20-05-2025
The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: As Ozempic arrives in India, eating habits will change, which is bad news for restaurants
Could the nature of the restaurant business be changing? If the experience of the West is anything to go by then: Yes, certainly. And the changes are going to gain momentum.
Dr Ambrish Mithal, India's leading endocrinologist was one of the first doctors in Delhi (perhaps all of India) to recognise how much the new drugs that were coming on the market would change our lifestyles. When most doctors were still reading about Ozempic he was already on to the next generation drug: Mounjaro.
Dr Mithal has an interesting new book coming out about how these drugs will affect our behaviour. Till recently you could only buy them abroad but they are now going to be distributed in India and newer, even more efficient drugs should hit our market next year. Dr Mithal believes that this will make a significant difference to the lifestyles of many of us.
As you probably already know, the technical names of the existing drugs are Semaglutide and Tirzepatide. Both work in the same sort of way. They affect our pleasure centres so that we are satisfied much earlier than normal. This means that we eat less because we feel fuller sooner.
The drugs were invented to fight diabetes which they do extremely well. But they have other effects. If you eat less, which these drugs make you do, then you lose weight. If you lose weight then that affects all the other conditions that excess weight leads to: Heart disease, hypertension etc. There is also new research that suggests that the drugs can have positive effects on your health that are not weight-related.
Once the drugs become easily available in India (by next month, I reckon) doctors will start prescribing them for weight loss. And given how overweight much of our upper middle class is, they will find many takers.
I am sure that this will have huge and beneficial consequences for public health but my concern today is more limited: What will Ozempic and Mounjaro do to the restaurant and food delivery businesses?
Almost all the evidence from America where the drugs have been available for a while is still largely anecdotal. I have not seen any research that provides convincing figures. But the anecdotal evidence points directly to only one set of conclusions: People are now eating less at restaurants and wasting more food than they used to.
The new drugs don't necessarily stop you from being hungry so people go to restaurants anyway. But once they start eating they feel full so quickly — because the drugs affect satiety — that they find it difficult to finish what is on their plates.
So far, restaurants have not had to work out how to cope with this trend. The drugs are expensive and so their use is not widespread enough to justify a change in the entire restaurant industry's approach to dining. But restaurateurs know that as newer weight loss drugs are introduced and patents for the existing drugs run out, prices will drop dramatically. And more and more people will start taking them.
Well, some restaurants are already reducing portion sizes. I expect this trend will gather steam in the months ahead. But fine dining restaurants face a very specific problem. Many of them only serve so-called tasting menus which can be upwards of 10 courses. (At Copenhagen's Alchemist the menu has 70 courses.)
They are now discovering that guests are ready to give up after two or three courses because they are already too full. Also, because it takes a little time for people to realise how full they are, restaurants that speed up the service have more luck. Those that take lengthy pauses between courses discover that by the time they are ready to serve the second course, guests are already complaining that they are too full.
Frankly: Yes. The people who go to fine dining restaurants are, by definition, rich. They can all afford Mounjaro and Ozempic. And most are a little concerned about their weight. They have already started avoiding multi-course tasting menus in the US and Europe and the trend will spread globally.
The only way restaurants will be able to cope is by either going a la carte or by offering smaller set menus. Personally, I don't think that this is such a bad thing. I am fed up of long tasting menus devised by chefs whose confidence is much greater than their skills.
The other effect of the move away from tasting menus will be a shift in power away from the chef. At present at top restaurants the chef acts like he is doing you a favour and expects you to eat whatever he chooses. If we do go back to a la carte system then chefs will have to cook whatever customers select from the menu. And I think that's a good thing.
But it isn't just the fancy places that will be affected. At Indian and Indian-Chinese restaurants most of us order too much. Just the carbs alone are breathtaking: Roti-naan basket, steamed rice plus pulao or biryani. At Chinese restaurants it can be noodles, plain rice and fried rice
Even though the order is too large, we feel obliged to finish it because we have spent good money on the food.
But what happens when we can't finish it because our bodies won't let us? When we start feeling like throwing up after too much matar paneer or chicken manchurian?
After the first couple of times when we have to waste the food we will start ordering less.
Once that happens the size of the average check at restaurants will go down and most restaurants will have to rework their economics.
It will affect delivery too. In America delivery meals are a fact of life: People who don't have the time to cook are forced to order them.
In India, on the other hand, we still regard them as treats; as opportunities to order delicious food we could never make at home. We usually order large meals and eat much more than we would have if we had just eaten home-cooked food.
So, what happens when we find we can no longer eat so much? We will order less. And the delivery boom could be affected.
There is another effect of these drugs that is still being studied: People who take them seem to want to drink less alcohol. Tables that would order two bottles of wine in a restaurant now have difficulty finishing one. In most of the world, wine sales are down. And spirits seem to be losing some of their popularity too. Some of the world's great liquor companies are in crisis because they can't shift their inventories. Not all of this is because of weight loss drugs. But once these drugs become cheaper and widely available, liquor consumption is unlikely to go up.
Will we all be thinner when all this finally happens? Yes, for sure. And healthier too.
And will the restaurant industry be in trouble? Well, not if it finds ways to cope with the drop in appetite. But yes, it will have to rethink its business models.
A change is coming.
