Jeff Owen
Chief Executive Officer at Dollar General
Thank you, John. Let me take the next few minutes to update you on our operating priorities and strategic initiatives, which have transformed this company in recent years, resulting in strong growth and enhanced profitability. Our first operating priority is driving profitable sales growth. Starting with NCI. With the initial rollout phase now complete, we will focus on continuing to refine the assortment and enhance the treasure hunt offering to provide value to our customers in the non-consumable categories.
Overall, we are very pleased with the success of NCI including market share gains in non-consumable sales in Q4. Moving to our pOpshelf store concept, which further builds on our success and learnings with NCI. As a reminder, pOpshelf aims to engage customers by offering a fun, affordable and differentiated treasure hunt experience delivered through continually refreshed merchandise, a differentiated in-store experience and exceptional value with the majority of our items priced at $5 or less.
During the quarter, we opened 37 new pOpshelf locations, bringing the total number of stores to 140 at the end of 2022, located within 14 states. While sales in this economic environment have been somewhat softer than our earlier results, we continue to be pleased with the customer response. Looking ahead, we plan to more than double the pOpshelf store count in 2023, bringing the total number of pOpshelf stores to nearly 300 by year-end, and we are excited about our goal of approximately 1,000 locations by year-end 2025.
Turning now to DG Fresh, which is a strategic, multiphase shift to self-distribution of frozen and refrigerated goods along with a focus on driving continued sales growth in these areas. We are now delivering perishable products to more than 19,000 stores from 12 facilities, and we continue to be pleased with the cost savings from this initiative and importantly, the significantly enhanced profitability of our perishables offering. In addition to capturing cost savings, DG Fresh also aims to increase sales in frozen and refrigerated categories.
We are pleased with the performance on this front, including enhanced product offerings in stores and strong performance from our perishables department, which had our strongest rate of comp sales growth during 2022. Going forward, we expect to realize additional benefits from DG Fresh as we continue to optimize our network, further leverage our scale, deliver an even wider product selection and build on our multiyear track record of growth in cooler doors and associated sales. And while produce is not included in our initial rollout, 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.
To that end, at the end of 2022, we offered fresh produce in more than 3,200 stores with plans to expand this offering to a total of more than 5,000 stores by the end of 2023. Finally, DG Fresh has also extended the reach of our cooler expansion program. During 2022, we added more than 66,000 cooler doors across our store base. And we plan to install a similar number of cooler doors in 2023. Importantly, despite the meaningful improvements we have 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. Turning now to an update on our health initiative, branded as DG Wellbeing.
As a reminder, the initial focus of this project is an expanded health offering, which consists of approximately 30% more selling space and up to 400 additional items as compared to our standard offering. This offering was available in nearly 4,400 stores at the end of 2022, and we plan to expand to a total of more than 5,500 stores by the end of 2023. Looking ahead, our plans include further expansion of our health offering and testing of our mobile clinic with the goal of increasing access to basic health care products and ultimately, services over time, particularly in rural America.
Finally, we also plan to make significant enhancements to our private brand offering in 2023 as we know how important these value offerings are for our customers. We are increasing private brand offerings across many important categories, including candy and snacks, perishables, pet food and over-the-counter health care products. We believe these products will further differentiate Dollar General in the marketplace as we look to provide our customers with tremendous value on quality products. In addition to the initiatives I just discussed, as well as the anticipated supply chain efficiencies I mentioned earlier, we continue to pursue other opportunities to enhance gross margin, including improvements in global sourcing as well as shrink and damage reduction.
Our second priority is capturing growth opportunities. Our proven, high-return, low-risk real estate models has served us well for many years and continues to be a core strength of our business. In 2022, we completed a total of 2,961 real estate projects, including 1,039 new stores, 1,795 remodels and 127 relocations. For 2023, our goal remains to execute approximately 3,170 real estate projects in the United States across our Dollar General and pOpshelf banners, including 1,050 new stores, 2,000 remodels and 120 store relocations.
Notably, this would be the most real estate projects we have executed in one year. Our ability to innovate on the store formats continues to be an important strength of the business, and we expect to leverage multiple formats to drive strong returns in the year ahead. Approximately 80% of our new stores in 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 in many stores.
In addition to our planned Dollar General and pOpshelf growth, we are excited about our international expansion. We were pleased to open our first Mi Super Dollar General in Monterrey, Mexico last month, and we have been very encouraged by the customer response and community reception we have seen so far. Looking ahead, our goal is to have approximately 20 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.
