An appetite suppressant for an insatiable appetite. On November 23, 2023, the Danish laboratory Novo Nordisk announced investing 2.1 billion euros to expand its Chartres factory. The result is 500 new jobs and, Emmanuel Macron relished, a ” victory “ In “the battle for industrial and health sovereignty”. In reality, the story is above all that of a Danish company whose stock market value exceeded the country's GDP, making this behemoth the largest capitalization in Europe. The key to its success? A molecule, semaglutide, whose effects have allowed big Nordic pharma to establish itself in the treatment of diabetes, but above all to eye a now colossal market, that of obesity.
Sold under the name Ozempic, available since 2017 in the United States and 2019 in France, the molecule is used as an injection by 200,000 patients in France. But Novo Nordisk hopes to market in France next year its other flagship product, already on sale in the United States: Wegovy, made from the same molecule as Ozempic, but more concentrated, this time used for its other property, the appetite suppressant effect, produced by the satiety signal that semaglutide sends to the brain.
Less appetite… And therefore a dazzling loss of kilos. So much so that across the world, we love Ozempic and Wegovy, imitated by competitors in the appetite suppressant race. In the United States, food industry giants, producers of sweets and snacks, are trembling in the face of this phenomenon. Are we at the dawn of a food revolution? Explanations in four key figures.
