Panera Bread’s highly caffeinated Charged Lemonade is now blamed for a second death, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.
Dennis Brown, of Fleming Island, Florida, drank three Charged Lemonades from a local Panera on Oct. 9 and then suffered a fatal cardiac arrest on his way home, the suit says.
Brown, 46, had an unspecified chromosomal deficiency disorder, a developmental delay and a mild intellectual disability. He lived independently, frequently stopping at Panera after his shifts at a supermarket, the legal complaint says. Because he had high blood pressure, he did not consume energy drinks, it adds.
Because they sell what looks and tastes like normal lemonade, without any safeguards to make sure you don’t accidentally drink four times the daily recommended limit in one sitting. The signs display the caffeine content in small text next to the calories, which you and I both know that nobody who doesn’t count their calories reads. It’s called “charged” lemonade, in small yellow text on the green sign. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that the lemonade in that lemonade dispenser is normal lemonade.
But why hold them accountable? Starbucks wouldn’t be in trouble if you drank 90 oz of coffee!
Coffee obviously has caffeine, it’s the kind of inseparable from the concept of it. Same goes to a lesser extent with many sodas–anyone who has to watch their caffeine likely knows that coke and doctor pepper have caffeine. But lemonade? Who sells caffeinated lemonade? I guess G-Fuel does, but someone with a heart condition probably knows not to order G-Fuel.
Lemonade is the safe choice when you don’t want caffeine, because to my knowledge nobody (besides Panera bread) has ever sold caffeinated lemonade out of self-service dispensers.
So it’s Panera’s fault because people refuse to read? How does that make sense? Hard lemonade is a thing and it has alcohol. Like if it’s not labeled as regular lemonade (it’s not, it’s labeled charged and tells you it has caffeine, same as hard lemonade tells you it has alcohol), why would you assume it’s “regular” lemonade?
Because you buy Mike’s Hard Lemonade from the beer section of the store and have to show your ID to prove you’re 21 and old enough to buy alcohol. They don’t put it out by the sodas.
In fairness, I see non-alcoholic beer and wine are sold alongside alcoholic ones, too. The same goes for non-dairy foods in the dairy section, nut-free food in the nut spread section, gluten-free food next to gluten-containing food, etc.
Also, would you be outraged at a restaurant (or office) if someone drank too much self-serve coffee and was harmed by that consumption? Not even regular coffee drinkers are informed about how much caffeine they’re consuming in a day, and when they do know the amounts, they don’t know what it means. It’s not on any beans or ground coffee I’ve ever purchased, and many people drink in excess of 400 mg of caffeine per day on a regular basis.
It’s up to the customer to know what they are consuming, including through inquiry if the information is not available. From all accounts, Panera did have information clearly available in several places, and it was not the first time both of the people who died had consumed that lemonade.
As a reminder, both deaths were related to known health issues, and as tragic as they are, Panera would have no idea who’s “at risk” or not.
It’s Panera’s fault because they refuse to make it clear. The only way you can look at the sign displaying the flavors and the caffeine content and notice the caffeine content is if you’ve already decided that Panera is right and you know that the sign shows caffeine content. Every single person I’ve shown the picture of the sign to who isn’t already familiar with these incidents could not tell me how much caffeine was in the drinks after I took my phone back from them, because putting it in tiny low contrast text next to the calories is not a sufficient warning.
If hard cider was sold alongside regular cider, and didn’t require an ID to purchase, and was 150 proof, then a hard cider brewer might get in trouble if someone died from drinking it.