The Food Industry’s Moment of Recalibration
15 minute read
For many CEOs in the food industry, 2026 feels less like a continuation and more like a rupture. When you move past the day-to-day urgency, you see that the forces reshaping food are not incremental disturbances but more like tectonic shifts that simultaneously redefine value, demand, and the role of strategy itself.
In January 2026, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mark Carney famously declared that the old global order has experienced “a rupture, not a transition.” What he meant - beyond geopolitics - is that assumptions once taken for granted no longer hold true in the same way.
“The world is in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
That sentiment echoes in food today. This sector is not merely reacting to new inputs; it is operating within an altered framework of consumer behaviour, technology, regulation, and cost economics.
It is not just change. It’s redefinition.
The Shape of the Problem
What does this look like in practice?
1. Demand Redefined by Biology and Behaviour
One of the most consequential shifts underway in food is not behavioural or cultural, but biological. GLP-1 weight-loss and diabetes medications are now being adopted at scale, with direct implications for how much people eat, what they choose, and how often they purchase food.
Over the last 6 months on our Podcast The C-Suite Spot we have been bemoaning the lack of empirical data in this area-we now have some!
So, the impact is no longer anecdotal. In early 2026, UK grocery leaders acknowledged that the effects are now visible in aggregate data. NielsenIQ figures show that while UK grocery sales rose 2.5% in value terms in the four weeks to 27 December, volumes fell by 0.2% - a divergence that Dr Clive Black, head of consumer research at Shore Capital, described as “perhaps the clearest indication” yet of the influence of appetite-suppressing drugs on national eating habits.
At the household level, the signal is even clearer. Exclusive data reported by The Grocer shows that UK households containing at least one GLP-1 user are spending around 5.5% less on groceries than comparable households.
Behavioural data supports this shift. Research from IGD indicates that among GLP-1 users, 69% report eating fewer snacks, 48% say they are eating fewer meals overall, and 35% are eating out less often. This suggests that GLP-1s are not simply redistributing spend between channels but actively reducing total consumption occasions.
Scale matters here. Reuters reports that around 1.5 million people in the UK are now estimated to be using GLP-1 drugs, a figure expected to rise as access improves and new oral treatments enter the market. Even at current penetration, retailers and suppliers describe the impact as structural rather than cyclical.
Importantly, this is not simply a volume story. Early evidence suggests GLP-1 users are trading down in quantity but trading up in nutritional intent - prioritising protein, fibre and satiety over traditional treat-driven purchasing making M&S’s recent slew of smart health innovation all the more timely. Reuters reports that fresh produce sales rose by 6.6% over the same period, even as overall grocery volumes declined, indicating a reallocation of spend toward foods perceived as healthier and more functional.
What differentiates GLP-1s from previous health trends is persistence. These drugs alter appetite signalling and satiety over sustained periods. This is not a short-term wellness cycle or a behavioural fad; it represents a durable shift in demand physiology.
For food businesses, the implication is profound. Demand is no longer shaped solely by price, promotion and preference. It is increasingly shaped by medical intervention and health optimisation goals. Growth models built on assumptions of volume recovery, impulse purchasing and habitual consumption now need to be stress-tested against a future where value can rise even as volume structurally contracts.
2. AI, Health and the Re-Wiring of Food Choice
Health has quietly become one of the most significant entry points into AI adoption. OpenAI reports that hundreds of millions of people globally now ask ChatGPT health-related questions each week, spanning nutrition, lifestyle, symptoms and chronic condition management. For many users, AI is becoming a first point of interpretation for health information, not a novelty.
What shifts the stakes further is depth. With the launch of ChatGPT Health, users can now securely connect medical records and wellness apps, grounding conversations in their own health data -blood pressure, glucose, activity, weight and sleep - so responses are personalised rather than generic. Health guidance is moving from population-level advice to individual-level orchestration.
Once health advice is personalised, execution is the natural next step. The distance between “what should I eat given my health goals?” and “here is your optimised weekly shop” is no longer technological, it is commercial.
Retail and delivery platforms already hold the infrastructure: product data, substitution logic, pricing and fulfilment. This alone would make them central to any shift toward AI-mediated food choice, but that shift is already happening. In late 2025, Instacart became the first grocery partner to launch a fully embedded shopping and Instant Checkout experience directly inside ChatGPT, giving consumers the ability to go from meal idea to paid, delivered groceries without leaving the AI conversation. Other providers, from Uber and DoorDash to Target’s e-commerce ecosystem, are also poised to roll out similar integrations, allowing users to shop and order via conversational AI platforms.
