Key takeaways:
- GLP-1 household adoption has more than doubled since January 2025, with one in five U.S. households now including a current user, according to new PwC research.
- Grocery baskets are shifting toward protein, fiber and fresh produce, while apparel spending among GLP-1 users is up nearly 10% after six to eight months on the medication.
- Retailers from subscription services to plus-size specialists are rethinking assortment, return policies and customer experience as bodies and buying habits change.
One in five U.S. households now includes a current GLP-1 medication user, according to new research from PwC. The rapid adoption of drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro for weight loss and to treat diabetes is driving a shift that’s impacting grocery aisles, fitting rooms, supplement shelves and ecommerce return queues all at once.
“This is not a passing diet fad,” said Ali Furman, PwC’s U.S. Consumer Markets Industry Leader, in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “It’s a physiological disruption similar to technological disruptions like smartphones. When the smartphone emerged, no one predicted the rise of entirely new business models and ecosystems. We’re at a similar inflection point with GLP-1s.”
PwC’s 2026 GLP-1 Usage and Attitudes Survey, which polled more than 3,000 current, lapsed, and considering users, 54% of users surveyed have been on the drugs for more than a year, up from 38% in 2024.
“Our research shows that GLP-1 household usage has more than doubled from 9% to 21% since January 2025, and adoption is expected to keep accelerating as barriers like access, format, and price continue to evolve,” Furman said.
For retailers, the implications are already showing up in the numbers.
Grocery and Supplements: Protein and Fiber Take Center Stage
Per-household grocery spending is down 5.5% after six to eight months on GLP-1s, according to PwC’s proprietary transaction data. Sixty-one percent of current users report that they’re buying fewer sweet treats, and 56% report they’re buying fewer salty snacks. Instead, spending is shifting toward protein- and fiber-rich foods.
Sally Lyons Wyatt, Global EVP and Chief Advisor for Consumer Goods and Foodservice Insights at Circana, has been tracking GLP-1 purchasing behavior for more than three years.
“We see more protein-focused [purchases],” Wyatt said. “So think ground beef, chicken, yogurts, yogurt drinks, cottage cheese, dried meat snacks. We see more hydration with sports drinks and low-calorie, carbonated soft drinks. We see snacking happening, but consumers leaning into better-for-you snacks.”
Photo: The Vitamin Shoppe
PwC’s data backs this up. Among current GLP-1 users, 44% are buying more fresh produce, 35% more packaged protein and 34% more fresh protein. Greek yogurt is up 6.8%, along with jerky (+7.9%), nutrition bars (+3.4%) and energy drinks (+7%), according to the PwC report.
Fiber has also become a breakout category, driven in part by trends on TikTok. At The Vitamin Shoppe, fiber sales are up 20% year-to-date, according to the retailer’s 2026 Health and Wellness Trend Report, with searches for “fiber” on vitaminshoppe.com up 59% from January through May compared to the same period last year. Searches for “psyllium husk” grew by 150%, and searches for “fiber gummies” increased by 90%.
“Fiber is having a moment because people are realizing that better health doesn’t always require a complicated solution,” said Dr. Sarah Jamison, a member of The Vitamin Shoppe Wellness Council, in the report. “It’s one of the few nutrients that supports multiple aspects of wellness simultaneously, making it a simple, high-impact habit for people looking to improve their overall health.”
GLP-1 use is one contributing factor. While fiber can’t replace the medications, certain fibers can support satiety by slowing digestion and stimulating appetite-regulating hormones. For those already on the drugs, fiber may help manage common side effects like constipation while supporting gut health.
Wyatt cautioned against framing all these changes as GLP-1-driven alone. Protein and fiber are increasingly emphasized on social media platforms and beyond as a way for most people to eat healthier — not just GLP-1 users.
“What I have noticed is that everyone is blaming some of the reductions they may be having on GLP-1,” she said. “I would argue it’s actually more of the broader emphasis on wanting to live longer and healthier that is really driving the changes we’re seeing.”
Apparel: A Surge in Spending, But Sizing Headaches Too
Clothing is one of the clearest spending stories to emerge from GLP-1 adoption. Overall apparel spending among GLP-1 users increases 9.9% after six to eight months on the medication, according to PwC’s transaction data. Seventy-three percent of current users report that their clothing size changed.
The spending is concentrated in confidence and occasion-driven categories. Women’s jeans spending is up 66.1%, swimwear increased 31.1%, dresses increased 22.1% and jewelry was up 36.4%, per PwC.
“As people start to feel different in their bodies, they often start dressing differently and treating themselves to higher-quality, more expensive brands,” Furman said. “Spending on confidence and occasion categories suggests consumers are investing in occasions and experiences they may have previously avoided.”
Still, only 26% of current users say they’re spending more on clothing overall, a gap Furman describes as both a headwind and an opening. Many users are sizing down faster than they’re committing to new wardrobes, unsure where they’ll land in three months.
