Dirk Van De Put
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer at Mondelez International
Thank you, Shep, and thanks to everyone for joining the call today. I will start on Slide 4. I'm pleased to share that 2024 was another strong year for. We delivered balanced top-line growth, strong earnings and robust free-cash flow generation, while returning significant capital back to shareholders. Our top-line grew mid-single digit with balanced performance across both developed and emerging markets, and we delivered positive volume mix in the second-half of the year with improved share performance.
Despite continuing input cost inflation, we achieved gross profit dollar growth in the mid-single digits, driven by ongoing cost discipline and sound pricing. This allowed us to continue to increase our investments in brands, distribution and organizational capabilities. We also continued our track-record of strong free-cash flow, generating $3.5 billion, which includes our settlement with the EU Commission. We also continue to prior -- prioritize capital return, delivering $4.7 billion to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. And as we transition into 2025, we remain focused on executing with excellence against our long-term growth strategy.
We are confident that our chocolate playbook will enable us to successfully navigate unprecedented cocoa cost inflation, and we'll share additional color later in today's call. But perhaps most importantly, I remain convinced the team represents the very best people in the consumer packaged goods business and I'm proud of our team for staying focused and agile in a challenging operating environment. With the right strategy, the right brands, the right geographic footprint and the right people, I'm confident that we continue to be solidly positioned for attractive long-term growth.
Turning to Slide 5, you can see that 2024 was a strong year-on both the top and bottom-lines despite the impact of cocoa cost phasing in the 4th-quarter. Luca will provide some additional perspectives on our cocoa cost strategy in a few minutes. We delivered organic net revenue growth of 4.3% and adjusted gross profit dollar growth of 5.1% for the year. Our volume mix results demonstrate that consumers continue to prioritize our brands and our categories. It is important to underscore that we continued reinvesting in our brands to drive faster growth.
Our high single-digit investment increase in A&C continues to strengthen consumer and customer loyalty to our brands. Adjusted EPS grew 13% on-top of strong growth in the past several years and we delivered free-cash flow of $3.5 billion. We remain confident that our commitment to executing with excellence while reinvesting in our strong brands, capabilities and talent will enable us to continue delivering attractive long-term value for our stakeholders.
On Slide 6, you can see that our continued confidence is grounded in evidence of consumers and during preference for snacking. All over the world, snacks remain an important part of people's lives at-home, at-work or school and on-the-go. We're proud that consumers continue to prioritize our strong brands even in challenging times., in North-America, consumer confidence has improved slightly following the US election, despite continuing concern about the economic outlook.
While biscuit category volume remained relatively flat over the last three months, private-label continues to decline, demonstrating that consumers remain loyal to their favorite brands and that our price-packed architecture initiatives are showing promising signs. As a result, Oreo, Chips Avoy and Ritz all are regaining share. Meanwhile, in Europe, consumer confidence and also price elasticities remained stable despite ongoing uncertainty in the economic and political environment.
We continue to see solid category value growth in both biscuits and chocolate and our brands are steadily gaining share following disruption during the first-half of the year. Elasticities also remained stable in emerging markets with solid consumer confidence in India, Brazil and Mexico amidst continued softness in China. Overall, we're seeing solid category growth in both volume and value across our combined emerging markets. And share is improving in both biscuits and chocolate.
Turning to Slide 7, we are continuing to make progress against our strategic growth agenda, reinvesting in our brands, expanding distribution, strengthening our capabilities and continuing to transform our portfolio. Here are just a few highlights of our strategy in action. First, our iconic global brands, including Oreo and Cadbury Dairy milk executed award-winning activations that resonated strongly with consumers, driving incremental lift. For example, Oreo's space Dunk campaign and our innovative global collaboration with Coca-Cola helped strengthen partnerships with key retailers around the world.
Similarly, Cadbury's year-long celebration of its 200th anniversary delivered groundbreaking creative and strong return on investment. Looking ahead, we are excited about the potential of our just announced Oreo partnership with Post Malone, which will hit US store-sales later this week. Capturing the current cultural vibe, this limited edition features our first-ever twisted cream. Along with these creative brand reinvestments, we continue to expand distribution around the world, which includes a special focus on accelerating digital channels.
