Koninklijke Ahold Delhaize N.V. (AD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to the Ahold Delhaize Strategy Day on May 23, 2024. In today's presentation, forward-looking statements may be made. All statements, other than statements of historical facts, may be forward-looking statements. Such statements may involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results, performance or events to differ materially from those included in the statements. Such risks and uncertainties are discussed in Ahold Delhaize's public filings and other disclosures. Ahold Delhaize's disclosures are available on aholddelhaize.com. Forward-looking statements reflect the current views of Ahold Delhaize's management and assumptions based on information currently available to Ahold Delhaize's management. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made, and Ahold Delhaize does not assume any obligation to update such statements, except as required by law. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. Any views expressed by those asking questions are not necessarily the views of Ahold Delhaize. I would like to now hand the floor over to Frans Muller, President and Chief Executive Officer.

So a very good evening, a very good morning and a very good afternoon, all of you here in the beautiful town of Zaandam. Thank you very much for coming over and sharing with us the day of today, and thank you also for all of you online, for those who are following us and investing the time to learn more about our plans and about our future growth, of course. Today, you will meet many of our team. And together, we have worked hard in the last year in a thoughtful, provocative, inclusive and dynamic way to think about our future. And in this plan, we have taken a multi-stakeholder approach to bring new insights and diverse ways of thinking. And at the same time, we are not taking things for granted. Grounded in who we are and remaining true to our customer expectations, building strong relationships with our stakeholders, that means also including the financial community and our shareholders, that is extremely important to us. And being able to show you firsthand our people and infrastructure in action at the site visits yesterday in [indiscernible], you have been there, hopefully, and at the stores -- and at DC in Barendrecht of Albert Heijn. And this morning at Albert Heijn's flagship store at [indiscernible] and our mechanized warehouse here in Zaandam. And this is, for us, a valuable context and that goes for us far beyond an Excel spreadsheet or a DCF model. Therefore, I would like to invite you to take this time with us and step back from your quarterly results and reflect with us, think along with us, and as we unpack today our strategy for the coming 4 years. And don't worry, all the materials we show you today will be also available on our websites and online. So let's dive in. We have a great schedule ahead of -- in front of you. And at the tables, we have also provided you some snacks and some energy boosters, at the courtesy of Giant Food and Albert Heijn, if you need them. So let's dive in and let's look at the program of today. I'll start to say a few things more about the group strategy. Then JJ Fleeman will share more with you about our U.S. strategy and so does Wouter for Europe and Indonesia. We then have a generous break of 15 minutes. And then we go into the pretty cool deep dives. And there you see deep dives on people and communities, on own brands, but also on AI and tech. And you will see Natalia and Ben and Karen and Noortje in action and also some guest appearances by video. And then Jolanda takes a stage at the end of our presentations to share with you our financial ambitions because those are, of course, also very important to link with the contents too. And we talk about shareholder returns, and we talk about a few more of those important KPIs also for us. And we will finish together off with a Q&A session on stage with all the members you have seen talking to you today. And I just would like to check with you. Does that sound like a plan? Monique, what do you think? Is it a good plan? Nicole, are you okay? Yes. And Isabelle, what do you think? Okay. Let's go, operator, start the video, please. [Presentation]

When I see this video, it fills me with pride. I think we have a great company. The passion of our people you see in the video, our leading positions in the markets where we operate, but also the important role we play in society. And we'll talk more about this today, and we talked about this quite a lot of things yesterday. With our 150 years of heritage, we are a purpose and value-led company. We have a clear vision. We know who we are, but we also know who we want to be. With more than 7,700 stores, 16 great local brands, more than 400,000 people and our track record of innovation, customer centricity, reliability, but also community and connection. And that has yielded #1 and #2 positions in the 9 countries we operate in. We win when we focus on elevating brand strength and driving relative market share. And you heard me in the last couple of years, that combination is a very strong combination for us. And this is only possible with trust, and that is why trust is fully embedded in our refreshed vision. Together, we are your trusted local food retailer. And while the economic profile and financials of a grocery company might seem sometimes slow and steady, I can tell you that the daily activity is far from it. Everything that happens in society and in our local communities is felt by us. And it works both ways. Delighting 63 million customers a week requires thousands of decisions daily to ensure healthy, safe, fresh and convenient solutions for them. So who are our customers? Well, we are there, and we want to be there for every customer, any wallet and any cultural background. And that is the role of a full shop traditional grocer. And what do those customers want? They want a quality offer at their fingertips and ultimately, great prices that fit their spending power, their budgets. Customers today are very much in tune with what is going on. They are very, very smart. They are well informed, aware of their choices, and they have high ethical and social standards at the same time. Therefore, there is no coincidence that our growth model is rooted in our purpose, inspiring everyone to eat and live better for a healthier future for people and planet. And you've got this beautiful brochure, where we once more make this also very visible to you. And this purpose extends via our commitment to run our business in a sustainable way so that future generations can also thrive. This is a responsibility we take very seriously and with a positive can-do attitude. And we encourage our leaders to play active roles in forums like the Consumer Goods Forum and others to increase the dialogue, to share learnings and to keep our ambitions on healthy communities and planet super high. We know it is difficult. We also know sometimes it takes longer to achieve our ambitions than we would like. But as you saw in the short video, every small step can lead to giant leaps. The business of food is tough. It's competitive. It's hard work. But it's also fun and rewarding. And when you think about the impact we can make for the better as an employer, as a retailer, as a neighbor and as somebody you can daily in our stores, for example, can talk to. I'm proud of everything our brands and our associates do in this respect. I'm super proud of them, what they do during COVID, during hyperinflation, during and after the murder of George Floyd, during the Ukraine war and all the conflict geopolitical. And especially when it comes to food security, which is in the passion of mine, ensuring access to food in both good and in bad times, is often very humbling. For many years, our company has actively partnered with local food banks, creating a positive impact by alleviating hunger and reducing food insecurity. Throughout 2023, our brands contributed for more than EUR 240 million in charitable cash and food donations to local and regional food banks and to nonprofit organizations. And today, I'm delighted to announce that Ahold Delhaize is entering a sponsorship with the global food banking network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to hunger relief and environmental sustainability, supporting community-led food banks. As a sizable company with almost EUR 90 billion in sales, it is important for us as leaders to provide the tools, the resources and the conditions for our people's success, so that they can get the necessary support in serving our customers every day. Because it's through them, our people, that we, as a large company, can ultimately make a big difference locally. I've been in this industry now for a pleasant 30 years. And the one thing I know for sure, that success in this business comes down to passion and loving the things you do. If you don't love people in our business, you will not be successful. And the best way to create this is through the shared values we have. This is a filter of how we work and who we choose to work with. And you might know them already, for those who know our company for a little bit longer, courage, integrity, teamwork, care and humor. And they shape to winning Ahold Delhaize's culture, we are known and respected for. Our values are our secret sauce, and they are ultimately the synergies we have. All our brands share these values at DCs, distribution centers, at offices and in our stores, no matter where you are in our company. So now that all -- that you all have a feeling of who we are, let's now get into the detail of how we create value together for you. Since the formation of Ahold Delhaize in 2016, our Better Together and Leading Together strategies have positioned us extremely well. Common in both these plans and what also will be common in Growing Together is our philosophy around investments. While a large portion of our capital expenditure is to keep systems running, we leave plenty of space in our budgets to be innovative and to try new things. We were first movers in scaling e-commerce, and the large majority of our customers already have access to a full spectrum of omnichannel solutions. We are leading in loyalty and personalization, providing billions of personalized offers each month. And when we find winning moves, we are not afraid to bet big behind them. We're also rigorous in appraising our returns on investments. We monitor the impact of projects closely in a very disciplined way, regularly reviewing and escalating deviations in a highly structured and process different way. We correct things swiftly when they are not working or accelerate when we see success. We also regularly review our operating models to ensure they are still fit for the future. And last but not least, we are also not too shy or too proud to change course when things do not go according to plan or when we see partnerships with others as a more effective route to give our customers the best potential solution in the market. And to be a little bit more precise for those who are new to our company, let me share a few tangible examples. In innovation, we have built strong anchors in future growth fields, adding in-house expertise and/or partnering with best-of-breed vendors in domains such as digital, Gen AI and automation. And in Europe, the investment in Adhese, the opening of the Romanian tech hub and the AutoStore, Swisslog partnership you have seen yesterday in Barendrecht, show that we cast a wide net when we think about the future. In the U.S., in beginning in 2018, we began an ambitious project to consolidate an in-house important aspects of our supply chain to have more control of our destiny as we innovate and grow. And I'm pleased to say that we are now self-distributed to a level of 85% of our volumes, with only 2 categories, HBC and frozen, left to do. In terms of operating model transformations, the Delhaize Belgium future plan, led by Xavier and his team, and the joint operating model work carried out by Jesper and his team in Central and Southeast Europe, were major initiatives. And both are now close to being successfully completed. Beyond organic growth and efficiency programs, we have also selectively been active inorganically through acquisitions and/or new franchise partnerships, such as, for example, the acquisition of the bylaw stores for Food Lion. The partnership and acquisition of DEEN and Jan Linders stores for Albert Heijn. And shortly, we are looking forward to closing our largest transaction in recent years, with the intended acquisition of Profi in Romania, which will double our presence in that country in a very complementary way. And finally, we also have been active on the other side, disposing or divesting assets, we felt would not yield long-term returns or where our analysis suggested we could deliver better unit economics with third-party partners. For example, in the U.S., our divestment of Fresh Direct, shifting our e-commerce fulfillment operations, disposal of the U.S. meat facilities or entering into an exciting multiyear partnership with DoorDash, for instant delivery, which has already surpassed in the meantime, already 1 million orders. So what has all this yielded in terms of return, in terms of long-term value creation. And remember, when I talk about this, we are here for the long term. And never take a step back, considering our investment profile, our mentality to never rest and to be always accountable to serving our customers and winning in our markets. I think the scorecard behind me is pretty compelling. Because looking back, we've grown sales by EUR 22 billion. We delivered almost a 30% CAGR in net consumer online sales. We maintained a consistent underlying operating margin above 4%. We delivered over EUR 8 billion of free cash flow. We realized a 10% compound annual growth rate in our earnings per share and dividend per share. We increased the share of our own brand healthy food sales by 7 percentage points. We reduced our food waste by 37% compared to our 2016 baseline, and we reduced our carbon emissions in our own operations, our Scope 1 and 2, by 35% compared to our 2018 baseline. And this ability to compound growth and cash flow consistently through the cycles underpins the attractiveness, we think, of our investment case. Therefore, as we pivot to our new strategic plan with a volatile years of pandemic behind us, and as inflation becomes -- to become more benign, I'm confident we have everything we need to extend our value creation track record and even accelerate it. And this is certainly our goal and how this leadership team, you will see amidst today, have concluded the choices we are undertaking to drive a strong growth agenda towards 2028. And what I would like to do now is give you a little flavor for the rationale behind our choices. So let's step together with me into our growth model. As you saw in our press release this morning, our plans are ambitious. The most eye-catching component, I hope you agree, is to outperform the traditional grocery market and grow at a 4% net sales CAGR, which means, for sure, in this environment, market share growth. And the 4 levers of our growth model are: invest in our winning customer value propositions, densify and grow our markets, innovate for growth and efficiency and leverage and lower our cost base. And these levers are then powered by 6 strategic priorities, which support and mutually reinforce each other. And the 6 strategic priorities are, and you can read them faster than maybe I can talk, but our trusted product, vibrant customer experiences, healthy communities and planet, driving customer innovation, portfolio and operational excellence and very important to all of us, thriving people. JJ and Wouter will do most of the heavy lifting, explaining how this all will work in practice. However, let me share you my thoughts on the biggest of the opportunities in our growth model. The ones that will make a difference and the ones which will be fighting hardest for as a company. Let's start, of course, with the customer. We know that strengthening our competitiveness always brings the fastest and highest return on investment. This is because staying sharp around the basics, delivering trusted products, excellent prices and creating those vibrant customer experiences, and this is our customer value proposition formula that ensure we can continue to win with existing and future customers. The things we will be pushing here, including double down on our award-winning own brand assortments. While our own brands have served a critical role in our growth path so far, I can assure you the story won't end here post-inflation. We are doing a lot of great work on our own brands in center store, that means the dry assortments and in fresh, to enable differentiation, offer a wide range of price options, balance our assortments and support our healthy people and planet commitments. In terms of ambition, we are raising the bar significantly and to intent, push own brand penetration towards 45% for the entire company by 2028. And we will do this by moving faster with cross brands, best practice sharing and consolidating activities. We already have a few champions in our portfolio, and you saw for sure, one today, on private label, who have more than mastered this task, and you will hear from some of them later in the conversations with Wouter and JJ and some very nice proof points by video. In addition to products, we will also take the next leap in creating a vibrant omnichannel customer experiences. And this means in-store, digitally and any shopping journey combination of the 2. We are leading in loyalty and personalization, providing millions of personalized offers each month. And we know that an omni-channel customer spends 1.5 to 3x more with us in our most mature markets. Therefore, by infusing more life and more content and transforming our loyalty systems to lead with digital first, we aim to drive up our omnichannel sales and loyalty sales up to over 80% by 2028 from a penetration point of view. Along the way, we intend to funnel loyalty customers from physical cards to our digital app ecosystems, which should yield a rapid increase in monthly active users where we target 30 million by 2028. And this, in turn, will also play an important role in feeding growth of complementary income streams, which I will touch on in a minute. Now let's look at the lever to densify and grow markets. 96% of our sales today are from trade areas, where we are and with our brands are the #1 or #2 player. And by prioritizing and optimizing and sharpening our portfolio, you will see a more pronounced and rigorous focus on activating our portfolio to grow customer reach and extend leading positions in our most profitable markets. And this is all about quality, quality sales, quality brands, quality customers and of course, our quality people. And again, I will leave it to the regions to explain how they are shaping up their plans in this direction, but the few callouts I'm excited are the following. There is a clear and deliberate Stop & Shop plan, which we have already begun executing. Our Belgium future plan will shift from execution to growth. Central and Southeastern Europe, including our intended Profi acquisition, will provide outsized growth for the company versus the European peers, as that region becomes a consistent contributor to sales of more than EUR 10 billion. And our stance on Bol has not changed. Bol is a great asset, and we are remaining confident that it will have a very bright future. We will continue to keep an open mind on the best and most appropriate way to crystallize the brand's value. Now let's talk about innovation and innovating growth and efficiency. As Ben, my colleague in the Executive Committee, you will see him later, puts us in a very nice British idiom, innovation only cuts the mustard, when there is meaningful and tangible benefits for our customers. And within this plan, you will again see accelerating capability innovation, accelerating existing business models and developing new business models for B2C and B2B customers. And whether that is accelerating our retail media and data practices or using analytical and generative AI in new ways because we are already doing a lot here, by the way, we will continue to build, buy and partner to stay at the forefront of industry disruption and transformation. And you will hear later from Ben and from Karen and Noortje and Jelmer, how we are taking a future-back approach from well beyond 2028, to ensure we have the right steps now and in our infrastructure to unlock the full suite of future growth and efficiency potential. While I'm on the subject of innovation, I would like to take a slight detour for a minute to talk about our healthy communities and planet ambitions. First of all, we are really pleased that so many of you attended our separate healthy and communities and planet deep dive and dialogue of yesterday. We really appreciated it to share this with folks who are into the topics, have the right questions, put the pressure on us, have the dialogue and make us also co-create even in a better future. Engagement on this topic is really important to us. And we welcome the partnerships of the financial community on these kind of matters. The reason I bring this subject up is because I passionately believe that innovation, and even more so, innovation is a fundamental part of the solution here. To achieve the aspirations, we have on the screen, you see that we will embed those initiatives across our growth model and with our strategic priorities, leading and leveraging innovation, data and dialogue to drive results. Key areas of focus will be inspiring our customers and communities to engage in positive habits and supporting our associates to be ambassadors, inspiring everybody to eat and live better. For climate, we are accelerating value chain, decarbonization in our own operations, the Scope 1 and 2, while working with our suppliers to identify and implement initiatives relatively to their business and also helping them in the Scope 3 type of targets. For nature, we will strive to protect nature and biodiversity by promoting regenerative agriculture, water stewardship, working to stop deforestation, land conversion and pollution while we respect people, animals and their habitats. For circularity, we plan to scale circular models for packaging, for unsold food, designing for recyclability and driving higher valorization of our unsold food. And while getting after these initiatives, we will require additional resources, prioritization, time and energy. It's also clear to us that many of them will yield good paybacks and positive business benefits. With that, let's go to the final lever of our growth model, to leverage and lower our cost base. With our size and scale, we are known for ability to deliver consistent operational and financial performance. We are a strong partner for our suppliers and for our vendors, and we have built meaningful alliances with international peers to drive value for our customers and our operations. And examples of these are, for example, in Europe, Coopernic, EURELEC and on a more international scale, our newly -- new initiative, W23 Global. Also, we have a strong mentality internally when it comes to cost, well above our weight here in future years, which we think is why we are lifting our cumulative 4-year ambition for save our customers to EUR 5 billion. And most of the levers are the usual suspects, and you will get plenty of additional details on these from the regions and in the deep dives. Therefore, I will leave that opportunity to Jolanda, to share some highlights and summarize in her presentation a little bit more details how we think we're going to make those targets work. So now that I have done the full tour of the growth model, let me spend some time on driving accountability and execution of the plan and ultimately, also on what value Growing Together should deliver for our stakeholders. Firstly, it starts with thriving people, who are necessary to deliver our powerful organization. And this is the most important task for our strong, deep and talented bench of leaders across the total organization. I'm proud of our track record with our people, their desire to win, their commitment and hard work to service and serve communities, especially during the last difficult years of pandemic and a soaring inflation. Those were not easy times in 7,700 stores, DCs and offices, I can tell you. And today, as you will hear and see from Natalia, we have a highly engaged, productive and caring team of more than 400,000 people. We continue to break barriers on diversity, equity and inclusion. And when you combine this with our ambition to be the #1 or #2 employer of choice in all of our markets, we are investing and putting the tools in place to grow our people and future-proof our organization. In addition, the thoroughness that has come and has gone into defining our strategic choices. We also have paid great attention to how we create shared ownership and to deliver Growing Together. And this is clear in our incentive systems, in our ways of working, in our ways of communication, transparently with each other, and I believe we excel in this area. And you'll see those details later also with Jolanda's presentation. Before I finish, let me say a few words about our financial ambitions. As I said in my opening, I believe this is a very compelling set of ambitions, which is on delivery will yield strong growth in our shareholder returns. We have a strong foundation, and we are ready to set the pace for change in our industry. And this creates an opportunity, and we will capitalize on this. Our 4% sales CAGR to 2028 means we are fully intent and aim to grow faster than the industry average. We also keep our standards on maintaining industry-leading underlying operating margins. And of course, we will not be penny wise or pound foolish. At one time or another, if we need to take additional resources in hand to drive a quick win-win or to step in to remedy a challenge, we will do so, so that we are always defending our market shares or reinforcing our leading positions. And given all the important structural work we have behind us, we also do not foresee the need to change our annual gross cash CapEx of 3% as a percentage of sales between now and 2028. The real fuel for our growth will come from unlocking more efficiency, investing more in our winning propositions and shifting more capital to even more profitable and more obvious growth opportunities. And all in all, that also means we will continue our path to grow, to grow shareholder returns annually, and which Jolanda will detail as she will wrap up our formal sessions for today. So here it is, our Growing Together strategy. And now it's all about execution. And as you can probably tell, I'm very excited about this plan and all of the work our teams and associates have put into it. And as I said in my opening, now you know the results of our joint teamwork together with our top leadership in the company, together with our broader leadership in the total group. Growing Together is our new plan that we are unveiling today to the market, to the associates, the 400,000 people around the network. So with all of you in the room, too. And many of our stakeholders online following this event, I invite you to join in with us to Growing Together. Growing Together is about care, protecting the legacy of Ahold Delhaize and growing our company with the right leadership behaviors. Teamwork, winning in our markets, with our customers driving market shares, elevating brand strength and always providing the best assortments, great competitive prices at the freshest and the healthiest products we can find. Growing Together is also about integrity, being transparent, delivering on our promises and running our business in a sustainable way. Growing Together is about courage, taking on the big issues in society, collaboration with our partners and sticking to our healthier communities and planet ambitions, even if and when the path might take longer. Growing Together is also about humor because humor creates the space for humility, for optimism, for innovation and for creativity. And finally, Growing Together with your support, our financial community, our community where our promise is to fight hard to grow, nurture, protect the intrinsic value of our great company and our powerful portfolio of great local brands. Thank you again for your time and for your attention. I would like now to transfer to our next topic on the agenda, and I would like to introduce to you, JJ Fleeman, our CEO of Ahold Delhaize USA.

