For the past year, FIS Group has run Appetite Shift, a syndicated study tracking what GLP-1 medications are doing to the way people in the UK eat, shop and think about food. We recently brought our client partners together for a symposium to review year one. It was not a finale, more a moment to step back and ask what a year of evidence actually means for the industry.
We asked Jules Greene, Senior Insight Consultant at FIS Group and the lead voice on the programme, what surprised her most. Her answer had almost nothing to do with weight.
Appetite Shift has never only been about the people taking the medication. Across the year it has also followed those who are considering it and have not yet made the leap, asking why not, what they are doing instead, and how that makes them feel. That fuller picture is part of what made the symposium useful, because the answers rarely sit where you expect them to.
“The way the medication has completely transformed lives has been astonishing to me, way above the weight loss impact,” she says. People report feeling more connected to their friends and family than before. And there is a real tension running underneath it. Many users know very little about the medication itself. They simply know it helps them manage their appetite, and yet they have taken a genuine risk and invested significant money in it. That gap between how much it changes and how little people question it is one of the things the programme keeps returning to.
The finding with the biggest implications for food and drink businesses is what Jules calls the ripple. Because taking the medication is a conscious, deliberate decision rather than something people slip into, users become far more aware of what they eat. And once they are more aware of their own choices, they become more aware of everyone else’s too.
“That ripple goes really wide,” she says. A user wants to set a good example, especially in a house with children. Their changing tastes quietly reshape what the whole household is served. A family that once described its eating as poor is now making better choices together, and the people who benefit include those who have never taken the medication at all. What comes through the front door changes for everyone. It even changes the small daily rituals. Where a cupboard might once have run on a help-yourself basis, there is now a gentle check, a sense that one of something is plenty for today. The household is not being policed. It is simply being fed differently, and more thoughtfully.
The ripple reaches well beyond the household, too. Friends and colleagues notice the change, ask about it, and often adjust their own food, drink and activity choices as a result. And people who are considering the medication, or simply looking to manage their weight and change their habits, are watching closely. Learning what users do and don’t do, around portion size, plate composition and snacking, gives them a pattern to mirror, whether or not they ever take the medication themselves.
Even the household’s treats change character. Jules is careful here, because the shift is subtle. In many of these homes, snacks and treats had stopped being treats at all. They were simply what was eaten, all day, always available, consumed without much thought or pleasure. As the user’s appetite falls away, that habit breaks, and what is left is something more deliberate. A speciality coffee rather than a handful of something. A single serve portion rather than a whole tub. A takeaway ordered with intention rather than, in her words, a mountain of food eaten absent-mindedly.
For businesses, that is a meaningful signal. Indulgence is not disappearing. It is being repositioned as something genuinely appreciated, and the products that suit it are the ones packaged for a considered moment rather than endless grazing. The formats that let someone have one and put the rest away are quietly winning. It is a subtle brief, but a real one. The winners will be the products designed for the moment someone actually wants, not the ones built to be bought in bulk and forgotten.
The symposium itself pointed to a second insight, this time about the industry rather than the consumer. When Jules reflects on what the delegates valued most, it was not a single statistic. It was the reassurance of being in a room with businesses facing exactly the same question.
“Everyone knows they need to learn about this, but few yet know what they are going to do about it,” is how she describes the mood. The value came from the mix in the room: quick-service restaurants, fresh produce, dairy, snacking and flavour, categories that would never usually sit together, all sharing how they are facing into the same future. That kind of cross-industry perspective is hard to find anywhere else. Businesses arrived wanting answers and left, in Jules’s telling, reassured that the uncertainty they felt was shared, and that the smartest move was to keep learning rather than freeze.
So where does year two go? For Jules, the window for simply watching GLP-1 is closing, and the moment for acting has arrived. Year two moves away from confirming what the industry already knows and towards the questions that will actually shape decisions.
Chief among them is what she calls the exiter experience: what happens when someone comes off the medication. Do they keep the healthier habits they have built, use it tactically for a season, or drift back to old patterns? Some may never come off it at all, staying on a lower maintenance dose and looking to hold their new habits in place for good. Alongside that sit questions about how sticky the new habits really are, and what newer formats such as the pill will do to who considers the medication in the first place. There is a live question about whether a cheaper, easier format brings genuinely new users in, or simply lets existing users switch and save money, and Jules expects real movement in the categories most exposed to GLP-1 either way. Underpinning all of it is a shift in mindset. Many businesses came to GLP-1 frightened of what they might lose. Year two is about where they can win.
That is the invitation. Appetite Shift year two opens in August, and for any food or drink business that wants to move from watching the shift to acting on it, joining the study is the first step. If that is a conversation you would find useful, we would love to have it.