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.
Lemonade can have all kinds of shit in it. Some even have alcohol.
But I’m not defending these drinks at all. I think they are silly and harmful to teens and individuals who already regularly consume caffeinated beverages.
But I also don’t see it as much different to highly caffeinated coffee sold regularly at popular coffee spots. And coffee is far more likely to be over consumed at home, at the office, at social meets, etc.
The only issue here is that the people consuming these drinks had health conditions.
Could Panera have done a better job marketing what this product is? Perhaps. I don’t really know the answer to that, since people knowingly consume harmful amounts of food all the time without a care in the world.
I don’t consume anything without knowing explicitly what it contains, so my bias tends to be that consumers also share some responsibility in finding out what they are putting into their mouths.
You know that coffee has caffeine, because coffee obviously has caffeine. You don’t know that lemonade has caffeine, because lemonade doesn’t have caffeine.
Alcoholic lemonade is an established thing. “Hard” is an industry standard term meaning “alcoholic.” It’s why you find hard cider, hard lemonade, and hard seltzer near the alcohol.
“Charged” is not standard. Have you ever heard of charged cider? Charged seltzer? It’s not a thing. To be sure, I googled “charged cider,” and found one result. It is not caffeinated cider.
Panera is 100% at fault for both deaths. They need to discontinue sales of this drink until there are massive warning labels stating that a 30 oz cup of it has more than the daily recommended limit of caffeine. Putting it in tiny little letters next to the calories is not enough, clearly, because two people have died from it.