Good afternoon and good morning. Thank you, Frans, and I'm excited to be with you today to talk about our business in the U.S. For the past 30 years, I've been in the grocery business and have worked in nearly every part of our business. I've played a key role in more than a few strategic growth opportunities and transformation like the one that you're well aware of at Food Lion, and I truly believe that the Growing Together strategy really positions the U.S. well to accelerate growth in the future. In the U.S., as you already know, we have a strong thriving business led by more than 225,000 associates, who are incredibly passionate about making customer connections each and every day. As we move ahead, we'll leverage the strength of our people and our brands' rich local heritages, alongside the strength of our total scale as we grow and evolve, with the customer at the center of everything that we do. Let's take a look at our U.S. business. In the U.S., we have 5 local brands, what I call 5 beautiful brands, Food Lion, Giant Food, The GIANT Company, Hannaford and Stop & Shop. Considered together, our brands are the largest retail group on the East Coast. We have USD 59 billion in sales each year. Our brands serve more than 24 million customers every week across 19 states through more than 2,000 stores and online platforms. As our brands have evolved over the past several years, we are now truly omnichannel retailers. That's exactly how we're talking about our business today. As I talk about our brands, I'm speaking to the combination of both the in-store and our online business. I believe that this is really important because it represents the significant progress we've made in the U.S., and is part of our winning combination of local and scale. Through the capabilities that we've built, each brand now has a seamless integrated shopping experience that builds trust and loyalty across all of our channels. I personally believe this is where the magic begins. This is the power of food retailing as we move forward and into the future. And our brands are more than places to shop. As you know, they are really the heart of our communities and some for more than 140 years. During the most difficult and celebratory times, our stores are the hubs of their communities. They are the go-to place for people to connect, cheer for and support each other, we're really at the core of our communities. Being local is really important to us, and these local connections give us a competitive advantage. As we move through the presentation, I hope that you'll hear us speak more about that and learn more about why we feel like this is such a powerful combination. As you can see on the screen, our brands have a significant presence across the East Coast, and hold the #1 or the #2 position in the majority of the markets where they operate. When we combine these leading positions with significant scale, we create winning formulas for business performance. By truly leveraging the combination of local and scale, we have built a robust omnichannel grocery business and our business is growing. From 2019 to 2023, we've had growth every year, and have maintained over 7% sales CAGR and 43% e-commerce sales CAGR. Additionally, since 2019, 85% of our 54 DMAs have seen positive share growth. Before we move on, I'll punctuate this once more. We have a very strong business today, and we are growing. The performance is built on the combination of trusted local retail brands, our incredible people, loyal customers and new capabilities, which have enabled our brands to win and take advantage of our highly fragmented markets in the U.S. Trust, passion and loyalty are words we take very seriously and care about deeply. Our growth trajectory has also been fueled by bold moves we've made to evolve our business. A few examples. We've built key omnichannel capabilities like our proprietary e-commerce platform that we call internally, PRISM, and other native applications. The local brands have also developed a robust click and collect and delivery infrastructure across the East Coast that now includes more than 1,600 store-based fulfillment centers. And if you think about speed, the importance of speed, just a few years ago, we only had 58. It's an incredible accomplishment from our teams. This infrastructure, coupled with a strong digital experience, now offers pickup or delivery for 99% of our brands' customers across the 19 states. We've executed operational efficiency, something that we're known for, of course, so that we can further invest. We've also transformed our supply chain, as you heard Frans mention, and now have 85% of volume self-distributed through a network of more than 20 distribution centers across the East Coast. And we've taken further action to make the most of our assets, including selling the FreshDirect business and 2 meat processing facilities in the Northeast. Finally, we've enhanced commercial processes like planning with vendors to create strategic relationships to improve cost, trade rates, innovation, but more importantly, to grow the business together. Our focus on operational efficiency and simplification programs has resulted in significant savings over the past 4 years. And as you hear us talk about this more today, it remains an important focus for our teams going forward. And we believe that there's a lot more room to save and to find more efficiencies. Through this work and the capabilities we've built, we've learned a lot as well. For example, our omnichannel customers spend 2.5 to 3x more than other customers, fulfillment from the store is the most effective solution for us in the U.S., personalized value is a critical driver for loyalty and repeat customers, and these learnings will help our brands continue to offer trusted seamless experiences for customers going forward. As you can see, hopefully, in the images behind me, our connections with customers matter. They are at the center of everything that we do. For example, guiding stars, our nutritional guidance programs, make it really easy. I can tell you on a Sunday morning when my 3-year-old grandson comes, and I can go tell him to find 2 stores, it makes it really helpful. Shoppable recipes through our Savory magazine are also another way, options like making shopping more convenient, like scan and go checkout, to name a few, are other ways that we connect. By keeping the customer at the center of all we do, we build trust and drive loyalty, and that's the beauty of our business, that's the power of local brands connecting with customers and communities. As we now look at the next 4 years, the U.S. businesses are focused on delivering the Ahold Delhaize's growth model and strategic priorities that Frans introduced in his opening. In fact, each of these are at the core of what we do and who we are. We'll continue to grow and expand our business. We'll also expand in markets where we have density, grow our relationships with existing customers and make smart, disciplined investments. Now let's take a talk about this in just a little bit more detail. As you can see here on the slide, we will leverage both our local connections and our scaled opportunities to expand our portfolio. While our brands lead in the majority of their markets, it's important to note that there's still significant room for growth. Over the next 4 years, we'll increase brand strength and density by remodeling and/or adding more than 1,000 stores. We will strengthen our value proposition by investing over USD 1 billion in price while at the same time, expanding digital relationships and e-commerce capabilities. We will lead, we will grow, and we will differentiate in own brands by aligning our assortment to leverage scale and to innovate to get to the core of what customers need from our brands, and I'm really excited about this opportunity. We'll talk more about it later today. It's a significant opportunity for us. We will drive complementary income streams through opportunities like retail media, and we'll build new digital and e-commerce capabilities to achieve our ambition of 50% digital engagement by 2028. And finally, we'll continue reducing operating costs through robust efficiency programs. These moves, along with others, will earn us the right to win with our customers and in the marketplace. Here's a look at what to expect for each brand. Food Lion, a powerhouse brand, already strong, will further accelerate growth through focused market expansion, including an enhanced omnichannel remodel program. Food Lion will build density with new stores in key markets and expand their outer edge reach. And Meg will share more on Food Lion's growth plan shortly. Likewise, gains in market share and strong brand reputation, as I'm sure you have heard and hopefully experienced, give us confidence at Hannaford to invest and grow through targeted remodels, new stores in high-growth areas and expansion on the outer edge of Hannaford's footprint. In the Mid-Atlantic market, The GIANT Company will grow with a focus on maintaining its leading market positions and increasing density in key markets, along with targeted remodels and price investments. Also at the same region, Giant Food will build on its strong heritage through strategic investments in price, private brands and remodels. Stop & Shop has done a thorough evaluation, and is focused on ensuring a stable and thriving future, which includes investments in price and customer service, along with optimizing the portfolio to focus on core markets where it can win. Finally, we'll go into more detail today about 3 of our brands: Food Lion, The GIANT Company and Stop & Shop, to show a few examples of how our focused portfolio approach will solidify brand strength through each of our regions. I'd like to now take a bit of time to listen from Meg Ham about how Food Lion continues to grow by serving its towns and cities. [Presentation]

