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.

What will we be eating in the future? And what does that mean for the brands, manufacturers and developers trying to build products for a consumer whose relationship with food is changing faster than at any point in living memory?

Bompas & Parr have been making predictions about the future of food for nearly two decades, not through data models but through what Sam Bompas calls a zeitgeist approach: trust your gut, write the future you want to step into, and go back and check whether you were right. Mostly, they are. And if their latest six predictions are even half accurate, the implications for the food industry are significant.

In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, recorded at our London Olympia event, Sam Bompas and Pablo Britton from Bompas & Parr take the audience through their latest Future of Food report.

TV dinners: the argument that the television is becoming a cultural campfire again, and that the time is right for a properly designed food-to-match-the-show experience at home.

Gastro void: the risk that as biohackers treat food as a problem to be solved, we optimise the meaning, friction and communal experience out of eating entirely.

And boomer drinkers: why the most exciting innovation opportunity in drinks may be with older consumers whose palates have genuinely changed and whose relationship to sophisticated flavour is under-appreciated.

All that and more features in this high-energy episode!

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