Donald G. Tober, Sweet’N Low tycoon, died of suicide – reports

• Donald G. Tober, CEO of Sugar Foods Corporation and tycoon Sweet’N Low, 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 for 51 years, told the Post.
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The man who helped put pink Sweet’N Low packages on millions of tables died on Friday.

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

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

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

“He was bigger than life itself,” Steve Odell, Tober’s business partner for 51 years, told the Post.

He said, “Don had as much to do with building Sweet’N Low in a household name as anyone has ever done with a product. Every package of Sweet’N Low sold today can be traced back to a single sales call that he probably did or at least participated. “

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

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

Tober outlined a plan to keep Sweet’N Low relevant by organizing a Grand Waiter Contest, according to the Denver Post report. His company made a nomination call for 5 million Sweet’N Low boxes and received about 3,000 trials 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 wait staff can be a sales arm for us.”

During a snowstorm in New York City in January 1996, Tober spoke to a reporter for The New York Daily News. He said he lost tens of thousands of dollars because of the storm, which kept people indoors and restaurants closed.

Tober told the newspaper, “My wife woke up today and talked about how beautiful it was. I said no because of 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 remembered one of her first conversations: ” ‘Are you always so temperamental?’ I asked him. ‘What you see is what you get,’ he said, and I knew that he was the right man for me. He’s full of energy, and men with energy have always been attracted to me. ”

Barbara was chief editor of Bride’s Magazine for about 30 years, according to a profile of the couple at The New Jewish Home.

Both were involved in philanthropic activities in New York City, where Donald Tober co-founded the Citymeals nn Wheels program, according to the report. He was an avid equestrian and skier, according to the American Austrian Foundation, of which he was a curator.

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

Sweet’N Low was made in Brooklyn until 2016.