After 30+ years in innovation, I’ve seen a lot of “hot” trends come and go. From fat‑free to gluten‑free to keto to plant‑based meat, the pattern is familiar: capital pours in, everyone chases the trend, and the pace of development quickly outstrips real, durable demand. By the time long development cycles pay off, many companies are launching right as the trend is peaking, or already declining.
GLP‑1‑friendly products are starting to repeat this pattern. On one side, the innovation flywheel is spinning hard: CPGs are rolling out “GLP‑1‑friendly” badges, QSRs are testing GLP‑1 menus, and new brands like David are engineering ultra‑high‑protein, zero‑sugar bars explicitly for this user. The assumption baked into a lot of roadmaps is that a large, stable cohort will stay on these drugs for years and build entirely new consumption occasions around them.
When I evaluate a trend, I always come back to a simple question: does it work long term? Gluten free was going to make everyone drop a lot of weight too. Until they realized replacing wheat with corn or legumes was not a weight loss magic bullet.
Real world usage paints a picture of short term usage that will drive a volume drop. A real‑world study of more than 125,000 adults starting GLP‑1 or dual‑incretin therapies found that roughly half of patients with diabetes and nearly two‑thirds without diabetes had stopped within 12 months. Another analysis showed that fewer than one‑third of obesity patients were still on GLP‑1s after a year, with only about 27% meeting adherence thresholds. A separate claims review put two‑year persistence at just 15% for obesity use. In other words, the vast majority of “GLP‑1 consumers” are not long‑term, high‑frequency users, they’re short‑term or episodic.
Side effects and uneven results add more friction. Nausea shows up in roughly 20–40% of patients, diarrhea in about 10–20%, vomiting in around 9–16%, and constipation, abdominal pain, bloating, and indigestion each in roughly 5–12%. On top of that, clinical and real‑world data suggest that roughly 15–20% of people on GLP‑1s see little to no clinically meaningful weight loss (often defined as less than 5% of body weight), even before you factor in those who stop early due to cost or side effects.
Why does this matter for innovation investment? Economics and trade‑offs. List prices for branded GLP‑1s are often in the low four figures per month, and even cheaper compounded options still represent a meaningful recurring spend. Affordability is a major friction point, even among people who are satisfied with the weight‑loss outcome. Layer in GI side effects, emerging concerns about lean mass loss, and the need for resistance training and high‑protein diets just to mitigate muscle loss, and the “effortless miracle” narrative quickly becomes more conditional.
For innovators and investors, this isn’t an argument against GLP‑1s as a product category. It is a warning about building an entire product universe on the assumption of high, durable adherence. That’s exactly how bubbles form. We did it with plant‑based meat and with gluten‑free: overshooting on capacity and assortment, only to discover that the actual long‑term user base was smaller, more price‑sensitive, and more cyclical than the pitch decks assumed.
There’s another important distinction. With most dietary trends, there is a long term residual in a simplified version of the diet trend because consumers made behavior changes. For example, people on low carb tend to continue to maintain lower carbs or no/low sugar after they stop strict adherance. GLP‑1s are different. The appetite suppression is pharmacological, not behavioral. When people come off the drug, will they maintain the new patterns, or does the pendulum swing back toward prior habits?
So what makes sense from an innovation and portfolio standpoint?
The opportunity isn’t just to chase the GLP‑1 moment. It’s to build solutions that still make strategic and economic sense when the moment inevitably shifts.