I hope you found that pretty exciting. I'd like to thank Meg and the entire Food Lion leadership team. Food Lion's growth story is incredible, and it's unprecedented in our industry. I'm excited about our ambitious plans for Food Lion and the brand over the next 4 years, and I'm absolutely confident that Food Lion will continue to win. Next, let's take a closer look at the Giant Company. Just like Hannaford, which you've heard about on our most recent quarterly call, the Giant Company has an incredibly strong regional presence and loyal customer base. John and team who just celebrated their 100-year anniversary has built a really strong durable brand that fulfills its customers' core needs of saving time and money. But it has an opportunity to further increase density and reach in the Mid-Atlantic region. The Giant Company has seen great success in two primary states, Pennsylvania and Maryland. And thanks to the brand's work, deepening relationships with customers through personalized offers, in-store service, fast convenient delivery and value, the brand now has the highest NPS score in its 100-year history. The Giant Company has also increased its e-commerce sales penetration nearly 40% since 2022. Its Choice Rewards loyalty program has helped fuel these results. Millions of households participate in the program, which now accounts for nearly 90% of all transactions. I think it's pretty cool. But imagine the possibilities with this program, when you start to really connect with families and communities to save them money, but more importantly, to help them in everyday life. The Giant Company is also achieving historic returns as they remodel their stores to be fresh, modern, sustainable. Last year alone, they remodeled 29 stores, and this trend continues. To enhance customer value and to further grow the Giant Company will strategically invest in price and explore new stores and formats in region. I look forward to seeing the giant company continue to win in markets. Next, let's take a look at Stop & Shop. Stop & Shop located in the northeastern part of the U.S. has a rich heritage and holds a strong market share position despite fierce competition. As you already know, Stop & Shop has strong real estate positions, locations and markets. with close to 400 stores across seven DMAs. While there are many examples, excited to share just a couple with you of the investments that we've made in Stop & Shops since 2018. And we've now completed more than 190 remodels with many customer-focused upgrades. The remodeled stores are outperforming the non-remodeled stores. They've worked to strengthen their value proposition, both online and in store. They've expanded digital capabilities to further enhance their already strong e-commerce experience. In fact, Stop & Shop has the highest e-commerce penetration across all of our five local brands. They've enhanced Go Rewards, its loyalty program and other programs to grow digitally engaged customers. And lastly, they have driven operational efficiency through supply chain cost reductions, programs and through new technologies like RELX, which is our forecasting and replenishment system. But that's not enough, and it's not where we want to be or need to be. As Stop & Shop embarks on its next phase, we will be decisive and take deliberate and appropriate actions to ensure a stable future for the brand. We will use the learnings from the past several years, especially the last 12 months to make improvements. We're moving forward confidently in three key areas that I'd like to talk about. The first is one to improve the cost structure of Stop & Shop. Second, we're going to optimize the store portfolio. And third, we're going to celebrate and delight customers through CVP improvements and differentiation, starting by intensifying our price investments. More specifically, Stop & Shop will have a relentless focus on operational excellence and efficiency at every level of its organization. This will include a more efficient organizational structure along with a focus on quality, fresh products, well stocked shelves, further supply chain efficiency and fantastic service in each of its stores. Stop & Shop will focus on the markets that are most important, including those where the brand has strong density, holds a strong market position or has stores that are performing well. Stop & Shop has already evaluated its overall portfolio and we'll make difficult decisions to close underperforming stores to create a healthy store base for the long term and grow the brand. As we talked about, customers are already responding positively to Stop & Shop's remodel program as Stop & Shop now begins to optimize. The brand will use those learnings to deploy a more efficient use of capital as we further their remodels. And the value proposition and pricing at Stop & Shop are simply not strong enough. We will improve the end-to-end customer experience, value proposition started with a large multiyear price investment. While price is critical, we will differentiate the CVP across multiple dimensions. These investments will be fueled by leveraging scale to lower cost, streamlining operations and creating efficiency. Not only at Stop & Shop, but across the entire U.S. By making these moves, we are confident Stop & Shop can contribute even more to the U.S. business. So that's about a few examples about our portfolio. Now let's take a look at how we'll enhance our winning customer experience to grow trips and baskets across all of our brands. Our brand's customer value proposition includes three key areas: the first, fresh and unique assortments available in every shop. Second, personalized value every day, both in stores and online, and third, one-of-a-kind convenient experiences across the full omnichannel shop. Offering customers, as you know, fresh, local, healthy and sustainable assortments is something our brands already excel at. Having the right everyday local assortments builds trust and connections with our customers. At the center of each brand's assortment is their own brand offering, which we'll talk more about later. Already a strong business today, 95% of our U.S. baskets already have an own brand item product in that basket. Across our total store, we offer nine owned brand labels that span categories across the entire store. In fact, you're likely aware, I hope you're aware, of Nature's Promise, which is one of the nation's best organic brands. Going forward, we'll have a clear opportunity to lead across all of our own brands like we've done with Nature's Promise. You'll hear more about the importance of own brands and more specifically about the plans for own brands in the U.S. from Peter here shortly. In addition to continuing to expand and cultivate a compelling assortment, we will make a landmark $1 billion strategic price investment in our U.S. brands over the next 4 years. In an environment where customers are watching every penny, this will enable our brands to offer incredible value to their customers. Alongside the price investment, our brands will strengthen their award-winning loyalty programs, we will also continue to deepen relationships with customers by delivering value that is most meaningful to them from personalized pricing to promotions. As a result, our digital customer engagement will be more than 50% by 2028, which, of course, will contribute to our goals of increasing omnichannel loyalty sales, as you heard Frans talk about and also our monthly active users. Another area that will fuel our growth is the use of technology, data and AI. As you'll hear in Ben's presentation a bit later, technology and data are at the core of delivering four customers in the U.S. and around the globe. In the U.S., we've invested in the right set of digital capabilities already to create seamless tech-enabled experiences. We will build on this to drive further personalization, flexibility and delight and convenience that will increase customer connections. Underpinned by technology will continue to build new omnichannel features and functionalities that will drive growth. Building on those capabilities, I think and we have committed to have a large opportunity to grow complementary income streams like retail media. We are well positioned to do this because we know our customers well and we know what's important to them. We've taken bold moves to accelerate the growth of our Retail Media business already. One of those bold moves was bringing our retail media platform in-house last year. Since making this transition, we've increased retail media income by approximately 30%, significant increase. To further grow in this area, we will create unique shoppable content across channels and leverage innovative technologies for a truly connected shopping experience. As a result, customers will receive inspirational, hyper-personalized content that makes shopping fun. That's the power of the connection, but the beauty of our focus in this area is to provide a better customer experience so that they get more value for their money that they have a better experience in their stores, and we continue to expand our brands permission sets with customers. Imagine the potential of this, when we combine this with our already award-winning loyalty programs and the significant value propositions our brands have in the U.S., along with the significant price investments that we're going to make. And I think that's a great segue to our next topic, operational efficiency, one that I'm super passionate about. Strong operational efficiency will also be critical to help us fund and to grow all of our business and to keep top of mind for our teams. As you know, we've already demonstrated our ability to generate these dollars over the past several years, but we're even more confident that we can drive even more savings and further efficiency. First, we'll continue to simplify and streamline our U.S. operating model to remove redundancy to deliver the absolute best customer experience each and every day. Second, we'll drive efficiencies in our supply chain and e-commerce fulfillment by improving operations and pivoting to more store-based fulfillment. Third, we are investing in technology and AI to create greater accuracy in our operations while reducing cost. And finally, as you'll hear from Yolanda, efficiency and effectiveness is key to freeing up the funds our brands need to fuel more growth. In the U.S., we're committed to unlocking savings to reinvest in our customers. Now before I close, I'll say a few things on our commitment to our communities and our people. As I said earlier, our brands are at the heart of the communities that they serve. That relationship is critically important to us and is at the core of each of our local brand strategies. Our teams make that connection every day. A few examples of that. Hopefully, you've experienced some of it yourself. -- we've donated more than 1 billion meals since 2020. We offer fresh and healthy assortment to all customers and associates and we're committing to sustainability ambitions across the entire value chain. I'm super passionate about our people. Our people are what really makes our company. In fact, it's one of our key parts of differentiation across all of our brands at Ahold Delhaize. We remain committed to being the best place to work in food retailing and beyond. Among our teams, hopefully, you've seen we have a highly disciplined approach to managing the business every day, driven by precision, accountability and doing what is necessary and right to grow our brands. In Natalia's presentation, you'll hear more about the importance of people and communities. As you've heard, in the U.S., we've already cultivated customer connections and leverage the significant scale of our businesses. These customer-centric experiences are the foundation for accelerated growth through the growing together strategy. As we move forward, I'll close by summarizing what you can expect from the U.S. as we go forward. First, I hope you've seen that we have big plans for all of our U.S. brands. We will make strategic investments in each of our businesses with a focus on growing in markets where we have the best chance to have the biggest impact and generate the best returns. We will take decisive and deliberate actions starting with intensifying our price investments to solidify Stop & Shop's position. We will further accelerate growth at Food Lion, which already has 46 impressive quarters of consecutive growth. We will invest in price, remodels and market expansion at the giant company and at Hannaford. And we will built on the already strong heritage of giant food with continued investments in price models focused in the Baltimore and the Washington, D.C. markets. The combination of these actions account for opening and/or remodeling nearly 1,000 stores over the next 4 years. We will lead, grow and differentiate in own brands by innovating and aligning them across our local brands in the U.S. to better leverage our size and scale, but also across the entire group. We will also make a landmark $1 billion investment in price over the next 4 years to strengthen our overall value proposition fueled by continued cost reductions. And we'll grow complementary income streams prominently through retail media while we expand our digital and e-commerce capabilities. All together and truly aligned as one connected team across Ahold Delhaize. These moves will continue to earn us the right to win with customers across a highly fragmented marketplace in the U.S., and I look forward to sharing our progress with you as we move forward. And a quick invitation for anyone who lives in one of our brands geographies come in for a visit. I look forward to letting you see our growing together strategy firsthand, we're proud of it, and we're welcomed the chance to have you experience it with us. And you'll listen to a lot of things today, but I'd like to leave you with one thing. One thing that I'm very certain of is we're going to grow and we're going to win. Thank you for your time. I'd like to turn it over now to Wouter to talk to us about the European business.

Thank you. Welcome. Good afternoon or morning or evening for the ones on the video. I hope that I can still capture about 30 minutes from you before we have a break because I think you already got a lot of content from Frans and from J.J. I must say, J.J., when I see Meg talking so passionate about Food Lion, I always get super excited. So I'm looking forward to see her again in June when we are visiting with the Board. And I can assure you, we have a lot of these passionate people working at Ahold Delhaize that makes me also super proud. I also want to thank you, J.J., before I start of your performance over the last quarters because in Europe, we had Ukraine, we had hyperinflation. We had high energy costs. We had big changes also in Europe and the U.S. performance has always been very steady and solid. And so as a group, we can really compensate each other as well. So that's also the strength of the portfolio. Before I start with the story, maybe it's good to start with who we are as Ahold Delhaize Europe and Indonesia. We are 11 exceptional local brands with a very rich history. And I could throw a quiz at you because in Europe, we have the oldest brand and the youngest brand. Is anybody still awake? Does anybody know who the oldest is and the youngest? Sorry, no, Delhaize is the oldest. It's about 160 years, and Bol has just celebrated its 25th anniversary 2 weeks ago. So this is a very diverse portfolio of very much and strong existing brands and also a family of 175,000 associates which serve our customers every day through our stores, which amounts to about 5,600 in Europe. Last year, we also announced the intention to welcome a new comer in our portfolio, Profi, and welcome to our Southern Eastern business in Romania, which I will call later on in the presentation, the CSE group. Each of our brands has a strong local identity and this is coupled, of course, with regional scale, and this combination is unique for our success in the past and in the future. And our portfolio vision is quite simple. We would just like to be the #1 or the #2 in every market we operate in. And in these volatile times, we have grown our omnichannel capabilities while adapting to changing consumer needs. We have proven our resilience and our commitment to serve our customers and partners. And this has reflected in our annual sales growth in Europe of 7% since '19, which is significantly higher than the average of 3% across many of our competitors. Since '19, our store footprint has grown with 3% on an annual basis, and our e-commerce penetration has moved from 9% to 14% versus '23. Our market leadership is built on a highly concentrated investment program, and we have the capabilities to support our ambitious strategy. I would like to highlight a few success stories of the last years. Firstly, we provide excellent value to our customers. We have introduced approximately 2,000 price favorite in each of our brands which is a total of around 7,000 unique SKUs in total in Europe. These match and mind you, these match hard discounters in terms of price and also in quality and in design. Secondly, we have increased our e-commerce penetration 1.5x since '19, and we have launched and grown our e-commerce offering across all our markets, because when we started, we didn't have e-commerce everywhere. And thirdly, we have introduced a very comprehensive loyalty program in all our markets as well, and I will talk about them later because they are very important for our future. We have funded these initiatives through our comprehensive save for our customer program, which has grown every year by 15% since '19, when we started the program. Next to that, we have been investing continuously in our infrastructure. Many of you here visited a couple of beautiful centers yesterday and today, for instance, like the Bol Waalwijk fulfillment center and this is one of the most sustainable logistics buildings in the Netherlands and for Belgium, featuring a solar roof, numerous innovative and new packaging machine also to help to reduce the carbon footprint and also carton. And we need to move up with the -- yes -- and miles of conveyor belts and an enormous automated shuttle system as well. Also at Albert Heijn here, we have a warehouse in Zandan, which is an other example of how we are deploying a state-of-the-art mechanization capabilities to boost productivity, and I hope some of you have seen that. Another exciting one is the recent innovation at our warehouse in Barendrecht. This is a fully automated home shop center, which is really on schedule to deliver the productivity levels that we have aimed for. So let's have a look for the video. [Presentation]

