- Donald G. Tober, CEO of Sugar Foods Corporation and Sweet'N Low magnate, died Friday, according to The New York Post.
- Tober, 89, had been a driving force behind Sweet'N Low, the little pink packets of artificial sweetener.
- "He was bigger than life," Steve Odell, Tober's business partner of 51 years, told the Post.
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The man who helped put pink Sweet'N Low packets on millions of tables died on Friday.
Donald G. Tober, chairman of Sugar Foods Corporation, had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, according to the report.
According to a report in The New York Post, the 89-year-old died after jumping from his Manhattan apartment building.
Sugar Foods, which has about 1,400 employees in New York, had marketed Sweet'N Low and other well-known brands, including N'Joy coffee creamers and Sugar in the Raw. The company stopped marketing Sweet'N Low about 15 years ago, according to the Post.
"He was bigger than life," Steve Odell, Tober's business partner of 51 years, told the Post.
He said: "Don's had as much to do with building Sweet'N Low into a household name as anyone ever has with a product. Every packet of Sweet'N Low sold today can be traced back to a single sales call that he probably made or at least had a part in."
Sweet'N Low was created in 1957 by Ben Eisenstadt, who had run a cafeteria in Brooklyn, according to the artificial sweetener's official history. By the 1990s, when Tober was involved, it was estimated that about 86% of food-service outlets had Sweet'N Low on hand, according to a 1996 report from The Denver Post.
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In the early 1980s, Sweet'N Low had to deal with a new competitor, NutraSweet's Equal, which came in blue packets. Both are popular artificial sweeteners, used in place of sugar.
Tober hatched a plan to keep Sweet'N Low relevant by running a Great Waiter Contest, according to The Denver Post report. His company put a call for nominations on 5 million Sweet'N Low boxes, and got about 3,000 essays in return, according to the report.
"Concentrating on waiters and waitresses was very important to us," Tober told the newspaper at the time. "The wait staff can be a sales arm for us."
During a blizzard in New York City in January 1996, Tober talked with a reporter from The New York Daily News. He said he'd lost tens of thousands of dollars because of the storm, which kept people inside and restaurants closed.
Tober told the newspaper: "My wife woke up today and talked about 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 newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee.
In that report, she recalled one of their early conversations: '' 'Are you always so even tempered?' I asked him. 'What you see is what you get,' he said, and I knew he was the man for me. He's filled with energy, and men with energy have always been attracted to me.''
Barbara had been editor-in-chief at Bride's Magazine for about 30 years, according to a profile of the couple in The New Jewish Home.
Both were involved in philanthropy in New York City, where Donald Tober had co-founded the Citymeals nn Wheels program, according to the report. He was an avid equestrian and skier, according to the American Austrian Foundation, where he was a trustee.
—Citymeals on Wheels (@Citymeals) January 16, 2021
Sweet'N Low was made in Brooklyn until 2016.
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