Jeffery Owen
Chief Executive Officer at Dollar General
Thank you, Kelly. Last quarter, we introduced our DG Forward strategy, which is how we will position Dollar General to be a force for opportunity for our customers, associates, communities and shareholders. DG Forward is an execution and innovation strategy, and we remain focused on driving execution through our operating priorities, including driving profitable sales growth, capturing growth opportunities, leveraging and reinforcing our position as a low-cost operator, and investing in our diverse teams through development, empowerment and inclusion.
We will sharpen our strategic focus in four key ways:
First, we are focused on winning in rural. Today, approximately 80% of our stores serve rural communities with fewer than 20,000 residents. Our high-return, low-risk real estate model continues to serve us well as a core strength of the business. In the second quarter, we completed 849 real estate projects, including 215 new stores, 614 remodels, and 20 relocations. For 2023, our plan remains to execute 3,110 real estate projects in total in the U.S., including 990 new stores, 2,000 remodels and 120 relocations. We now expect over 80% of our new stores in 2023, and nearly all of our relocations will be in one of our larger store formats, which continue to drive increased sales productivity per square foot as compared to our traditional store.
With regard to remodels, approximately 80% will be in our DGTP format, which provides the opportunity for a significant increase in cooler count, as well as the ability to add fresh produce to many stores. One way we continue to serve these locations is through DG Fresh, where our current focus is increasing sales in frozen and refrigerated categories through enhanced product offerings and building on our multiyear track record of growth in cooler doors and associated sales. During Q2, we added more than 19,000 cooler doors across our store base, and we plan to install a total of more than 65,000 incremental cooler doors in 2023.
And while produce is not currently serviced by our internal supply chain, we continue to believe that DG Fresh provides a potential path forward to expanding our produce offering to more than 10,000 stores over time. We know this offering is important to customers, especially in rural areas. And at the end of Q2, we offered fresh produce in more than 4,400 stores, with plans to expand this offering to a total of more than 5,000 stores by the end of 2023. Importantly, despite the meaningful improvements we've made and savings we have realized to-date as a result of DG Fresh, we believe we still have an opportunity to drive significant additional returns with this initiative in the years ahead.
Our second focus area, as we move DG Forward, is extending our reach. We are striving to expand the DG universe by attracting and serving new customers through new formats, while also reaching existing customers in unique and differentiated ways. Starting with our digital initiative, where we are investing to further extend our digital front porch to build even deeper connections and extend our reach beyond our substantial physical brick-and-mortar footprint. We are excited about the growth we're seeing across our digital properties, including an increase of more than 20% in monthly active users since this time last year.
Further, we are seeing tremendous success through our partnership with DoorDash, which is now available in more than 15,000 stores and continues to drive significant incremental transactions with customers. Our DG Media Network is also extending our reach with customers with a more personalized experience while delivering a higher return on ad spend for our partners and profitable growth for our business. Overall, our digital strategy consists of building an ecosystem specifically tailored to provide our customers with an even more convenient, frictionless and personalized shopping experience, and we are pleased with the growing engagement we are seeing across our digital properties.
Next, we extended our reach beyond the borders for the first time earlier this year with the opening of our first Mi Super Dollar General store in Monterrey, Mexico. We continue to be very encouraged by the customer response and the early results, which include sales results that are significantly exceeding our initial expectations. Looking ahead, our updated goal is to have up to 10 stores serving underserved communities in Northern Mexico by the end of 2023, as we look to leverage our brand awareness while extending our value and convenience proposition to a customer base that is similar to our core customer in the United States.
The third way we are extending our reach is through our pOpshelf format which is now nearly three years old. This format provides a stress-free guilt-free shopping experience designed around non-consumable shopping occasions. During the quarter, we opened 26 new pOpshelf locations, bringing the total number of stores to 190 at the end of Q2 located within 20 states. We are continuing to refine the ideal layout and assortment for these stores and we have actively leveraged our learnings to develop our 3.0 version, which will begin rolling out next month. Looking ahead, we are taking a balanced approach to opening the right number of new pOpshelf stores in the right locations in this macroeconomic environment and expect to operate a total of approximately 230 stores by the end of 2023. Importantly, we still believe pOpshelf adds approximately 3,000 opportunities to our total addressable market over the long-term and we remain excited about the growth opportunity.
