Ozempic is good for chocolate 🍫

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Hi friend,

It’s Friday morning. You are reading VITAMIN C 🍋.

Welcome to the 53 new readers who signed up in the last two weeks. You are in good company.

As always I hunted down five insights about food business and food innovation that deserve your attention.

Here they are:

We archive almost everything. Photos, recipes. But smell? We let it disappear.

Scientists are now using analytical chemistry, archival records, and AI to revive historical aromas.

For a study published in 2025, an international research team analyzed nine ancient Egyptian mummies to reconstruct a scent that is apparently surprisingly pleasant.

There's something quietly profound about this. Smell has priority access to the brain regions that process emotion and memory, which is why scent-triggered memories tend to be especially vivid.

There's a reason scent marketing is a growing category. A single smell can move product faster than any campaign.

Read more about the research here.

PS: Heads to Daniel from FTW for the find.

In Lyon a project called Calim8 works like a health insurance but for groceries.

Conceived by a civil society collective and backed by the Lyon Metropolitan Region, the model is simple: members pay what they can. Each receives €150/month to spend exclusively at vetted local producers.

The incentive design is smart:

The underlying logic: unhealthy eating is expensive, not just for the person eating it. The cost lands on the healthcare system later.

More than 30 versions of this model are now running across France, Belgium, and Switzerland, and a national French law is being debated.

This is what systemic food innovation actually looks like.

More context on Food Social Security here.

There's a bar near me in Berlin where you're not allowed to talk.

It's called Rhinoçéros and the city’s original listening bar.

The concept of listening bars comes from postwar Japan. HiFi equipment was expensive, apartments were small, walls too thin to turn up the volume. So people gathered in cafés, so called jazz kissas, to listen together. Silently.

That idea is now quietly spreading across Berlin and other European cities. Listening bars are rooms with good drinks and a serious sound system. And a record playing from start to finish.

Why is this relevant?

Offline food moments are one of my 2026 top trends. Listening bars are proof the demand is real. People are actively choosing slow, screen-free, embodied experience.

In our world obsessed with speed, stories around provenance, craft, and communal experiences will only get more important. Because we know every trend has a counter-trend.

Check out Rhinoçéros here.

The consensus was that GLP-1 drugs are bad for food companies. Smaller appetites mean smaller baskets.

New data from Lindt and Circana breaks that assumption.

GLP-1 users in the US bought 17% more premium chocolate last year. Non-users: 6.5%. Households on weight-loss drugs make up 15% of the US population but 17.5% of total chocolate sales.

Appetite is down. Spending per occasion is up.

This pattern makes sense. When you eat less overall, you become more deliberate about what you do eat. Quality expectations rise. The mindless bag of chips gets replaced by one really good piece of chocolate.

Check out the Lindt findings here.

This tweet should be printed and framed in every conference room.

In the food industry, data is complex, stakeholders are many, and time is short. None of us can afford meetings where everything gets discussed and nothing gets decided.

Stay awesome,
Lia

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