Benjamin Eisenstadt, the innovative Brooklyn businessman who set Americans to shaking their sugar before sweetening their coffee and then shook up the entire sweetener industry as the developer of Sweet 'N Low, died on Monday at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. He was 89 and a major benefactor of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn.

The cause was complications of bypass surgery, his son Marvin said.

Considering the scope of his eventual philanthropy, Mr. Eisenstadt, a Brooklyn resident who gave millions to Maimonides, followed a circuitious path to business success.

Mr. Eisenstadt, who was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, seemed headed for a brilliant career as a lawyer, but his timing was off. He graduated first in his class from St. John's University law school in 1929 -- just in time for the Depression. Taking a job at a cafeteria his father-in-law operated in Brooklyn, Mr. Eisenstadt later ran a couple of cafeterias of his own, eventually finding a measure of success by opening one in 1940 on Cumberland Street, in the Fort Greene section, just across from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which became a boom town in World War II.

When the end of the war turned the Navy Yard into a ghost town and left him bereft of customers, Mr. Eisenstadt, recalling that his uncle had once operated a company that filled tea bags, turned the Cumberland Cafeteria into the Cumberland Packing Company, transforming it into a tea bag factory, one that was never a threat to Tetley or Lipton, and which limped toward oblivion in 1947.