The prospect of tens of millions of people cutting their caloric intake down to roughly 1,000 per day, which is half the minimum amount recommended for men, is unsettling the industry. Late last year, Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, the chief executive of Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, told Bloomberg that food-industry executives had been calling him. “They are scared about it,” he said. Around the same time, Walmart’s chief executive in the United States, John Furner, said that customers on GLP-1s were putting less food into their carts. Sales are down in sweet baked goods and snacks, and the industry is weathering a downturn. By one market-research firm’s estimate, food-and-drink innovation in 2024 reached an all-time nadir, with fewer new products coming to market than ever before.
Ozempic users like Taylor aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite but to rewrite people’s desires. They attack what Amy Bentley, a food historian and professor at New York University, calls the industrial palate: the set of preferences created by our acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives. Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant. “Wegovy destroyed my taste buds,” a Redditor wrote on a support group, adding: “And I love it.”
Major food companies are scrambling to research the impact of the drugs on their brands — and figure out how to adjust. “The whole field is still a little stunned,” Ashley Gearhardt, a food-addiction researcher and psychology professor at the University of Michigan, told me over the phone. But for Mattson, which for nearly 50 years has invented products for the nation’s biggest food conglomerates, the Ozempic threat could be a boon.
Given Big Food’s track record, it’s likely that the companies will succeed at finding products Ozempic users crave. But what if they’re too successful? I asked Nicole Avena, a professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai who studies sugar addiction, if she believed it could be possible for food companies to engineer, intentionally or not, compounds that would make GLP-1 drugs less effective. Avena told me it was plausible. The food industry, she pointed out, has cabinets of formidable reward-triggering compounds with which to experiment. Companies could end up counteracting the drugs to some degree in their efforts to make foods more rewarding, she said.
Shimek, who is in talks with the “biggest of the big” food companies about designing GLP-1-optimized products, said he was not anxious about Big Food’s trying to overwhelm the brains of GLP-1 users with hyper-rewarding compounds. Taste and pleasure are “very important,” said Shimek, who seemed to be choosing his words carefully, but “not the only thing.” There is “an honest desire” in the industry, he added, to support people in their weight-loss journeys. Shimek wouldn’t say which companies he is speaking to about GLP-1 products. “We are professional secret keepers,” he said.
Stuckey had her team think about companies that might be a natural fit for their optimized creations for GLP-1 users. As I was finishing up my Ozempic-inspired lunch, they started throwing around ideas. Could the NourishFit brownie become a high-protein cake mix sold by Betty Crocker, a General Mills brand? Or Hostess, Stuckey said, could easily start a GLP-1 line: “Nobody would know it was from Hostess.” Because GLP-1 side effects include gastrointestinal issues, how about reaching out to General Mills, the owner of Fiber One, Stuckey said, and offering to help it design products targeted to GLP-1 users?