And this is also one of our partners, Swisslog, as Frans talked about. And last but not least, we've also developed our complementary income streams, including in-store digital experiences like you see behind me. Frans also mentioned in his opening, our Growing Together strategy ensures that we execute our purpose while delivering on our financials and our healthy communities, people, planet commitments. We have everything we need to drive further success by leveraging our strengths. So why do customers love our local brands. First of all, we are a purpose-led organization. We inspire everyone to eat and live better for a healthy future for people and planet. Our purpose-driven approach is something both our customers and our associates also really love. And I am personally very proud that we are the employer of choice in most of our markets and where we consistently rated a top employer with high associate engagement scores across all the brands. Second, once we get something right for one of our brands, we leveraged that success across the whole group, where we are able to unlock additional value by leveraging this regional scale in several areas, including the technology will, which Ben will talk about. And finally, our brands are deeply local and cater to the unique needs of customers in each market. Whenever -- Whether it's a strong focus on local assortment, personalized engagement or our deep commitment to local communities. We take immense pride in delivering differentiated local experiences. Let me now show you how all of this comes together with our growth model for Europe, starting with our winning CVP. This all starts with getting really close to the customers, and this is also what I meant with the loyalty programs. Our ambition in Europe is to really increase the monthly active app users. This deeper engagement is the gateway to building stronger omnichannel relationships with our customers. We have brought our loyalty programs, all of them onto our apps and to able to engage more deeply with our customers and offering better personalized offerings than competitors do. And for example, Albert Heijn who started years ago with the bonus program has now 4.5 monthly active app users, of which 1 million are member of the Albert Heijn premium part. 30% of our sales at Super Indo in Indonesia are made by members of the MySuper Indo loyalty program, which was only started 3 years ago. And in Greece, more than 80% of the sales of our Alfa Beta brand are made by our 1.1 million loyalty members. This is something that differentiates us from discounters and from other local brands in our markets. We believe that the future of customer engagement will be highly personal, social and very gamified. To that end, we are growing our engagement capabilities even further. And I have a nice example for you. We are also introducing for Albert Heijn cardholders to pay for all their groceries, both online and in-store with their digital wallet. And this wallet contains all the saving programs like [indiscernible] also the famous [indiscernible] and Dutch people amongst you might still remember it, from sticking real [indiscernible] in a little booklet. We've made it digital and now a lot of customers are using it, and they can use it as currency to pay for their groceries. This is a real option that boosts convenience, loyalty, and, of course, also our ability to cross-sell other products. But let's move on also to our offerings. Here, own brands play a critical role. J.J. talked about own brands. We will have a own brand deep dive later on, but own brands will help us to differentiate better by allowing us to give customers a product that they love faster and much more effectively and efficiently than the CPG companies can do because we own the retail chain by tailoring our own brand offering to each of our markets taken also become a vehicle of localization and innovation, which are really a key for our winning CVP. This includes also value options for local delicacies and creating an assortment that is better for our customers and better for the planet. For instance, at Albert Heijn, and you've maybe seen it Ahold [indiscernible], the huge range of our own brands, but especially also the bio range which concludes almost 2,000 options available. At Delhaize, we are continuing to remove plastic to be more planet friendly. For instance, our own brand, Cheese Range. We have reduced plastic in our packaging by almost 60%. Secondly, it allows us to drive healthier choices and to make this easier for our customers through products like our meal kits, fresh soups and ready-to-eat meal. And thirdly and lastly, we continue to offer great prices for our customers through our best value offering across our brands. We ensure our price favorites have a local name and flavor in each market. For instance, here in the Netherlands, we call them price favorites. But in Belgium, they are called Little Lions, and each brand has their own way of communicating this to the local customers. But let's move on to another critical element of our CVP, the role we play in leading the transition to a more a healthier and more sustainable food system. Leading health efforts in this area has always been in the DNA. This is not something we started a couple of years ago, but already many, many years ago, and we were very aware of our role and it's also really a part of our DNA. And it's also very important for me as a person that we take the responsibility that we can. We prioritized three critical areas. The first is supporting customers to make healthier. For example, the SuperPlus loyalty program at Delhaize is unique because it gives our 3 million loyalty customers, 10% discount of all the healthy and fresh items with a Nutriscore. In the U.S., we use guiding stars in Europe, we use Nutriscore. Nutriscore A and B with, for instance, in Czech Republic, with my Albert app, customers can save 15% on healthy food. And secondly, so besides price, secondly, we offer more and more low-carbon footprint products. All our brands in Europe will commit to establish a baseline of their current protein ratio and setting a target by the end of '24 for '28. Here, we will take a huge step towards the transition to more plant-based protein. I'm also extremely proud of our teams, taking on this massive challenge, which is quite unique in the European market. And then thirdly, we also work closely with our suppliers and our farmers to achieve Net Zero across by 2050. All our European brands have launched climate hubs, which we have developed ourselves, where our suppliers can learn more about how to reduce emission. We are also closely collaborating with our farmers to reduce their Scope 3 or our Scope 3 emission by the program, which is [indiscernible] beta for [indiscernible]. And this program, we've developed at Albert Heijn, we've also opened this up for all the competition to join forces in order to help the society to move closer into a lower carbon footprint. So I have just explained our efforts to improve our CVP. Let me now talk about how we see our brand portfolio today and in the future. In the Benelux, as you know, we are the #1 retailer in food and nonfood. Albert Heijn, where you are here currently leads the way in innovative retail with a strong omnichannel multi-format network. Our high level of digitization is evident through self-scan technology, electronic shelf labels and our digital screens in all our stores. At Delhaize, the team of Xavier they have taken on the challenge to turn around the operating model to meet local challenges and opportunities and which is going quite as planned. Our now 100% affiliated store network positions us well for the future growth while retaining a very strong connection with the affiliates. Moving on, bol led by Margaret is also a powerful brand in our portfolio whose financial performance is accretive to our growth and to our return on capital. And bol's journey, if you look back when it started with [ Bertelsmann ] online has been quite spectacular. Transforming from a simple online bookseller in '99 to a multi-category full-service marketplace and platform as it is today. We are nearly twice the size of the nearest competitor in the Benelux, as Frans already mentioned, and we have built a very strong brand over the years. Our business is balanced with half our business today coming from the platform and half of our own retail. We have -- we serve 14 million customers and have 50,000 and growing partners, which all find each other at our bol platform, our bol app. Reach first-party data on sales and consumer buying behavior, which is a huge asset to our ambitious monetization plans. Bol is also a constant front-runner in sustainability. I don't know if you're aware, but last year, Bol received the B Corp status, which is the gold standard for sustainability of corporates. Bol continues to play an important role in our portfolio providing complementary skills and knowledge to our grocery business and also helps us to diversify our portfolio. We are very excited to see what the next 25 years and beyond will hold. Now let us move on to the fastest-growing part of our portfolio. Over the last year, we have built a strong and growing portfolio of the CSE brands under the leadership of [ Jesper. ] We have created a setup for success by harmonizing our operations. And by doing so, we are also able to leverage the Benelux model to deploy and scale best practices very fast in the CEC region. For example, we have expanded our [indiscernible] which is one of our oldest owned brands, and it's almost 130 years old and also [indiscernible] ranges in CEC. We've also took Nature's Promise from the U.S. and implemented into CEC. We've also deployed Gambit, which is our group monetization technology that is part of the company of Adhese, where Frans was talking to, and we started now to deploy that in Alfa Beta to professionalize our monetization capabilities, and we will do that across the region. But we have also harmonized almost 70% of our store equipment in order to reduce cost across the region. We've also taken on the challenge of making our brands more relevant for our customers. One example is also the successful price approach and as you might know, in CEC is a very heavily discounted and dominated market as a very successful approach. And lastly, we have created enormous community impact. For instance, Albert is the only food retail company in the Czech Republic to be in the top 10 ranking for sustainability. Mega Image in Romania was the top employer in '22 and '23 and has won various awards for sustainability and energy efficiency. Maxi and Serbia has won awards for being the top and most inclusive employer as well as the customers' favorite online supermarket in '23. And these awards are a testament to our investment in the region and the fact that we've been creating real leading brands in that region. Now I've given you a flavor of the different parts of our portfolio. Let me talk about how we drive synergies and scale across the region. As a $34 billion company, we can leverage our volumes to unlock sourcing opportunities. We source better and more economically through alliances, which we -- after the merger, we started with Coopernic and for A brands and AMS for own brands. We have scaled our strategic partnerships on fresh products, which are now handled by the same partner across Albert Heijn and Delhaize and we have harmonized more than 50% of our not-for-resale purchases, and they are done centrally. Finally, our regional setup allows us to export best-in-class retail technologies across our portfolio. We have rolled out our self-checkout technology, our air in-store digital capabilities like screen and self labels and we have unlocked that with the speed and efficiency that the customers are really benefiting from. Now that you have heard about our winning CVP and our world-class digital capabilities, let me tell you about how we will further densify and grow our position in the region. In the Netherlands, with a strong market share on both food and nonfood, we will continue to level up our capabilities to drive growth at a higher share of wallet through more personalization and in addition, we expect to see more growth in new models like which we've just done with [ Jan Linde's ] affiliation, which Frans also mentioned. With bol, given the slower macro environment, we are exploring new growth curves and opportunities to make our organization leaner and more efficient. For example, we are testing new B2B services and circular business models, which we can -- which we believe can deliver fast growth and high margins. In terms of monetizing bol, as Frans mentioned earlier, we will continue to monitor the environment but for now, our focus remains on enabling Bol to continue to thrive. In Belgium, from a store perspective, the team is close to switching from execution to growth mode. We are well positioned in Belgium with Delhaize and Albert Heijn in food and of course, bol in nonfood. We will accelerate investments in our CVP to grow all three brands more profitably. In the CEE, as I already mentioned, will be a major force for growth in the future. Our focus for now is to successfully complete the announced acquisition of Profi which is, of course, subject to conditions, including the merger clearance under the applicable competition laws and regulations. What we like about Profi is that it extends our customer reach and brings us to parts of the country where we are not currently present, and we are not currently serving. Profi will double our size and bring us to the desired top 2 position in Romania. Historically, we were adding roughly 80, 90 stores per year in Romania. Profi will give us a 10-year boost by adding nearly 1,600 stores. The strong format fits and the complementary customer propositions between Profi and [indiscernible] will allow us to serve an even more diverse set of Romanian customers. The deal is expected to be sales growth and EBIT margin accretive to the Ahold Delhaize Europe business and EPS accretive to the total group after synergies. Now let me talk to you about another exciting source of growth, innovation. Europe will be a significant contributor to Ahold Delhaize complementary income streams growth will -- which will reach approximately EUR 3 billion for the group in '28. We have already grown this since we started in '21, 5x. Our retail media model leverages our omnichannel approach to capture traffic from both online and physical stores. This results in more personalized offers for customers and higher conversion rates for advertisers. To achieve this we are partnering, building and acquiring technology and capability our investment in advertising technology company Adhese, which we have done started a couple of years ago. And of course, we can use our existing network of 10,000, mind you 10,000 in-store digital screens across Europe, which really demonstrates the commitment to their strategy. We are also looking to use innovation to better leverage our large customer base, which we have everywhere, thanks to our loyalty programs and our current existing infrastructure. For example, bol is working on new business models to make sustainable shopping easier, as I was mentioning earlier, Albert Heijn is exploring ways to convert waste to value, such as upcycling waste streams with other partners. And we've also started to offer vehicle charging stations in our parking lots at Albert Heijn and Delhaize for our customers. Examples I have used to capture our ambition to drive business growth but also with the spirit of our purpose. As you can see, we have a tremendous number of growth opportunities. So now how are we going to fund all of this? Would Yolanda ask me, Wouter how are you going to do that? Well, we are also super committed just like J.J. is to do our part in our safe for our customer group ambition of the total of EUR 5 billion. And J.J., I think we split the ambition half-half didn't we 2.5%, 2.5%, that was the plan. Now to do this, and we have already been doing this for the last couple of years, but we really want to up our game. Firstly, the first part is to take our sourcing practices to the next level. And an essential part of the sourcing contribution will be done through a collaboration with others and also here, the just announced collaboration on Euro leg is very critical and also, of course, a further harmonization of our private label offering will help to achieve this goal. Second, to future-proof our operations, we are also implementing automation, and you've seen some examples here already today and yesterday and also AI across the region. And you will hear more about how technology can help us also to operate more efficiency -- efficient with then later on. And finally, we are also deploying new models to maximize efficiency. Including the very successful affiliate model in Belgium, but we also have it in the Netherlands. We also have it in Greece and in other countries. And we expect that this affiliation model will account to more than about 30% of our sales in the future. So bringing this all together, I'm extremely proud of where we are today in Europe, driven by our strong teams and front-runner mentality. I am very confident that are growing together strategy will ensure that we do what we do best is win with our customers and deliver on our promise inspiring everyone to eat and live better for a healthy future for people and planet. I'm also very confident because this is my third Capital Markets Day or a Strategy Day that -- and as some of you know, that's one but I'm also very confident that the team will carry this ambition forward because we have a very strong team with Marie for Albert Heijn, [indiscernible] for Delhaize, margaret for bol and Jesper for CSZ to take this challenge on and to achieve the results in the future. So I want to thank you very much for your attention. You really deserve the break now for 15 minutes, we will call you back. But thank you very much and see you later. Thank you. [Break]

So welcome back. I mean, 2034, is that far away for you? Or is that quite close by still? Or do you believe this is 2044 or this is next year? I think those are interesting things for all of us to look at. And that's why with all the knowledge and strength we have in our teams and a lot of bottom-up talent in our company, who can sometimes see the future clearer for us because they're well educated or a different type of generation, too, we try to reach the future a little bit. And this looks pretty cool to me, I must say. And that's what I said in my opening, we would like to go with you a little bit and jump forward, step away from the short term and jump into the future together. And think a little bit about, long term, where does this all go? And it's not only about technology but where does the climate view go, where can we help customers with complete new technologies to fight food waste and all these kind of things, but also a little bit imagine where the future is heading for. And while we have a strong foundation in our markets, as hopefully also, JJ and Wouter have made it very clear to you, with a strong base in the markets where we are in strong positions. We also know that the pace of change across our total industry continues to accelerate. And that is pretty cool, but we also would like to look at this through the lens of the consumer and of the customers and we see long-term customer preferences, which you sometimes can read. In 10 years, we didn't believe that was coming and then it came much faster than we thought. So the rate of technology change, that is not slowing down, as we all see. Automation, Internet of Things, gen AI are key themes, and we need to keep an eye on it, to have the hand on our pulse where this is moving because, otherwise, we are too late; and when it is more seamless or effortless shopping, hyper-personalization to give you the best potential offer completely fitting to your needs; or the dynamics of an aging society, which is, in most of the mature markets, the case; or the increased consciousness about health, sustainability or the community. We need to stay very, very alert to these kind of developments and to understand the consumer shifts and to take advantage with our learning with our great local brands. And to showcase this, we selected 4 deep dives for you. And yesterday, we had a very good deep-dive dialogue on sustainability, and I hope you also enjoyed it from your side. But the team, very grateful, have been open for these kind of dialogues and candid discussions because you come from different angles and you look at different angles and industries on sustainability, and we only can learn where the dialogues are and we only can help each other where the dilemmas are because it's not an easy topic when we talk, for example, about Scope 3. But let's now go to the next 3 deep dives. Great businesses thrive with great culture, great products and the agility to move fast to capitalize on disruptive technologies. So with that, let's kick off with great culture and welcome Natalia to talk about people and communities. Natalia, please.