As AI systems begin to reason across health data, stated goals and real-world food availability, the weekly shop itself becomes a health-optimised output, not just a brand-led choice.
For food businesses, this signals a deeper shift. Influence begins to move away from shelf presence and promotional mechanics toward algorithmic relevance, nutritional credibility and system compatibility. The strategic question is no longer whether AI will shape food choice, but who defines the logic by which it does.
3. Policy, Regulation and the Compression of Strategic Space
Over three decades in this industry, I’ve seen waves of regulation come and go - reformulation targets, labelling schemes, advertising codes, voluntary pledges dressed up as progress. What feels different now is not any single policy, but the stacking effect.
I can’t recall a period where so many regulatory levers have been pulled at once, all pointing in broadly the same direction: less sugar, less salt, fewer calories, less exposure, more transparency, and less room for error.
Many of these forces are not new. HFSS has been in play for some time, and most food businesses have already invested heavily in reformulation, range rationalisation and compliance. The industry has adapted, not always easily, but with a degree of clarity about the rules of the game.
What has changed recently is the signal coming from government about where health policy may be heading next. The publication of updated technical guidance on the Nutrient Profiling Model (NPM) suggests a tightening of how foods are classified as “healthy” or “less healthy”, with greater emphasis on free sugars and broader nutrient thresholds. If applied, this would likely mean that products previously considered non-HFSS could fall back into regulated territory, with significant implications for advertising, promotion and placement.
While there is not yet a fixed enforcement pathway, consultation on how the updated 2018 model should be applied is expected to take place this year, and the very fact it is back on the table signals continued momentum behind health-led intervention.
Layered on top of this are the existing HFSS restrictions, which together form something close to a laundry list of constraints. Volume price promotions curtailed. Prime in-store locations restricted. Online paid advertising effectively banned. A 9pm watershed on TV advertising now imminent. Each measure in isolation is manageable. Collectively, they change the economics of how brands grow.
What’s striking is how explicitly policy is now designed to reshape demand, not just inform it. These are not nudges around the edges; they are interventions aimed at altering exposure, availability and habitual consumption. And they arrive at a time when biological shifts (via GLP-1s) and technological shifts (via AI-mediated choice) are already reducing volume and fragmenting demand.
For leadership teams, this creates a compression of strategic space. Fewer levers to pull. Less tolerance for legacy portfolios. More scrutiny on claims, credentials and intent. Growth becomes harder to buy, harder to promote, harder to create and harder to defend.
The risk, in this environment, is defaulting to reactive behaviour - lobbying here, tweaking packaging there, squeezing margin somewhere else - without stepping back to reassess what the business is really optimised for.
These signals are telling us what governments believe the food system must become -healthier, more transparent, more accountable - whether the industry feels ready or not. The question for CEOs is not whether these forces can be resisted indefinitely, but how quickly their organisation can recalibrate to operate profitably within the world that’s being shaped.
4. Economic Complexity Isn’t Slowing Down
If regulation is compressing strategic space, economics is doing something equally destabilising: removing predictability.
For much of the last decade, food businesses learned to operate in a world of relative consistency. Input costs rose and fell, consumer demand flexed, margins tightened and loosened, but the underlying system was broadly intelligible. Today, that stability has ruptured.
Inflation may be easing in headline terms, but cost volatility remains embedded. Energy, commodities, labour and logistics no longer move in neat cycles; they spike, plateau, correct and re-spike, often out of sync with one another. What used to be manageable inflation has become persistent complexity.
At the same time, consumer demand patterns are fragmenting. Shoppers are not simply “trading down” or “trading up”. They are doing both - often within the same basket. Value-seeking sits alongside selective premiumisation; price sensitivity coexists with willingness to pay for perceived health, function or quality. This makes forecasting harder, promotions less reliable, and historical elasticity models increasingly blunt instruments.
Layer in ongoing geopolitical uncertainty, supply chain fragility and currency exposure, and the result is an environment where risk is no longer episodic, it is structural. Planning cycles shorten. Confidence bands widen. Decision-making moves closer to the edge.
What this means for CEOs is not just tighter margins, but a loss of signal. Traditional dashboards struggle to distinguish noise from trend. Volume no longer tells a clean story. Value growth can mask underlying demand contraction. Efficiency gains are harder to bank because they are quickly absorbed elsewhere in the system.
The organisations that continue to perform are not those trying to outpace complexity, but those learning to navigate it with intent: clearer priorities, sharper trade-offs, and a ruthless focus on what genuinely drives value in a less forgiving system.
Economic complexity isn’t slowing down. The question is whether leadership thinking evolves fast enough to keep up.
