One in eight American adults is now taking a drug that quietly switches off the urge to eat. The shrinking waistlines mean many categories are approaching it as a diet trend. It isn't. What is really shrinking is desire, and that’s not solely a food and drink problem. Although this is where it is showing up most, currently.

The truth is the customers haven't gone anywhere. The thing that used to make them buy has.

Which means we need to shift from innovating for smaller appetites to designing for when the craving isn’t there at all.

Wanting was the product. Now it's leaving.

For a growing number of people, the craving that food and drink were built around has gone quiet. The instinct is to make smaller versions of the same things, or to make them more nutritionally dense. Smaller appetites = smaller portions or portions that deliver more of a nutritional punch. These are all perfectly reasonable and smart solutions but it’s probably not the whole answer.

Most industries built their success by designing for desire: yes fulfilling needs, but the big bucks come when you find a way to drive desire. Find the craving, meet it. The bliss point, the next bite, the third round. The product mostly just had to be there when the pull arrived.

GLP-1 drugs take that away. Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro. People on them talk about "food noise" going quiet, the constant low chatter about what to eat next simply stopping. The same drugs soften the pull toward alcohol and cigarettes, which tells you this was never really about food.

What makes it a business problem rather than a medical one is the shape of the effect. The drugs seem to quiet wanting, the chasing and the anticipation, while leaving liking, the actual pleasure of eating, mostly alone. In one brain-imaging study, a GLP-1 drug lowered people’s response to anticipating food but not their response to eating it. So people haven't lost the ability to enjoy a meal. They've lost the pull toward one. The pleasure used to come bundled with the craving. Now the food has to deliver the pull on its own. For industries that have been structured around designing for the pull, this represents a nutty problem to solve that could open up a radical rethinking about how to innovate and design.

• 1 in 8 US adults are on a GLP-1 right now. Nearly 1 in 5 have ever taken one, up from 1 in 8 ever just eighteen months before. (KFF Health Tracking Poll, Nov 2025)
• Wanting ≠ Liking  Brain-imaging work showed a GLP-1 drug dropped the response to anticipating food while keeping the response to eating it. The same drugs ease cravings for alcohol and nicotine. (van Bloemendaal et al., fMRI; addiction reviews, 2025)
• Nearly 50% stop within a year (46.5% with type-2 diabetes, 64.8% without). Many start again later, as the appetite comes back. (Rodriguez et al., JAMA Network Open, 2025)
  
  

What the data means

Put the three numbers together and you don't get a clean picture. This isn't one world replacing another. It's one market splitting in two, with the line running straight through individual people. A large and growing group is living with the craving switched off. Most people aren't. And the same person can move from one camp to the other and back inside a year, depending on whether they're on the drug that month.

So you can't just pick the new customer and chase them. You need something that works whether the craving is switched on or off. That rules out the obvious move. When appetite drops, shrinking the product to match feels sensible: smaller packs, fewer calories, a diet line. But people aren't asking for less of the same thing. If anything they need a better reason to reach for it at all, and a smaller portion doesn't give them one.

What that points to is a principle, not a product fix. When nothing is pulling someone toward what you sell, the thing itself has to be worth choosing. Designed to be chosen, not compelled. It's also why "healthier" isn't the escape hatch it looks like. Many brands are already crowding down that road, and it still runs on the old story of guilt and earning, which is the story.

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The problem worth solving

The danger was never that people give up treats for virtue. It's quieter and worse than that. Once the craving is gone, the open question is whether food and drink still mean anything to a person, or whether they turn into fuel. Something you deal with rather than look forward to.

The brands most at risk aren't the indulgent ones. They are the ones nobody really chose. The ones that lived on habit and proximity, picked up because they were on the shelf and the hand was already moving. A brand people genuinely want can lose the habit and keep going. A brand that was only ever a habit has nothing left when the habit goes.

That's why this is a question about what you make, not how you market it. You go through a range one product at a time and ask which of them a person would still pick on purpose, in a life where nothing is making the choice for them. Some of the honest answers won't be things you currently sell.

At BTDT, we work with leadership teams to find the problem that's actually worth solving. The one underneath the obvious brief. If the wanting/liking split has landed somewhere in your pipeline thinking, we'd like to hear about it.
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