Hamish Renton at The Grocer Health Summit
Hamish Joins The Grocer Health Summit to discuss the GLP-1 effect:
HRA Global CEO Hamish Renton joined industry experts at The Grocer Health Summit to explore the changing health landscape and what the rise of GLP-1 medications could mean for food, drink and retail businesses.
One of the big questions under discussion was deceptively simple: What happens to food and drink when people simply aren’t as hungry?
Hamish joined a lively panel looking at the impact of GLP-1s and changing eating behaviours, including how brands and retailers may need to rethink everything from portion size and product development to positioning, nutrition and marketing.
An uneven impact across food and drink
A key theme from Hamish’s session was that the impact of GLP-1s won’t be felt evenly across the industry.
Categories built around volume, impulse and indulgence could face very different pressures from those centred on function, nutrition and lighter eating. For other categories, there may be opportunities to adapt through NPD, smaller formats, portion architecture and a different proposition.
For food and drink businesses, that raises an important question: where does your category – and your proposition – sit?
Beyond GLP-1
The wider Health Summit also raised some significant questions about how consumers think about health and nutrition.
Among Hamish’s takeaways were the gap between consumer awareness of UPFs and people’s ability to identify them in practice; the disconnect between widespread concerns about gut health and low fibre consumption; and growing interest in longevity among younger consumers.
Trust was another recurring theme. Hamish highlighted the potential tension between the speed at which health and nutrition claims can appear in marketing and the considerably more complex process of reformulating the products behind them.
The discussion also reflected growing scrutiny of the food industry’s role in public health, highlighting the need for businesses to think carefully about how they respond to changing consumer expectations and the wider regulatory and political environment.
What does the GLP-1 effect mean for your business?
HRA has been following the impact of GLP-1s on food and drink for several years and is continuing to develop its thinking around how changing appetite and consumer behaviour could influence category strategy, NPD and marketing.
We’ve brought together our latest analysis of the GLP-1 effect on food and drink, including the categories we believe are most exposed, marketing approaches proving resilient and 10 questions food and drink businesses should be asking themselves now.
More from The Grocer Health Summit
A huge thank you to The Grocer team, Hamish’s fellow panellists and everyone who joined the discussion.
