GLP-1 medications are not a silver bullet. That's not a controversial statement, but it is one that tends to get lost in a media narrative that swings between miracle cure and moral panic.

The more interesting question for the food industry might be: what actually happens to people's diets when they're on these drugs, and what do they need from food, from support services, and from manufacturers, both during treatment and when they come off?

The honest answer, for now, is that the data is thin. People are eating less, but whether they're doing that through smaller portions, skipped meals, or a shift in macronutrient preference is largely uncharted territory.

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, three specialists bring different lenses to the GLP-1 debate.

They cover dietary deficiencies, dietary support alongside the drugs, and how consumers’ tastes are changing as a result of taking GLP-1 medication.

If this has whet your appetite for next year’s Food Matters Live events - you can already register your interest to partner with us in London and Rotterdam. Just head to foodmatterslive.com

If you handed a consumer two products - one with 18 ingredients and one with 6 - they already know which one they’d choose. But here’s the more interesting question: what if the product with fewer ingredients didn’t just look better, but performed better?

That’s the argument at the heart of this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded live at our event in London's Olympia.

Clean label has largely been framed as a removal exercise, but often that leads to having to add something else in. Daniel Jones, Head of Food and Beverage at Blue Sky Botanicsis argues it makes more sense to choose better ingredients in the first place, ones that bring flavour, function and fibre simultaneously, without the downstream cascade of additions.

In this context, we learn about the baobab, a fibre-rich African superfruit that also delivers mouthfeel, viscosity and system stability.

Daniel also makes the case for elderflower as a masterclass in what gets lost when you isolate compounds: there are 148 identifiable flavour compounds in an elderflower, and extracting each individually produces wildly different results. But if you extract the whole plant naturally, it tastes of elderflower.

Seven out of ten women say they want to improve their nutrition. The problem isn't knowledge or even willingness, it's time, mental bandwidth and a food system that makes consistently hitting nutritional targets genuinely difficult.

And for women, that target is moving all the time. Nutritional requirements shift across the monthly cycle, through pregnancy, perimenopause and beyond, meaning the standard one-size nutritional recommendation built largely on male data is, at best, a starting point. At worst, it's masking a persistent micronutrient gap that shows up as fatigue, brain fog, poor concentration or even just feeling cold, and gets dismissed as a lifestyle problem when it's actually a nutritional one.

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, made in partnership with Arborea, three experts from the company make the case that microalgae could be a quiet but significant part of the answer.

We learn about the biochemistry of why minerals such as iron and magnesium and vitamins such as D and B so critical for women specifically, why nutrition is not just what's on the label but what survives processing and can actually be absorbed by your cells, and why uniquely cultivated microalgae may be what it actually takes to get these micronutrients in a bioavailable form into foods that people want to eat.

The Arborea team bring the science to life and into the real world, explaining how their technology can be used to produce clean microalgae at scale.

Guests:

Karen Stetter, Senior Research and Development Programme Manager, Arborea

Ulliana Sampaio, Senior Product Development Scientist, Arborea

Estelle Alenxadre, Business Development team, Arborea

Arborea

Arborea uses its patented Biosolar Leaf™ technology to capture and convert carbon dioxide into controlled, highly nutritious, natural food ingredients. It uses sunlight for the industrial photosynthesis and extraction of microalgaeon barren, non-fertile land and thus with zero deforestation and no loss of biodiversity.

The consistent micro-environment in this contained process ensures uniquely controlled taste and nutritional content. The process is easily scalable, without requiring expensive fermentation tanks, open ponds, internal photobioreactors, pressurised gases, and without risk of any cross-contamination from heavy metals or organic toxins.

Example products include :

• BioSolar Spirulina™ bioactive nutrient concentrates rich in iron, magnesium and vitamins but without the ‘fishy’ or ‘earthy’ aftertaste of traditional microalgae production methods
• NOvo Protein™, a white, neutral tasting, water-soluble, multi-functional ingredient nutritious protein suitable for any easily incorporated into any food product
• Pure Blue™ spirulina extract food colouring.