Past issues
The Paper in print
RSS feeds
Print edition (PDF)
Email Alerts- The current issue
- Neighborhood Map
- Bay Ridge
- Bensonhurst, Dyker Heights
- Brooklyn Heights
- Downtown, DUMBO
- Carroll Gardens
- Cobble Hill, Red Hook, Boerum Hill
- Fort Greene
- Clinton Hill, Crown Heights
- North Brooklyn
- Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick
- Park Slope
- Prospect Heights, Windsor Terrace, Greenwood Heights
- GO Brooklyn
- Brooklyn Cyclones
- Not Just Nets
- Police Blotter
- Perspective
- Parenting
- Politics
- Transit
- Podcasts
- The Brooklyn Bride
- Brooklyn Boom
- Classifieds
- Merchant news
- About The Paper
- RSS Feeds
-
Still ‘sweet’ on Brooklyn
Print this story
digg
del.icio.usThe little Brooklyn biz known for creating Sweet’n Low celebrated its 500 billionth carnation-colored packet this week, reminding a Splenda-iferous world that the old lady of sugar-free is still going strong.
And let the sugar puns begin!
“It’s pretty sweet,” deadpanned Borough Historian Ron Schweiger before turning serious about the decline of Brooklyn industry.
“Domino Sugar left. The oil industry left, the Navy is gone. At least we kept something indulgent,” he said.
The scion of the company, Ben Eisenstadt, invented the world’s first granulated sugar substitute in 1957, the year the Dodgers left his hometown.
And for the past 49 years, Eisenstadt’s saccharine blend has been mixed, packed and shipped from a low-slung factory across from the Navy Yards in Fort Greene.
“It’s a beautiful, lovely pink place,” said Brenda Holland, a Sweet’n Low packer who estimated her share of the 500 billion packets produced by the company as “a lot.”
Eisenstadt’s company, Cumberland Packing, donated the 500 billionth packet to the Brooklyn Historical Society.
The Pink Panther, as the sweetener is now trying to re-brand itself, has seen its fate shift along with the tides of American culture and health.
The diet craze of the 1970s, and 1980s brought prosperity, but like TAB, the no-cal drink with a similar aftertaste, the growth of the nation’s multi-billion-dollar diet industry brought competitors and flagging profits to Cumberland.
A mob scandal and unproven links to cancer in the 1990s didn’t help — but the nation’s battle with diabetes — the sixth leading cause of death in the Brooklyn — has the pink lady no longer singing the blues (except in diners where only Equal is offered).
“As terrible as it is, diabetes has been good for us,” said company CEO Steven Eisenstadt, the third-generation Eisenstadt to run the company.
©2006 The Brooklyn Paper
Enter your comment below
By submitting this comment, you agree to the following terms:
You agree that you, and not BrooklynPaper.com or its affiliates, are fully responsible for the content that you post. You agree not to post any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening or sexually-oriented material or any material that may violate applicable law; doing so may lead to the removal of your post and to your being permanently banned from posting to the site. You grant to BrooklynPaper.com the royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual and fully sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such content in whole or in part world-wide and to incorporate it in other works in any form, media or technology now known or later developed.
