S. Daniel Abraham, an entrepreneur who turned a tiny family business into a giant that dominated the weight-loss industry with popular brands like Slim-Fast and Dexatrim, died on Sunday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 100.
His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Rabbi Abe Unger.
Mr. Abraham built his fortune on a pharmaceutical company that his father, a dentist, bought for $5,000 in 1947 after spotting it in an advertisement in the trade publication Drug Store News. Mr. Abraham expanded the company into an empire with a line that came to include Slim-Fast, a weight-loss product that involved no complex diets, calorie counting or weighing of ingredients, and that did not forbid specific foods or beverages.
“What I wanted to bring to market was a meal replacement in liquid form, composed of protein, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals, and even a little healthy fat,” he wrote in “Everything Is Possible,” a memoir published in 2010 and written with Joseph Telushkin.
When Slim-Fast — since rebranded as SlimFast — was introduced in 1977, it was sold premixed in powder form, which buyers then blended with skim milk. The beverage was intended to constitute breakfast and lunch followed by a “sensible” dinner, as its television commercials advised. A ready-to-drink version appeared in 1989.
Mr. Abraham, whose family of six at the time lived in Israel for much of the 1970s, was also active politically, especially in his later years. In pursuit of Middle East peace, he cultivated relationships with top Israeli, American and Arab leaders, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a friend for more than three decades. Mr. Abraham was particularly close to Bill and Hillary Clinton, becoming one of the biggest donors to Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign for president.
Mr. Clinton wrote the foreword to a 2006 book by Mr. Abraham, “Peace Is Possible: Conversations with Arab and Israeli Leaders from 1988 to the Present.”
Saul Daniel Abraham was born on Aug. 15, 1924, in Long Beach, N.Y., where he grew up in an ardently Zionist household. He became an accomplished swimmer, and his odd-job efforts included scavenging bottles for 2-cent returns.
Most ambitious was a one-man newspaper operation he ran as a teenager. He wrote articles, operated a mimeograph machine, sold ads and delivered his paper to houses all around Long Beach. (On one occasion, he interviewed Mayor Louis Edwards, who was shot to death a few days later. )
But he was an indifferent student, and rather than attending college, he enlisted in the Army after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.
As an infantryman in Italy, Private Abraham crossed the Arno River, near Florence, as American troops began three months of fighting up to the Po Valley in the north.
Poor eyesight led to his discharge in December 1945 on $50 a month in partial-disability pay. He then passed up a chance to attend college on the G.I. Bill of Rights and began an unhappy stint with a company that his father and his father’s brothers had started in the family’s basement in the 1930s.
The company’s product, a medical douche called StomAseptine, was modestly successful, but Mr. Abraham became bored and wanted “to cut loose a little” from his conservative father and uncles with a broader array of goods, he said.
Then came the family’s $5,000 purchase of Thompson Medical Company, maker of an anti-itch ointment called San-Cura. Mr. Abraham turned the business into his springboard.
He hit the road peddling San-Cura to individual pharmacies, hitchhiking at first and later driving himself. Once, in western Pennsylvania, he was so broke that he had to trade three dozen bottles of San-Cura for gas money to make the trip back to New York.
During those tough times, he learned that plastering 8½-by-11-inch San-Cura signs on merchants’ windows worked wonders for sales, and the business began to thrive. He created Gas-Tabs, Throat-Aid and eventually Slim-Mint Gum, his gateway into the weight-loss industry in 1956.
Slim-Mint took off, but the Food and Drug Administration insisted that it could not remain on the market unless all claims for weight reduction, including the Slim-Mint name, were removed.
Mr. Abraham fought tenaciously in court, and after the jury ruled in his favor, he broke down and cried. “If we had lost, I would have lost everything,” he recounted in his memoir. “The whole business. My entire future would have gone up in smoke.”
Thompson Medical’s weight-loss pill Dexatrim hit shelves in 1976, and its profits enabled the development and promotion of Slim-Fast, which was introduced in 1977. Slim-Fast received various medical endorsements and was designated as a meal replacement under a special F.D.A. category.
