Many surprising twists await us in the interaction between food marketing and the rise of GLP-1 medicines for treating obesity. Eating habits are changing for the people who take them. In part, this is happening because of a reduction in food noise – intrusive, persistent, and unpleasant thoughts about food. But the effects of this might be surprising, says food and health reporter Deena Shanker.

Counter-Intuitive Increased Spending on Restaurants

Shanker wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek recently that, actually, in households with a GLP-1 user, spending on restaurants goes up. How can this be? On the Marketplace podcast, she explained:

“It’s GLP-1 users’ households that we’re tracking. And what do GLP-1 users talk about when they say it has an impact on them? It’s not just that they eat less. It’s that they think about food less. The food noise drops out. So if you’re the person in charge of feeding a household, you are usually the one who’s going grocery shopping. You’re meal planning. Even at a random time during the week, there’s probably some list in your head of the foods you need to buy and the foods you need to prepare and the meals coming up and what needs to happen for them.

“But you go on a GLP1 and all of that disappears. So what happens when it’s 6 o’clock. It’s dinner time. Your family is hungry and expecting to eat, and you haven’t thought about it. So what happens? You guys go out to a meal. So with just that alone, you can see GLP1 users, as well as their families, pushing into restaurants more.

“That’s one explanation. The other is that restaurants are becoming increasingly GLP-1 user-friendly.”

Marketers Adapt – It’s What They Do

These observations illustrate an important fact about food marketers that some vocal food policy advocates overlook. Like all marketers, food marketers adapt to changing consumer preferences. If you can’t do that, you can’t be a successful marketer.

So food marketers don’t care whether they drive sales growth by selling people more junk food calories or by selling them more of the food they are coming to prefer because they are on a GLP-1. They just want to meet consumer needs. And they want to do it better than their competitors.

This is just one reason why the food environment might be more likely to change because of GLP-1s than because of feeble attempts to regulate food marketing.

Click here for Shanker’s reporting for Bloomberg and here for her interview on Marketplace. For more of the research the restaurant habits of GLP-1 users, click here.

New York Restaurant, painting by Edward Hopper / WikiArt