5. The Sense-Making Gap
One of the quieter but most substantial shifts playing out across food businesses is not in data or technology, but in how organisations make sense of what they’re seeing.
There has never been more information available to leadership teams. Dashboards update in real time. Consumer insight arrives continuously. Policy signals, health data and performance metrics stack up faster than they can be absorbed. And yet, clarity feels harder to find.
MBA courses have taught the fact that “perfection is the enemy of progress” and that CEOs get killed by indecision-this has never been a more apposite learning for a new generation of tech savvy Millennial leaders who are prone to the drug of data.
Recent business research shows this isn’t abstract. A 2025 complexity survey found that 55% of UK business decision-makers experienced decision paralysis in the past year, with more than half overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices they face. At the same time, organisational studies show that executives burdened by excessive information are 7.4× more likely to experience decision regret and 2.6× more likely to avoid decisions altogether - a stark indication that more data is hampering strategic action, not helping it. And perhaps most revealing, analysts report that up to 73% of corporate data goes unused for decision-making, meaning organisations are awash with noise rather than clarity.
What’s emerging isn’t an information deficit, but something more destabilising: information overload is now creating a widening sense-making gap, where shared interpretation breaks down even as data multiplies.
Different functions are reading the same environment through different lenses, all valid, all partial. Sales sees pressure on volume. Marketing sees fragmented attention. Supply sees volatility. Finance sees risk. Innovation sees opportunity. Without a common narrative, decisions slow, committees expand, and accountability blurs.
Under sustained pressure, this fragmentation becomes self-reinforcing. Teams retreat into what feels safe - their own data, priorities and definitions of success. Functional boundaries harden, not out of resistance, but self-protection. Each part of the organisation builds its own ‘igloo’ against the storm, even as the need for shared interpretation grows.
In this environment, leadership is no longer about broadcasting plans or cascading KPIs. It is about sense-making - creating a shared understanding of what matters most, what can be deprioritised, and where informed judgement must replace consensus.
The organisations that move fastest now are not those with the most data, but those with the clearest signal. They don’t communicate more. They close the sense-making gap, translating complexity into direction, and direction into action.
Why Old Responses Fall Short
Faced with this level of complexity, the instinctive response is often to reset. The reset reflex kicks in. Start anew. Throw out the old plan. Build a new one. Announce a fresh strategy.
It’s an understandable reaction. When familiar signals break down, starting again feels decisive. Clean. Controlled.
But when the environment itself has shifted, reinvention without orientation tends to amplify confusion rather than resolve it. It creates motion without direction.
New strategies get layered on top of unresolved assumptions. New structures are built around misread demand. New initiatives compete for attention in organisations already struggling to interpret what matters most. The result is more activity, but not more clarity.
In periods of genuine structural change, the problem is rarely that organisations aren’t doing enough. It’s that they are responding with tools designed for a world that no longer exists.
What’s required now isn’t a louder reset. It’s a different posture altogether.
Recalibration - Not Reinvention
Recalibration is not about tearing down what exists. It’s about re-establishing orientation in a landscape where the reference points have moved.
When demand is shifting biologically, choice is being mediated algorithmically, regulation is tightening structurally, economics are less predictable, and organisations are struggling to interpret it all coherently, the task of leadership changes. The question is no longer “what should we build next?” but “what are we actually optimised for, and does that still make sense?”
Recalibration starts by re-anchoring strategy in updated truth. That means stress-testing assumptions that once felt stable: about volume recovery, about brand influence, about promotional mechanics, about where growth really comes from. It means aligning portfolios, forecasts, KPIs and narratives with the world as it is now, not the one most strategies were written for.
It also requires focus. In an environment overloaded with dashboards, signals and competing priorities, recalibration is about narrowing the field of attention. Fewer metrics that matter more. Clearer trade-offs. A shared understanding of what success actually looks like, and what can safely be deprioritised.
Crucially, recalibration closes the sense-making gap. It brings commercial, innovation, supply, finance and consumer insight back into a shared frame of reference, so decisions are guided by informed judgement rather than diluted by committee. It’s how organisations step out of their functional igloos and re-establish a common reading of the landscape.
This is not about slowing down. And it’s not about speeding up. It’s about restoring signal.
Because this is the danger of the moment: reacting skilfully to the noise while drifting strategically off course.
Recalibration offers an alternative. Not a reset button, but a lens adjustment - a way to step out of reaction mode long enough to rebuild shared interpretation and act with intent.
In a world where the forces shaping food are no longer incremental but convergent, advantage accrues to those who pause long enough to see what’s really changing and move with clarity before competitors even realise the shift has happened.
That, increasingly, is what leadership looks like now.