Ozempic Users Actually Spend More Dining Out. Smart Restaurants Are Adapting

This past September, Olive Garden announced it was testing smaller portions—unlimited bread sticks still included—at lower prices. Rick Cardenas, chief executive officer of Darden Restaurants Inc., which owns Olive Garden and almost a dozen other brands, attributed this move to customers’ desire for more affordable meals. But it was hard not to think another factor was also at play.

In May 2024, 6% of Americans said they were taking a GLP-1 drug such as Ozempic, according to a tracking poll by health policy researcher KFF; by November 2025, that figure had doubled to 12%. That share will only get higher, thanks to the recent White House deal to lower the drugs’ prices, the growth of compounded knockoffs and the rise of microdosable supplement versions. In September, when an analyst asked Cardenas about the class of drugs increasingly used to control diabetes or lose weight—the kind of question he’d been fielding for two years—he showed the company had done its homework. “They eat smaller portions, or they eat out a little less,” Cardenas said of GLP-1 users, “but when they eat out, they actually eat out more in casual dining.”