of those would be areas where and again, I appreciate that's a really broad answer to your question. I think that's the unique power of our portfolio is that we know that we can grow in markets around the world. Back to you, Jody.
Great. Thank you for the comprehensive answer. Doug, I actually have a follow-up on that same topic from David Tarantino at Baird. Let me read it. Related to the unit growth outlook, have you seen competitor fallout during the pandemic in any key markets that would create an opportunity for KFC to accelerate growth in upcoming years?
Thanks, David. Essentially, that's kind of an inorganic and organic growth question. As you just saw, we're seeing some opportunity. Turkey is a good example, and all of our business units are scouring the landscape. I don't think we necessarily see more opportunity in one market versus another, but there is an opportunity to be clearly opportunistic and our franchisees are seizing that.
One of the things I think is most encouraging is our franchisees have turned their attention from the worries about the business impact of the pandemic to exploiting the opportunities created by the pandemic. So will there be some kind of icing on the cake type growth that is inorganic from struggling competitors? I think that I think there
will be, but I also just wanna
reinforce how strong the existing pipeline is. You You saw what we did last year. You saw what we did in Q1. That Q1 performance was not spillover from last year. That is really the product of years of deep, rich pipeline momentum created by our franchisees.
And so we're seeing the benefit of that. I would tell you that we obviously started the year strong. We intend to close the year strong, and it will be a combination ultimately of our historic organic growth and I think driven by some upside in inorganic growth. Jody?
Thank you. Great. Catherine, our next question comes from Peter Sala at BTIG. You mentioned beyond chicken. What markets are you targeting for plant based chicken?
Additionally, when should consumers expect to see a broader launch of plant based chicken? And the third part to our question is, are you testing other brands?
Yes. Thanks, Jodi, and thanks, Peter. Definitely seeing increased customer increase or customer interest in plant based proteins, specifically with regards to regions, North America, Europe and even Asia, too. So it's quite broad reaching in terms of customer interest. We're definitely excited about the opportunity.
You heard us talk about it earlier, so much so that Yum! Has recently signed a strategic global partnership with Beyond as well. And then in terms of rollout, we are actively rolling out across the globe. We have either piloted or launched a plant based in eight quite diverse markets, and we will continue to roll out in all of the markets where it's relevant to our customer base to do so. So.
Thanks, Jodi. Back to you.
Thank you, Catherine. Nitin, our next question as we shift to digital comes from Andrew Strelzik from BMO. What does breakdown in growth of digital look like across digital channels? Understanding lots of markets, but maybe just broad brush picture.
Yes. Excellent question. Thanks, Jody. Look, our rapid digital growth is right now coming from all channels and geographies. Delivery, including aggregated delivery, is a big part of it.
But we're also seeing significant growth in own channels in markets like The Middle East, Thailand, and Australia. As we discussed, our fundamental belief is we need to be present, at the point of hunger for customers and then create frictionless experiences for them. So we're expanding all sorts of channels, both traditional ones as well as non traditional ones like Facebook and Google. And a few channels like Collect, we see significant upside potential, as we modernize our technology platforms and we upgrade our experiences on them. Back to you, Jody.
Great. Thank you. Stay hang tight, and we have a follow-up question from Jeffrey Bernstein at Barclays. Please discuss the outlook for loyalty, digital, and delivery in terms of current and future usage with an example of specific markets?
Yeah. Great question, Jeffrey. Look, our digital growth has been amazing, but we still think there's significant additional potential. As an example, if you look at our top three out of the five markets, they're quite a bit below our average mix of 43%. So we see a lot of headroom for growth.
We have a very clear playbook for capturing that headroom, which includes making our own assets stronger, driving life on value on our on our assets through loyalty and CRM, creating new access points. We are implementing that playbook. Markets like Canada, Thailand, and The Middle East are are three markets that have actually seen good success with that playbook, and we'll continue to replicate it across the network.
Great. We appreciate your answer. Shannon, our next question comes from John Glass with Morgan Stanley. Can you talk about the range of factors for KFC franchisees and key markets? The data that may be a global average or paybacks by other key markets, including The U.
S.
Thanks, Jody and John, for the question. As we talked about in the prepared remarks, we're quite confident that we have an industry leading payback. It typically ranges between three to five years. And we feel confident it's actually a great payback in both developed markets and emerging markets. We talked about two examples.
One was a food court in Mexico and one was a drive thru in The U. K. And they have very different upfront costs, but those are four year paybacks. So there are some franchisees that enjoy paybacks even shorter than three years. But in general, we're continuing to see three to five year as our international average.
COVID post a couple of temporary challenges, but I think our momentum on development really speaks to the strength of our investment opportunity for franchisees. We had our first positive quarter in The U. S. In Q1 since 02/2003. We posted 700 net new units in the last two quarters.
