This is how much sugar is packed into South Africa’s favourite cereals in 2022

Update: This article has been updated to reflect the current Cheerios Honey sugar content

While the cost of frying up a full farmhouse breakfast in South Africa continues to climb, breakfast cereals have been a reliable go-to in the mornings for decades.

Over the years, shoppers have seen brands come and go – while tried-and-true classics like cornflakes, oats and Weet-Bix have persisted for generations.

Among the churn of cereal brands popping up and disappearing off shelves across the country, South Africans have bid farewell to Tony the Tiger and his Frosties, while Nestlé Bar One cereal and Nature’s Source Choc Bitz have become scarce finds.

Other brands have gone through evolutions, with the likes of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies having a recipe change and then u-turning back to the classic format (with the new variation called Rice Krispies Vanilla).

Retailers have also launched their own private-label remixes of some classic formats – but we’ll not go into those here – and health-focused brands like FutureLife have also made a splash in the local breakfast market.

Breakfast is for everyone, but South Africa has a multitude of brightly coloured cereal boxes stacked on the shelves of major retailers, adorned with mascots and advertising “fun” flavours for kids – and shoppers have been warned to be mindful of the sugar content in each offering.

BusinessTech looked at over 70 cereals that are available in South Africa to see exactly how much sugar is contained in each serving.

We found that 17 cereals in the country have a sugar content of 25 grams per 100 grams of cereal or higher, meaning that one-quarter of any given bowl is sugar. At least three cereals are one-third sugar.

In previous years, Bokomo’s Creme Soda Otees consistently ranked as the cereal with the highest sugar content, at 38.6 grams of sugar per 100 grams of cereal. However, in the 2022 assessment, the bowl of green has had a significant reduction in sugar content, now coming in at 25.2 grams per 100g.

Other Bokomo brands known for high sugar content – the Weet-Bix Bites – have also seen a massively reduced sugar count, dropping from around 31 grams of sugar per 100g in previous years, to 13 grams and 20 grams for the honey and chocolate variants, respectively.

These sugar reductions leave the door open for the new king(s) of sugar – Coco Pops and Strawberry Pops, both with 33.1 grams of sugar per 100g – and new entrants into the top five: more Coco Pops variants, Coco Pops Big Five and Coco Pops Fills, and the Looney Tunes Choc Pillows from Morning Mills.

Coco Pops – 33.1g of sugar per 100g

Strawberry Pops – 33.1g of sugar per 100g

Coco Pops Big Five – 33.0g of sugar per 100g

Choc Pillos – 30.0g of sugar per 100g

Coco Pops Fills – 28.9g of sugar per 100g

On the opposite end of the table, the trusted Weet-Bix bar remains the least sugar-filled of all the breakfast grains, with only 1.1 grams of sugar per 100g of cereal. This old favourite is among ten other low-sugar options (less than 10 grams per 100 grams of cereal), including Corn Flakes and FutureLife’s smart oats.

The table below outlines the nutritional information of 63 popular kinds of cereal in South Africa, ranked by the highest sugar content per 100 grams.

The recommended serving size for a bowl of cereal is 30 grams, and the details below do not account for added milk or sugar, which can significantly change the sugar content.

The grams of sugar per 100 grams can be interpreted as a percentage – thus, some of the worst offenders (33 grams per 100 grams) can be read as one-third of any serving size being sugar.

Read: How much more it costs you to make bacon and eggs for breakfast in South Africa: Index