- Appetite-suppressing drugs, artificial intelligence (AI) and at-home diagnostics will reshape food choices and disrupt traditional volume-led growth models
- Weight-loss drugs are expected to influence millions beyond users themselves, accelerating demand for protein, fresh foods and healthier options
- AI is increasingly guiding grocery decisions, with personalised nutrition advice and shopping assistants becoming mainstream
- Brands that prioritise health, trust, nutrition and evidence-backed outcomes will be best placed for future growth
There’s no doubt in the minds of anyone in food and beverage that change is afoot.
With forces acting on the industry that are out of its control, it’s vital to follow them closely. By doing this, it’s possible to flex and adapt to meet changing consumer needs without losing profit.
In its Tomorrow’s Appetites report, food industry advisory and consultancy business Bramble Intelligence has identified the three consumer tools that will change the way people eat in the very near future and ‘make the food industry’s volume-led growth playbook less relevant and reliable’.
These forces don’t act in isolation and understanding how they interact is the key to acting early and maintaining commercial advantage. The three tools are developing rapidly and several trends are emerging within each one.
1. Appetite-suppressing drugs
Bramble estimates that a quarter of UK adults will be using them regularly by 2035 and their popularity is across income groups. Adoption has been faster than statins and this will speed up because of the oral formats and as innovation provides next-generation drugs with fewer side-effects, as well as more conditions becoming treatable through GLP-1s.
While F&B is already acutely aware of the changing preferences of GLP-1 users, a vital point made in the report is that the effect spreads through households. This is where the industry needs to pay close attention.
The GLP-1 patient base skews heavily towards women aged 30 to 49, and they are often the household’s primary shopper. Early evidence suggests that when one person starts on the drugs, their partners and children begin to eat differently too. By 2035, Bramble estimates that 15 to 20 million UK adults will be influenced by the drugs without being on them.
Indeed, all consumers have already started to shift to healthier options – for example, 15 of the top 20 cereal brands are losing volume while gut-health challengers such as Bio&Me are up 40%, and in multinational sandwich shop chain Pret A Manger, salads are growing three times faster than sandwiches
For GLP-1 users, calorie intake falls by around a quarter in the first year on the drugs, though grocery spending only falls by about 5% as shoppers buy more protein and fresh food. If they stop the drugs, they would need to eat, on average, 16% fewer calories than they used to in order to maintain the weight loss. The categories most exposed are the discretionary, high-margin ones, says the report – snacks, desserts, bakery and alcohol.
2. Artificial intelligence
As consumers start to ask more questions about their food, AI is where they go to cut through the noise and clarify contradictory advice. The definition of ‘good food’ is getting more personal, says the report, and more than a label on a packet can hold. Within seconds, AI can tell a family what they should eat based on health goals, preferences and budget, and the kind of personalisation once only available to elite athletes is now widely available.
This information drives their purchases. Over a third of UK and US online grocery shoppers have used AI to assist them with their shopping in the past six months.
Notably, most consumers are not even aware of the full capabilities of current AI models, but it won’t be long until they are. It is already possible, says the report, to upload your blood results, dietary preferences, medication restrictions, budget and health goals, and have the agent do your shopping online.
That was not possible three months ago, indicating how fast this technology is developing. In the first five months of 2026, the four largest AI labs launched consumer-facing health products, which promise to integrate medical records and wearables.
Brands must move quickly to ensure that they’re visible to the AI that is making recommendations, not just consumers themselves.
AI shopping assistants are also gaining traction, with Walmart in the US reporting that shoppers using its assistant, Sparky, have a 35% higher average order than non-users.
The final frontier of agentic shopping – where an AI agent learns a consumer’s preferences and places the grocery order itself – is in the early stages of deployment and the technology will mature unevenly, according to the report. The agents are expected to disappoint before they’re good enough to save time and money for consumers.
3. Diet-related diagnostics
The proliferation of at-home tests, from gut-health tests to continuous glucose monitors, means that consumers have unprecedented access to information on how their bodies respond to different foods, giving them motivation to change their behaviour. They are currently not completely reliable and are the preserve of the affluent, but they’re getting cheaper.
This will be the slowest of the three tools to reach the mainstream, says the report, but the group most likely to pull it into wider use is those on weight-loss drugs because they’re highly motivated to keep the weight off.
Diagnostic tests will do for food what wearables did for fitness and could be one of the most powerful forces that change how people eat for health outcomes.
The future
The future is not bleak for F&B if it adapts quickly, builds consumer trust and meets the shifting values of consumers.
Consumers could even spend more on food than they do now, as they pay a premium for what they value. According to Bramble, the four areas that will lead to profitable growth are making it easy to eat well, food that nourishes, ingredients grown and processed in a way that people can trust, and creating a diet and health feedback loop (building an evidence base that links purchases, diets and biomarkers to health outcomes).
Convenience and price won in the last decade, concludes the report, but health and wellbeing will shape the next.
Chris Mitchell, managing partner at Bramble Intelligence, will be speaking at Future Food Tech London on 24-25 September 2026.