And as Dike mentioned, we've been the fastest growing of the top 10 global QSRs since 2019. So we're really proud of our paybacks, and we'll continue to do everything we can to keep them sharp. Back to you, Jenny.
Thanks, Shannon. Shannon, I actually have another question for you on a similar or a different topic, excuse me. So Shannon, Steven Gojak with Cleveland Research asked, you referenced supply chain challenges and strong growth around the chicken sandwich on the last earnings call. What are you doing to manage any potential supply disruption? Another related question is, has it had any impact on sales or operations?
Are you seeing supply chain or labor pressures in markets outside of The U. S?
Yes. Great question. Our lovely chicken sandwich. I was jealous watching Catherine eating it again in the video. The spicy sandwich is my personal favorite, so I hope you've all had a chance to try it.
Yes, the chicken sandwich has been even far out ahead of our food expectations. So it's selling 4x what our chicken sandwich was prior to that. And as we mentioned in Q1 earnings, that posed some challenges in keeping up with demand. If I look broader internationally, we are also seeing some broader inflation trends as well, which is impacting the whole industry in chicken and frying oil and some commodities. But thankfully, the pressure outside The US is much less great than it is within The US.
We have a very diversified supply base. We have privileged relationships with suppliers. We do a fair bit of our buying on long term contracts, and we have a world class team on our supply chain working through these supply chain issues. So thankfully, we have had very little impact on sales margin or operations through these shortages. But we're looking forward to kind of getting back to a more normal environment here, and we'll be working very hard to make sure we keep KSP in stock around the world.
Back to you, Jody. Thank you, Shannon. So our next question comes from Fred Whiteman at Wolfe. At a high level, how do you see drive through versus dine in demand trending as The US reopens?
Thanks, Jody. Thanks, Fred. It's a good question, and it's an important question for us in operations as we see what's gonna happen post pandemic. And, actually, what we're anticipate in The US is pretty much what we're seeing in some of the other markets in in The UK that has already started opening up dine in, which is that while customers do come back into dine in, what we are seeing is that there is some sticky behavior staying with the drive through channels and the off premise channels as well. So what really gives us good excitement and hope about the future is the fact that while customers will come back and enjoy the brand in the dining channel, we are seeing that the off premise channels, the drive through channels, the click and collect channels have given a broader experience to consumers about how to enjoy the brand at different times and different occasions.
And therefore, they will enjoy that multifaceted approach to the brand as well. So we're quite hopeful that even in The US as dine in channels open up, consumers will come into the dine in, but hopefully, also continue to enjoy the brand off premise whether it's with drive thru, through the collect, and all the other other channels that we have opened up in the recent past as well. Thank you. Back to you, Jody.
Thank you, Sabra. Welcome. Next question comes from Krista Cool at Stifel. Kathryn, you spoke about the Sobo strategy, sales overnight, brand over time. Can you please provide some additional color on what levers are affected by driving near term sales?
Yes. Thanks, Jodi. I can. That's a great question when that's very near to my heart. So I think the three biggest levers for driving what we call SO or sales overnight measured by same store sales growth, They're still very much based on RED, so being a relevant, easy and distinctive brand.
And so the first lever, I would say, is all about being relevant functionally. So that's about offering our amazing tasting Kentucky Fried Chicken food at really strong price points. So we talk about having disruptive value on our promotional calendars and everyday value on our menus. That would be the number one lever for driving same store sales growth. And we know the category is still very much driven by news, so this is really important around our food, as I said, at value price points.
The second one is around being easy, easy to see and hear, particularly around top of mind awareness through media share of voice and brand buzz. That is we've seen through data sciences, that's really important for driving short term same store sales growth. And then thirdly, also related to ease, it's all about access. So how do we promote all of those channels that Nitin talked about earlier that we've stood up over the over the last few years, so whether that's been drive thru or all the way through to delivery and click and collect. So in summary, it's very much around news on our core at really strong value.
It's then around being easy to see and hear through media and brand buzz. And then thirdly, it's really around, being easy to access. Thanks, Jodi. Back to you.
Okay. Thank you, Catherine. And our next question comes from Andy Barish of Jefferies. On third party aggregators, what percentage of delivery sales globally are integrated with the KFC POS currently? Additionally, the follow-up question is, where are you on The U.
S. Journey to new POS and integration?
Yes. We are integrated with all of our major aggregator partners, including The US where we've expanded beyond Grubhub. In general, our approach is we want to maximize both speed and accuracy, in the restaurant to free up team member time, and aggregator integration is actually a very critical part of that. That's why we made it a priority. To you, Jody.
Great. Thank you so much. Next question comes from Peter again with BTIG. Peter's question is for Dike. Dike, can you discuss unit development expectations in The US after contraction for the past fifteen years?
