Terry Prone: Retailers have food for thought as snack sales dip due to diet drug

The findings are surprising, given the newness of the drugs, but they show that people on the prescription put much less in the way of cakes, crisps, chocolate, and ice cream into their shopping trolleys than the ones who aren’t on it. It’s not a tsunami of salad. But it is a measurable trend.

What Walmart is saying, in the person of CEO John Furner, is: “We definitely do see a slight change compared to the total population, we do see a slight pullback in the overall basket. Just less units, slightly less calories.”

Investment analysts, however, are telling financial media that the drugs pose an existential crisis to the food industry, among them Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, who told Bloomberg: “When Walmart mentioned it, I think the concept of weight-loss drugs having a broader effect on a wide range of companies really took hold in investors’ minds.”

Bloomberg notes that it’s not just an American trend.

“In Europe, food and beverage companies also came under pressure. Chocolatier Lindt & Spruengli AG and brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev SA slid, while Nestlé SA dropped 2.5%, the most since May. To be sure, consumer staples stocks have been falling for some time, especially as inflation squeezes household incomes.”

On the other hand, the Irish Examiner business pages on Saturday reported a Barclays analysis showing people on these drugs “pose a real risk to companies ranging from fast food restaurants to cigarette makers”.

The makers of ultra-processed, empty-calorie foods are sitting up and anxiously taking notice. They include Steve Cahillane, the CEO of Kellanova, which makes Pringles and Pop-Tarts as well as Kellogg’s cereals.

“We’ll look at it, study it, and if necessary, mitigate,” he said, sounding as if he has a plan when there’s no evidence he actually does.

How, precisely, do you “mitigate” a reduction in the consumption of Pringles occasioned by a drug that effectively turns down the sound of food craving, so that instead of “needing” a tube of saucer-shaped reassembled crispy starch and the salty, fatty dip into which to insert each, the shopper just goes “you know what? I don’t need that today”.

You might seek to mitigate by a different approach to marketing, or by making the product even saltier, fattier, crispier, but the astonishing thing about the new slimming drugs is that they reduce the imperative to buy in the first place.

So it may not matter how much reformulation plays to preexisting addictive preferences because if the shopper doesn’t feel the compulsion to buy, that shopper is never going to go through other rituals associated with ultra-processed food addiction.

They’re never going to be attracted by the bright tube in the cupboard, never assaulted by the conviction that their life will be improved by ingestion. The cravings will be stilled at source.

In other words, Cahillane has a potentially insuperable problem on his hands and might be well advised to get into some other business. The fact that the CEOs of such US giants as Walmart and Kellanova are bothered enough to publicly acknowledge the real and present threat of the new drugs underlines their understanding that this isn’t a flash in the pan.

Of course, negative stories about the new drugs will surface — indeed, one such report was published on the same day as the Walmart data came through — that report suggesting that weekly semaglutide injections increased the risk of pancreatitis, bowel obstructions, and stomach paralysis.

While the threat is reasonably small at the moment, the view is that the rising popularity of the drug could change that. The researchers behind the new study perused millions of records showing the health insurance claims of people who had been prescribed one of these drugs in the decade before 2020. 

The complications are clear, but potential future-tense negative health outcomes become markedly less threatening when measured against guaranteed weight loss now.

That’s just part of the revolution. On the social and healthcare front, it could be that these drugs are likely to upend standard thinking as much as the arrival of antisepsis or antibiotics did.

They’ve already crept into language, with people referring to “Ozempic face” to describe the facial emaciation delivered by the drug. They are likely to undermine the body positivity movement. 

Of course, celebrities like the wonderfully talented Lizzo may continue to push for more acceptance of people who live with obesity, but the places and professions that first and most fiercely adopted Ozempic suggest that her famous peers will leave her to it.

It’s interesting that the loathing of fatness and the frequent extension of that loathing to people larger than the norm is really only a century old and an artefact of the First World.

Des Elkins’ gorgeous book about the Islamic pirates who stole the inhabitants of Baltimore on Ireland’s south coast and enslaved them in Algiers recounts that the women who commanded the highest price were those considered beautiful, which in turn meant “ample and curvaceous”. That was mid-19th century.

At some point towards the middle of the 20th century, “ample and curvaceous” began to surge towards obesity. 

Some claimed this was because of the evil food industry, in cahoots with the newly-arrived televisions, flogging us junk food and persuading us into a sedentary passive consumption of their programming, all of which made us fat.

Others pointed out that this was the first generation that, by virtue of cars and machinery, did not have to win their food by the literal sweat of their brow. 

James Le Fanu, fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, was a lone voice making the suggestion that while all of these factors may have contributed to the radical change in eating patterns, an unidentified catalyst in the form of a widespread viral infection might have set the western world on a path of ungovernable cravings and weight-grief.

That, in turn, led to a branch of science devoted to the eating disorder, one strand of which holds that the ED (with its high morbidity and mortality rates) is a way to control a chaotic life, rather than a function of appetite.

It will be interesting to see if that narrative sustains in the face of the wave of new weight loss drugs, just as it will be interesting to see what the wave does to the numbers who choose to undergo bariatric surgery.

All that’s certain is that Ozempic is profoundly changing the world.