A rich, 89-year-old artificial sweetener magnate who made Sweet’N Low a household name committed suicide by jumping from his apartment building in Park Avenue, law enforcement sources told The Post.
Donald Tober, CEO and co-owner of New York-based 1,400-employee Sugar Foods, passed away just after 5 a.m. Friday and was found in the courtyard of the upscale Upper East Side building between the 65th and 66th Street, the sources said.
He was struggling with Parkinson’s disease, sources said.
At the helm of Sugar Foods, Tober transformed the company’s flagship product, Sweet’N Low, and its ubiquitous little pink packets, into a mainstay on kitchen tables and restaurant tables across the country, teaming up with Sugar in the Raw and N’Joy nondairy. .
“In short, we are concerned about everything that surrounds the coffee cup,” Tober told Restaurant News in 1995. “We are strictly focused.”
By the mid-1990s, about 80 percent of food services had used Sweet’N Low; the sweetener also commanded more than 80 percent of the sugar replacement market, reports Restaurant News.
“Donald IS Sweet’N Low,” Sugar Foods president Steve Odell told the magazine.
‘Don’s had as much to do with building Sweet’N Low into a household name as anyone has ever done with a product. Every packet of Sweet’N Low sold today can be traced back to a single sales call he probably made or at least participated in. ”
Odell told The Post he had been Tober’s business partner for 51 years.
“He was bigger than life,” Odell said. “He made everyone feel special – everyone. He is an icon and he will always be. ”
Tober fought a “devastating” illness, “especially for someone as active as he was,” Odell added.
Yet the suicide was a shock.
‘I talked to him yesterday and decided, no. There was no indication at all. ”
Tober was a Harvard Law School graduate and was a former chair 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 a former chair of the board of directors at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan. The couple lived on the 11th floor of the building.
While it no longer distributed Sweet’n Low fifteen years ago, Tober’s company now manufactures a range of sweeteners and other products for supermarkets and food service industries under the N’Joy and Blue Diamond line.
“He was much more than just one product,” Odell said. “A thousand people per second use our products.”
He added: ‘Donald left us eight words, and we live them every day. The first two words are ‘Be prepared’. The second is ‘Show up’. The third two words are ‘On time’. And the last two are ‘Follow Through’.
“He did it every day, all day, throughout his career.”
Additional reporting by Amanda Woods