Our e-commerce business grew double-digits in 2024, and we continue investing in new capabilities to accelerate our leadership in digital snacking. In fact, our next tier markets grew approximately 35% in 2024 as a result of our continued investments. We are also making significant progress on growing our revenue growth management capabilities. We launched new fresh stacks during Q4 across our largest US brands, including Oreo, Rich and Chips Avoy. These new offerings provide products our consumers love in smaller Hold fresh packs at an attractive everyday price. And in chocolate, we are launching an array of pack sizes at several new price points around the world. Additionally, we continue to advance our portfolio reshaping strategy. In 2024, we purchased a majority stake in Evert, the leader in China's fast-growing frozen to chilled baked snacks category. We have worked with Evert for several years to develop, manufacture, market and sell cakes and pastries featuring some of our iconic brands, including Oreo and Philadelphia. First, our expanded partnerships enables us to further accelerate growth through continuous innovation, leveraging the combination of our high-value brands with Evert's advanced R&D and technical expertise. We also liquidated our investment in JDP speeds, providing another important source of funding for reinvestment that can be used to buy our stock as well as further advancing our brands, talent and capabilities. On Slide 8, along with our financial performance and strategic growth priorities, I'm pleased to share that we made significant progress towards our sustainability objectives in 2024. First, we continue to advance our leadership in more sustainably sourcing critical ingredients. About 90% of the cocoa volume used in our chocolate brands now is sourced through Cocoa Life, our signature cocoa sourcing program, which works to lift up the people and restore landscapes where cocoa is growing. We also made continued progress in helping to combat climate change. We reduced carbon emissions across our manufacturing operations by about 38% versus our baseline in 2018. Additionally, we continued advancing our light and right packaging strategy. Approximately 96% of our packaging is recyclable. We also continue investing in ways to empower consumers to make more mindful snacking choices that fit into their healthy active lifestyles. Approximately 80% of our snacks revenue comes from mindful portion snacks, that is snacks that are packaged in individually wrapped mindful portion serving sizes or with clear mindful portion recommendations on the pack. These are just a few preliminary highlights of our continuing progress towards building a more sustainable snacking company. We continue to believe that helping to drive positive change at-scale is an integral part of value-creation with positive returns for our stakeholders. We encourage you to watch our annual Snacking Mades Right report, which will be published in April to view our full-year sustainability data. Turning to Slide nine, I'd like to reinforce our conviction that remains well-positioned to navigate through a very dynamic operating environment. Like many other companies, we are closely tracking and planning around several near-term themes, including variations in consumer confidence, foreign-exchange volatility, potential changes in trade policy and pricing negotiations, all against the backdrop of record cocoa prices. By focusing on our strengths and controlling our controllables, we are confident that we have the right strategy, the right execution and the right people to effectively navigate these headwinds. Our teams have undertaken extensive planning since last spring for the challenges created by record cocoa inputs costs. We have a clear and sound strategy to navigate these conditions, which Luca will describe in more detail in a few minutes. At the same time, our categories remain resilient and consumers continue to prioritize our iconic snacking brands. We remain committed to reinvesting in our brands and capabilities to continue accelerating this momentum. We also continue to focus on expanding distribution opportunities in both developed and emerging markets. And our disciplined approach to capital allocation gives us confidence that we will continue to generate strong free-cash flow. In conclusion, I'm pleased to reiterate that 2024 was another strong year and that we are well-positioned to continue driving attractive growth. While the road ahead will not be without challenges, our team is at its best when we are united and clear about what we need to do. By continuing to double down our attractive core categories of chocolate, biscuits and baked snacks, investing in our widely loved brands, focusing on operational execution and cost discipline and empowering our great people, I am confident that we can deliver strong performance for years to come. Thank you with that, I'll turn it over to Luca to share additional insights on our financials.
