Lawsuits have blamed the highly caffeinated drink for at least two deaths.
A Panera Bread spokesperson says the restaurant chain is phasing out its Charged Lemonade, a highly caffeinated beverage that has been blamed for at least two deaths in lawsuits.
The beverages prompted controversy in October following a lawsuit filed by the family of 21-year-old Sarah Katz, a University of Pennsylvania student with a heart condition who died after consuming Charged Lemonade. A second lawsuit was filed in December by the family of Dennis Brown, a Florida man with a chromosomal deficiency disorder and a developmental delay who also died after drinking a Charged Lemonade.
A third lawsuit was filed in January by Lauren Skerritt, a 28-year-old Rhode Island woman, which claimed the beverage left her with “permanent cardiac injuries.”
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Panera previously advertised its Charged Lemonade as “Plant-based and Clean with as much caffeine as our Dark Roast coffee.” But the lawsuits said that at 390 milligrams, a large, 30-fluid-ounce Charged Lemonade has more caffeine in total than any size of Panera’s dark roast coffee, referring to the amount of caffeine that is in the drink with no ice. Panera has since updated its nutrition information to reflect how much caffeine is in the Charged Lemonade with ice, listing the large size of the blood orange Charged Lemonade, for example, as having 302 milligrams.
According to the Food and Drug Administration, healthy adults can generally safely consume 400 milligrams of caffeine a day.
It was a bizarre thing. Energy drinks are at least marketed as having extreme amounts of caffeine, but this has more, is sold at a bread store, and the caffeine is intentionally downplayed.
Aye, that’s the weirdest part. Panera is like the basic mom place, coffee and bagels and sandwiches. Seems like a demographic mismatch, and not being blatent about the caffeine intake literally got people killed.
Point is, shouldn’t have been a thing and should have gone away sooner.
Right? Like I feel like it’s already run its entire promotional campaign course and they’re announcing this just because they’re “done with it” (for now at least. Who knows about next year).
Like it’s been the 4-6 months or however long they originally planned it for and are just finishing up the cycle.
And how many basic moms go on about their coffee?
panera turned multiple accidental deaths into a marketing stunt to sell more lemonade. They should burn.
It’s because caffeine is mote addictive than nicotine. You drink the chatged lemonade at Panera during your lunch break and think “wow! I felt great after my working kunch at Panera! I’m going back there more!” But that’s just because you are caffeinated up to your gills without realizing it. It’s the exact same as the story of a Chinese restaurant putting opium in the noodles to get people addicted to the shop.
I really hope you are joking.
Caffeine is nothing compared to nicotine.
I’m not sure I agree - I’ve quit smoking hundreds of times, I’ve never been able to quit caffeine.
You forgot this
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/s
I didn’t forget. Deliberate choice.
Stimulant withdrawal in general is just shit (cocaine withdrawal is well-known to cause suicidal ideation), but yeah I would rank nicotine as the worst personally. Of all the times a patient just about straight up punched me in the face, nicotine withdrawl is about 50% of my top ten.
That said, there’s some key differences between caffeine and nicotine that probably contribute to this:
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the obvious: caffeine is completely flameless. Even a vape has a heating element that I don’t want anywhere near cotton bedsheets with oxygen literally on tap from pipes that run through almost every interior wall in every patient care area. In theory they can have as many cups of coffee as they want and it’s super easy to taper with half-caff (or similar) if they are ready to quit. (Caffeine also doesn’t put anything into the air that could harm someone with a respiratory disorder or allergy).
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More importantly: The caffeine withdrawal management options we have replicate the sensory experience of consuming the drug MUCH more closely than nicotine. The hand-to mouth behavioral pathway centers the experience on almost every place in your body with dense sensory nerve clusters. The only way they could make either nicotine or caffeine more addictive is by finding a way to also involve your genitals. The patch just does not cut it, but half-caff just might.
Now my work does also have nicotine lozenges, which help with oral fixation and better replicate the peaking and troughing blood levels of intermittent use, but that doesn’t help with the hand motion. A significant portion of smokers are self-medicating either ADHD or one of the similar disorders, and you’ll notice they LOVE to fidget with their hands (remember fidget spinners? They were supposed to be for kids with ADHD). I’ve been trying to talk my work into buying those quit-go inhalers (it’s a plastic tube with menthol flavor) but you know how admin weasels are with their yacht money.
My body and brain are mostly caffeine at this point, so I know a thing or two. I’ve also done more than a few rounds of cutting caffeine out for a few weeks or more.
In most people you don’t have to have a protocol for caffeine withdrawal or eliminating it completely. It sucks really bad for about 48 hours with a headache that is just shy of a migraine but once you get past that, all that is left is being a little more tired and run down until your body starts to adjust.
I’m not sure if you meant that for me or the dorkus I responded to but I already knew most if not all of that.
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I dunno, dude. My local Panera’s is pretty much the only restaurant I’ve seen that has zero-caffine diet colas in their soda machines (was right next to said charged lemonade).