Mr. Abraham’s success was not with controversy. In 1978, a 26-year-old woman in Albany, Ga., sued the company, claiming that her use of another of its weight-loss products, the nonprescription diet pill Appedrine, had caused her to have a stroke that left her permanently paralyzed on her right side. She attributed the stroke to the pill’s active ingredient, phenylpropanolamine.
The company agreed to pay $125,000 in an out-of-court settlement, but insisted that drug industry studies had shown that such diet pills were both effective and safe, provided consumers followed usage directions. (Because of safety concerns, the F.D.A. issued a public health advisory about phenylpropanolamine in 2000, and the ingredient has since been removed from weight-loss products and cold medications.)
Slim-Fast caught on quickly, surviving an industry slump when the government disclosed that dozens of people had died from a popular fasting diet. Slim-Fast then got a big break when Oprah Winfrey told her TV audience in 1988 that she had lost 67 pounds with the help of a product called Optifast.
When people tried to buy Optifast, they were told that it could be obtained only under a doctor’s supervision, but that Slim-Fast, available over the counter, was similarly effective.
That prompted the makers of Slim-Fast to seek their own endorsements, choosing celebrities whose struggles with weight gain were well known to the public. The first was Tommy Lasorda, the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose players in spring training had offered to donate thousands of dollars to charity if he lost 20 pounds by midseason.
Initially rebuffed by Mr. Lasorda, Mr. Abraham chartered a plane and headed for the Dodgers’ Florida training camp, arriving around midnight. He mixed up a batch of Slim-Fast and had Mr. Lasorda try it. The verdict: “Hey, it’s not bad.”
Mr. Lasorda lost 30 pounds in three months and began shooting commercials.
Sales skyrocketed, and Mr. Lasorda, who agreed not to regain the lost weight, became the company’s best spokesman.
Another pivotal moment for Slim-Fast came in 1991, during the Persian Gulf war.
Major national advertisers, presumed to be unwilling to be associated with death and destruction, were expected to cancel their reserved broadcast airtime, leaving an opening for Mr. Abraham. He was told that he could buy the airtime at discounts of 80 to 90 percent.
He wasn’t insensitive to people dying, he explained: “It was just that I thought they weren’t going to die at all.” His experience as a former soldier had convinced him that the war would end quickly.
Mr. Abraham sold his company to Unilever in 2000 for $2.3 billion. In 2014, Unilever sold the SlimFast brand to the private equity firm Kainos Capital, which sold it to the nutrition company Glanbia in 2018. Glanbia put the product line up for sale in February.
Forbes estimated Mr. Abraham’s wealth this year at $2.4 billion.
His marriage in 1963 to Estanne Weiner ended in divorce in 1993. He married Ewa Sebzda in 1996. She survives him, along with four daughters from his first marriage, Rebecca Gridish, Leah Pinck, Tamar Wolchok and Simona Ganz; two children from his second marriage, Sarah and Samuel Abraham; 27 grandchildren; and 34 great-grandchildren.
Mr. Abraham found unwanted publicity in two episodes in recent years.
In 2016, he entered into a pitched battle with his first wife over a $1 billion trust that had been set up for their daughters and that she and her second husband, an accountant, had overseen. Mr. Abraham accused the couple of mismanaging the trust and sought to remove them as trustees. The matter was settled out of court.
And in 2023, he was accused of sexual harassment by a former executive assistant, who filed suit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, contending that over three years in the 1980s he had assaulted her while riding in cars, had propositioned her to have sex and had groped her under dinner tables. Mr. Abraham sought to have the case dismissed. A judge had not yet ruled on the motion when Mr. Abraham died.
In business, Mr. Abraham disdained partnerships, maintaining that true success came from self-reliance and being solely in charge. That view extended to his pursuit of peace in the Middle East.
It is rarely productive to try to influence policymaking by courting underlings, he contended. When peace comes, he predicted, “one person at the top will take responsibility for making it happen.”
Robert D. Hershey Jr., a longtime business and economics reporter for The Times, died in 2024.
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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