Good afternoon, everyone. Good morning, good evening. Great to have you here. I will start by saying what is my favorite part of working for Ahold Delhaize. Well, in addition to working with great people who are here with us today, my favorite part is to be able to make a difference for 400,000 people and millions of customers each day. Frans, JJ and Wouter have spoken to you about the strength of our business, how we will keep innovating and how we plan to deliver on our new purpose: to inspire everyone to live and eat better for a healthier future for people in the planet. When I think of this purpose, I really think of this: how food connects us, how it creates a shared experience, how we make a positive impact that extends beyond our walls, how we serve not only customers but associates and communities. Today, we have shared our new strategy, but we know that nothing, absolutely nothing, happens without people. Their passion, their talent, their creativity, is what will help us bring it to life. Therefore, our ambition is to be the most local, most future-proof and most inclusive grocery retailer. Let me walk you through how we think about this already today and how we will continue doing what we will continue doing to meet our ambition. I'm sure you have felt this from all of our presenters today, what sets us really apart is our great local brand approach. Each of our brands represents the unique character and the needs of the communities they serve. This local approach would not be possible without our greatest asset: our brands, great local people. They're our colleagues, but they're also our neighbors and our customers, and they represent all the vibrancy and diversity of the communities they serve. They reflect not only our deep leadership bench but also the people you see across every one of our stores, but also people you don't see in our distribution centers and head offices. From teenagers as young as 13 years old here in the Netherlands, working on the weekends or after school in the afternoons, one of them is my son, who started working for Albert Heijn a little bit over a year ago, to newcomers building a life in the new home country, to people in their golden years looking to stay active and connected. Some of them as old as 94, 95 years old. It is both fascinating and a great responsibility to offer jobs and connect people across 5 generations. I find it really cool. Our stores, distribution centers and offices are home to a range of people and their unique stories. I'd like to share one with you today. Last year, Delhaize leadership team was visiting Albert Heijn Gelderlandplein store, the same store some of you visited today. There, we heard the story of [ Padma Pampana ], a colleague in operations department, you might have also met her today, who has been working there for 3 years. She came to the Netherlands from India when her husband got a job here. During her first days in the Netherlands, she found it cold, it was winter, and she didn't feel at home. She decided she wanted to start working and not just be at home waiting for her children to come home from school or her husband after work. So she joined Albert Heijn and quickly found that it was more than just a workplace but a kind of a home, too. She encouraged other expat wives to join Albert Heijn as well. And now out of 420 associates in that store, 60 of them are from India, mainly expat wives. Together, they bring a unique perspective, a new culture and a whole new set of national holidays to celebrate together with the rest of the team. Because of their passion, their feeling of ownership and their enthusiasm, they create an excellent example for the rest of the team. For us, fostering great local brands begins and ends with building strong talent pipelines; attracting, developing and retaining the best people that also reflect their communities. We do this through our Thriving People strategy where we promise to create a caring place to work, inspiring growth and collaboration, a place where everyone is heard and valued, a place to find purpose in serving your communities. How are we living up to that promise? Well, let me leave it to our colleague to tell you. [Presentation]

Don't you just love these stories? I do, especially the laughter and humor in them as well. We demonstrate our local approach in everything we do, but we also share a common set of values. In my many visits to the brands, our value of care especially stand out. I'd like to share the example of Stop & Shop school food pantry. Stop & Shop works directly with schools and communities to establish and support in-school pantries to ensure kids have access to food at night and over the weekends. The goal is to help kids thrive in school and beyond by giving them consistent access to healthy food. This is the families that don't have access to food easily, otherwise. They operate food pantries in 5 states, in 230 schools and serve over 40,000 students in need and their families. What this demonstrates is great commitment and passion for our local communities because there is nothing more fundamental to one's well-being than access to food and education. What this also shows is the great empowerment our teams feel. The fact that they felt empowered to shape and implement such a wonderful program is equally inspiring as the cause itself. This brings me to our first thriving people ambition: most local. Each of our brands has the aspiration to be the leading employer of choice in each of its markets. And we are well underway. Our brands have continuously been recognized externally as both a top employer but also an inclusive and diverse one. We are proud of what we have already achieved, and we continue to build on it. Now to our second ambition: most future-proof. We strongly believe that to enable the best customer experience, we need to enable the best employee experience. Well, of course, our brands have come up with many ways to meet their teams' unique needs, there is a lot we do together to drive scale and impact. The jobs we have in our stores and our distribution centers and even our offices are constantly changing as a result of customer expectations, changing quickly evolving technology and now with the introduction of gen AI. Our brands invest in upskilling and reskilling our associates to ensure they continuously learn, challenge themselves and keep growing. This way, we ensure our people are always prepared to go beyond customer expectations and are also prepared for the future of work. We're constantly investing in leveraging technology to help us do this, for example, with our SuccessFactors platform where we host 400,000 associates, which enables seamless, paperless process for all associates and line managers; or another example, LinkedIn Learning, with more than 21,000 courses available to everyone. In the past few years, our people have shown incredible resilience, dealing with crises, call it, 2 active wars, energy price hikes, unprecedented inflation, social polarization. Despite all these challenges, our people grow stronger together and delivered outstanding results. We took care to provide resources and support as needed, including focus on mental health and well-being; as well as developing tools and technology to improve the human experience of our associates, from leveraging mobile app, [ MyHire ], in Netherlands to hire and onboard new store associates in 8 minutes. Think about it. In food retail, where we hire literally thousands associates, you can apply to a job and be hired and onboarded in 8 minutes. This is a fantastic productivity lever for us; to increasing associate self-service; to helping associates in our distribution centers pick the right bulk size using artificial intelligence to pack your order. We know we have a future-proof organization that can handle anything. And we will continue using technology to help our people be more productive, efficient and make their jobs easier. Naturally, we do this ethically and responsibly. We will always be a very human-, people-focused organization that uses technology to learn, advance and accelerate. Now let's take a moment to talk about our third ambition: most inclusive. At Ahold Delhaize, our simple commitment is to be open for everyone. And by this, we mean everyone: associates, customers, partners, suppliers, every member of our communities. Our brands do this through our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, which is brought to life through our 100/100/100 aspiration. A workforce that is 100% gender balanced at all levels, a workforce that is 100% reflective of the communities we serve, and a culture that is 100% inclusive. I'm often asked whether we have representation targets. We do not. Instead, you'll notice that I described them as aspiration. There are many downsides and pitfalls when you set representation targets, including misunderstanding the demographics of your location or industry, limiting the definition of diversity to only one dimension or establishing targets without putting thought into how to achieve them and, more importantly, how to sustain them. But you may say what gets measured gets done, and that is very true. Since we don't have targets, we must measure other things. So what our brands do, they measure things like external and internal hiring balance slates, individual development plans, pay equity and psychological safety, to name just a few. And it works. Ahold Delhaize have seen progress since 2021 on gender representation. Women represented 2 years ago 27% of our leaders, at VP and above, and by the end of 2023, this number became 37%, so that's a significant difference. We have also seen positive progress in pay equity, ethnic and racial diversity, and inclusion. While we're happy with the progress, we know and we see opportunities to do more, and we are committed to doing so. We also know that by connecting with our communities, we can strengthen our leadership and make an impact beyond our organization. Let's see for a moment how our brands do this. [Presentation]

Personally, I always find these stories and numbers tell best what we stand for in our communities. JJ already mentioned that U.S. brands have donated, since 2020, 1 billion meals. Just think about it, 1 billion meals. Last year, Stop & Shop donated 21,500 Thanksgiving turkeys to Hunger Relief. Albert, our Czech brand supports a local orphanage. Mega Image in Romania has a program, 12 Acts of Kindness, where they continuously support -- from the very beginning of the war in Ukraine up until now, they support Ukrainian refugees. The Jan company in the U.S., the colleagues have contributed 50,000 volunteering hours per year. It's more than an hour per person on average. Albert Heijn here in Netherlands offers jobs to people with distance to labor market 2,000 jobs, providing these colleagues with the social, mental and financial support. Along with our local approach, we also like to drive impact at the broader societal level through a few key partnerships. Some of which are displayed behind me, and including our newly extended partnership with The Global FoodBanking Network, which Frans announced earlier today. People are the core of building a better world. With this approach, we aim to create a place where not only our people thrive but our communities and our planet, too. We believe in taking a systemic and holistic approach to driving sustainability. Our brands engage our associates in sustainability in many ways unique to their markets, but we also do many things together. Some of these ways are our new purpose, our leadership development programs, and incentives which, in addition to rewarding business results, also reward the sustainability results. 25% of each our STI and LTI are dedicated to sustainability measures and that cascades to more than 1,200 associates, our leaders. And before you ask me about bring your own bottle in a workplace, this is not wine that we encourage people to bring to office, this is a water bottle that we encourage people to bring to avoid using plastic. Our great local people with deep experience and passion for customers have and will continue to be our key differentiator. Together with them and our aspiration to be most local, most future-proof, most inclusive, our brands will be the leading employer in their markets. They will improve productivity, serve our customers better and foster more innovation and humanity for future to come. We are all set to grow together, and we hope you will join us for the journey. Thank you. And let me welcome back JJ and Wouter to tell you more about the great potential we have in the growth of our own brands.

You first.

Would you like me to stand here or somewhere else, Wouter?

That's fine.

Now to a topic that excites both Wouter and I as retailers of own brand. As you heard Wouter and I speak about in our presentations earlier, own brand plays a critical role in driving customer loyalty and business performance across each of Ahold Delhaize's brands. You've heard lots of examples of that so far this morning. Our own brands differentiate us and are one of the key reasons our customers continue to shop with us each and every day. This is why we've chosen our brands as one of the core areas or focus areas of our Growing Together strategy. Earlier today, you saw the Ahold Delhaize company video on how both big and small are important for our Growing Together strategy within own brands. There are a lot of great examples of how we are bringing the concept to life for fresh and center store. I talked a little bit about Nature's Promise earlier, and I'll leverage that as one of those examples where we were small and then big or big and small. Within Nature's Promise, we're leveraging the brand across the U.S. and in Europe, creating both benefits for the customers and company. We took the Nature's Promise brand from the U.S., and we brought it to Romania, where this brand is now available for customers. In the U.S., equally, we've taken the strong own brand wine business in Europe and brought it to our U.S. brands. This enables us, of course, to be able to leverage global shared producers and learnings across our businesses. Those are just a few examples of what we've done so far. But as you've heard in the other presentations today, we have even bigger aspirations in this space, and we see really untapped potential for growth in own brands. In fact, at Ahold Delhaize, we will now have a super aggressive target. Hopefully, you'll see that as well, but I hope that you're excited about it because it's very exciting for us, of having towards 45% of our total sales of own brands by 2028. Wouter, anything that you would want to add about the European business for private brand?

Yes, of course. Thank you. And today, you've actually experienced some of our lovely own-brand products in front of you. You see at least my favorite, the mini stroopwafels. And I can assure you, you can run a marathon on it if you eat all of them. And I think your favorite is the giant food trail mix, JJ.

When I look across here, it looks like mine might be winning, Wouter.

And of course, you also had some tastings in your launch and later on as well. But yes, we are very proud of our own labels. And I hope that you've seen also a good display of them for the ones who went to the Gelderlandplein store. Albert Heijn, where you've been, has already started with own brands 130 years ago with Perla and Delicata and Brouwers beer, and really helps us to strategically balancing our own brands also together with national brands. And this is a setting that we consider at Albert Heijn at least, the diamond standard in the industry. And since we have a long industry but we have also accelerated a lot of our own brand expertise and penetration at Albert Heijn, I'm very proud to introduce Marit, which I've mentioned before, is the CEO of Albert Heijn who has successfully led the company over the last 5 years, to share that success story in a video shortly to come. Next to Marit, we also have Peter, the SVP of omnichannel merchandising at Hannaford, who will share the U.S. growth story in own brands. And then JJ and I will be back to wrap up what else we can do on the own brand part. And later on, we also have space for questions on this part. So I think over to the video and over to Marit.

Thank you for your introduction, and I'm delighted to tell you about our own brand at Albert Heijn and successes that we share with the other European brands. Our trusted products are the reason why our customers continue to shop with us. And at Albert Heijn, over 98% of our baskets contain at least one own-brand product. Own-brand sales in Albert Heijn have grown to well above 55%, which translates to more than 62% in terms of volume. And I'm pleased to report that we have maintained and continued our success in this area. During this short presentation, I would like to put a spotlight on various roles that our own brand plays for us. As I mentioned earlier, own-brand line serves us by keeping shopping affordable for our customers. With our 2,000 price-favorite products, we have built a very strong foundation based on the high level of quality that our customers expect from us. And this is offered at a competitive price point that doesn't break the bank. These everyday essentials, which can be found storewide in every category, are easy to recognize in store, online, and in our app, which means our customers have no reason to shop anywhere else. We are thrilled to see that European Ahold Delhaize own brands in the Czech Republic, Greece, Belgium and Serbia have implemented the price-favorite concepts as well with enthusiastic responses from customers. This enabled us to source the products together and create even more synergies. In addition to price favorites, with our unique set of own-brand labels, such as Albert Heijn Terra, Albert Heijn Organic and Streeckgenoten, our local specialties, we have solidified Albert Heijn's frontrunner position when it comes to eating delicious, high-quality food while, at the same time, taking sustainability into account. With our expertise and deep customer knowledge, we keep adding new concepts and building new fresh food categories based on the well-known insight: to eat better, fresher, more variety, healthier and with the right size and packaging to avoid food waste. Our fresh package category, for example, has grown beyond EUR 100 million in sales today. It is one of the jewels in the Albert Heijn crown. Customers love us for our great mix between own brands and national brands. And also in specific high-involvement categories where national brands are powerful, we are able to build strong and solid own brand alternatives. We call these our venture brands. Perla, our venture brand in the coffee category, offers a wide variety of tasty and appealing products with a brand experience that is competitive to other national brands globally. And the same goes for Delicata, our chocolate brand; and Care, our venture brand for health and beauty. Our successful venture brands are now making their way to Europe as well, serving customers at Alfa Beta, Mega Image and Albert. Our dedication to our own brand development has enabled us to grow customer loyalty and share of wallet, and to create a distinctive customer value proposition, and to strengthen our position as leading food trade data in the Netherlands. This passion is also the driving force behind our health and sustainability achievements. One of them is in the upgrades in own-brand packaging. This has resulted in a reduction of over 20 million kilos of packaging over the last 5 years. We've also taken great strides in making our products healthier, reducing the amount of sugar, fat and salt from our products while adding fiber to our bread products and pastas. And I'm extremely proud that we were among the first European food retailers to be transparent and show our CO2 footprint on a product level. We are leveraging our capability year-round, 360-degrees marketing campaigns, and unique and tasty designs. We see that our efforts are recognized by our customers as the number of award-winning products keeps increasing. With our integral approach to own brands, we have been very successful in growing Albert Heijn, and we will continue to do so today, tomorrow and all the years to come by bringing our trusted own-brand products to more European families. We help them to live and eat better every single day. Thank you for your time. And now over to Peter.

I'm pleased to speak with you today about the exciting potential of own brands in the United States. At Hannaford and across each of the ADUSA brands, we have been on a journey to transform the own-brands approach. Thanks to this work and more we have planned for the coming years, each of our retail brands is well positioned to unlock even greater value for both the business and the customer through these offerings. Own brands help the ADUSA retail brands meet a wide range of customer needs. They're an integral part of customers' lives, nourishing day-to-day routines, holidays and special events. Customers can count on a wide range of own-brand products found across all the U.S. retail brands, including our best-performing Nature's Promise and Taste of Inspirations Wines. In addition, we have ADUSA-wide own-brand products that cover virtually all categories throughout the store, including pet, baby, home care and much more. These offerings are complemented by trusted house brands in virtually every category across the store that deliver on decades-long connections each of our retail brands have with our customers. With more than 25% growth across the own-brands portfolio since 2019, these trusted products account for more than $14 billion in sales across the U.S. each year. We're incredibly proud that today, more than 95% of shoppers across ADUSA brands have an own-brand product in their basket. In addition, the U.S. brands have driven over 16 consecutive periods of own-brand unit and penetration growth. At Hannaford, we believe in the power of own brands, as anyone visiting our stores or digital properties can clearly see. We have a blended approach balanced across ADUSA-wide own brands and our Hannaford-branded products. By locally curating and delivering and communicating the value proposition of these offerings to our customers, we have achieved the year-to-date own-brand food penetration well above 35%. To inspire shoppers to purchase own brands, our customers earn 2% rewards on all own-brand products when they sign up for My Hannaford Rewards. We have also strengthened our overall price position through our own brands, and the customer appreciation of these efforts has been outstanding. In a geography where we invested in own brands, customer perception for overall price and value went from trailing the entire network by 500 basis points to outperforming the total Hannaford network by 500 basis points. And Hannaford is just one example, winning an own brand transcends all our U.S. retail brands. While ADUSA companies are proud to have a vibrant own-brand business, we believe there is more potential to lead in own brands, significantly grow own brands and differentiate with own brands. As Hannaford and the other ADUSA retail brands move ahead, we're accelerating performance in own brands by continuing to invest in price, to drive sales and ensure competitive pricing that provides customers with the best value possible. We also see additional opportunities to continue to improve productivity and margin while offering customers more options by expanding our label's presence throughout the aisles and exploring new alternatives to offer value. Across each ADUSA brand, we see own brands playing a more prominent role in assortment, enabling the retail brands to streamline the number of labels in each category and giving us the space to innovate and grow our presence in emerging customer segments. Driving innovation across own brands is key as we continue to find ways to best meet the evolving needs of today's customers. To do this, we'll leverage and build upon our strong digital connections to continue to drive loyalty and grow baskets. Likewise, we'll enable our healthy sustainability ambitions through our own-brand products by expanding fresh and organic options, increasing nutrition transparency and driving meaningful reductions in plastics. All the while, we will further leverage the scale as the largest U.S. retail group on the East Coast to deliver efficient and high-quality customer offerings, to win bigger in own brands in the U.S. as well as explore how we leverage the total scale of Ahold Delhaize across the globe, all while doing what we do best, creating meaningful customer experiences that inspire lasting connections.

