The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back.’
Sun, 29 Dec 2024
For decades, Big Food has been marketing products to people who can’t seem to stop eating, and now, suddenly, they can. The active ingredient in new drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound mimics a natural hormone that slows digestion and signals fullness to the brain.Around seven million Americans take these drugs, but estimates from Morgan Stanley suggest that number could increase to 24 million within the next decade. More than 100 million American adults are obese, and the drugs may eventually be rolled out to people who don’t have diabetes or obesity, as they seem to tame addictions beyond food — appearing to make cocaine, alcohol and cigarettes more resistible. Research is at an early stage, but the drugs may also cut the risk of stroke, heart and kidney disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.Major food companies are scrambling to research the impact of the drugs on their brands — and figure out how to adjust. But for Mattson, which has invented products for the nation’s biggest food conglomerates for nearly 50 years, the Ozempic threat could be a boon. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What are GLP-1 drugs and how do they work?
Hi, my name's Thomas Weber, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine. Ozempic, Wagovi, Manjaro, Zepbound. They're some of the brand names for weight loss drugs called GLP-1 agonists. In a nutshell, GLP-1s reduce people's appetites. We know they mimic the hormone that signals fullness to the brain.
But a couple of scientists I spoke to speculated that GLP-1 drugs may also regulate the amount of dopamine that the brain releases. And so, when it does that, the drugs make foods that have been engineered to trigger the dopamine hit less appealing. But researchers have also discovered something interesting about GLP-1s. They change the kinds of foods that people are interested in eating.
So instead of packaged, processed foods, many users tend to gravitate towards fresh fruits and vegetables. So for this week's Sunday Read, which you'll hear in a moment, I wrote about how drugs like Ozempic have the potential to disrupt, even upend, the packaged food industry.
Early one morning last August, my reporting brought me to a glassy, airy office building in the Bay Area, to the headquarters of a company called Mattson. Mattson basically invents packaged foods and pitches them to the biggest food and drink companies in the world. I passed display cases of prototypes from years past, deep-fried chocolate Twinkies,
Le Choy packaged Asian dinners, DiGiorno pizza, Hungryman's steakhouse meals, Marie Callender's frozen entrees. There were scientists in white coats all around, and one of the projects they were working on was finding products that Ozempic users would actually crave.
There was a cube's high-protein brownie bite, a citrusy chicken strip that was similar in form to a mozzarella stick, and a taco with an endive leaf instead of a taco shell, which, I'll admit, was rather unsatisfying to me. Around 40% of Americans are obese, a huge market that might potentially be weaned off packaged food to some degree.
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Chapter 2: How is the food industry reacting to weight loss drugs?
And there's also a lot of research being done on these drugs as potential treatments for all sorts of diseases and conditions like stroke and heart disease, liver disease, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. The American packaged food industry, an over $1 trillion a year industry, is aware of the ramifications of this.
And so what I really wanted to know is in this looming arms race between big pharma and big food, which one is going to prevail in conquering our appetites? So here's my article, read by Simon Vance. Our producer is Jack Desidoro, and our music was written and performed by Aaron Esposito.
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 behavior 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.
They'd be like, you need to exit, she said. Auerbach watched in silence as Taylor, who was earning $150 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 Ho-Hos 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 Lays. 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. He inspected the goods. "'I'm on all of these,' he told us.
"'I eat a lot of pineapple, a lot of pineapple cucumber, ginger, oh, a lot of ginger.' "'Taylor, who lives in Haywood, California, 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 candy. "'I just couldn't,' he said. "'It was so sweet it choked me.'
His midnight snack used to be cereal, but now he stirs at night with strange urges, salads, chicken. He has sworn off canned sodas and fruit juices and infuses his water with lemon and cucumber. He dropped a heavy bag of lemons into the cart and sauntered over to the leafy vegetables. I love Swiss chard, he said. I eat a lot of kale.
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Chapter 3: What changes do GLP-1 users experience in their food preferences?
They attack what Amy Bentley, a food historian and professor at New York University, calls the industrial palette. The set of preferences created by 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 ultra-processed 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.
Mugovie destroyed my taste buds, a Redditor wrote on a support group, adding, and I love it. 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 Wins, a 69-year-old from Pittsburgh, Kansas, who joined via video call, described being emptied of desire for what he used to love. Before Wegovy, said Wins, who is now thirty-five 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 ultra-processed foods had been replaced with a lust for fresh and unpackaged alternatives. A 32-year-old scientist who works in a university chemistry department spoke about discovering, for the first time, the true flavor of food. "'Celery tastes like celery,' she told the group, "'and carrot tastes like carrot.
"'Strawberry tastes like strawberry. "'Since taking Wegovy,' she said, "'I just started to realize that they taste wonderful by themselves.' Kathleen Kenney, a 54-year-old who runs a sword-fighting school in Kansas City, Missouri, said at the focus group that she has always been heavy. "'I was the child of people who lived through the Depression,' she told me later.
"'A clean-your-plate kind of family. With the help of a sequence of different weight-loss drugs, Kenney has lost more than 100 pounds.' And it has been easy, she said, because the treatments have transformed her experience of flavor and mouthfeel. A ho-ho no longer seems like food. It tastes plasticky, she said, or feels plasticky in my mouth.
