Making non-artificially dyed sprinkle sugar is really easy. The range of colors you can get with natural dyes is a tiny bit smaller and admittedly not quite as glowing as with artificial dyes but you can get a nice range. If your children are a bit sensitive to certain chemical dyes (my kids have been known to enter "wild-demon-child" phases a few hours after consuming some of them) then you can appreciate having options when your kids beg for sprinkles.
Vegetable based food dyes are nice and are fairly bright but they are also hugely expensive. A three pack at Whole Foods runs at about 18-20 dollars. The last set I had was about ten dollars from the Vitamin Shoppe with a free shipping deal when I purchased Fenugreek but I haven't seen anything like that in a long time.
Dying sugar brings me back to my days as a summer camp counselor when we would use things like coffee, spinach, and beets to do natural cloth tye dyes. This batch was done with beet juice quickly so I did not boil and concentrate which is why it's more of a light magenta color than the burgundy red I would have gotten otherwise.
To make a batch like this stir in about 1/2 to 1 tsp of the juice (beet juice, cherry juice, blueberry juice, spinach juice...etc) in a half cup of sugar. Mix it well and let it sit out for about four hours stirring about once every half hour. If the sugar isn't completely dry and crumbly then you'll need to have it sit out longer. Once it's fully dry and no longer "sticks" when you mix it you can store it in a glass or plastic container.
You will get darker colors if you boil off some of the water in the juice first. At camp we would boil down beet juice on low heat until it was practically black. It would give the cloth (sugar) a deep burgundy color.
This is a really fun project to experiment with!
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