Thanks, Marit and Peter, for sharing the EU and U.S. perspectives on own brands in, I think, such a compelling way. As you've heard from Peter just now, in the U.S., we have a significant opportunity to lead, grow and to differentiate with own brands. Hopefully, you can see evidence of the fact that we're already accelerating. Our ability to do this will depend on how we continue to leverage scale, share product lines and implement best practices across the globe. I hope that you can also see evidence of what Natalia was talking about earlier; Marit and Peter, our 2 very talented leaders, very great people. And that's the real connection of Ahold Delhaize is not only do we understand our customers, make that connection with customers, but together, we're a team. We focus locally, but we leverage our size and scale across the industry, across the globe, to make sure that we're really bringing the best forward of all of our brands. So hopefully, you'll see more and more of that as we move forward. Wouter?

Yes. No, JJ, thank you. And I think there is a lot of value that we can drive by leveraging our global knowledge and also our scale. And especially, I also look at our combined sustainability ambitions. Also, for instance, Albert Heijn pioneering with Terra, which was just launched in the second half of '23, which is our new plant-based assortment at Albert Heijn and already has 250 SKUs, and helps us in that protein transition. And already, the first sales are really promising. What maybe some of you have also seen at the Gelderland store is also new refill packages at Albert Heijn. And if customers choose for refills, they can really save up to 70-plus percent in packaging material. So that's a win-win from a customer and also much more cost effective. And we've seen also some examples of that in the U.S. So yes, there is a lot to do together, I think, JJ.

Yes. I mean I think I reflect back to when I first started in the role, I had the opportunity to go with you to Albert Heijn. It wasn't my first time to Albert Heijn, but I was looking there to really understand how we could accelerate own brand in the U.S. And we talked a little bit about Nature's Promise. We talked a little bit about wine, going back and forth. And we saw a lot of opportunities in the Albert Heijn XL store that they -- I won't pretend to know the name of it, particularly in my Southern slang to be able to pronounce it, so I'll leave that one alone. But are there other things that you see that we could leverage, Wouter?

Yes, I think so. And then we are slowly moving into the next chapter with the infamous Ben at the moment on technology. But I do think that it is nice that the teams are coming together also with our AMS organization, where we can also join and source on pasta and not only on wine, but much more. But the other thing just, I think, is good for everybody to understand is that we are not only leveraging scale but also know-how and technology. Our teams, when we built Barendrecht, which you've seen actually in the U.S., in Philly, you already had an operation running and the teams went over there and really learned a lot about the mistakes, about how to ramp up productivity. So when we designed Barendrecht, we were actually really learning already from our U.S. colleagues on how to really process and how to ramp up quicker than we would normally do. So I think that's a real benefit not only about scale in private brands, innovations and designs, but also about technology. And I think it's good to switch over to Ben, where Ben can explain a little bit more about technology and AI and how can we apply that in our business. So Ben is here. Thank you very much, and I'll move on.

Well, thank you, JJ, and thank you, Wouter. A very warm hello from me to everybody in the room and to the 1,400 or 1,500 or so people we've got online. It's an absolute pleasure to be here with you to talk about tech and AI. I don't think I've ever made a presentation where the expectations have been set so high by everybody that's gone before me, so I just trust that I can cut mustard today. As you've seen in the previous presentation, our company manages an enormous amount of detail, an enormous amount of complexity. We have huge numbers of customers online and off-line, 16 brands, 9 countries, lots of stores, lots of associates. And as Frans said in his opening, the daily activity in our business is incredibly dynamic. Everything that happens in society and in our local communities, the good and the bad, is felt by us. It requires speed, agility and insights to move fast in serving our customers' needs in those circumstances. And therefore, resilient technology enabling real-time data, predictive analytics and AI solutions are fundamental to managing and mastering this complexity. And that's kind of the hard part, the machine behind it. But then there's the fun part because, when all of those things are in place, the tech enables us to continuously improve and transform customer experiences, enhance our associates' experiences and drive efficient and sustainable operations, delivering the goods to meet our purpose to inspire everyone to eat and live better for a healthier future for people and planet. Our scale and unique combination of brands and markets provides us with an abundance of knowledge so that we can really get to grips with the best of both worlds, fulfilling our customers' needs and leveraging the creativity of the scale to deliver winning solutions and industry best practice across all of our markets. Today, I'm looking forward to sharing those innovations that are driving today's successes and introducing you to some of our extraordinary tech and data science leaders charting the path to tomorrow. Just as we continuously invest in our store estate, we also invest in our technology, maintaining but also enabling us to serve customers better with new innovation every day. For example, we're driving efficiencies by investing in the tech that powers our supply chain, furthering the development of infrastructure for our U.S. distribution centers and launching a world-class fully mechanized e-commerce home shop center in the Netherlands, in Barendrecht, that many people in the room have the opportunity to visit yesterday. It's scaling up after only 14 weeks towards the 45,000 order per week target with 300 robots and approximately 20% improvement in efficiency. We deliver better customer experiences through tech-powered investments in our stores, such as electronic shelf labels and putting handheld technology in our associates' hands to free them up so that they spend more time on the shop floor, doing things with customers, serving customers. On the back of our tech stack and our data, we're building a retail, media and data insights income stream with revenues of around EUR 1 billion. And we're doing that in partnership with companies like Adease and LiveRamp. We track the use of plastics and recycled materials in our products and packaging with tools like Trace One in the U.S. to support our sustainability ambitions. And on top of that, we leverage our scale to deploy winning solutions across the portfolio. To share a couple of examples, I'd like to highlight a forecasting tooling we developed in Albert Heijn and scaled through Delhaize and now into some of our U.S. brands; our online product recommendation engine, which we deployed rapidly across, first, Belgium, then Romania, Serbia and Greece; and JJ mentioned the e-commerce platform, white-label e-commerce platform, in the U.S. that serves all of our brands; and finally, our global assortment optimization tool that we implemented in partnership with Oliver Wyman. Alongside these technical solutions, we've been working extensively with AI to improve our customer experiences and optimize our operations. I'm going to introduce you to 2 of the leaders building these solutions, starting with Noortje van Genugten, who is a leader in our product, analytics and data science operations at Albert Heijn. Noortje, please take the stage.

So good afternoon, good morning for the people listening from home. I'm Noortje. I'm Head of Product Operations at Albert Heijn. I've been with the company for over 17 years, and I'm really passionate about data and food, especially the combination of that. So today, I would like to give you an example of that. Marking down products that are about to expire to optimize revenue and minimize food waste is not new. But by adding AI to this, it means we can up our game and add a whole new level of sophistication. At Albert Heijn, we developed a state-of-the-art AI solution called Dynamic Markdown. With Dynamic Markdown, we incentivize customers to buy products that are about to expire by increasing the discount over the day. This allows us to significantly reduce food waste and consequently improve efficiency. It makes us very proud that we're one of the very few supermarkets in the world to have developed this AI solution in combination with electronic shelf labels. So with Dynamic Markdown, we try to make products that are about to expire more attractive to our customers by giving these items an increasing markdown during the day. The closer to closing time of the store, the higher the discount. In this way, we avoid wasting perfectly good food. How does it work? An employee scans the products that are about to expire and puts a sticker on it, saying, "For discounts, see the shelf label." The shelf label immediately displays the discount. From that moment on, we can remotely change the discount shown on the shelf label and in the point-of-sale system through the cloud without any actions from our store employees. So we can do this whenever we want, as many times as we want. Our algorithms determine the optimal discount and reevaluate the discount every 15 minutes for each registered product. We've already saved more than 250 tonnes of food waste, and we expect to save another 450 tonnes the coming year. Dynamic markdown has been very effective in achieving our goals. Thanks to a great team of data scientists who developed the solution. I'd like to introduce Jelmer, a machine learning engineer at Albert Heijn, to tell us how we have developed the state-of-the-art solution.

We are very proud of Dynamic Markdown, and there are 3 main reasons for its success. We started out by using a simple rule-based model to gather data to learn to understand how the Dynamic Markdowns affect the customer. We started out by trying to understand what is the effect of the Dynamic Markdowns on the sales and also on the food waste that we try to minimize. Secondly, thanks to close collaboration between our data scientists and engineers, we were able to build a state-of-the-art machine learning platform. We need this platform because the number of markdowns throughout the day varies a lot. So we need a solution that can adapt and scale to this change. It allows our data scientists to experiment, to try out new models or improve existing models. Thirdly, we're always looking to learn and improve. To ensure that our customers receive the most optimal markdown, we continuously perform AB tests in the stores. Another great example is the transition to reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning is an advanced modeling technique that allows the model to learn from the decisions that it takes. We use this technique to try to learn and understand the customer even better. Using this type of technology to improve Dynamic Markdown even further makes us extremely proud, and it also makes Albert Heijn data science a very cool place to work at.

So what's next? Given the great success, I'm really looking forward to expanding this Dynamic Markdown solution to more assortment groups this year, improving value for our customers and preventing even more food waste. So isn't it cool that data can do this? Back to you, Ben.

Thank you. I think it's really cool that using data can have a big impact on something as simple as the food waste, and it also makes me proud that we've got the infrastructure, the technology, the algorithm, but that we can then get that out across the network at the speed that Noortje described. I'm only aware of one other retailer in the world who can do that. So thank you, Noortje. I think you can see it is a great example of how this technology data and AI can enable us to deliver a healthier future for people and for planet. Next, all the way from Chicago, I'd like to introduce you to Karin Chu. Karin leads our data science teams in the U.S. So Karin, come and tell us about some of the things you've been doing.

Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you all today. I'm Karin Chu, Head of Data Science and AI for ADUSA. I've been here 3 years. And prior to this, I spent several years working in financial services doing a lot of quant and data science. My background is a PhD statistics from Texas A&M University in the U.S. So I've been doing data science quant long before it was deemed cool or sexy, or exciting for that matter. So with that, let's go ahead and get started. So in a fiercely competitive U.S. grocery market where customers expect home delivery in a little as 15 minutes, having precise and adaptive customer demand forecasting is essential to maintaining a competitive edge in the e-commerce fulfillment process. So as a customer orders online -- after a customer orders online, the associate at the Giant Company and Stop & Shop, fulfill the order by picking in store. This is our pick-from-store process, using a custom-built e-comm fulfillment platform spectrum. And what you see spectrum is they're after wearing to manage the orders, while also organizing products in bags to optimize for space and batching. What you may not see here is a complex science, data and technology that enable this process, and optimizing this process is our core goal as we design the next generation of demand forecasting algorithms using machine learning and artificial intelligence. So our solution will help to ensure our great local brands are well positioned to schedule the wide amount of labor at the right time with greater efficiency and a reduced cost to serve our customers. So how does this work? Our solution consists of 2 sets of ML AI algorithms. The first set is going to be slightly technical. The first set forecast hourly item-level customer demand at each store. The second set forecasts hourly order volumes by store, both are forecasting 12 weeks into the future, so quite a lot of lead time, providing substantial lead time for strategic planning and operational adjustments. Our computational workflow forms a feedback loop, continuously cycling from data to model training to implementation, and updating dynamically based on user input. It's a very complex forecasting problem to solve. Since I only have 3 minutes here today, I will spare you the math and the calculus behind it. We'll save that for another day. But our team's final solution demonstrated an impressive 90% accuracy in demand forecasting, and just in this initial phase alone, our work will translate into real-world efficiencies of up to 5% savings in the first year alone. So in the next phase of the project, we plan to expand these algorithms by adding growth trajectories thus unlocking revenue generation opportunities in the e-comm fulfillment space. I want to punctuate, this expansion signifies more than just a leap in our modeling capabilities. It also represents a strategic advancement in fully harnessing AI, data and tech. And as we move into the next generation of data-driven decision-making, this strategy will inform smarter, more sustainable business practices. So what is next on our plate? We're looking to build out the next generation of solutions in e-comm fulfillment. And here are some examples: leveraging AI to batch customer orders more efficiently, reducing pick time and optimizing space in bags. Optimizing the routes, the brand associates take inside the stores to enable them to move faster and with less friction. And finally, integrating gen AI, we are enhancing our e-comm fulfillment platform such as upgrading the substitution algorithms to further refine product recommendations for other stocks. So all this translates into getting the orders out the door more efficiently and at a lower cost. We look forward to not only supporting our e-comm fulfillment growth ambition but also building AI ML capabilities and solutions that are transferable across Ahold Delhaize. Thank you. Back to you, Ben.

So Karin notch a thank you. Thank you for sharing those inspiring examples on your great work in AI with the advent of generative AI, we and the industry are at a pivotal moment to reshape food retail. Gen AI has the potential to disrupt the world more radically than any other technology we've seen in the last 3 decades. And it impacts every domain of our business, customers, operations, our people and the planet. In combination with AI, Gen AI will enable us to unlock previously inaccessible opportunities. We're investing in generative AI solutions and building the foundational capabilities. We set up valuable partnerships such as Kickstart AI, which helped accelerate the development of the dynamic markdown solution that you just heard about. Kickstart AI works closely with the Dutch Food Bank to support our local communities. Albert Heijn launched our Gen AI Lab, a start-up incubator to develop and roll out generative AI applications, such as the recipe scanner, which enables customers to take a photo of a recipe, translate the ingredients into Albert Heijn products and add them directly into their shopping list. We've also leveraged in Gen AI to help customers reduce their food waste with solutions coming soon such as Scan & Cook to help recipe ideas based on what's on -- in your fridge, and Scan & [indiscernible] or keep, which is showing customers how best to store fresh food to give it the longest life and reduce their domestic food waste. In the U.S. e-commerce business, we've launched a semantic search solution that understands the context of a customer's online search request and returns better results even if the customer didn't get exactly the right words in the first instance. We use gen AI to prepopulate a shopping list from short-form videos, helping customers discover new recipes and new products from our assortment. And in addition, we're deploying and scaling these tech and AI solutions, we are also projecting ourselves into the future. And we've shaped a vision. You saw the video with people with all the posted notes, where we're aiming to drive significant value and significant innovation. By optimizing our customer value propositions in our core retail operations, enhancing our associates experiences and reaching our sustainability goals. Today, I want to try and share with you a sense of that vision. So come with me into the future to 2024. Let's set the stage by imagining who the customer is going to be and how they're going to act. Ten years from now, just as you heard from our colleagues in that video that opened these deep dives, we see a world where the customer will experience a whole new way of shopping. We will automatically replenish their homes with the basics. We'll provide hyper-personalized offers, which are based on their purchase history, their preferred brands, their budget, their health goals, and their sustainability preferences. With the help of an AI conversational shopping assistant, our customers will always have someone available to answer their questions and provide suggestions. The seamless omnichannel experience offered through the messaging platforms will allow our customers to communicate with the AI assistant, receive updates on their orders no matter where they are or what device they're using. Our tech data and AI foundations will empower our teams to leverage AI and make the shopping experience possible for our customers. And I think sooner than we might think. So I'm really pleased to bring Karin and Noortje back on the stage one more time to talk a little bit more about the work our teams have been collaborating on to create our vision for the future of our Ahold Delhaize.

