Sweet’N Low mogul Donald G. Tober committed suicide – reports

• Donald G. Tober, CEO of Sugar Foods Corporation and Sweet’N Low tycoon, died Friday, according to the New York Post.
• Tober, 89, had been a driving force in Sweet’N Low, the little pink sachets of artificial sweetener.
• “He was larger than life,” Steve Odell, Tober’s 51-year business partner, told The Post.
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The man who helped put pink Sweet’N Low packets on millions of tables died Friday.

Donald G. Tober, president of Sugar Foods Corporation, had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, according to the report.

According to a New York Post article, the 89-year-old man died after jumping from his apartment building in Manhattan.

Sugar Foods, which has about 1,400 employees in New York City, had marketed Sweet’N Low and other well-known brands, including N’Joy and Sugar in the Raw coffee creamers. The company stopped marketing Sweet’N Low about 15 years ago, according to the Post.

“He was larger than life,” Steve Odell, Tober’s 51-year business partner, told The Post.

He said: “Don’s has as much to do with creating Sweet’N Low in a household name as anyone has ever done with a product. Every pack of Sweet’N Low sold today can be traced back to one. sales call he probably made – or at least participated in. “

Sweet’N Low was created in 1957 by Ben Eisenstadt, who ran a cafeteria in Brooklyn, according to the official story of the artificial sweetener. In the 1990s, when Tober was involved, it was estimated that about 86% of dining establishments had Sweet’N Low on hand, according to a 1996 Denver Post report.

In the early 1980s, Sweet’N Low had to face a new competitor, NutraSweet’s Equal, which came in blue packages. Both are popular artificial sweeteners, used in place of sugar.

Tober hatched a plan to keep Sweet’N Low relevant by hosting a big server contest, according to the Denver Post report. His company called for applications for 5 million Sweet’N Low boxes and received around 3,000 essays in return, according to the report.

“Focusing on the waiters and waitresses was very important to us,” Tober told the newspaper at the time. “The servers can be a sales agency for us.”

During a blizzard in New York in January 1996, Tober spoke with a reporter from the New York Daily News. He said he had lost tens of thousands of dollars to the storm, which kept people indoors and restaurants closed.

Tober told the newspaper: “My wife woke up today and said how beautiful it was. I said not for the economy.”

Tober met his wife, Barbara D. Tober, in 1972 and married a year later, according to a 1992 profile in The Commercial Appeal, a Memphis, Tennessee newspaper.

In it, she recalled one of their early conversations: “Are you still so tempered? I asked him. “What you see is what you get,” he said, and I knew he was the man for me. He is full of energy, and energetic men have always been drawn to me. ”

Barbara had been the editor of Bride’s Magazine for about 30 years, according to a profile of the couple in The New Jewish Home.

The two were involved in philanthropy in New York City, where Donald Tober co-founded the Citymeals nn Wheels program, according to the report. He was passionate about horseback riding and skiering, according to the American Austrian Foundation, of which he was a director.

—Citymeals on Wheels (@Citymeals) January 16, 2021

Sweet’N Low was made in Brooklyn until 2016.