How Big Food Is Navigating the GLP-1 Era

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:07)
Last month, our colleague Amira McKee got an inside look at a test kitchen in Omaha, Nebraska.

**Amira McKee** (0:15)
So imagine an industrial kitchen, the kind you might see in a fine dining movie, you know, the one with these stainless steel appliances, everything's huge, and the chefs are in these aprons.

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:27)
I'm like picturing Ratatouille in my head, but okay, I'm with you.

**Amira McKee** (0:30)
Something like that. And you know, you might not realize that you're in, you know, a development laboratory for one of America's biggest food makers.

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:41)
That food maker is Canagra, the company behind Slim Jim's and Hungry Man Dinners. Kitchens like this one are places where food brands perfect the kind of packaged food you see on shelves and in freezers at grocery stores around the country.
In this test kitchen, Canagra chefs were working on their newest breakfast recipes.

**Amira McKee** (1:00)
These chefs serve this bowl of microwaved eggs and sausage and potatoes to a group of executives. The executives sort of pour this gooey orange cheese sauce over the bowl. And before they even take a bite, they sort of pause and they ask themselves, was it satisfying? How would this make a consumer feel?
They're sort of trying to evaluate whether or not, you know, this consumer experience of again, pouring the cheese or add something for the consumer who's buying this in the frozen aisle of their grocery store.

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:36)
Kitchens like this one are a window into a shift happening across the food industry, people spending less on food. It's a shift driven by a combination of higher food prices, healthy eating trends, and the rise of GLP-1 weight loss drugs.

**Amira McKee** (1:53)
A pretty solid portion of the American population is already on these drugs, and it's a number that's expected to really increase aggressively in the next couple of years and drain the industry of billions of dollars.
And so it's about creating products that will woo and win over these GLP-1 consumers who don't feel hungry for the foods that these companies make. How do you deliver satisfaction and satiation to consumers who don't experience hunger and fullness like an average person might?

**Jessica Mendoza** (2:25)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Wednesday, September 2nd.
Coming up on the show, the food industry's attempt to win over the GLP-1 user.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:51)
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**Jessica Mendoza** (3:26)
Amira, what is your go-to snack? It's like I'm very partial to chocolate covered pretzels myself because I love like it's salty, it's sweet, it does all of the things all at once.

**Amira McKee** (3:39)
That's a good one. I concur on that point. I'm also a big fan of a tortilla chip.

**Jessica Mendoza** (3:43)
Yeah.

**Amira McKee** (3:43)
Honestly, make it a Dorito, make it anything and I'll enjoy it.

**Jessica Mendoza** (3:49)
Saltiness, crispiness, and at least in my case, sweetness or maybe some combination of all of them. Those are the types of flavors and textures that the food industry turns to keep us coming back for more.

**Amira McKee** (4:03)
A lot of these snacks are really designed to cater to those cravings. The kinds of things that you sort of think about during your work day or you know, have to keep yourself from eating off the snack bar. To put it sort of flippantly, right, these food makers make the kinds of foods that we want to eat and they invest a lot of time and money into studying and figuring out exactly what that is.
Because these food companies are so good at fine tuning their products to what we crave and the kind of food we're really excited about, critics have accused the industry of sort of getting consumers hooked on their foods, drawing comparisons between what nicotine does to smokers and sort of fueling the obesity epidemic we have in our country.

**Jessica Mendoza** (4:44)
And have food companies pushed back on that?

**Amira McKee** (4:46)
Food companies would tell you, right, that their goal is to make the food that people want to eat.

**Jessica Mendoza** (4:53)
But GLP-1 drugs are changing how people feel about food, and how much of it they even want to consume.