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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #199:

 Snoop Dupe: The Sour Taste of Snoop Dogg's Sugar-Soaked Cereal  

The central theme running through much Food and Health Facts commentary is America’s toxic food culture and the ways in which this culture contributes to high rates of disease, disability, and death.

Emblematic of the toxic food culture are efforts to portray ultra-processed food – better known as junk food – as serving some noble purpose. A new – and particularly egregious – example of this comes from Calvin Broadus, Jr., who is better known by another moniker: Snoop Dogg 

For the past 30 years, he has been one of America’s most famous hip-hop artists, branching out from music to act in movies (such as Starsky & Hutch), peddle cannabis, and cash in on his image. Earlier this year, his net worth was pegged at $150 million.

Recently, he moved into the breakfast businesses and launched something called “Snoop Cereal.” (Its original name, “Snoop Loopz,” had to be scrapped after Kellogg’s apparently claimed the name was an appropriation of “Froot Loops.”)

Snoop Loops come in three flavors: “fruity hoopz,” “frosted drizzlers,” and “cinnamon toasteez.” The cutesy spelling is just one of many reasons to be suspicious of Snoop Cereal. And a little digging reveals that all three of the cereal’s flavors are health hazards in a box. (See for yourself by reading the nutrition labels here.)

“Fruity hoopz” is the worst of the three, with 19 grams of added sugar in a single serving. That’s 38 percent of the recommended daily maximum. It exceeds even the level found in Honey Smacks, which was recently listed as the cereal with the second highest sugar content (surpassed only by Post Sugar Crisp).

Predictably, the target audience for Snoop Cereal is children – each flavor features a cartoonish animal known as “Captain Ace” – and black children in particular.

Last week, one of Snoop Dogg’s partners, Percy Miller – better known as “Master P” – visited a predominantly black high school in the Mississippi Delta and distributed boxes of the cereal to students. Adding insult to injury, the giveaway was supported by the local chapter of a national non-profit, Save the Children, despite its supposed commitment to “nourishing food.”

Master P frames Snoop Cereal as a tool of black progress. He has said, “We want to take care of the community and build economic empowerment. That’s what this brand is about.” And he touts that, “we are the first black-owned cereal company.”

In an irony that perhaps only policy wonks can appreciate, he has also spoken of benefiting from the federal government’s Women, Infants, and Children meal program during his childhood – yet he’s pushing a product that doesn’t come close to meeting WIC’s standards for sugar in cereal.

The bigger issue is that Snoop Cereal undermines the health of black children – one of four of whom are already obese, according to federal data. Some reviewers on Amazon have addressed the product’s health profile:

My biggest problem is this has been strongly marketed to children and Black people as a whole. The last thing we need is more garbage like this masquerading as food in our diets. If you haven't purchased this I say avoid it and definitely don't buy it for your children.

Just takes me back to being a kid in the 70's when mom didn't realize she was feeding us almost pure sugar to start our day. LOL That being said I would never ever feed this to my kids unless I wanted to watch them climb the walls for a few hours on their extreme sugar high!! Had to knock off a star for all the terrible ingredients and the fact that it's marketed to kids.

It’s striking that Broadus has lent his name to the cereal since he’s spoken out about how unhealthy diets can lead to poor health, citing his mother and older brother developing diabetes:

A lot of [illness] is contributed by eating . . . what we’ve been thinking is good for us because it tastes good but it’s really bad for us. . . . If we could eat better, work out a little bit, and just do a little bit more research on the food that you are eating and find ways to find better food. There’s plant-based food that’s out now. That is another way to better fight this and have a mechanism of defense against this.

A special shout-out goes to the Post cereal company, manufacturer of everything from Grape Nuts to Oreo O’s, which is partnering with Snoop Dogg and Master P on Snoop Loops. The company claims that the partnership is based on “their shared passion for feeding families and strengthening diverse communities.” There’s a phrase in some communities for self-deceiving statements like this one: getting high on your own supply.

The existence of Snoop Loops is symbolic of a food environment in which those with low incomes – often black or Hispanic – are targeted with highly caloric, nutritionally poor products. I’ve written previously about a 2018 study revealing that retailers are four times more likely to advertise sugar-sweetened beverages on days food stamps are issued.

The marketing of ultra-processed products is sometimes wrapped in the language of race-based solidarity, a la Master P. Listen to Megan Thee Stallion, a rap star, who is a franchisee of Popeye’s, which is home to multiple menu items extremely high in sodium and fat: “I’m appreciative of Popeyes' commitment to empowering Black women.”

These individual examples are part of a larger mosaic that has given the United States one of the highest obesity rates in the world. The food and beverage sector denies any responsibility, of course. But it was none other than Snoop Dogg himself who channeled the sector’s tunnel vision some 30 years ago in a song, “Gin and Juice,” that featured his most quoted lyric: “my mind on my money and my money on my mind.”

The selling of Snoop Cereal is but the latest extension of the tunnel vision – a vision that may enrich Snoop, but at the expense of those who consume his breakfast bowl of morbidity.