twists and turns...
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Will Ozempic crush the junk-food business?
Developers inventing products for big food companies are trying to work out how to sell convenience food to those who suddenly crave fresh fruit.
by Tomas Weber
Trinian Taylor, a 52-year-old car dealer, pushed his cart through the aisles of a supermarket as I pretended not to follow him. It was a bright August day in Northern California, and I had come to the store to meet Emily Auerbach, a relationship manager at Mattson, a food-innovation firm that creates products for the country’s largest food and beverage companies: McDonald’s and White Castle, PepsiCo and Hostess. Auerbach was trying to understand the shopping behaviour of Ozempic users, and Taylor was one of her case studies. She instructed me to stay as close as I could without influencing his route around the store. In her experience of shop-alongs, too much space, or taking photos, would be a red flag for the supermarket higher-ups, who might figure out we were not here to shop.
Auerbach watched in silence as Taylor, who was earning $US150 in exchange for being tailed, propelled his cart through snack aisles scattered with products from Mattson’s clients. He took us straight past the Doritos and the Hostess HoHos snack cakes, without a side glance at the Oreos or the Cheetos. We rushed past the Pop-Tarts and the Hershey’s Kisses, the Lucky Charms and the Lay’s – they all barely registered.
Clumsily, close on his heels, Auerbach and I stumbled right into what has become, under the influence of the
revolutionary new diet drug, Taylor’s happy place: the produce section. Taylor used to nurse a sugar addiction, he said, but he can no longer stomach Hostess treats. A few days earlier, his daughter fed him some sweets. “I
just couldn’t,” he said.
“It was so sweet it choked me.”
For decades, Big Food has been marketing products to people who can’t stop eating, and now, suddenly, they can. The active ingredient in Ozempic, as in Wegovy, Zepbound and several other similar new drugs, mimics a natural hormone, called glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), that slows digestion and signals fullness to the brain. About seven million Americans now take a GLP-1 drug, and Morgan Stanley estimates that by 2035 the number of US users could expand to 24 million. That’s more than double the number of vegetarians and vegans in America, with ample room to balloon from there. More than 100 million American adults are obese, and the drugs may eventually be rolled out to people without diabetes or obesity, as they seem to tame addictions beyond food – appearing to make cocaine, alcohol and cigarettes more resistible.
The prospect of tens of millions of people cutting their intake down to about 1000 calories per day (about 4200 kilojoules), 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.
Ozempic users such as 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 acclimatisation, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavours 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: colourings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users find 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.”
Lusting for the unpackaged
The day before I followed Taylor around the supermarket, I sat in on a focus group facilitated by Mattson’s consumer-insights team, listening to people describe how the weight-loss drugs have transformed their cravings. Larry Wynns, a 69-year-old, who joined via video call, described being emptied of desire for what he used to love. Before Wegovy, said Wynns, who is now 35 pounds lighter than he was in the spring, his “whole life was fast foods.” Now, “my first place I hit when I get to the store is produce,” he said. “My favourite is Mount Rainier cherries and apples, peaches, pears.”
Most of the other participants felt like that. Almost everyone’s cravings for ultraprocessed foods had been replaced with a lust for fresh and unpackaged alternatives.
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,” said Ashley Gearhardt, a food-addiction researcher and psychology professor at the University of Michigan. But for Mattson, which for almost 50 years has invented products for the nation’s biggest food conglomerates, the Ozempic threat could be a boon.
I first walked into Mattson’s glassy facility by the San Francisco airport on a beautiful Bay Area morning mid-year. Barb Stuckey, the company’s chief innovation and marketing officer, who describes herself as a hypertaster and whose tongue can detect changes in barometric pressure, greeted me in the hall carrying an armful of milk cartons. I followed her through the lab, past scientists experimenting with gummies and blitzing high-protein smoothies and carrot soup, out back to the “trophy wall”. On the shelves were rows of packages and bottles for products that Mattson had either dreamed up or helped scale and shepherd to market. There were deep-fried chocolate Hostess Twinkies, Hungry-Man frozen meals and arrays of frozen meals, ice creams and condiments from America’s largest brands.
Big Food is practised at spotting perverse openings for new products in our faddish drives for self-improvement. In 1978, for example, Heinz bought Weight Watchers, added products such as cheesecake and made a tidy profit. That acquisition heralded a trend of health-conscious rebranding that peaked in the 1980s and ’90s. Nestlé started Lean Cuisine, and Chef America began selling Lean Pockets alongside its Hot Pockets. (The difference between the two was about 125 kilojoules.) Conagra Brands introduced Healthy Choice, a diet-conscious frozen-meal brand. McDonald’s made McLean Deluxe hamburgers. Nabisco came out with Snack Well’s fat-free cookies.
There is little the industry hasn’t tried to keep health-conscious consumers eating. Companies can seal clouds of nostalgic aromas into packaging to trigger Proustian reverie. When they discovered that noisier chips induced people to eat more of them, snack engineers turned up the crunch.
