Sweeteners, a fascinating story.
You probably didn’t know that the inventor of sugar packets was Mr. Benjamin Eisenstadt.
When he finished University, this New Yorker Jew started a business manufacturing tea bags. The business didn’t go well, and he had to turn his shop into a coffee shop in Brooklyn.
In order to recover the cost from manufacturing his tea-bagging machine, Mr. Eisenstadt came up with the idea, around 1940, to divide sugar into individual portions. He contacted the main sugar manufacturers to explain his business idea to them, but it didn’t go well. As he hadn’t patented his idea before starting to make related purchases, the sugar manufacturers were free months later to use it without paying copyrights, and unfortunately for him, that’s what they did.
Up to the year 1957, saccharine was sold in the form of liquid drops or small tablets, but then Mr. Eisenstadt invented a formula to get saccharine sweetener in dust form. He mixed the saccharine with dextrose in bulk until he got a portion of the size of a spoon and added anti-binding agents.
Along with his son Ben, he came up with the idea of creating a single-dose sugar substitute packet, but with no calories, and it was then when he patented the brand "Sweet N’ Low", a name chosen because of his favourite song. In order to distinguish it and make it stand out from sugar at restaurants and coffee shops, he made his saccharine packets a bright pink.
During its first years on the market, Sweet 'N Low was only available at restaurants and coffee shops, but in 1963 it made its debut in food markets so people could grab a box of their favourite zero-calories sweetener and enjoy it at home. His company was also a pioneer later on in the packaging of soy sauce and other individually sized condiments.
Benjamin Eisenstadt and his wife dedicated a substantial part of their wealth to medical philanthropy and at 89 years old, the innovative businessman from Brooklyn passed away.
Nowadays, it’s so common to find sugar or saccharine packets in the restaurant business that you probably never wondered where it came from. In Jurado you have three ways of sweetening your coffee: with sweetener, with white sugar or with brown sugar, your choice