What's changed? What's driving the inflection and positive development? Is it category growth, off premise, closure, poor performing restaurants? Doug, please let me know if you need to repeat any of that as it was a multipart question.
No. I I think I've got it, and and hopefully, you can hear me. I understand we've had a bit of an audio problem. You know, Typically, Peter, what you see in this industry is when you've got a winning consumer proposition and really good unit economics, then franchise capital moves against that. And I would say that in the last couple of decades, have been elements early on where we struggled with some of those in The U.
S. What the team has done a brilliant job in the last several years of doing is driving same store sales growth, which sharpens the model, makes us more relevant to consumers. And so now we've got a proposition that franchisees are excited about and keen to invest behind. So as Kevin said, we're excited about the possibility of becoming positive this year in The U. S.
And then sustaining that for the next several years. Thanks, Jody.
Thanks, Sykes. I appreciate it. Our next question comes from John Glass. It's to you, Hinton, on the TikTok or an acquisition. So the question is, can you please describe perhaps an example of how TikTok works to drive digital orders?
Yes. Great question. A core part of our strategy, as we've discussed, is easy to access, and easy to access means meeting the customer at their point of hunger. We know customers are spending more and more time on digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram. So we are trying to create access points there.
TikTok is very much in line with that strategy, across a range of channels like WhatsApp or Instagram or text or web. If you're already on the platform, you can create a very simplified way to order from KFC. It's just a few clicks, and we believe that we need to do more and more of that in the future. Back to me, Jody.
And, Tyson, I have one follow-up question. Can you provide an example of of where Tic Tac is is currently used in an international KFC market and and how that the success and really the team member, and customer experience from that integration? Yes,
of course. So we started with TikTok in KFC actually in our Latin American markets. Right now, it's live in about 400 plus stores across the world. From Latin America, we've expanded it to some of our sub Saharan African markets as well as to some of our Asian markets. And the way the ordering works is, let's say you're on WhatsApp.
You just type in, you know, your choice. You'll see a simplified menu. You type in a choice from that menu. That gets sent to to the KFC platform. The order gets fulfilled, you know, on the back end, and you can choose pickup or delivery.
So that's how it works. The reason we are so excited about it is because we are it's such a simple process, and it's so fast that we are seeing a lot of excitement from consumers around it, and we are seeing pretty high conversion rates on it. As I mentioned, 60% in some of our African markets. So we're pretty excited about it.
You. Great. Shannon, our next question comes from Eric Gonzalez at KeyBanc. He asks, you mentioned that much of last year's ticket growth has sustained as traffic counts come back. Can you discuss how you see the traffic ticket dynamics playing out this year?
Sure thing. Thanks, Eric, for the question. Yes, we have seen sustained ticket growth. We saw the ticket come up about 30% in the peak of the pandemic, and then it dropped back off in q three of last year. But we've actually been holding in a sustained 15 to 20 higher ticket essentially since then, 15 to 20% above precrisis levels.
And that's really been driven by two things. The first is the shift to off premise channels, which tend to have a higher ticket on average anyway. And then the second is a higher ticket within those channels. And we think some of that will stick. So we believe the channel shift will be somewhat sticky, as Nitin has talked about.
We think consumers really enjoy the convenience. And and so while we expect the ticket average may come down a bit from where it is now as dine in reopens, we actually think it'll normalize at a higher level. And we are seeing that in some of our markets that are more open than others, such as Australia and The Middle East. Jody, back to you.
Great. Thanks, Shannon, and the broader team. We have one final question, and I'm going to send it to you, Tony. It comes from David Tarantino at Baird. Do you think the unit economic model for franchisees exiting the pandemic will be the same or better than that realized before the pandemic?
Example, has the shift to digital or along with some cost savings that you outlined improve the return equation for the franchisees?
Thanks, David. Look, that's a great question. It's also a question which is hard to be very precise on. Just a couple of comments, though. We are certainly exiting out of this pandemic a lot stronger and a lot more resilient than we were before the pandemic.
And as we've talked about a little bit before during the on the session here today, digital is really helping drive our sales. And a lot of that is incremental rather than just a a channel shift in the in in the business. And as Dike was talking about, our franchisees are incredibly confident about the business model. And we normally see when the franchisees are confident, they put their capital and they put their cash behind the investment that they have. And we're seeing that happening at an increasing rate and makes us extremely confident about the future.
So our business model is very strong. It is very resilient. As we look to the future, we couldn't be even couldn't be more optimistic than we are right now and feel that the growth model for us is, incredibly viable. Thank you, Jody.
Thank you, Tony, and the broader KFC global leadership team. That's a wrap for today's Q and A portion of the event. And if we were unable to answer your questions today or you have additional questions, please feel free to reach out to the Yum! Investor Relations team. And thank you for joining our KFC Virtual Investor Day today.
Have a great day.