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Master P partners with Snoop Dogg to launch 'Snoop Cereal'

Rapper-turned-entrepreneur Master P sits down with Yahoo Finance Live to talk about his new children's breakfast line "Snoop Cereal." Master P, who launched the business with Snoop Dogg, said that it was important to him to create a Black-owned family brand that is "bigger than just cereal."

Video transcript

- The past few months have shown a common trend in grocery stores. People are actually buying less. Food manufacturers, like Kellogg, PepsiCo, and Nestle all reported sales growth in the first quarter of the year, but that growth had been fueled by higher prices, not consumer spending. More buying, more sales of everything from eggs to bread, and even cereal have actually been falling, which makes it an interesting time to invest in this space. Legendary rapper and entrepreneur, Master P, he's not letting any fears of inflation keep him away from the business. The latest venture here, instead of serving up hit tracks, this time he's bringing something new to the table, Snoop Cereal.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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- (SINGING) Good morning, and I'm eating my Snoop cereal. Got a lot of energy now. Let's go. Seven, eight, day 19, let's roll. Plane so high in the sky, let's go. 1+1 is 2. 2+2 is 4. 4+4 is 8.

- Smooth cereal. Delicious.

- Getting everyone excited to taste the cereal that's coming up here. Teaming up with Snoop Dogg for the latest adventure, about to hit store shelves. Master P joining us here in studio, along with Brian Sozzi. Master P, it's great to have you.

- I'm glad to be here. Like you said, for me growing up, eating cereal, that was my breakfast choice.

- I was going to say, so this is, obviously, far from your first business venture. You've been very, very successful in your career. Why cereal and what's going to be the differentiating factor here?

MASTER P: Well, I grew up eating cereal. I grew up on WIC, and to be able to be in a partnership with Snoop, one of the most famous hip hop artists in the world. And we said, you know what? Instead of just putting out music, we want to build a family brand.

And so, that's where Snoop Cereal comes from. And we're building that family brand. We're doing it together as brothers, and we said we come from hip hop, but why we can't change the game? Because we loved cereal growing up. So we also the first Black-owned cereal company. This has been going on for over 100 years that we've been consumers and never owners.

So we're changing that game. Shout out to Post for believing in diversity to help us get these cereals on all these major grocery store shelves, from Walmart, to Target, to Ralphs, to Albertsons, to amazon.com. And it's a blessing that we don't have someone to talk about diversity. Just adding diversity on to the grocery stores. We know there's a lot of great companies and great brands, but here we are right there with them now.

- I remember about a year and a half ago, I remember talking to when you were starting to get this off the ground. Why did it take so long to launch a deal with Post? This seems like to me a no-brainer, and I think a no-brainer for a lot of consumers out there. They're paying $8 a box for cereal, if not more.

MASTER P: Yeah. So what happened was we put out Snoop Loops at first, and we got into a copyright infringement trademark infringement with Kellogg's. We had to stop that product. Snoop said, you know what, P? Let's just give this product to the kids. We gave it to food banks. We lost millions of dollars.

So I want people to realize that first go-around for us was like practice, a learning experience. It's not losses. It's lessons. So we really had to learn the game. And once we figured it out and had national distribution, we know that it's time to have an African-American brand for the American people, for everybody, whites, Blacks, Asian, Latinos. This is a cereal for everybody.

And it's also a family brand name that we're building with Broadus Food. So it's bigger than just cereal. Mama Snoop oatmeal will be coming next. And so, we're constantly growing. And so, the partnership with Post, this has never happened before. So it's definitely time to change the game.

- What is it like trying to get a brand like this off the ground against really established players? Any advice to entrepreneurs out there that now see this story, see these products in a Walmart, in a Target, in an Albertson's, and they want to replicate what you have done?

MASTER P: Well, we hope that we opened those doors up for those guys where they're not afraid. I say just go for it. The opportunity is there is not a black or white thing. You have to really put the work in. But for us, it's not just getting into the stores, it's having great tasting product. We can put this product in a brown paper bag, and it's going to taste better than everything that's out there.

- The boxes are cool, though.

- Yeah, the boxes are cool. Captain Ace is our character. And Captain Ace is all about education. We build curriculum's for kids in school. We also made learning fun. We got music to go along with this, and cartoons to go along with this so kids can have a fun breakfast.

- And to that point, you're a big proponent, obviously, of financial literacy, getting our kids familiar with financial learning as early as possible. What has it done for your career just in terms of your experience there, and how that's helped you evolve as an entrepreneur?

MASTER P: It helped me a lot, and I have a great partner with Snoop Dogg. I can't wait to go ring the bell with Broadus Food. People can see that. And even with Post, we want to be the part of where that stock is constantly rising. We want to make their stock rise. We want to go on this journey together, and I feel like African-Americans has been consumers for so long.

When you look at these Fortune 500 company CEOs, we make 1/10 of 1%. So this is just motivation for me. This pushed me. I want to show people that change is here. We're talking about in corporate America. So I feel like we could change this in corporate America to show other kids, to show Latinos, Blacks, that they can go out here and do this, and we're just a part of opening those doors, kicking those doors open for people that think that we're going against these major giant companies, but a lot of these companies started out in their garage.

- Do you think diversity efforts are still a buzzword? I talk to a lot of CEOs. And, to me, I think they're just trying to check a box in many cases. But I look at what you're doing here at Post, they're taking a stand.

MASTER P: Now Post has taken a stand. Like, this has never happened. And that's I love about this. This is where my passion come from, to make me want to go out there and show people that we got a company that that's not just using buzzwords. They actually doing something about this.

And so, I think together we're going to make history. We're going to change the game. We're going to feed a bunch of people. For me and Snoop, our motto is "the more we make, the more we give," and with the cereal, we're tackling homelessness and early hood child education. We're focusing on that, giving back to the inner city kids. But homelessness is so important for us. We want to be able to feed families, and this is the way we build economic empowerment.

- I want to switch gears here just a little bit and get your thoughts on what has certainly been a trending topic over the last several months, and that's AI and its influence across a number of industries. As a five-time Grammy Award-winner, how do you see AI revolutionizing? Do you see it revolutionizing the music industry and how?

MASTER P: Yeah. I'm not afraid of it. I feel like we just got to get to that stage in life. We're going to need humans. Even though you see this stuff, humans are behind these things. So eventually, the world is going to catch up with that technology, and we'll be where we need to be at, and we'll be able to do stuff faster. I feel like it's going to change the game. But I also feel like you've just got to know how to use it. I was telling somebody about this the other day. I say, well, AI for me, I could go to AI and try to get it to write something, but it's not going to be me. AI can't go uh.

[LAUGHTER]

So.

- Not yet.

MASTER P: It won't be like me.

- I'm not even trying it right now.

- I know. I know. I'm just kidding.

MASTER P: But what I love about it is it'll definitely make some things go faster for us in the business world. So it's got its good and its bad, so we're getting there. But I feel like we're going to get past that too.

- Finding that balance and capitalizing on the strains there. Well, Master P, congratulations on Snoop Cereal. Great. I'm excited to try some of those. Right. Master P, thanks so much for joining us here in studio.

MASTER P: Thank you guys for having me.