So Karin, Noortje, you've both been very involved in the workshop processes that we've been running to really shape this future. Let's spend a little bit of time talking about what you and the teams have envisioned. Noortje, perhaps I can come to you first. How do you see AI generative or otherwise, transforming the work in our commercial teams?

In the end, we see that AI would be able to support full dynamic assortment and running promo in all our stores. As an example, AI could integrate social media data that a local event, like a festival is coming up near a store, include weather data and automatically make adjustments to price promo and assortment to attract customers. And you, Karin?

Yes. So building on that, I can see how AI will streamline the supplier negotiation processes, such as managing the interactions with the smaller suppliers through AI-powered systems or think about using gen AI to help prepare for negotiations or simulate scenarios for the larger supplier negotiations. This will really help ensure consistency in otherwise rather complicated process.

And everything that happens in the merchandising operation flows through into the supply chain. How do you see -- how do you see the supply chain operations changing with this technology, Noortje?

For supply chains, we see that they become fully self-steering. Meaning they will automatically simulate multiple scenarios and pick the best one, making complex trades between cost, sustainability and service levels. And for example, think of self-steering warehouses that make dynamic real-time adjustments to product locations, thinking routes and truck loading, monitor safety and automatically manage labor planning.

It's not that we're not working on these things today. It's just the tools that we have today aren't so sophisticated. It gives us the opportunity to go to the next level. And Karin, I know you've got some passion for how these technologies can really transform our sustainability ambitions. How do you see that showing up in the supply chain?

Yes. So I think AI will be a powerful tool that enhances sustainability and supports ethical sourcing throughout our supply chain process, helping us manage carbon footprint, packaging, plastic and waste. And AI has the potential to evaluate suppliers based on their environmental impact. And on the consumer side, the algorithm will enable us to develop pricing strategies that will help the consumers make healthy and sustainable choices.

It's very compelling when you start to get into it. And I think it's easy to see that -- or easy to imagine the impact that this will have on our ability to deliver our customer value propositions more efficiently. Karin, if we shift our focus to store operations, where do you see the big levers in the stores?

Good question, Ben. I think there are lots -- I believe there are lots of applications. AI, machine learning will transform store ops by empowering the brand associates. And by using predictive analytics and AI, for example, we will enable store managers and brand associates with more efficient scheduling and task management. Now on the maintenance offsite, I think by using AI and machine learning algorithms, we'll be able to predict equipment issues and schedule any sort of preventative repairs, which will minimize downtime and ensure ongoing quality control.

And adding to that, one of the most important priorities for our customers is that what they want to buy in the store is also available in the store. So an AI will help us have full inventory visibility, ensuring that we will always bring the right stock to the right store and not bring too much so we can prevent food waste. This will give our associates more time to focus on value-adding activities.

Absolutely. And I think increasing the day-to-day satisfaction for both associates and customers is a fundamental goal. And I think everybody needs to really see that we will always be a people-led organization. We see technology data and AI increasing and enhancing our associates' roles in the stores and in the offices. So Karin, Noortje, last question, what are you most excited about how these technologies and how AI will transform the future of work?

Yes. So for me, remembering that I have worked 5 years in HR. Personalized training and development is something that I am very passionate about. Imagine the potential of AI to equip all the associates to be top performers. Think about a model that drives or extract insights from all the actions of the top-performing colleagues, and translate that into personalized training content and recommending the next best actions for these associates. AI will transform our ability to help our associates grow into the fullest potential. Noortje, what do you think?

I'm really looking forward to the potential for AI to automate all routine activities and enhance decision-making. For example, by analyzing all data available, extracting relevant conclusions and actionable insights. And imagine that no more routine tasks, I would like to work in a world like that.

Absolutely. As the colleague said on the video, "less hassle". I can vote for less hassle. Thank you both for taking so much time to share your insights that I hope have created a truly exciting picture. So you can see how this will enable us to create exceptional experiences for our customers, and for our associates in the future.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

It's an exciting time to be part of Ahold Delhaize. I think it's -- in my 11 years, always been an exciting time to be a part of Ahold Delhaize. But as we continue to push the boundaries of what's possible in the retail technology, it's even more so. Bringing these innovations to life, we'll, of course, require focus and resources. And to deliver on the vision, we continue to commit significant investments towards our tech foundations and our data and AI capabilities. The foundational investments enable rapid integration of new technologies alongside data that's reliable, available and secure. We're investing through our ecosystem of in-house capabilities and with partners like Microsoft and through thoughtful collaboration in initiatives like the W23 grocery retail innovation fund. Great talent is also key to our future. We recently opened the tech studio AD/01 in Bucharest in Romania but this further strengthens our ability to attract top talent in Europe. And we'll continue to reinforce our unique model that enables us to experiment locally and scale winning solutions across our markets. And we're going to do so responsibly as you would expect us to do. Responsible to our customers, our associates and our shareholders, be financially responsible building on our strong track record of selecting the use cases that matter most for our customers and associates and drive efficiency back to invest in price. And also be the responsible custodians of technology with the right policies, privacy, governance, security, while always retaining a human touch. We're very excited to further transform our business and the industry on behalf of our customers, unlocking more value for them for our associates, stakeholders and the planet. I'm sure you're excited as I am as we are about to deliver the value -- sorry, I make sure you're as excited as I am. I've done pretty well until I had a [ tip of the slang ] there. I'm sure you're as excited as I am as we are about to -- about the value delivered to date and even more so, the great potential that we've poised to realize. I want to say thank you. And now who better to take us on the journey of how we will realize all of this than our CFO, let me hand over to Jolanda.

Well, thank you, Ben, and hello to everyone. It's great that you are here with us today. So thank you for being here. And I hope you are as excited about our plans as we are. In the next 20 minutes, I will take a step back and tell you more about our ambitions. We shared that we are committed to sustainable value creation with our strategy, rooted in our purpose fueled by our growth model and enabled by our strategic priorities, which together allows us to achieve our ambitions. We will specifically focus on the following areas: First, driving profitable growth by selectively investing where we see optimal growth and returns, ensuring we maintain our industry-leading margins, supported by laser-focused cost discipline; second, embracing and driving transformational change by further leveraging the power of data and AI to support our business now but also so seeds for the future; third, enabling our journey towards healthier communities and planets by ensuring we have what we need to make fact-based decisions and to take timely actions to deliver on our purpose; and last, but certainly not least, continuation of our track record of cash flow generation, we invested in our company while delivering growing returns to our shareholders. Before we step into our ambitions going forward, it's good to reflect on the plans we shared in 2021. If we look at the scorecard from leaving together, we are delivering in line or ahead of our aspirations. We are particularly proud of our free cash flow development, margin stability and solid earnings per share and our strong market positions. But like with any longer-term plan, there are a few areas where we underperformed our ambitions. The slowdown in the online market has resulted in lower growth and the longer part to profitability. And as you heard from Frans and JJ, the path to revitalization for Stop & Shop is taking longer than we would have liked. However, it's also exciting to see the new green shoots that have emerged. And I believe there are many areas such as technology, AI and commercial best practices that will provide more synergies in our future than in our past. So grounded in this reflection, let's look into our ambitions going forward. And there's a lot to like about our plans for the coming years. It's balanced. It's about growth, industry-leading margins, cost discipline, investing in the future, cash generation and all this results in growing shareholder returns. And there are a number of avenues to deliver on our ambitions. We are not dependent on one element to drive the value. We have multiple levers to deal with volatility and economic, political or social context. Our Growing Together plan is anchored in the core attributes of what it takes to being a great retailer. It starts with consistently investing in our customer value proposition, creating exceptional customer experiences and providing trusted products to strengthen loyalty and engagement, which allows us to densify and grow our markets, strengthening our foundation and expanding our horizon into new growth territories. We continue to innovate and create new opportunities to fully utilize our exits, our data and accelerate complementary income streams, while we relentlessly leverage and lower our cost base through enhanced digital automation and infrastructure capabilities. Strengthening competitiveness in our omnichannel network and thereby remaining top choice of our existing and future customers is the most profitable and the fastest way to grow. We've put together a strong set of levers to drive market share and volume growth, increasing own brand shares to 45%. Leveraging mega consumer trends such as healthy sales and driving healthy sales across the full store and taking the right actions on assortment and promotions to enhance our price position, whether it be the $1 billion in price investments in the U.S. or expanding our price favorites across our European brands. These are just some of the examples that we are truly excited about. As we strengthen our customer value proposition, we will continue to scale opportunities to grow our customer reach and our market density. Portfolio excellence is a significant part of our plan, incorporating both organic and inorganic components, such as Profi delivering strong and rapid returns. Together with the growth elements of the customer value proposition that I've just mentioned, we envision these levers will help us grow online loyalty sales to 80% and to grow our digital monthly active users to 30 million. Densifying and expanding our strongest spend will be top priority. Some examples. Returning to more pronounced organic store growth in the U.S., particularly with the acceleration of our winning brands, Food Lion and Hannaford, further leveraging our Benelux stronghold to Albert Heijn and capturing new growth opportunities in the CSE region with new store openings and with accretive bolt-ons such as Profi, bringing scale and synergies. On the flip side, making necessary interventions when brands are challenged will also be an essential contributor to elevating the quality of our sales. Our recent Belgium future plan demonstrates our ability to do so, and we will apply the similar rigor to the transformation of Stop & Shop. And I'm confident the interventions highlighted by JJ will secure a bright future for this brand, and we will communicate transparently and regularly on the progress at Stop & Shop. These combined actions enable us to grow our complementary income streams, an excellent example where we see more synergies in the future than in our past. Over the past few years, markets, technology and consumer sentiment shifted at high pace. And these changes have resulted in an unprecedented opportunity to leverage both our tangible and intangible assets in many ways. Last Investor Day, we made the commitment to deliver over EUR 1 billion in complementary revenues by 2025. And we are on our way to deliver this target despite the slower general merchandise e-commerce market in the Benelux at bol. To create acceleration, we introduced several group focus areas to leverage the diverse expertise embedded in our different brands to find innovative and scalable solutions. With strong teamwork, we've identified additional opportunities, which have increased our scope. And it's all about capitalizing on our abundant data to drive retail media business, partnering with other industry leaders to innovate and develop required strategic capabilities. As we will do with the W23 Global and scaling new business models in the B2B and B2C areas such as those at Albert Heijn and bol as highlighted by Wouter. Taking this into account, our ambition for complementary income streams is to grow to around EUR 3 billion in 2028. For context, including the wider scope, that implies a doubling versus 2023, which brings me to the last part of our growth model, the Save for Our Customer program. And as you know, we have a relentless focus on driving operational efficiency and cost discipline, we need it to fund our growth plans and to simplify where we can. We believe in simplicity. Over the past 4 years, we've achieved a lot with the Save for Our Customer program, and this is a muscle we want to flex. We are again raising the bar to EUR 5 billion in the 4 years period, and this is by no means an easy lift and will certainly require a lot of hard work and discipline, but those are qualities you all know we excel in. Many of the mechanisms to deliver savings are ongoing and as Frans already said, usual suspects. We expect to step up in areas like cost of goods sold as we see significant benefits in joint sourcing through alliances such as Eurelec, and in growing scale in own brands, and then further leveraging the power of data and analytics in our assortment building and procurement negotiations. But also in logistics, distribution, store operations and back offices by infusing AI and automation and by simplifying and refining our operating model, which will enable more efficiency and lower our G&A spend over time. The savings from the Safe for Our Customer program will be reinvested in our CVP, technology enablement and in our sustainability agenda, which in itself drives growth again. So on that note, it's a good time to turn to our capital investment allocation. Maintaining our stance and cadence as a well-invested company is and always will be one of the key elements of sustainable success, and striking that right balance of investment in front and consumer-facing and back-end infrastructure is critical. As our omnichannel capabilities evolve, we need to drive seamless integration across the value chain and lay out a strong foundation for future growth and opportunities. And this will ultimately feeds into our margin again. We will maintain our CapEx guidance on an average of 3% gross cash CapEx as percentage of sales. To optimally deploy our money and increase our return on capital, we will continue our rigorous and disciplined capital approach and selectively invest in the best opportunities in our portfolio of brands and functional capabilities. JJ and Wouter have already shared details here but there are 2 areas we are particularly excited about. Our return to net store growth in the U.S. in the coming years and the strengthening of our core infrastructure to capture scale and efficiency opportunities from data, technology and automation as Ben, Karin, and Noortje already touched upon in their interesting session. And as I said in my opening, enabling our healthy communities and planned journey by ensuring we have what we need to deliver on our purpose is an important focus area. And how we invest is also an essential enabler of our sustainability agenda. While we do not report on these investments as a separate category, sustainability is interwoven in our investment and capital allocation processes, and in our performance management systems. You could say it's part in everything we do. Looking at our purpose, our ambitions are translated into concrete targets where possible and we are creating the necessary road maps to deliver on those. While there are elements of our sustainability journey that add cost, many of the steps we are taking also bring financial and business benefits. For example, investment in energy efficiency projects generally have short buybacks of only 2 years. And growing the share of healthy sales, particularly in Fresh, tends to have better margins and faster throughput in our system, which is a positive driver for working capital. This brings me to the final part of my presentation, where I would like to share how our Growing Together plan translates into our financial ambitions for 2025 to 2028. Let's start with a 4% compounded annual growth ambition in net sales. For us, as a leadership team, this is an exciting and important element of our plan, directly related to our profitability. In the assumptions, we have included Profi and potential portfolio interventions in the U.S. Building a quality top line will also benefit the quality bottom line. We have an industry-leading operating margin and are committed to strengthening our position. Given our regional and brand diversification and the blend of growth and self-help opportunities, the power of our portfolio lies in the opportunity to leverage our scale and drive synergies. To maintaining a strong upward trajectory in absolute euros and dollars, which ultimately fuels growth and shareholder returns, the art but also the science lies in how we sequence our strategic long-term priorities, maintaining enough flexibility to capitalize or intervene in the short term as opportunities and challenges arise. To realize the faster than industry growth rate that we are targeting and to ensure sufficient flexibility to top up investment, if needed, we are planning for an average 4% operating margin over the period. And although we do not give specific regional guidance, we remain steadfast in our view that both regions are 4% plus businesses over time. Two of the biggest drivers to unlock additional funds will come from complementary income streams and from the Safe for Our Customer program. And this brings me to how we plan to drive cash flow and shareholder value. Following strong and consistent performance, combined with our outlook for growth, we see a path to over EUR 9 billion in cumulative free cash flow. Our #1 and 2 market positions, industry-leading margins of 4%, diligent focus on working capital and focused capital allocation are the most important drivers. The lessons that we've learned over many years will guide us in the future. The ambitions that we discussed translate into growing shareholder returns, assuming consistent exchange rates at current levels as well as interest rates, we expect to generate a high single-digit earnings per share CAGR for the period of 2025 to 2028. Our guidance for 2024 remains as is. And although it's too early to give specific guidance for 2025, barring any unexpected economic or macro-related shocks, we expect to return to diluted underlying earnings per share growth as of next year. Our intention is to continue with a EUR 1 billion annual share buyback program in the lifetime of this plan, which is subject to the usual disclaimer and continuing with the usual approval procedure during our November Supervisory Board meeting. In addition, we will continue our annual increase in dividend per share within the ranges of our dividend payout policy. For me, the financial strength and the courage to take on the growth and investment plans we are laying out here today is firmly rooted in our confidence in the strong cash flow generation of our company, and the strong financial fundamentals, which you can see on the screen behind me. And we're in this together as our incentives are closely aligned with our ambitions centered around growth, margins, cash flow, sustainability and shareholder returns. And I believe in our ambitions. We can grow together. And that's because of our people. They drive our strategy. For more than 150 years, we've been successfully serving our customers, growing our business and expanding our markets, and we achieved this together as a team through passion, dedication, innovation, agility, and in no small way with a human touch. We've weathered storms and focused on opportunities to remain relevant for our customers in an ever-changing environment, and we are ready and willing to pioneer scale and lead through innovation, backed by strong data, a real-time pulse of the customer and carefully iterating and learning into new areas. And we have a strong track record of delivering on our promises and being there for our customers and our communities in good and bad times. We have created multiple angles to deliver on growth, margins and cash flow while reducing risks to meet and hopefully exceed expectations over time. Our differentiating factor without any doubt is our people. They are the essence of Ahold Delhaize and enable our operational strength to outperform. Together, we are Ahold Delhaize, and we are here to grow together, and we look forward to it, and we hope you do too. Thank you for your attention.