Finally, we are extending our reach through our health initiative branded as DG Wellbeing. Our customer research continues to show that not only are our rural communities underserved with basic staple offerings, but they also have trouble accessing healthcare goods and services. In response, we continue to focus on rolling out an expanded healthcare product assortment, which was available in nearly 6,000 stores at the end of Q2, and we now plan to expand to a total of more than 7,000 stores by the end of 2023. Looking ahead, our plans include further expansion of our health offering and also of our partnership with a third-party payment platform to allow customers to use health plan supplemental benefits to purchase various health and wellness-related items in their local Dollar General stores. This health benefit option is now available in approximately 13,000 stores, but the goal of being available chain-wide by the end of the year as we continue to focus on increasing access to basic healthcare products and ultimately services over time, particularly in rural America.
Our third area of strategic focus is to fuel our growth. These efforts are comprised of strengthening and modernizing three critical components to improve execution; our supply chain, our operating model and our IT foundation. We plan to fuel our best-in-class growth by investing in high-return projects and resources to enable our team to execute at the highest levels to serve our customers. Within our supply chain, we have made significant progress adding capacity and increasing the productivity and efficiency of operations within our distribution centers. And with three additional facilities under construction in Colorado, Arkansas and Oregon, we are on pace to add significant incremental capacity in 2024.
Furthermore, we recently went live in South Carolina with our first distribution center to feature large-scale automation to replenish stores. Once fully ramped, this automation will be able to deliver half of the SKUs served from this facility to over 1,000 stores. Ultimately, this will allow the team to process thousands of additional SKUs while improving our storage per square foot inside the facility and lowering our cost to serve. We are excited about this opportunity to support our growth more effectively and efficiently and look forward to adding automated functionality to more facilities moving forward.
We also continue to expand our private tractor fleet, which consisted of more than 1,800 tractors at the end of Q2 and accounted for nearly 50% of our outbound transportation needs. As a reminder, we save approximately 20% of associated costs every time we replace a third-party tractor with one from our private fleet. Looking ahead, we plan to have more than 2,000 tractors in our private fleet by the end of 2023. These efforts have been and will continue to be an important driver in lowering our overall transportation costs. Within our stores, we are intensely focused on reducing complexity to create a better in-store experience for customers and associates. We have simplified operations by optimizing our routine of [Phonetic] delivery and rolling out self-checkout option, which was available in nearly 14,000 stores at the end of Q2.
Finally, over the past year, we have been working to implement a full end-to-end transformation of our retail operating model, its first major overhaul in nearly 20 years. We recently launched the pilot of this model, and while it's still very early, we believe this will significantly enhance the in-store experience for our teams while also further enhancing our position as a low-cost operator. We will have more to share on this in the coming months, but we are excited about this opportunity as we leverage enhanced technology and innovation to further support and fuel our growth in the years ahead.
The fourth area of focus with DG Forward is that it's all powered by our people. The strength of our people was on display recently as we hosted more than 1,500 leaders of our company in Nashville, for our annual leadership meeting. This is my favorite week of the year, and I was once again inspired and humbled by the commitment of our people to move DG Forward while fulfilling our mission of serving others every day. The people of Dollar General are our greatest strategic advantage. And to further enhance our position, we are investing in our people and creating opportunities for growth and development and amplifying our culture where our people can enjoy a meaningful career where the work they do every day makes a difference.
Our commitment to growth and development is as strong as ever. And with our robust footprint, ongoing growth and strong sense of purpose, we believe there is no better place to start and develop a career than with Dollar General. Our internal promotion pipeline remains robust, as evidenced by internal placement rates of more than 70% at or above the Lead Sales Associate position. Additionally, more than 10% of our growing private fleet team began their careers with us in either a store or distribution center. We continue to have great success hiring the talent we need and we are pleased with our staffing levels and applicant flow. We often note that our customer experience at Dollar General will never exceed the experience of our associates, and we are committed to continuing to elevate the experience for our people as they power our DG Forward strategy.
In closing, I want to thank our more than 185,000 employees for their commitment and hard work to serve our customers and the communities we call home. Dollar General is an essential part of small towns across America that form the backbone of our country, and we are focused on serving our customers with value and convenience they deserve every day. We are taking the actions and making the investments we believe are necessary to accelerate our progress and return even more quickly to executing with the operational excellence that has long been a hallmark of this company. The opportunities ahead of us are significant, and we are excited about the steps we're taking to drive sustainable long-term growth and shareholder value.
With that, operator, we would now like to open the lines for questions.
