Say what you will about its taste (nowadays, most people prefer Splenda), Sweet'N Low is one of the most interesting stories in the supermarket. The above is only half of it. Rich Cohen would seem the perfect person to tell it. As Eisenstadt's disinherited grandson, Cohen had insider information but also the critical distance to write his new autobiographical business history Sweet and Low (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) with candor.

As a memoirist and a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, Cohen also has the journalistic chops. He's particularly good at placing his Jewish immigrant grandfather's rise as a Brooklyn artificial sweetener baron in context—of the history of New York, the sugar industry and American eating and buying habits. In the early 1960s, riding the health craze, Sweet'N Low was a business of the future. Cohen's other grandfather's trade, hats, was a business of the past—thanks perhaps in part to JFK, whose New Yorker obituary began, "When we think of him, he is without a hat." This is just one of the book's many wonderful connections. Cohen's literary voice is both Brooklyn-brash and poetic. Writing about the wee-hours work of the mob members who hung out in Ben's cafeteria and would later infiltrate his factory: "Pistols coughing blue flames; sawed-off shotguns going BLAM, BLAM; clotheslines tightening until the face turns blue."

Too bad Cohen isn't more interested in business and less biased toward his better-behaved but less interesting nuclear family. The most vivid anecdote about his mother is of when she chartered a plane to fetch him when he fell ill at summer camp; his uncle Ira, a company vice president, on the other hand, is a "genuine nut" who stood beside Cohen at a urinal during a family wedding and told him, "Nice dick."

Cohen excels at psychoanalyzing the relatives—integral to understanding any family business—as well as detailing the history of U.S. government regulation of food products (including, unbelievably, a turn-of-the-20th-century "Poison Squad" of young heroes who ate and thus tested the safety of chemical- and preservative-laden steak, chicken and pastries). Finally, the intricacies of a 1990s embezzlement and tax fraud case lends this immigrant-to-riches fairy tale as bitter an aftertaste as is in those ubiquitous pink packets.

Rich Cohen speaks and signs, Thu., May 11, 7 p.m., free, with Douglas Century, Free Library of Philadelphia, 19th and Vine sts., 215-567-4341.