“Buyers can no longer assume last season’s size mix will match next season’s demand,” Furman noted. “But the brands that pull ahead will make it easier to shop during the transition, not just after it.”
Plus-Size Retailers: Staying the Course
For California-based Torrid, which sells women’s fashion in sizes 10 through 30, the GLP-1 moment has prompted close attention but not a strategic pivot.
Ashlee Wheeler, Torrid’s Chief Commercial Officer, said the brand hasn’t seen meaningful size shifts.
“We have not seen any appreciable shift in our size-selling data across customer cohorts that would indicate our customers are sizing out of our brand,” Wheeler said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Customers report in recent surveys that nearly as many are increasing in size as are currently on a weight loss journey.”
Wheeler said Torrid’s longstanding approach, fitting every garment on a live model rather than relying on mannequins, engineering proprietary fabrics for stretch and drape and maintaining a return rate she described as industry-low, means the brand isn’t scrambling to adjust.
“We’ve always designed for a woman whose body moves through life, long before GLP-1s were part of the conversation,” Wheeler said. “So this isn’t a disruption to our model. It’s one more reason our model was built the way it was.”
On the marketing side, Torrid has deliberately avoided referencing GLP-1s in its campaigns, in either direction.
“Our responsibility, as I see it, is to make sure a medication category never becomes one more voice telling her that her body is something to fix,” Wheeler said. ” We don’t build marketing around GLP-1s, and we don’t build marketing against them either. We simply don’t ask her to explain or justify her body, now or ever. Whether she’s taking a GLP-1, has never considered one, or has stopped, she’s still fully our customer.”
Subscriptions: A New Fit for a Changing Body
Some retailers are experimenting with subscription models as a way to retain customers whose sizes are in flux. Stitch Fix, the personalized styling service, published a blog post in March 2026 addressing GLP-1 users, offering styling guidance for what it called a “bridge wardrobe.” The post advises members to update their photos in the brand’s AI styling tool, called Vision, as their body changes.
“You can update your Vision photos anytime,” said one Stitch Fix stylist in the post. “This keeps your styling aligned with your progress and helps you make confident, well-timed wardrobe decisions.”
Ali Fazal, Chief Marketing Officer at Gladly, an AI commerce platform that works with retail brands, said subscriptions are becoming a more appealing proposition for retailers navigating GLP-1-related uncertainty.
“We’ve seen a lot of our retail brands really dig into subscriptions because it’s become a much more appealing model,” Fazal said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “It gives people an ongoing stream and you can change your sizing at any time.”
Rental services like Nuuly, which allows subscribers to swap items monthly, are similarly positioned to benefit, given that customers can refresh their wardrobes without committing to sizes that may not fit in 90 days.
Returns: From Cost Center to Revenue Opportunity
GLP-1 use is compounding an already complicated returns environment. Fazal said three trends are converging: brands have made sizing less precise as manufacturing has diversified across countries; consumers have become accustomed to high-volume, low-friction returns through companies like Amazon and Rent the Runway; and GLP-1 users often don’t know exactly what size they are because weight loss tends to happen in chunks and plateaus rather than linearly.
“When you take into account all of this plus the background things we just talked about, it means that customers as a whole are often buying multiple sizes of products with the intention that they will return one or two if they don’t work,” Fazal said.
He said forward-thinking brands are starting to treat returns as a revenue opportunity rather than a loss.
“Every single person who comes in for a return is an opportunity for an exchange or an upsell,” Fazal said. “If you have this legacy mindset of ‘oh, it’s a lost customer, it’s a lost sale, let’s deflect them,’ then you’re going to lose those people even quicker.”
Gladly works with brands including Hoka, Ugg and Sephora, and Fazal said many are training customer service teams to offer exchanges proactively. Brands are also offering extended return windows, sometimes without advertising them, as a quiet accommodation for customers in between sizes.
“It’s not even necessarily fully advertised on their website,” Fazal said, “but if customers come inbound to support, they have an exception use case baked into their support model.”
What Comes Next
The PwC survey found that 85% of current GLP-1 users say they could use more support from wellness platforms and other companies on their wellness journeys. Forty-seven percent say they haven’t seen brands do anything meaningful to support them. Eighty percent are piecing together their own routines with supporting products.
Furman framed that gap as the central opportunity for retailers across categories.
“The winners will be the ones that rebuild the offer around who this consumer is becoming,” she said. “The end of more isn’t the end of growth. It’s the start of a more deliberate kind.”
Circana’s Wyatt echoed that read, placing GLP-1 adoption within a broader generational shift toward health-conscious consumption that predates the medications and is likely to outlast any single trend.
“It is not something that’s just because of the medication,” Wyatt said. “We are in an era of recalibration, where consumers are absolutely trying to take their health into their own hands.”
