Food and drink manufacturers in the US will open the door to the new year with a fresh challenge – the first pill variant of the GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.
Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk has announced its Wegovy pill has been approved for commercial sale by the US Food and Drug Administration and will arrive on shelves “early” in January.
The introduction of the pill has widely been anticipated by the food and beverage industry, which has been facing sales volume and reformulation pressures from people taking the GLP-1 injection format.
Other injectables are also on the market, such as Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Mounjaro from Eli Lilly, which have created an uplift in demand for protein and fibre-rich foods to complement dietary regimes for people on the drugs. At the same time, manufacturers of less healthy food and drinks have taken note.
Hank Cardello, an executive for health and prosperity at the Business for Impact Centre, Georgetown University, spelled out the challenges in a recent in-depth article from Just Food on the potential impact from GLP-1 drugs.
“People just don’t want to eat much on these particular drugs and that’s a big issue for the industry but I do think there’s a lot of opportunities for the industry, too,” Cardello said
“I think once a pill comes out, that really accelerates the move towards these drugs, and I think the industry will really get a wake-up call, a serious wake-up call.”
Novo Nordisk said the pill variant is intended to provide a more convenient way to take the weight-management drug. And it could soon be available in Europe as the Danish firm said it applied for approval of the pill format from the European Medicines Agency in the second half of this year.
“With today's approval of the Wegovy pill, patients will have a convenient, once-daily pill that can help them lose as much weight as the original Wegovy injection,” Mike Doustdar, president and CEO of Novo Nordisk, said in a statement.
“As the first oral GLP-1 treatment for people living with overweight or obesity, the Wegovy pill provides patients with a new, convenient treatment option that can help patients start or continue their weight-loss journey.”
Bernstein CPG analyst Alexia Howard, commenting in the same Just Food article, suggested the “headwinds” posed to the food industry are likely to dissipate beyond 2026 in the aftermath of the GLP-1 pill introduction.
“Most are positioning it as an opportunity to get closer to specific consumer needs – portion control, higher protein and fibre in particular,” she said. “Few are really owning the idea that this is part of the volume pressure we have seen over the past three years, although that could change as we start to see a slowdown in the rate of adoption in the US.”
However, the magnitude of anticipation around the GLP-1 pill variant was evident in the stock-market reaction today (23 December). Novo Nordisk’s shares were up 8% on the Copenhagen exchange as of 12:20pm GMT.
That anticipation will likely continue through the festive season into the new year.
“GLP-1s and their widespread availability have accelerated the conversation around appetite, nutrition and food choices,” Anna Del Mar, a managing director at consultancy AlixPartners, said.
“Food manufacturers are apprehensive because even modest GLP-1 adoption drives measurable, category-specific demand drops that hit high-margin products first, creating outsized revenue risk without needing large user numbers.”
