Weight-loss drugs are hitting alcohol a lot harder than snacks, food-and-beverage VC explains

Weight-loss drugs may do more damage to booze shops than to the snack aisle, according to Nate Cooper, founder and managing partner of Barrel Ventures.

"At the end of the day, you have to eat, right? What you don't have to do is you don't have to drink alcohol," Cooper, whose first real check as an investor went into the nascent stages of Olipop, told Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi on the Power Players podcast (video above). "I think GLP-1s are having a much more severe impact on alcohol consumption than they are in food."

His reasoning: GLP-1 drugs "decrease addictive behaviors."

Sozzi noted that snacking giants such as PepsiCo ( PEP ), the owner of Frito-Lay, and Campbell's ( CPB ), the maker of Goldfish and Snyder's-Lance pretzels, are pushing back on the idea that GLP-1s will hurt their businesses over the long term.

Cooper expects "a slow drip effect" on snacking instead.

"Snacking is never going to disappear," he said, but brands will pack more protein and fiber into less food "because people are eating less."

What can replace alcohol if people drink less? Cooper's fund invested in Nowadays, a hemp THC beverage, a year and a half to two years ago. Cooper said Nowadays was the No. 2-selling item last year at the country's largest liquor retailer, behind a 750 ml bottle of Tito's vodka.

The appeal, he said, is "a similar feeling of having a drink or two without the downside effect of like waking up and feeling like crap in the morning."

Cooper said it's "not out of the realm of possibility" that the category could make up 10% of alcohol sales in stores, assuming it stays legal.

Extrapolated across US alcohol sales, he said, that would be $50 billion a year, for a category "that didn't exist five years ago."

He suggested a three-tier framework for lawmakers looking to regulate the drinks like alcohol: age-gate them, cap the milligrams, and "eliminate the synthetics."

Internal AI tools help analyze interview transcripts and draft. Editors reviewed, edited, and fact-checked this post before publication.