The aging population in our country is creating a large pool of individuals who are living with and managing chronic health conditions. Many younger people are doing so as well. There is also a growing shortage of primary care physicians, nurses and other medical clinicians. For these and other reasons, including advances in technology, the health care industry is implementing new solutions that enable patients to manage many of their health care needs at home. Often, these solutions combine a connected medical device and digital communications, which can provide key information to patients or report information back to medical providers. We believe our company can help both the patients and the medical providers through solutions created under the Hamilton Beach Health banner.
Over the past few years, we’ve had discussions with many companies in the home medical market about prospective collaborations. A few years ago, we met with a company called Health Beacon, which is based in Dublin. Health Beacon is a digital therapeutics company that has created a patent-protected the FDA-cleared system for managing injectable medications, which are used to treat a broad range of chronic conditions in the home. Their system is a connected countertop medical device that combines with a digital support system to help patients manage their adherence to their prescribed treatment. Device also provides for the safe disposal of Sharps. Health Beacon was seeking a relationship with a company that could help them market and distribute their system in the large U.S. and Canadian markets.
In June of 2021, we entered into an exclusive multiyear commercial relationship to do that. In March 2022, we introduced the Smart Sharps Bin from Hamilton Beach Health powered by Health Beacon in the U.S. Health Beacon has an agreement with a major specialty pharmacy company and there is a strong pipeline of prospects. As Health Beacon prepared to deploy the system to market, they experienced delays, unfortunately, this has caused Health Beacon to experience financial pressures and ultimately a cash squeeze. Last Friday, Health Beacon entered examinership in Irish statutory framework for restructuring companies and financial difficulty. Hamilton Beach Brands has entered into a facility agreement with Health Beacon under which we will make secured loans to Health Beacon up to a total of EUR 1.85 million or approximately $2 million to fund its operations during the examinership, which is a period up to 100 days.
Due to our existing commercial relationships with Health Beacon and our knowledge of current and prospective specialty pharmacy orders, we believe Health Beacon should be able to stabilize and continue to operate. Now let me turn to how we are working to increase our leadership in the global commercial market. We are a leading participant in the global commercial market, serving the food service and hospitality industries with small kitchen appliances. We continue to develop products that support our competitive advantage in the core blending and mixing categories, and we have expanded into new categories as well. We continue to increase our relationship with the regional and global chains. In 2022, sales of our commercial products accounted for 10% of our total revenue.
Our sales of commercial products increased 50% in 2022 as businesses in the food service and hospitality industry is engaged in significant post-pandemic restocking. While we do not expect that growth rate to continue, we do expect the commercial products will continue to be 10% or more of total revenue in 2023 and beyond. As we expand into new markets, we continue to drive the growth of core brands continue to invest in driving the growth of our flagship brands, Hamilton Beach and Proctor Silex in our core North American market. Hamilton Beach remains the #1 unit brand in the U.S. Our rebranding of Proctor Silex as simply better has gained traction in the marketplace. We are accelerating our digital transformation for the benefit of all the markets we serve, we continue to make significant investments in our well-developed e-commerce capability and digital marketing.
Through the first 9 months of this year, e-commerce sales accounted for 36.5% of our total sales up from 35% in the same period last year. In addition to organic growth, we plan to also leverage partnerships and acquisitions, we are actively engaged in the pursuit of additional trademark licensing agreements, strategic alliances and acquisitions to drive growth in all of our markets. For all these reasons, we believe we are well positioned to deliver strong results and increase shareholder value in the years to come. Let me conclude by sharing some early thoughts about 2024. Over the past few years, our strong team has managed through an extraordinary operating environment due to a wide variety of factors such as tariffs, pandemic-driven historic surge in demand, disruptions across the supply chain and spiking then following product and container costs.
