A rich, 89-year-old artificial sweetener, who made Sweet’N Low a household name, committed suicide by jumping out of his Park Avenue apartment building, law enforcement sources told The Post.
Donald Tober, CEO and co-owner of Sugar Foods, with 1,400 New York employees, jumped to death just after 5 a.m. Friday and was found in the courtyard of the Upper East Side luxury building between 65th and 66th streets, sources said.
He struggled with Parkinson’s disease, sources said.
At the helm of Sugar Foods, Tober turned the company’s flagship product, Sweet’N Low, and its ubiquitous pink packages into a pillar on kitchen countertops and restaurant tables across the country, along with Sugar in the Raw and N’Joy Cream .
“Basically, we’re concerned with everything around the coffee cup,” Tober told Restaurant News in 1995. “We’re very focused.”
By the mid-1990s, about 80 percent of food service units used Sweet’N Low; the sweetener also owned more than 80 percent of the sugar substitute market, Restaurant News reported.
“Donald IS Sweet’N Low,” Sugar Foods President Steve Odell told Odessa.
“Don had as much to do with Sweet’N Low in a household name as anyone has ever had with a product. Every package of Sweet’N Low sold today can be given from a single sales call that he probably made or at least participated in ”.
Odell told The Post that he was Tober’s business partner for 51 years.
“It was bigger than life,” Odell said. “It made everyone feel special – everyone. He is an icon and will always be. “
Tober was battling a “devastating” illness, “especially for someone as active as himself,” Odell added.
However, the suicide was a shock.
“I spoke to him yesterday and certainly not. There was no indication. ”
A graduate of Harvard Law School, Tober was a former president of The Culinary Institute of America and a founder of City Meals-on-Wheels.
He was the husband of Barbara Tober, who worked for three decades as editor-in-chief of Brides magazine and was chairman of the board at the Manhattan Museum of Art and Design. The couple lived on the 11th floor of the building.
While it stopped distributing Sweet’n Low fifteen years ago, Tober now manufactures a range of sweeteners and other products for supermarkets and the food service industry under the N’Joy and Blue Diamond lines.
“It was much more than a single product,” Odell said. “A thousand people a second use our products.”
He added: “Donald left us with eight words and we live them every day. The first two words are “Be prepared.” The second is “Appears”. The three words are “On time.” And the last two are “Watch.”
“He’s been doing this every day, all day, throughout his career.”
Additional reporting by Amanda Woods