In Sweet and Low, Rich Cohen describes how his family achieved its fortune—even though, as it turns out, he never made a dime from it. A contributing editor to Rolling Stone and the author of several books including Tough Jews and The Avengers, Cohen writes in Sweet and Low that while his grandparents cut him and his siblings out of the estimated $100 million estate, he was left with the story. And what an interesting story it is.
Cohen’s perspective may not be completely unbiased, but as a storyteller he’s in an ideal position: “Outside but inside, with just enough of a grudge to sharpen my sensibilities,” he writes. At the same time, Sweet and Low is an immigrant tale of rags to riches, a chronicle of business innovation, a family saga filled with complex relationships and, on some level, a drama of power and morality.
Benjamin Eisenstadt, the Sweet’N Low patriarch, was born in the early twentieth century on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He graduated at the top of his class from St. John’s University Law School in 1929. The Great Depression cut short his promising career as a lawyer, and he took a job at a cafeteria operated by his father-in-law. Eisenstadt gained some success as a restaurant entrepreneur, opening several cafeterias of his own, including one in 1940 across from the bustling Brooklyn Navy Yard. By the end of World War II, however, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was a virtual ghost town with no demand for a cafeteria.
Eisenstadt turned the venue into a tea bag factory, the Cumberland Packing Company. The tea bag venture eventually failed, but his drive for commercial success did not. He thought up the idea of packaging sugar into packets and naively took the concept to leading sugar companies; they stole the idea and established their own sugar-packet operations. Eisenstadt finally managed to wrangle a contract to produce packets for the Jack Frost sugar company though he lacked his own brand.
The turning point came when Eisenstadt and his son, Marvin, who had studied chemistry in college, began experimenting with saccharin. (Saccharin had existed since the nineteenth century, but only in liquid and pill form.) Mixing saccharin with dextrose and other ingredients, Ben and Marvin created a low-calorie sugar substitute, named it Sweet‘N Low, and sold it in pink packets. Their timing was ideal: Sweet‘N Low entered the market just as the American health craze found its footing in the 1960s. All was well until the early 1980s, when Equal, a new low-calorie sugar alternative, would challenge Sweet‘N Low’s dominant market position.
The Sweet‘N Low journey is not without intrigue. Along the way, Cumberland Packing got mixed up with tax evasion and criminal conspiracy, lending the pink packet a certain notoriety. Cohen tells it all with biting wit and perhaps a little (understandable) resentment. His grandmother Betty’s final statement to Cohen, his mother, and his siblings was, “To my daughter and her issue I leave nothing.” Ouch.
Sweet and Low illustrates the American dream in all its complexities.