‘Sugar is love’: How sweet treats have become embedded in Utah culture

If Utahns have a deep relationship with any particular food, going by the widely held perception, it’s sugar.

The signs are all around us. A major chain of cookie bakeries launched here. So did the whole “dirty soda” trend, supercharged by Utah women on TikTok. Salt water taffy is a common gift Utahns give to out-of-state relatives. The symbol on the state flag is a beehive — a natural factory for sweetness.

Sugar is embedded in Utah’s history. One of the early industries the Latter-day Saint settlers started was raising sugar beets and trying to process them into granulated sugar. The place where this happened was known as “Sugar House” — a name that has stuck to the Salt Lake City neighborhood where the factory was located.

Sugar is “the drug of choice” for Utah, a dentist in Herriman declared in an essay on his practice’s website in 2021. A doctor in Spanish Fork, writing in The Salt Lake Tribune about the “dirty soda” craze in 2022, told Utahns to “stop the madness. Stop ingesting so many processed sugars.”

Pastry chef Romina Rasmussen, who founded the Salt Lake City chocolate shop Chez Nibs and operated the French bakery Les Madeleines for two decades, said Utahns “really like sugar, and that’s always been one of my challenges, because my food is not sugar-forward.”

Is the perception true? Do Utahns consume sugar more fervently than other parts of the country? And what does Utah’s relationship with sugar say about us and our culture?

Sugar by the stats

Sugary treats make a lot of money for Utah.

The National Confectioners Association reports that confectionery manufacturing in Utah produces $337.6 million in economic output. Utah’s ice cream industry produces $194.3 million in economic impact, according to the International Dairy Foods Association.

But does Utah have as big of a sweet tooth as it appears?

According to a 2023 study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), intake of added dietary sugar among adult Utahns in 2010 and 2015 was 17.1 teaspoons per day. That’s a shade over the national average of 17.0 teaspoons per day — though among the Western states, people in only two states, Hawaii and Arizona, had higher consumption levels than Utah.

States in the South had the highest consumption levels, the NIH study found. People in Southern states averaged 17.8 teaspoons a day, with Kentuckians topping the chart with an average of 21.2 teaspoons a day.

The NIH study noted that groups like the American Heart Association suggest that adult men consume no more than 9 teaspoons of added sugar in a day, and women no more than 6 teaspoons a day.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that nationally, 63% of adults age 18 or older reported drinking sugar-sweetened beverages one or more times daily. In Utah, just over half of its adults (53.6%) reported drinking sugar-sweetened beverages one or more times daily. The South, the Northeast, Wyoming, South Dakota and New Mexico had the highest numbers.

Utah’s rate of diabetes is lower than the national rate, too. According to the Utah Department of Health and Human Services’ 2022 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, Utah’s age-adjusted rate of diabetes is 9.0% of adults, compared to the U.S. age-adjusted rate of 10.8%.

When it comes to consuming sugar and feeling the effects of that sugar, Utah isn’t an outlier. Instead, it’s pretty average.

Sugar ‘is how you communicate with people’

Anecdotal evidence, though, paints a different picture — and, like many aspects of life in Utah, it’s one often linked to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Rasmussen, famous for her French kouign amann pastries, grew up in Salt Lake City. But her mother is an immigrant from Chile, and “they don’t like things as sweet either,” she said. When her family did have “dessert” at home, it was often fruit.

But her father grew up in Idaho, in a family that belonged to the Latter-day Saint faith, “and there was always cake or pie,” she said. “There was always dessert.”

About 40 years after Latter-day Saint leaders failed to produce sugar, the church largely bankrolled the Utah Sugar Company, which contributed to the completion in 1891 of a $400,000 beet sugar factory in Lehi, writes historian Leonard J. Arrington in an article for Utah History Encyclopedia titled “The Sugar Industry in Utah.”

After the Lehi sugar factory was determined to be a “technical and financial success” in 1897, Arrington wrote, several new factories were built in the West, including 17 in Utah.

“When asked their motive in using the agency of the church to promote an enterprise of this nature,” Arrington wrote, “Mormon officials replied that this was one means of fulfilling their covenant to redeem the earth and build up the Kingdom of God.”

Sugar production eventually ended in Utah in the 1980s, according to Arrington, but members of the Latter-day Saint faith have never seemed to shake their connection to sweetness and sugar.

