On a Sunday evening in late June, the Danish beach town of Tisvilde was winding down after a busy weekend. At the small blue shack that houses Hansens Ice Cream Parlour, families were securing their last scoops of organic vanilla. Tanned teens with sandy toes and cat-eye sunglasses trailed up the sidewalk back into town. Quaint, relaxed, and charmingly windswept, Tisvilde has been drawing Copenhagen’s creative class for decades. It is reminiscent of what the East End of Long Island was like in the 70s, before the billionaires arrived and high-end fashion boutiques transformed its picturesque main streets into Bergdorf-sur-Mer.
But that may be about to change. Tisvilde and its neighboring towns on what is known as the Danish Riviera are already showing signs of boom times courtesy of Ozempic, of all things. In the past two years, Novo Nordisk, the manufacturer of the weight-loss drug (as well as half the world’s insulin supply), has transformed Denmark’s economy, boosting its G.D.P. by 1.8 percent in 2023.
