If you haven’t noticed it at family gatherings, you may be observing it in your business: The rise of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy is reshaping consumer eating habits. Originally developed for diabetes and weight management, these medications suppress appetite and reduce cravings, leading many users to eat less and feel fuller faster. This trend impacts food consumption patterns, with users often skipping meals or opting for smaller portions.
Knowing this could affect how foodservice operators plan menus and manage waste, Datassential recently surveyed operators and consumers about this trend. Of the operators they surveyed, 41 percent say they are keeping an eye on the trend but don’t believe it will impact business and 31 percent are unconcerned. However, the consumer response tells a different story: 49 percent of respondents said they would be interested in menu items labeled “GLP-1 friendly” and 50 percent said they would be interested in meal kits, frozen meals or other food items that accommodate GLP-1 diets.
Foodservice operators open to adapting to this shift might offer more flexible and health-conscious menu options. Smaller portion sizes, high-protein meals, and nutrient-dense, lower-calorie dishes are increasingly in demand. Operators might also consider customizable menus and shareable plates to suit reduced appetites. Transparency in nutritional content and ingredient sourcing can support these guests too.

​Like never before, restaurants are gaining new tools to collect guest data and mine it for increasingly precise insights. This information is feeding limited-time offer ideas and menu development, as well as expanding operators’ capabilities in terms of the targeted communications they can send to subsets of guests. It’s also shifting the competitive landscape for restaurants as businesses adopt restaurant technology in varying degrees. Sweetgreen’s CEO, for example, recently announced that the salad brand would like to do for the menu what Spotify did for the playlist – in other words, identify exactly what ingredient and nutrient combinations people want and need to eat, then executing that to a specific degree. Expedite reports that Sweetgreen’s robotic technology, currently in use in two of the brand’s 225 locations, can dispense all of the restaurant’s 55 ingredients with the exception of avocado and salmon, which require human intervention. So far, the technology is proving to lift check totals and margins (it can measure ingredients down to the gram, eliminating waste). The planned expansion of this offering sets the stage for guests to not necessarily order off the menu, but to get customized recommendations based on the information they are willing to share about themselves. To be sure, most restaurants won’t be investing in the kind of robotic technology that is in place at Sweetgreen. But the changes at Sweetgreen – and similar changes at other brands – are apt to incrementally move the needle when it comes to consumer expectations. What mechanisms can you put into place that will allow you to address a range of dietary needs and preferences?

As more businesses adopt environmental goals as part of their corporate practices, restaurants and related vendors are doubling down on waste management too. Chipotle recently announced that it is expanding composting across its more than 3,200 stores – and CNBC reports that waste management is one of the goals that the restaurant’s executive compensation bonuses are based on. For their part, Uber Eats is also offering restaurants grants worth $10,000 to switch to sustainable packaging as part of its plan to remove all unnecessary plastic waste from deliveries this year. How do sustainable practices factor into your operations this year?

Environmental friendliness means a lot more to today’s consumers than it did just a few years ago – and to accommodate that change, restaurants are making changes well beyond the food they serve. For example, Taco Bell’s planned installation of electric vehicle charging stations in more than 100 of its California restaurants this year is not only a nod to its environmentally aware guests in the state. It also has the potential to help the brand pull business from convenience stores, which, as Modern Restaurant Management put it recently, have been taking a “larger piece of the quick-service restaurant pie” with their ability to combine multiple service offerings in one stop. Considering the habits and values of your guests, how might you demonstrate your environmental awareness in creative, convenient ways – whether large or small, and both on your menu and beyond it?

Do you have guests who like to know that what they are eating isn’t only good for their health but is also environmentally sustainable? This mindset, which has become more widespread since the start of the pandemic, is likely to expand further as American consumers struggle to manage high inflation. The average American family of four wastes $1,500 of food each year, according to Earth.org, and rising grocery bills make it that much more important to minimize waste. Chefs are in a powerful position to continue to move the needle when it comes to the consumer mindsets and habits that generate food waste. While chefs have long found creative ways to use excess vegetables in soups and other dishes, minimizing waste is now less a case of slipping a less-than-perfect carrot into a stew than actively promoting menu specials because they contain ingredients that might otherwise go to the compost bin. Nation’s Restaurant News reported recently that Michael Guiess, chef at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, developed a pop-up menu feature dubbed the Low-Waste Bowl. The bowl’s ingredients, which change depending on what is available, have included such items as roasted carrots, herb-braised celery and watermelon rind pickles, as well as grains like brown rice or sorghum. The common elements woven through the bowl are that they feature healthy ingredients and cut down on waste. The popular feature has won industry accolades and helped the foodservice operation glorify ingredients that may be slightly past their prime but still have health-preserving (and money-saving) benefits.

When supplies are unpredictable and it’s more critical then ever to minimize waste, restaurants need to find ways to make use of every ingredient they have on hand – even when those ingredients are changing week to week and season to season. Being nimble with ingredients – and not necessarily hiding that from customers – can help. As described in a recent Nation’s Restaurant News report about how restaurants will be operating in the near future, Puritan & Company in Boston has gotten creative about adapting its menu to whatever stock it has on hand. The chef there has a $22 dish on the menu dubbed the “kitchen sink” lasagna. It incorporates whatever vegetables the restaurant happens to have available, as well as any excess meat it has at the time the dish is offered. If a kitchen-sink-type dish won’t work on your menu, think about how you might best cross-utilize ingredients across multiple dishes. It minimizes waste, utilizes labor more efficiently and typically improves overall business results. Restaurant brands ranging from McDonald’s to Olive Garden to Taco Bell have trimmed their menus in recent quarters. Instead of turning off customers, the move has improved performance across the board because it has enabled the restaurants to focus on churning out more of its most popular items to larger numbers of people.

Your to-go packaging says a lot about you: Before a customer even sets foot in your restaurant, your packaging immediately communicates messages about not only your brand identity but also about how much you value customer safety, the environment and the quality of your off-premise food. Now that we’re emerging from the pandemic, more operators are picking up where they left off with innovating the packaging and cutlery they include with their off-premise meals. Shake Shack, for one, recently announced it is testing sustainable cutlery and straws from AirCarbon, which includes no synthetic plastics or glues in its products, doesn’t need food crops in its production process, and produces items that are home-compostable, soil-degradable and ocean-friendly. Edible packaging is on the rise too, with materials like mushrooms being fashioned into bowls and seaweed being tested as a plastic-like but biodegradable alternative to traditional plastic cutlery. If you’re currently evaluating the carbon footprint of your menu, consider the entire carbon footprint of the meals you provide (including the containers surrounding them). Of the 78 million tons of plastic packaging produced around the world each year, only 14 percent is recycled, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Off-premise dining isn’t showing signs of slowing down, and in the months and years ahead, the way you present your food for consumption off-site is likely to play an increasingly important role in how customers perceive your business.