“I feel like I’m constantly defending Big Food,” Stuckey told me when I brought up the industry’s history. And perhaps she is right to be. Eating is more convenient now, and it can be cheap; poor harvests don’t have nearly the same impact that they might have had in the past. Breakthroughs in processing that made possible products such as dehydrated chicken soups, frozen French fries and Jell-O instant puddings helped reduce domestic burdens on, for the most part, women – many of whom then entered the workforce.
The trade-off is obesity. Caloric consumption per capita in the United States has plateaued since 2000, while Americans have slightly intensified their physical activity. At the same time, the obesity rate has swollen by more than a third. Probably, the culprit is the food. Ultraprocessed products, the consumption of which has increased over the past 25 years, are often highly refined and rich in starch and sugar – we digest them, quickly, in the stomach and small intestine before they get to the colon, which is home to the gut microbiome. As emerging research shows, when we eat unprocessed or minimally processed foods, our gut bacteria consume as much as 22 per cent of the energy. With ultraprocessed products, our bodies soak up all 100 per cent of the kilojoules.
Big food’s answer to changing tastes
Right now, the industry’s adaptation to Ozempic is in its infancy. While Ozempic is threatening to turn off the industrial palate, Mattson believes that industrial foods may just need to be tweaked. Though many ultraprocessed foods and drinks turn off a lot of GLP-1 users, some are breaking through: on GLP-1 forums, people celebrate Fairlife, a line of sweet protein shakes owned by Coca-Cola. And Mattson has already dreamed up an arsenal of other potential winners.
In a glass-walled conference room, Mattson scientists prepared for me some of its foods tailored to GLP-1 users that are being conceptualised. Amanda Sinrod, a senior food scientist in a white lab coat, placed a plate of soft brown cubes on the table. She explained that she had enriched each NourishFit brownie bite with two grams of whey protein, for maintaining lean muscle mass during rapid weight loss. A peanut butter swirl would push that protein level even higher. Whey protein can have a grainy texture and chalky off notes, but the NourishFits were defectless, smooth and sweet with remote echoes of cocoa. About one-third sugar and about 15 per cent fat, the bite-size portions were “self-limiting,” Sinrod said. Servings could be packaged individually.
Then there was a chicken stick, wrapped in see-through plastic, that looked like a riff on string cheese. “A supercharged mozzarella stick,” Sinrod said. It had 13 grams of protein, and its grill lines were real – for now. (To scale up, the quadrillage, or char marks, might be faked using caramel colouring.) It was a grown-up rendition of a classic kid’s snack, Sinrod said, that an adult could throw in a bag. It tasted felicitously of citrus. (GLP-1 users report craving fresh, acidic flavours.)
A small cardboard tub of salty, freeze-dried chicken soup was followed by no-carb tacos, also chicken, with an endive leaf taking the role of the tortilla. “Taco Bell could go for this,” said Stuckey, who was sitting on the other side of the table and watching me eat. To wash it down: a translucent protein shake in psychedelic purple with lashings of sweetener and lingering medicinal notes of berry.
My Ozempic-optimised banquet was
fine, it was fine, but compared with ripe Rainier cherries, I feared, Larry Wynns might have found it a little dull. The mild flavour profiles and engineered textures of Mattson’s inventions were similar to existing packaged foods, such as Betty Crocker cake mixes and Tyson Grilled & Ready chicken strips. Were products like this enough, I wondered, to break through Ozempic’s defences and excite people whose relationship to food has been turned on its head?
Rewiring taste receptors
GLP-1 drugs change far more than our metabolic processes. There are GLP-1 receptors in the hypothalamus, the area that regulates hunger and signals fullness, and in the brain’s dopamine reward system, the primitive, so-called reptilian desire circuitry involved with addictive behaviours. It seems that GLP-1s, by regulating the release of dopamine, may make the flavour profiles of ultraprocessed products, many of which have been optimised to stimulate the brain’s reward system, less appealing.
Mattson is betting on convenience winning out. Although Larry Wynns is now buying mainly fruits and vegetables, he still turns to Healthy Choice frozen meals in a pinch.
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, whether she thought 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.
I asked Mattson’s chief executive, Justin Shimek, an easygoing, ursine Minnesota native with a PhD in food science, whether he worried about that possibility. He helped invent the chemical formulas that make marshmallows change colour or reveal hidden images upon their contact with milk. But making GLP-1 products, for Shimek, is also personal. He has struggled with his weight since childhood. Early this year, he started taking a GLP-1 drug. His “food noise,” the droning monotone of want that torments many who end up on the drugs, has since vanished – along with more than 22 kilograms. He no longer craves sugary lattes.
Shimek, who is in talks with the “biggest of the big” food companies about designing GLP-1-optimised 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 these were “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 optimised creations for GLP-1 users. As I was finishing 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?
A 40-something restaurant owner from Pennsylvania had explained to his fellow participants in the Mattson focus group that, since starting on Wegovy, he now has to force himself to eat. Beef jerky is one thing that’s just about bearable. But his fibre levels are way down. So Stuckey suggested a jerky infused with a fibre source. Maybe inulin? Maybe psyllium husk? “
That is a really disgusting idea,” she said. “
But we’re good at making things taste good.
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END
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