GLP-1 user insights: overview
- Health and side-effects are driving choices
- Smaller, smarter consumption – preference is for bite-sized formats, smaller portions and clearer in-store guidance
- Overall grocery spend down by £780m
- Trend set to grow – cost is a barrier today, but cheaper GLP-1 pills could accelerate adoption further
GLP-1 take-up in Europe has been slower than the US, but it’s speeding up. The number of users in Great Britain has tripled in just two years, according to a new survey.
“We’ve done this study for three years now and every year we give it a new name,“ says Nishita Pattni, Senior Consultant at Worldpanel by Numerator. ”This year, it’s called From New to Normal.
“What we mean by that is GLP-1 users are becoming mainstream. They now account for 6% of households in Great Britain. We risk treating them as a weight-loss trend or a small group of users that aren’t significant, but their needs should be recognised and acknowledged as one that is rising rapidly.”
Here’s what they want and why...
Help with side-effects
While GLP-1 drugs can be life-changing for many, they do come with side-effects and users look for support to deal with them. Where other categories have taken a nosedive, it’s here that a rise in sales is seen.
The survey of 11,500 households found that ‘Ozempic mouth’ is driving a 24 percentage point uplift in chewing gum confectionery among GLP-1 user households compared to non-user households. Mouthwash also saw a 20 percentage point uplift, showing that users really are struggling with oral health.
While it’s not a listed side-effect of GLP-1s, ‘Ozempic mouth’ refers to some users reporting a metallic taste, dry mouth or bad breath. It’s not clear what causes it and could because of gastrointestinal issues, dehydration or not eating enough, but it’s an unpleasant thing to experience.
Dr Nadia Ahmad, Medical Director of The Weight Care Clinic, sees it in clinic. “Some patients experience dry mouth, which can make heavily salted snacks, very sweet foods and alcohol less appealing,” she says.
But other foods and drinks take their place for her patients, she says. “Hydrating foods, yoghurt-based snacks, fruit, smoothies and protein-rich options often become more attractive.”
Clear signposting
When they’re shopping for foods and drinks to ease side-effects and suit their new appetite levels, users want it to be easy to find what they’re looking for.
“It’s about making that day-to-day shopping journey easier for GLP-1 users,” says Pattni. “Navigation in store to those types of products makes it much more user friendly for them. An example being M&S’s Nutrient Dense range. It’s things like that that these users need support on.”
While GLP-1 friendly labelling is still a minefield in Europe, making the qualities of foods and drinks as obvious as possible is vital.
Bite-size and smaller portions
It’s not a black-and-white picture and F&B is right to be going down the bite-size route. “There is nuance within categories and that’s often format led,” says Pattni. “Bite-sized chocolate categories are doing slightly better than bigger formats. So that specific nuance is where I think manufacturers have more of a role to play in listening to what these users are after.”
This is reflected in what users want when they eat out too. Two-fifths (40%) of users said they want smaller portion sizes on menus, and over a quarter (26%) want GLP-1 friendly menu sections.
Extra insights
British users have cut an extraordinary £780m off their annual shopping bills and the survey confirms that chocolate and crisps really are suffering.
That users are cutting back in these categories isn’t news to F&B but the severity of it found in this survey suggests that they’re not going to recover.
Seventy two per cent said they had cut back on crisps and 75% had cut back on chocolate, and the retail data agrees.
There are plenty of hypotheses about which categories are more exposed by GLP-1 use and “people often claim to cut back on categories”, says Pattni, whereas the data often doesn’t agree.
“Chocolate and crisps are two of the categories that users reported actively trying to cut back on and that is very much reflected in the data,” she says.
Chocolate confectionery spend among users fell 18 percentage points more than in non-user households.
Don’t rely on lapsers
Side-effects were the top reason for giving up on GLP-1s in last year’s survey, but this year, cost took the top spot. Four in 10 people who were on the drugs stopped in 2026 because of the expense.
But while that might mean they go back to their pre-GLP-1 shopping habits, the arrival of the GLP-1 pill in Europe might see them disappear again. The pill is likely to be cheaper than the injectables and one (not yet available in Europe) has been shown to help maintain weight loss after coming off injectables.
Final word
“My biggest advice to manufacturers would be to not treat this as an elimination of spend,” says Pattni. “There is a lot of nuance at a category level and beyond food and drink we are seeing, for example, hair styling and dyes do really well. So there is that lipstick effect coming through with smaller treats amongst these users.
“And, yes, we’re talking about crisps and chocolate declining, but crackers are a category that are actually doing relatively well amongst users. So there is a lot of nuance and that might be because crackers are seen as a slightly healthier alternative or a buildable alternative.
“So what I would say to food and drink manufacturers is that these users have needs that are evolving, they’re managing tricky side-effects and it very much isn’t a blanket story of decline.”
Dr Ahmad agrees. “One of the biggest misconceptions is that people on GLP-1 medications stop caring about food,” she says. “In reality, they still want enjoyment, comfort and social connection through food, but they’re looking for quality over quantity.”