So good afternoon, everyone, also from my side. I'm the invisible voice in the room today. So we're now ready to get started with our Q&A. [Operator Instructions] So with no further do, Frans, I'm going to hand the floor back to you and have a great Q&A session.

The invisible J.P. Before we start, I just would like to thank one colleague of ours who is going to retire from the company by the end of the month, Jan Ernst de Groot. Since the merger, he was our Chief Legal Officer; and the last year, he also took the Chief Sustainability Officer role, and Ernst is transitioning by the end of the month, Alex Holt, our new Chief Sustainability Officer is joining us as from next week. And guess what? We have already a successor for Jan Ernst the CLO role, the Chief Legal Officer, because Linn Evans joined us on the 15th of April already in the row. So welcome, Linn. We haven't seen you live on stage but now you are, and that makes also our team even more complete.

So that makes us ready for opening the question around. I saw a few hands already. I start for the moment with Sreedhar. And 2 question Sreedhar, we know you from the Analyst call.

No, no. Talked about growth. I'm sorry, if I'm very crudely bringing this back to a couple of very financial points, I guess. 4% growth is clearly ambitious relative to where we've come from. If you could flesh it out a bit more, is there a ramp-up phase here? Should we be anticipating growth from 2025 already? You've touched on space growth but you've not given us an idea how much space growth is in there. And also expand a little bit on interventions, you've touched on interventions, we don't really know what it means. So if you could explain, that will be very helpful on growth. Secondly, margins. You've talked about averaging 4% relative to what we've become maybe more used to at least 4%. So are you hinting at a period where margins could be below 4%? Or is that not a conclusion that you want us to get to? Yes.

Well, I start this. The first question on the growth trajectory, it's rather linear over the period that we foresee. But bear in mind also for the modeling that in the first year, we include Profi. In 2025, it has a positive impact, of course, that supports that first year, but a negative effect in the first year, and that's more or less a bit of an answer to your second question is that we foresee that we will close underperforming stores in the U.S. We have to that formal decision ahead of us but it has been included in the guidance as well, and that is, in the first year, a negative impact on the growth. But apart from that, it is rather linear over the period. And as I said in subsentence somewhere, we do expect earnings per share growth already in 2025.

Do you see them offsetting each other the Profi and U.S.? Or is that -- do you see the Profi and U.S. offsetting each other or?

It is included in guidance, and it's not of the same magnitude. But it is a positive and a negative impact that we've included in that growth number.

The margin question, I think, for sure?

Yes, there were 3 question [indiscernible] Yes, maybe you can touch upon space first and then...

And then square meters, Sreedhar, we still have to figure that out. It depends also a little bit on the plans that JJ already alluded to. But I think you will hear soon about this also still in the 2024 year.

And then the average 4%. Let me start with the statement that I already made that for us, both regions are 4% plus businesses over time. Our guidance is an average of 4%, which allows us to do the right thing at the right time to enable our company to grow and to top up investment if needed. And that allows us to deliver in the end more profit, a high single-digit growth in our earnings per share, the commitment to grow dividends year-on-year and also to share the intention we do to have a EUR 1 billion share buyback program over the lifetime of the plan. So it's all interrelated. And that's how we came to the average of 4% for the lifetime of this plan.

Izabel, yes?

Hello. It's Izabel Dobreva from Morgan Stanley. I have a couple of questions. So the first one is the cadence of the price investments relative to the cadence of the savings. Should we assume a linear part for the savings relative to the price investments being front loaded? That's the first question. And then I have another one for JJ.

Okay. I have a short answer to that. It's well balanced. So there is not a big discrepancy and timing of neither of the two. So it's paid over the period for both of them, the savings and the price investments.

And then my other question is on Stop & Shop in the U.S. I wanted to follow up on the question of what exactly intervention means? So what percentage of the portfolio are we closing? Are those stores loss-making or maybe not if it's a way on growth the first year? But also more broadly, when we talk about the EUR 1 billion of price investments, what do you have in mind when it comes to your price gap versus the market average for Stop & Shop?

Yes. Thank you for the question. Maybe just for a little bit of context for the group here on Stop & Shop. So in the Northeast, we have Stop & Shop holds the #1 or #2 position. It has across 7 DMAs. We have 54 DMAs in the U.S. and Stop & Shop occupy 7 of those. Over the last 4 to 5 years, we've remodeled 190 stores. And to your question, we've actually already made investments in price in those stores. We've strengthened the value proposition. We've completed the overall portfolio assessment. We won't share the exact number of impacts on those stores today but we will come back later in the year to talk about that. That is factored into our overall financial plan that Jolanda shared. Of the $1 billion in price investment, a significant investment will go into Stop & Shop but it's not the only brand that we have a price investment in, and it's not the largest investment that we have. We're going to do price investments across each of the businesses that occupy the U.S. geographies, and it will vary based off of the pricing strategy and their position in the marketplace. So if you look at the Food Lion banner, of course, it has a very different price position in the marketplace based off of its brand position, high in convenience, high in personalization, very, very strong quality in convenience, but also a very focused on everyday price. Whereas Stop & Shop has a heritage of assortment, strong equity in assortment but also needs to strengthen its value proposition. So we make a significant investment there but it's not the only brand that we put investment in for price.

Yes, please go ahead.

Freddie Wild from Jefferies here. The first question, and maybe this is sort of can be widespread across JJ and Wouter as well. But a breakdown of the guidance by region. My impression, I know you don't want to sort of beat [indiscernible] but my impression is that there may be more sales growth opportunity in the U.S. with maybe a little bit of margin retrenchment there, certainly in the near term. And then maybe more margin opportunity than sales growth opportunity in Europe. Is that a fair way to characterize how you're thinking about the businesses?

No. As you have understood already, it's a rather rhetoric question. We don't give that guidance. But I think what you've seen in the last quarters that we are already recovering our margin profile for Europe, and it is a very logical reason because we are out of our Belgium future plan and going to grow again. We see a more benign effect, although still heavy on energy, commodity prices also linked to the Ukrainian war. So I think it's a fair expectation that European margins like Jolanda already mentioned, will be at -- coming at the usual 4%. That's what we always worked on. And I will pass on your higher expectations for growth in the U.S. and Europe to [indiscernible]. But I think Wishart mentioned at the beginning, 4% CAGR on sales is in the present inflation environment. And of course, it's not so easy to have that outlook for 4 years. I think it's an ambitious plan. But we worked on those plans, it's top-down and bottom-up connected. So in all the plans of the brands, it all adds up to that 4% CAGR.

And then on Stop & Shop, you obviously got some remodels under your belt. And I realize this is a question you will be very familiar with from the last couple of years. But could you share some details on how those remodels are performing, maybe the like-for-like difference, the margin uplift you're seeing there? And will you be sharing those details on sort of an ongoing basis?

We shared in the past already quite some data on the sales uplift of the Stop & Shop remodeling, but maybe JJ, give a little bit more color from your side too much closer to the fire than I am.

Yes. So of the 190 stores, for sure, we see a marked difference between the remodeled stores and the unremodeled stores, we see kind of strength in a couple of key areas. First of all, in key attributes around freshness, quality and service, really important to Stop & Shop. We see those improving over time and not only at the time of the remodel but continues over time over each quarter. We also see strength in overall volume performance inside of those stores different than where we see the other stores. But we also need to strengthen our value proposition and that's why we're bringing in more price investments into that business. We also, as you know, when you remodel a lot of stores, I can tell you from experience, you learn a lot. And so as we move forward, we're applying those learnings to not only the Stop & Shop business but areas across the U.S., and that's where we believe we can get more efficient with our capital at the Stop & Shop business.

You mentioned already a more efficient allocation of capital earlier with the remodeling also. I think we learned a lot along the way starting in Connecticut, starting in Long Island. I think later on the -- later remodels, we're already more efficient on capital allocation. So I think that was a good learning there, too. What we also should realize with the Stop & Shop brand is that we talk about self-distribution of the supply chain on the East Coast. And that means for a big part that the third-party provider of supply chain services, [ C&S ] that we replace them by our own people and our own operations. And Stop & Shop had, by far, the biggest share in that C&S operation. Now having that massive supply chain operation almost in the middle of COVID, is an unfortunate timing, but nobody could tell us is also Stop & Shop there was harder hit by the supply chain, let's say, efficiencies there and is now enjoying again, a better and fuller supply chain. So we have good expectations there that, that will be also a little bit of a tailwind as well for Stop & Shop too. Yes, please.

William Woods from Bernstein. So when you were talking about U.S. store growth, you talked about densification in areas where you were strong already. I was surprised that you didn't mention much M&A in the U.S. and also potentially regional expansion, you'd be moving into Georgia and things like that. Do you still see both of those things as an opportunity?

The answer the simple answer is yes. JJ did a very deep work on densification where can we win more where there's an opportunity in a very fragmented East Coast for growing our business. At the same time, we always said that inorganic growth or M&A is a part of our strategy. And we also said that looking at the most profitable way of growing is on same square footage to start with, existing store base, then to fill in the tuck-ins in areas where you are already there, where your brand is there, where your supply chain is available. And the third thing is an acquisition, let's say, in an adjacent area. So that is the same strategy. Strategy -- it should be fitting our strategy. It should be an accretive proposal for us and our shareholders. And we have a strong financial base to do so. So yes, both strategies are valid and can work in parallel and can work together very well, calling out, growing together.

And to come back to the U.S. margin, obviously, pre-pandemic you were below 4.5%, post-pandemic or during the pandemic you've been above 4.5%. It sounds like the costs and the investments are self-funding to some extent. Do you think we should see U.S. margins stay above 4.5% during the course of the plan?

We stick to the guidance that we've shared with you that it is on average 4% over the life time period for both regions together.

And that would be stability in the U.S. margin or?

That's your third question.

Back there, thank you.

Robert Jan Vos, ABN AMRO. I have a question for J.J. Apart from the Stop & Shop outcome and maybe some store closures, you talked a little bit more about store expansions in the U.S. than what you have shown in the past few years. It was pretty much flat. What number of stores should we think of? Is that a couple of hundreds or is that less than that? And related to that, is that fully by choice? Could you open stores if you wanted to? Or are you dependent on opportunities, small add-on M&A? Or could you easily open stores?

Yes. Good. Thank you for the question. Maybe just building on the question upfront as well. So if you look at the portfolio assessment that we've done across the 54 DMAs that we have since 2019, we've seen good, strong market share growth and about 29 of those, we've seen more than 100 basis points in growth where we have the #1 or #2 position. We talked today about a combination of new stores and remodel being somewhere around that 1,000 stores. Of course, more of those will be remodels than the new stores given our store base but there will be a significant uptick in new stores in that projection. What we don't talk about a lot is we also have areas on the outer edge of some of our larger DMAs that we hold a #3 or #4 position in to where we can dense up. It's not a new market entry, but we're densing up. Think about the outer edge of the Food Lion regions. Think about the outer edge of some of the Hannaford regions. So a lot of those stores are ground-up stores that would either be a new store ground up or we would take an existing store that perhaps the market's grown away from it a little bit, and we would offset it. Food Lion has a really strong track record of offsetting right now. So it's a combination of remodels, ground up new stores and of course, to build on Frans' point. We still see opportunities across the U.S. If you take a look at the majority of our markets across the U.S. inside of the East Coast, 90 competitors bring up, I think, about 90% of the total share population, there's an additional 3,000 independents in that same geography. So we believe that there'll be an opportunity for small-scale acquisitions like we've done in other of the brands in the U.S. as well in the future.

We saw that the acquisition of the 70 stores BI-LO to Food Lion in the same type of geography. People know the brand, people know the supply chain, people know the company and our team has been extremely strong in integrating that. It's almost immediately accretive. So I think that what JJ is sharing with us and stronger growth in store fleet and in remodelings, and that with a very specific capital allocation to those brands which are the strongest and where we have the biggest profit potential. And that is for us also, let's say, a new type of strategy going forward. And I'm also pretty excited about that. But looking at the brands which have the opportunity, giving them more breadth and more energy to grow in their geographies.

And then my second question is for Wouter. I think on your slide -- on one of your slides, there was this 15% square meter expansion in the European region. Is that also including Profi, or is that excluding including?