This is a must but we will also ensure that our brand and marketing investment spend is more focused with deliberate allocation behind bigger platforms, more consistent, fully funding our power brands, more digital and more effective increasing returns of marketing spend. Taken together, these levers driving unmissable superiority scaling multiyear innovations and increasing brand investment can positively impact our growth profile. And as I said, we will maximize their effectiveness by prioritizing their application across our top 30 power brands. The next element of our faster growth plan is the selective optimization of the portfolio. The reshaping of the portfolio through M&A since 2015 has undoubtedly benefited Unilever overall. The portfolio today is structurally more attractive than it was.
In total, some 20% of the portfolio has been rotated over the last eight years with sizable lower-growth businesses divested and 22 businesses added. And these have included some great acquisitions. such as Dermalogica, Paula’s Choice, Liquid I.V. and Nutrafol, all of which are growing strongly and are supporting the development of Prestige Beauty and Health & Wellbeing and are poised to make an ever more meaningful contribution to Unilever as a whole. But equally, we have to accept that not all acquisitions have delivered in the way that was hoped or expected. The likes of Blue Air or Dollar Shave Club were unsuccessful attempts to move away from our core. And we need to learn the lessons from what has worked and what hasn’t and be open in the way we share relative successes and failures, and we will.
In the case specifically of one of our biggest and most important acquisitions, Horlicks, while the value creation case has been met the business is not yet growing at the level that we expect. However, we are committed to ensuring that it will. Since 2019, our acquisitions performed better because the deals have been fewer in number. They are more strategically aligned and where the opportunity for Unilever to add value was very clear. And based on these lessons, there are some M&A criteria that will guide and inform the way we think about the evolution of the portfolio in the future, enabling us to set an even higher and clearer bar for acquisitions. So let me sum up this section by being crystal clear. Our approach to optimizing the portfolio will be based on a recognition that there is more pruning to be done.
A continuation of bolt-on acquisitions with a higher bar for acquiring in line with the criteria I have outlined. No major or transformational acquisitions in the foreseeable future. Let me turn now to the second shift we are making what we are describing here is productivity and simplicity. In other words, fewer things, done better and with greater impact at lower cost, this won’t just be an action list, but rather a guiding philosophy for the way in which I think we should run the business. And for today, let me tell you about three important and accelerated actions that we will take. Each of which demonstrates this philosophy. They are built back gross margin, a more focused sustainability agenda and driving more benefits from the new organization.
First, build back gross margin. This is the source of funds for our organic investments. That is why I like to think of it as the bank of gross margin. I’ve already spoken about the gross margin decline over the past few years. Rebuilding gross margin is an opportunity and a necessity. The recovery started in the first half of 2023, driven by a more balanced cost price equation and positive mix from SKU rationalization and portfolio change. Under this plan, we now have to accelerate the gross margin recovery through working the cost side harder. We will shift our focus from a growth savings approach to net productivity to shine the light on what’s actually landing in the P&L and filling our gross margin bank. This focus extends across all P&L lines.
Starting with material costs which comprise raw and pack materials as well as products bought from third parties. It is our biggest cost line, and we have an ambitious program to beat market inflation and contribute to gross margin progression through competitive buying, value chain interventions and product reformulations. For production and logistics costs, we have done extensive benchmarking and set challenging productivity targets to reduce the cost per unit produced. We will deliver these through an end-to-end network optimization, such as the supply chain network resets that we announced for North America Personal Care and Beauty & Wellbeing this year and which we will invest in over the coming years. We will also deliver through operational improvements with crystal clear targets set for labor productivity, energy efficiency, warehouse and truck utilization and material waste reduction.
And these are stretching targets, but I’m confident we can deliver them. We have best-in-class manufacturing and logistics efficiencies in emerging markets and will apply investment and knowledge to achieve the same in our developed markets. Each business group has developed specific implementation plans for cost and mix improvement. To deliver these plans, we will step up capital expenditures from 2.4% in the 2019-2022 period to above 3% of turnover. We will deploy a very disciplined approach to restructuring expecting costs of around 1% of turnover for the next three years, down from an average of 1.6% over the past four years. The second action we are taking under the heading of productivity and simplicity relates to our sustainability agenda.
And of course, sustainability permeates all aspects of the business. It gets to the heart of what the Company stands for. It was a key factor in my own decision to rejoin Unilever and its importance to the business and the world at large is only going to grow in the years ahead. You may be surprised, therefore, to see it appear under the heading of productivity and simplicity. But for me, that is just underlines how important and how integral it is. Everything we do in this area must have material impact for the benefit of Unilever as well as for the environment and the societies we serve. I’ve concluded that the best way we can do that is by radically focusing our sustainability efforts. Our desire to play our part across the piece has led to efforts being spread increasingly thinly with a very real risk of the law of marginal returns setting in.
By contrast, Unilever’s work in those areas of most critical importance to the business has been industry-leading. We will now accelerate that industry-leading work by focusing our Unilever-wide efforts and resources on four key pillars: that is climate, nature, plastics and livelihoods. This is a huge agenda by itself. The need for focus is vital. And let me be clear, we are not walking away from sustainability. Rather, we are stepping into it in a different and I believe, even more impactful way. And we will do that not by setting a lot of aspirational goals that are so long term that none of us will be around to be held to account for them. But instead, by short terming our work that is by making real steady, meaningful progress on the big issues quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year, time bound.