Overall, our real estate pipeline remains robust, and with more U.S. brick-and-mortar stores than any retailer, we are excited about our ability to capture significant growth opportunities in the years ahead. Next, our digital initiative, which is an important complement to our physical footprint as we continue to deploy and leverage technology to further enhance convenience and access for customers. Our efforts remain centered around creating a digital front porch for our customers as we look to continue building engagement across our digital properties, including our mobile app. We ended 2022 with approximately 4.5 million monthly active users on the app and expect this number to continue to grow as we look to further enhance our digital offerings.
Our partnership with DoorDash continues to serve us as an important extension of the value offering of Dollar General, combined with the convenience of same-day delivery in an hour or less. DoorDash is available in nearly 14,000 stores, and we anticipate extending this offering to an additional 1,000 stores in 2023. We are pleased with the incremental sales growth attributed to this partnership as well as its profitability, and we believe we have an opportunity to drive even stronger growth moving forward. In addition, we are excited about the continued growth of our DG Media Network.
We are seeing significant interest and participation from CPG companies and brands who are seeking to connect with our more than 90 million unique customer profiles, especially rural customers, who represent about 30% of the country. We expect our DG Media Network to grow significantly in 2023 as we expand the program and enhance the value proposition for both our customers and brand partners while substantially increasing the overall net financial benefit for the business.
Overall, our strategy consists of building a digital 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. Our third operating priority is to leverage and reinforce our position as a low-cost operator. We have a clear and defined process to control spending, which continues to govern our disciplined approach to spending decisions. This approach, internally branded as Save to Serve, keeps the customer at the center of all we do while reinforcing our cost control mindset.
Our Fast Track initiative is a great example of this approach. The first phase of this initiative, which included rolltainer optimization and self-checkout is focused on enhancing customer convenience and labor productivity in our stores. Self-checkout, which provides customers with another flexible and convenient checkout solution, was available in more than 11,000 stores at the end of 2022, and we continue to be pleased with our results, including strong customer adoption rates.
Looking ahead, our goal is to have a self-checkout offering in more than 13,000 stores by the end of 2023, including the full self-checkout option in more than 2,000 stores as we look to further extend our position as an innovative leader in small box discount retail. Moving forward, the next phase of Fast Track consists of increasing our utilization of emerging technology and data strategies, which includes putting new digital tools in the hands of our field leaders. When combined with our data-driven inventory management, we believe these efforts will drive greater efficiencies for our retail leaders and their teams while laying the foundation for additional phases of Fast Track in the future.
We also continue to reduce costs through the expansion of our private tractor fleet, which is one of the largest private retail fleets in the U.S. Our fleets consisted of more than 1,600 tractors at the end of 2022 and accounted for more than 40% of our outbound transportation needs. Looking ahead, we plan to have more than 2,000 tractors in our private fleet by the end of 2023, which would account for more than 50% of our outbound transportation fleet. Overall, our underlying principles are to keep the business simple but move quickly to capture growth opportunities, while controlling expenses and always seeking to be a low-cost operator.
Our fourth operating priority is investing in our diverse teams through development, empowerment and inclusion. As a growing retailer, we created more than 10,000 new jobs in 2022, while continuing to drive opportunities for personal and professional development, and ultimately, career advancement. 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, which nearly doubled in size in 2022, 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. Ultimately, we believe the opportunity to start and develop a career with a growing and purpose-driven company is what sets Dollar General apart from the competition and remains our greatest currency in attracting and retaining talent. We added incredible individuals across the organization in 2022 as we grew teams in our stores, distribution centers, private fleet and at our store support center, while also adding a local team in Mexico to support our new customers in those communities.
In addition to new opportunities, we have made significant investments in our people, including raising average hourly retail wages by approximately 23% over the last three years and investing over 4 million training hours in 2022 to promote education and development. The people of Dollar General are our greatest strength and the driving force of this company. In closing, we made great progress against our operating priorities and strategic initiatives in 2022, while making a difference in the lives of our customers.
As we enter 2023, we are excited about our robust plans for growth, which we believe will further enhance our ability to serve our customers in meaningful ways. We are the innovation leader in our space, and we are laser-focused on executing at a high level to continue driving long-term sustainable growth while delivering strong returns for our shareholders. Finally, I want to thank more than 170,000 employees for their commitment to serving others every day, and I am looking forward to all we will accomplish together in 2023. With that, operator, we would now like to open the lines for questions.