“When it comes to ice cream and cookies and soda, [Latter-day Saints] do not hold back. I can attest to that,” said Jared Gold, a chocolatier and candy maker who grew up in the Latter-day Saint faith and opened the sweets shop and ice cream parlor Sugarbeast across the street from BYU-Idaho. He splits his time between Rexburg and Salt Lake City.

Gold has been making candy since he was about 5, when he’d pull vinegar taffy made from his grandma’s recipe. And a lot of the recipes for the old-fashioned candy sold at Sugarbeast — for the English toffee, buttercrunch peanut brittle and maple walnut divinity, for example — Gold has made at home with his family, he said.

While Gold was growing up in Idaho Falls, he remembers that people in his neighborhood — most of them members of the Latter-day Saint faith — would give one another plates of homemade peanut brittle, fudge and divinity, and see who would have the prettiest plate and candy, he said.

Giving someone sugar, like the way Gold’s mom would often give her home-baked cookies to people around town, “it’s a way you support each other,” Gold said. “So I definitely feel like I’ve supported quite a few people, and not only their habits but emotional state as well.”

Gold said his mother taught him that “sugar is a tool, it’s a communication device. ... This is how you communicate with people that you have hurt, or people who are hurt, or people who are sick.”

“The [Latter-day Saint] culture is already very close-knit,” he continued. “When you’re in an LDS ward, it’s very familial amongst everybody there. ... When you first walk into the Sugarbeast, there’s a huge banner that says, ‘Sugar is love,’ and that is so in my DNA.”

Making memories over ice cream

Sugar, Snelgrove Ice Cream CEO Lyndsay Snelgrove said, isn’t just something to reach for to have something sweet. It’s more of a “way to connect and make memories with family,” she said.

Her great-grandfather founded the Snelgrove company in Salt Lake City in 1929. During the Great Depression, when ice cream cones cost a nickel, Snelgrove said her great-grandfather’s thought “was you can’t go on vacation necessarily anymore, but you can always go get an ice cream cone. You can always take your family. That’s a little break you can get.”

The brand, and its shops’ signs in the shape of a giant double-scoop cone, became iconic in Utah. The giant sign outside the company’s old factory on 2100 South in Sugar House remains standing; the block is being developed into condos. A double-cone sign on 400 South in Salt Lake City is still there, though it was painted black when the shop was converted into a Jimmy John’s sandwich place.

Snelgrove has been leading her family’s brand — which was bought by a national manufacturer in 1990 and discontinued in 2008 — through a comeback over the past few years. She opened a Snelgrove ice cream shop in St. George in 2021, and is in the process of opening more stores across Utah.

Today, she said, the world is facing an “epidemic of loneliness.”

“We’re surrounded by people, and we’re surrounded by technology that allows us to be in touch with people, but people are super lonely,” Snelgrove said. “And so my vision with the whole thing is to provide a place people can go and really connect with each other and make memories.”

As the mother of four teenagers, Snelgrove said she is always looking for ways to get them out of the house to spend time with them and connect. She said when one of her children is having a bad day, it’s easy to say, “Hey, let’s go drive through Swig or let’s go grab a cone.”

At the Snelgrove shop, as she’s scooping ice cream and talking to customers, she said she often hears people’s memories of Snelgrove ice cream.

“I’ve had people come in just in tears because their mom passed away, and she used to bring them to Snelgrove’s, or a ton of first dates. They’re married now, but it was their first date. Just all sorts of stuff like that,” Snelgrove said.

When opening the first Snelgrove shop in decades, “I didn’t realize how powerful it is to really provide people with an opportunity to feel loved and connected,” she said.

Snelgrove said Utahns do have a reputation for loving sugar, and “I think it’s well deserved.”

“But I think we just love life, and that’s our way to celebrate a little bit,” she said.

Sugarbeast candy is available to order and ship at Sugarbeast.com. Orders placed after Dec. 20 will be shipped on Jan. 6. Pints of Snelgrove ice cream are available at The Store in Holladay, at Meiers Meats & Fine Foods in Highland, and at Bowman’s Market in Kaysville. Chez Nibs is currently taking orders for Christmas cookie platters and other holiday items at ChezNibs.com.

Salt Lake Tribune deputy enterprise editor Sean P. Means contributed to this story.

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