A shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch and a sensible dinner. That was SlimFast’s pitch to consumers in the 1980s and 1990s. It was a hit. The simple idea was that you could lose weight by replacing meals and snacks with low-calorie shakes. The company promised fast results, hence the name.
At the height of its popularity in 2000, consumer goods giant Unilever bought the Florida-based company for $2.4 billion (€2.2 billion). Since that point, however, the SlimFast fad has waned, not least because of concerns about replacing healthy wholefoods with highly processed synthetic shakes – a no-no for nutritionists – and as consumers opted for more active weight-loss programmes rather than passive meal-replacement regimes.
Studies also showed that the product itself – even when adhered to – had mixed results in terms of weight loss.
Unilever eventually offloaded the brand to Kainos Capital in 2014 at a steep discount. There was the usual chatter about portfolio reshaping and product evolution but SlimFast remained on a downward flight path.
Irish food group Glanbia acquired it from Kainos for $350 million in 2018 (another steep discount), also pledging a turnaround. And there was a time when sales appeared to stabilise. The product attached itself to the keto diet fad which helped. But then came two big sledgehammer blows.
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First the pandemic hit sales as restrictions closed shops and gyms. Then came the GLP-1 revolution in form of weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, game-changers in the market. They have blown the doors off products such as SlimFast.
A top-to-bottom rebrand in 2022 failed to arrest falling sales and as part of its full-year results yesterday Glanbia announced it planned to offload its underperforming SlimFast brand, seven years after buying it from Kainos.
The company said it racked up a non-cash impairment charge of $91.4 million last year relating to SlimFast reflecting “continuing challenges in the diet category”. The charge related to crashing sales in the US.
Chief executive Hugh McGuire said the move to sell SlimFast was based “on prioritising growth opportunities” while noting that the arrival of weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic would complement its suite of protein powder products, which include its top-selling brand Optimum Nutrition.
