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 HoHos, 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. 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 Hayward, Calif., 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.”
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. Around seven million Americans now take a GLP-1 drug, and Morgan Stanley estimates that by 2035 the number of U.S. 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. Research is at an early stage, but they may also cut the risk of everything from stroke and heart and kidney disease to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
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.”
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 from Pittsburg, Kan., 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 favorite 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. 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, Mo., 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 HoHo no longer seems like food. “It tastes plasticky,” she said. “Or feels plasticky in my mouth.” Freed from her addiction, Kenney believes that she can now taste the true HoHo — she can perceive what Hostess treats, loaded with sugar, actually are. Jennifer Pagano, Mattson’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 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.
I first walked into Mattson’s glassy facility by the San Francisco airport on a beautiful Bay Area morning this summer. 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 (“not something I would put in my body,” Stuckey said), Hungry-Man frozen meals and arrays of frozen entrees, ice creams and condiments from America’s largest brands. “We Invent the Future of Food One Product at a Time,” read a sign on the wall.
Big Food is practiced at spotting perverse openings for new products in our faddish drives for self-improvement. In 1978, for example, Heinz bought Weight Watchers, added products like 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 roughly 30 calories.) Conagra Brands introduced Healthy Choice, a diet-conscious frozen-entree brand. McDonald’s made McLean Deluxe hamburgers. Nabisco came out with SnackWell’s fat-free cookies.
The public’s obsession with weight loss has led to the industry’s concocting some very weird substances. In 1996, PepsiCo released potato chips fried in an indigestible fat substitute called Olestra that, miraculously, had zero calories. One problem: Olestra impeded the absorption of essential vitamins. Another: It caused fecal incontinence. The substance is now used to paint decks and lubricate power tools. By the time the owner of Carl’s Jr. and Cinnabon got around to buying the rights to the Atkins diet in 2010, interest in fad diets was starting to wane, and Big Food pivoted. The industry increasingly pushed foods enhanced with protein and fiber, or with herbs and minerals and antioxidants and vitamins — a trend that continues today, despite scant evidence that eating ultraprocessed products infused with individual nutrients makes people healthier.
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. Food technologists found a way to amplify the intensity of artificial sweeteners to hundreds of times beyond sugar’s natural flavor. 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 Moskow, a food-industry analyst who works at the investment bank TD Cowen, told me. But many chemicals used in industrial processing can taste unpleasant, metallic or bitter. Flavor companies like the U.S.-based International Flavors 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,” 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 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 work force. 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 percent. (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. Ultraprocessed 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 percent of the energy. With ultraprocessed products, our bodies soak up all 100 percent of the calories.
Right now, the industry’s adaptation to Ozempic is in its infancy. A few companies have tested the waters: Nestlé, for example, has started a line of frozen meals targeted at people taking GLP-1s called Vital Pursuit — frozen pizzas, sandwich melts and chicken bowls 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 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 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 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. Approximately one-third sugar and about 15 percent 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 coloring.) 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 flavors.)
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. There were other snacks, too, that were at an even more embryonic stage, including Bird-gers, a blend of frozen vegetables and seasonings to jazz up turkey meat, a two-ounce portion of yogurt that you could squeeze from a pouch like baby purée (Strawberry Sensation, Mango Magic, Blueberry Bliss: each six grams of protein) and something called satiety gum in four flavors: Crisp Green Apple, Watermelon Fresh Mint, Cinnamon Red Hot Mama and Minty Fresh Metabolism.
My Ozempic-optimized 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 flavor profiles and engineered textures of Mattson’s inventions were similar to existing packaged foods, like Betty Crocker cake mixes and Tyson Grilled & Ready chicken strips. Were products like this enough, I wondered, to break through Ozempic’s defenses and excite people whose relationship to food has been turned on its head?
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 behaviors. It seems that GLP-1s, by regulating the release of dopamine, may make the flavor profiles of ultraprocessed 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 Gearhardt, the Michigan food-addiction researcher, are “still a black box.”
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. 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 wagers, 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 Shimek, an easygoing, ursine Minnesota native with a Ph.D. in food science, if he worried about that possibility. Shimek’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 Shimek, 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.
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?
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 fiber levels are way down. So Stuckey suggested a jerky infused with a fiber source. Maybe inulin? Maybe psyllium husk? “That is a really disgusting idea,” she said. “But we’re good at making things taste good.”
Prop stylist: Brian Byrne
Tomas Weber is a writer who lives in London. He has written about orcas’ attacking yachts, an inventor who fell in love with his A.I. and a tiny Scottish village betting its future on rocket launches. Jamie Chung is a photographer in Brooklyn who has shot nearly a dozen covers for the magazine, including such concepts as a giant CBD gummy bear, an empty bird’s nest for Twitter and a robot hand holding a skull like Hamlet.
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