How Sweet’N Low Taught Americans to Say No to Sugar

Louis Armstrong had two great loves in life—music, of course, and eating. The legendary trumpet player “ate just like a dog,” he once said. Armstrong adored soul food and Chinese food, scarfing down so much of both that he’d also swallow antacids and laxatives in an attempt to keep his weight in check. In 1968, Armstrong found another remedy, one that worked so well he wrote a letter to the company.

The grocery store 50-pack appeared in 1963 and, three years later, this coupon appeared. It had no expiration date, so (if you saved one) it’s still good today.

Sweet'N Low

“Dear Sweet’N Low Folks,” it read. “I just want to tell you that Sweet’N Low picks me up and is just right for my diet. … Let me know if I can buy maybe a carton or so.”

History does not record if Pops ever got his carton, but the letter is an enduring testament to one of the most revolutionary food products of the 20th century, one that accomplished the tiny miracle of making your coffee sweeter than sugar with just a single calorie.

Today, 138 million Americans use sugar substitutes, fueling an industry that’s worth nearly $16 billion. It’s a crowded category now, but 60-year-old Sweet’N Low—the first of its kind—continues to prosper. “Many consumers remain loyal,” said marketing vp Catherine Steffen, “simply because they love its one-of-a-kind sweet taste.”

Ben Eisenstadt ran a restaurant near the Brooklyn Navy Yard (1) and took the name for his new sweetener from a Tennyson poem (2). While the company closed its original factory in 2016, its headquarters remain in Brooklyn (3). The debut of aspartame-based Equal in 1982 meant competition for Sweet’N Low, which crafted this sly tagline (4) to hit back in TV spots.

That taste was the work of a restaurateur named Ben Eisenstadt, who ran the Cumberland Cafeteria across from the Brooklyn Navy Yard during WWII. When the war ended, Eisenstadt’s business fell off, so he sold it to buy a teabag-filling machine and went into the tea business as the Cumberland Packing Co. One afternoon, Eisenstadt and his wife, Betty, were lunching at a local eatery when she remarked the sugar bowl on the table was unsanitary. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” she mused aloud, “if sugar came in individual bags, like tea?”

In a eureka moment, Eisenstadt decided to retool his teabag machinery to put sugar into paper packets—an idea so revolutionary that sugar companies promptly stole it.

The tune: The brand name inscribed on a G clef is a reference to a song (founder Ben Eisenstadt's favorite), adopted from Tennyson’s 1849 poem, “Sweet and Low.” The color: Eisenstadt chose pink for his packets because they’d stand out on restaurant tabletops, where Sweet’N Low debuted in 1957. The goods: Sweet’N Low is a blend of dextrose, cream of tartar and saccharin, an artificial sweetener invented in 1879 but, in 1957, not yet in wide use in America.

Raquel Beauchamp; Prop styling: Dianna McDougall

So Eisenstadt pivoted once again: In 1957, with some help from his son Marvin (a chemical engineer), he mixed up a batch of saccharin, dextrose and cream of tartar, sifting it into small pink paper packets.

And it caught fire. Part of the winning formula was timing (dieting took off in the postwar years), but much of it was packaging. Paula Hansanugrum, ecd of Chase Design Group, observes that the “iconic pink packet became instantly recognizable in sugar bowls in restaurants across America.”

In February 1879, Russian chemist Constantin Fahlberg was working late in his lab and forgot to wash his hands before eating dinner. To his surprise, the bread he’d touched tasted incredibly sweet. Rushing back to his lab, Fahlberg began drinking from every beaker until he found the cause—benzoic sulfimide, better known as saccharin. As Fahlberg later told a reporter, he had “out-sugared sugar.” Saccharin is 400 times sweeter than table sugar.

Alamy Stock Photo

The boom years didn’t last forever. Newer nonnutritive sweeteners such as aspartame (Equal) and sucralose (Splenda) eroded market share. Consumers complained about Sweet’N Low’s aftertaste. An early-1970s study linking saccharin with cancer in lab rats—a link that the National Institutes of Health has since stated does not extend to humans—soured things further.

But that hasn’t stopped loyal consumers from tearing open more than 5 billion Sweet’N Low packets a year. And why? “When you are familiar with a flavor profile, you can attenuate to that and become accepting of any of its seemingly negative qualities,” observed Barb Stuckey, president and chief innovation officer of consulting firm Mattson. Besides, she adds, Sweet’N Low will always have a distinction none of its competitors will:  It was the first. “No new sweetener has made as big a splash,” she said. “They really broke the ground.”

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This story first appeared in the Jan. 15, 2018, issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.

Robert Klara

@UpperEastRob

Robert Klara is a senior editor for Adweek, where he specializes in covering the evolution and impact of brands.