The wealthy Sweet’N Low creator, Donald Tober, committed suicide by jumping from his Park Avenue apartment, Fox Business reports.
Tober, 89, had Parkinson’s disease. Around 5 am Friday, he leaped to his death and was found in the courtyard in the luxury Upper East Side building.
Tober was the CEO and co-owner of the New York-based Sugar Foods, which employees 1,400 employees.
He is known for turning Sugar Foods flagship product, Sweet’N Low—and it’s infamous pink packets—into a household name found on kitchen counters and restaurant tables all over the country. This also includes Sugar in the Raw and N’Joy non-dairy creamer.
In 1955, Tober told Restaurant News, “Basically, we’re concerned with everything that surrounds the coffee cup. We’re tightly focused.”
By the mid-‘90s, well over half of the foodservice businesses used Sweet’N Low. The product also commanded over 80% of the sugar substitute market.
“Donald IS Sweet’N Low,” the president of Sugar Foods, Steve Odell, told the magazine.
“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.”
Tober and Odell were business partners for 51 years.
“He was bigger than life. He made everybody feel special — everybody. He’s an icon, and he’ll always be,” Odell said, adding they Tober was fighting a “devastating” disease, “especially for someone as active as he was.”
But still, his suicide came as a surprise.
“I talked to him yesterday, and certainly, no. There was no indication whatsoever.”
Tober was a Harvard Law School graduate and a chairman of The Culinary Insititute of America. He also founded City Meals-on-Wheels.
He’s survived by his wife Barbara Tober, who worked for 30 years as editor-in-chief of Brides magazine.
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