How GLP-1 Drugs and Big Pharma Are Reshaping the Sugar Market

The sugar lobby: the great untouchable? Not really, especially when Big Pharma is the one tapping it on the shoulder - rather forcefully.

Since 2021, as the world emerged from the COVID-19 crisis, we have been living through an inflationary period, although it is now showing signs of easing. Food, energy, property, tourism: every sector has been hit head-on by the surge. Yet a few have escaped, including raw sugar. Its price has fallen to its lowest level since 2020, losing half its value compared with its 2023 peak.

Although the world’s two largest producers, Brazil and India, enjoyed exceptional harvests in 2025, this decline has a different cause. Demand is weakening because of the rapid rise of GLP-1 analogue medicines used to treat obesity, including Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound. These treatments have a powerful effect on satiety, leading patients to consume far fewer sugary products and processed foods. Investors, as ever several moves ahead, did not wait for half the planet to begin treatment: they have already bet on a long-term collapse in global sugar consumption. The market has therefore pushed prices down in anticipation.

Who still wants sugar? Hardly anyone

These drugs replicate an intestinal hormone that tells the brain the stomach is full. People taking them snack less because they lose interest in the compulsive pleasure associated with eating sugar, and the confectionery, biscuit, cereal and ice-cream aisles are losing their best customers.

The economic consequences are inevitably harsher in the United States and Mexico, markets with particularly high glucose consumption. Yet manufacturers’ real concern is not the average shopper buying three packets of biscuits a year, but heavy consumers. According to Stephen Geldart of Czarnikow, a wholesale trading company specialising in chocolate and confectionery, the industry is sustained by a small core group.

Indeed, just 20% of consumers account for 65% of sales of ultra-sugary products. As these are precisely the typical profiles targeted by the laboratories producing GLP-1 medicines, they could sever the financial lifeline of an entire sector. “If these heavy consumers start taking these medicines, the fall in sales could be far greater than expected,” Stephen Geldart warns.

Big Pharma takes on the sugar lobby

For the first time in its history, the sugar lobby is being outmanoeuvred by an opponent of its own size. The billions of dollars once spent by heavy consumers satisfying their sugar cravings are now being captured by Big Pharma. Financial flows have shifted from one empire to another.

Protein: the new white gold

One industry’s misfortune is another’s opportunity, and in this case the dairy sector is taking the prize. The medicines in question are highly effective for weight loss, but they also cause considerable muscle loss. Treated patients must follow a strict instruction to avoid losing too much weight: eat more protein.

While sugar prices sink ever deeper, whey prices are climbing sharply. In the United Kingdom, sales of fresh cheese rose by 50% in January 2026, while sales of whey, the powdered whey protein, have never been stronger.

Sugar production remains unchanged

Alongside these two shifts, what is happening to global sugar production? It has not changed at all, despite collapsing demand: 180 million tonnes are produced each year. Too much of a product is being made for a planet that no longer has the appetite to eat it. This is a structural issue inherent to sugar cane cultivation: once planted, it can be harvested for five to seven years. Growers cannot simply clear their fields on a whim without sacrificing years of investment.

Producers and processors therefore risk being left with a surplus on their hands. João Paulo Frossard, an agribusiness analyst at Rabobank, says that “this shift is not temporary”, adding: “It is a factor the industry must now incorporate into its long-term plans, because people are eating less and paying more attention to what they consume.” The major sugar dealers, which had survived every war and nutritional campaign, certainly did not anticipate the great collective withdrawal forcibly imposed by Big Pharma. The sector has no choice but to reinvent itself, or risk falling behind in a deflationary dead end.