Freed from her addiction, Kenny believes that she can now taste the true ho-ho. She can perceive what hostess treats loaded with sugar actually are. Jennifer Pagano, Matson's Director of Insights and Artificial Intelligence, was leading the focus group. It sounds like, you know, I'm hearing from all of you, it's the simple pleasures of food, food in its natural state, she said. Interesting.
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 Gearhart, a food addiction researcher and psychology professor at the University of Michigan, told me over the phone.
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Chapter 4: What insights do focus groups provide about weight loss drugs?
The structure of salt crystals can be altered to accelerate the speed at which they absorb into chemical pathways that signal saltiness, allowing the brain to perceive the flavor more intensely. In the chemosensory world, says Dan Wesson, the director of the Florida Chemical Senses Institute, referring to the science of how chemicals provoke sensations, almost anything is possible.
Dullness has its uses, too. Companies make products like potato chips, popcorn, and mac and cheese meals bland on purpose to bypass sensory-specific satiety, the feeling when strongly flavored foods become less desirable as they are eaten.
Big food plumbed behavioral research for clues to how the brain's reward system reacts to sugar and salt, using it to keep products tickling the bliss point, the height of delight. But there is no equivalent bliss point for fat. Fortunately for the industry, people tend to want as much fat as they can get.
Scientists can engineer fats to melt at precisely the right temperature in the mouth, sparking the release of dopamine while creating an impression of vanishing caloric density. A Cheeto, disintegrating innocently on the tongue, tells us it contains fewer calories than it does.
The more they get away from the actual food and into the convenience of the packaging, the better they do, Robert Mosko, a food industry analyst who works at the investment bank T.D. Cowan, told me. But many chemicals used in industrial processing can taste unpleasant, metallic, or bitter.
Flavour companies like the US-based International Flavours and Fragrances create masking compounds to cover up those off-notes. But those chemicals, it turns out, can taste weird too. The industry's solution is masking compounds that cover up the tastes of the original masking compounds. I feel like I'm constantly defending big food, Stucky 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 in the past.
Breakthroughs in processing that made possible products like 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. In 1947, at a time when food processing was in its early days, Americans were spending nearly a quarter of their disposable incomes on food.
Last year that figure was only 11%. And inflation was running high. 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 swelled by more than a third. Probably the culprit is the food.
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Chapter 5: How have weight loss drugs affected consumer shopping behavior?
Ultra-processed products, the consumption of which has increased over the last 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% of the energy. With ultra-processed products, our bodies soak up all 100% of the calories. Right now, the industry's adaptation to a Zempic is in its infancy. A few companies have tested the waters.
Nestle, for example, has started a line of frozen meals targeted at people taking GLP-1s called Vital Pursuit. Frozen pizzas, sandwich melts, and chicken balls with a sharper focus on smaller portions. But reliable data about how GLP-1s reshape people's likes and dislikes is yet to come.
While Ozempic is threatening to turn off the industrial palette, Madsen believes that industrial foods may just need to be tweaked. Though many ultra-processed 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 currently being conceptualized.
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 nourish-fit 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 nourish fits were defectless, smooth and sweet, with remote echoes of cocoa. Approximately one-third sugar and about 15% fat, the bite-sized 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 thirteen grams of protein, and its grill lines were real. For now. To scale up, the quadrilage 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 purse. 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 Stucky, who was sitting on the other side of the table and watching me eat. To wash it down, a translucent, protein-shaken, psychedelic purple with lashings of sweetener and lingering medicinal notes of berry.
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Chapter 6: What innovations is the food industry pursuing in response to these drugs?
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 behaviors.
It seems that GLP-1s, by regulating the release of dopamine, may make the flavor profiles of ultra-processed products, many of which have been optimized to stimulate the brain's reward system, less appealing. Does Ozempic shatter the illusion that junk tastes good by turning down the dopamine hit? Data is lacking.
The drugs, said Gerhardt, the Michigan food addiction researcher, are still a black box. Mattson is betting on convenience winning out. Although Larry Wins is now buying mainly fruits and vegetables, he still turns to healthy choice frozen meals in a pinch. That's no surprise to Bob Nolan, a senior vice president at ConAgra Brands, the line's owner and a Mattson client.
As people eat less, he wages, the value of convenience will grow. You're probably not going to want to be in the kitchen prepping an elaborate meal to just have a few bites, Nolan told me. Eating fewer calories makes it harder to obtain the nutrients we need, said Auerbach, the Mattson relationship manager. So selling products pumped full of protein and fiber makes sense.
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. I asked Mattson's chief executive, Justin Schimmack, an easygoing Ursine, Minnesota native with a Ph.D.
in food science, if he worried about that possibility. Schimmack's first job, before he drove his motorcycle from the Midwest to California, was working for General Mills on Lucky Charms. Foams are his forte. He helped invent the chemical formulas that make marshmallows change color or reveal hidden images upon their contact with milk. But making GLP-1 products for Shimmock is also personal.
He has struggled with his weight since childhood. Near the beginning of 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 50 pounds. He no longer craves sugary lattes.
Shimmick, 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 foods trying to overwhelm the brains of GLP-1 users with hyper-rewarding compounds. "'Taste and pleasure are very important,' said Shimmick, who seemed to be choosing his words carefully, but not the only thing."
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