A rich 89-year-old artificial sweetening mogul who made Sweet’N Low a household name has committed suicide by jumping from his Park Avenue apartment building, police sources told The Post.
Donald Tober, CEO and co-owner of 1,400 New York employees, Sugar Foods, jumped to death shortly after 5 a.m. Friday and was found in the courtyard of the luxurious Upper East Side building, among the 65th and 66th streets, sources said.
He was battling Parkinson’s disease, according to sources.
At the helm of Sugar Foods, Tober turned the company’s flagship product, Sweet’N Low, and its ubiquitous pink packages, into a key pillar on kitchen counters and restaurant tables across the country, along with Sugar in the Raw and N’Joy nondairy cream.
“Basically, we care about everything around the cup of coffee,” Tober told Restaurant News in 1995. “We’re very focused.”
By the mid-1990s, 80% of food service establishments used Sweet’N Low; Sweetener also dominated more than 80 percent of the sugar substitute market, Restaurant News reported.
“Donald IS Sweet’N Low,” Sugar Foods President Steve Odell told the magazine.
“Don has had as much to do with turning Sweet’N Low into a name as anyone has done with a product. All of the Sweet’N Low packages sold today can be traced back to a single sales call he probably made or at least he participated. “
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 always will be ”.
Tober was battling a “devastating” illness, “especially for someone as active as him,” Odell added.
Still, suicide was a shock.
“I spoke to him yesterday and I certainly didn’t. There was no indication at all.
Tober, a graduate of Harvard Law School, was president of the Culinary Institute of America and 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 board member of the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan. The couple lived on the eleventh floor of the building.
Although it stopped distributing Sweet’n Low fifteen years ago, the Tober company currently manufactures a range of sweeteners and other products for supermarkets and food service industries under the N’Joy and Blue Diamond lines.
“It was so much more than a single 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 ones are “Appears”. The third two words are “On time.” And the last two are “Follow.”
“He did it every day, all day, throughout his career.”
Additional reports from Amanda Woods