Cowards. Bring back the heart attack juice
You could always drink a Gin Panic.
Recipe:
- Pour an amount of Gin into a large lager glass
- Add a tablespoon of instant coffee to the Gin and stir vigorously
- Fill the rest of the glass up with a Monster (What flavor? It doesn’t matter, your not drinking this for flavor. This whole recipe went sideways the moment you picked up that coffee)
Voila, Cheers!
This puts into context how truly dangerous Panera’s lemonade was: combining instant coffee and monster energy drink together would only net you maybe 200mg of caffeine (160mg from a 500ml monster, and most instant coffee is incredibly weak with 25-40mg of caffeine being in them). You’re combining two known stimulants together and still cannot approach 1 charged lemonade. It was incredibly stupid of Panera to make this, and then defend it (although I get why they defended it in court).
I did the math, a gallon of coke doesn’t have this much caffeine. It’s more than just filling the cup with redbull without ice. You can knock back 2 16oz monsters and get less. It’s more caffeine than two original recipe Four Loko.
This stuff would have still been irresponsible if served in shot glasses, let alone a 30oz.
Coke doesn’t have all that much caffine compared to something like coffee.
85mg for 12oz can to 105mg to 8oz cup to be specific. I went with coke because it’s less variable and most people have had a can of coke.
No, I looked it up when this first came out. The caffeine content in Panera’s stuff was about the same as an equivalent amount of coffee.
It’s only equivalent to something like a pour over. Most people can’t properly brew something even remotely close to the straight caffeine content of the charged lemonade. Not to mention that to most people a lemonade is refreshing and they’re drinking 24+ ounces of it at a time.
You’re looking at it from the perspective of caffeine per ml (which still, is not close since they’re artificially loading this with straight caffeine), but it’s really more about how this guises the caffeine behind something refreshing and easy to drink in large quantities. It’s why fruity alcohol cocktails are so much more dangerous to drink since they cover how much actual alcohol you’re consuming.
It’s still well below caffeine by volume of actual energy drinks (2-300mg in a 16oz can is fairly standard beyond monster and red bull)
Would be healthier to just do meth
I used to have the drink plan thing, because a year of it came as a perk/promo on a credit card we have. I called it “artisanal red bull” and I had to be careful with how fast I drank it. I’ve only got the uncontrollable jitters twice. Once when I didn’t realize that a coffee shop doing big-assed iced coffees was just sugaring their coffee and adding a couple ounces of cream, not adding any particularly large amount of milk.
Then with the charged lemonade. I knew it had caffeine, a lot even, but I didn’t do the math and assumed it was like a little more than mountain dew or something.
I was mistaken. I saw my ancestors in the vibrations of the universe strings.
I went back the next day.
It isn’t so bad if you don’t drink it all at once
Right, I just tried one for the first time the other day. Just put a bigger warning on it.
What this article doesn’t say is that it’s being replaced with an endless refill Four Loko original recipe fountain.
And when you say “fountain,” you don’t mean the dispenser for “fountain drinks,” you mean like a chocolate fountain.
Exactly. Right in the middle of the store, a fountain featuring renaissance-style fish spewing Four Loko from their marble mouths.
I think that that might make the ethanol evaporate, as it’ll do so more-readily than water.
It seems to me that that would have two effects:
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That would presumably cause the ethanol content to drop over time. You’d either have the impact fall off, or need to replenish it. I’d suggest a small Cupid statue urinating pure ethanol into the Four Loko fountain.
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If you can evaporate enough of it, maybe you can get enough ethanol vapor going on to get everyone in FlyingSquid’s Panera’s establishment drunk from breathing. I dunno if fountains would be enough, though. I’m thinking maybe add some of those ultrasonic misters, which would create a mysterious Four Loko fog at ankle level and add to the ambiance.
You just gotta drink it really fast before too much evaporates.
Don’t ruin my dreams.
“Ruin” or “perfect”?
Do you think I want the kids drunk any hyper while I’m at Panera getting drunk and hyper?
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And a child in a small boat sailing around filling up people’s cups.
Why do they keep bringing out these drinks that are so over caffeinated? They never learn their lesson until people start dying.
It wasn’t any more caffeinated than their coffee, but they make them because people buy them. Caffeine addiction is a real thing, and other stimulants are heavily regulated.
Panera previously advertised its Charged Lemonade as “Plant-based and Clean with as much caffeine as our Dark Roast coffee.” But the lawsuits said that at 390 milligrams, a large, 30-fluid-ounce Charged Lemonade has more caffeine in total than any size of Panera’s dark roast coffee, referring to the amount of caffeine that is in the drink with no ice.
I’m not aware of that advertising. Dark roast coffee does have less caffeine than light roast, though; their 20oz light roast has 384mg caffeine.
Did they measure that caffeine content independently? Because the published values state between 210 and 236 mg for a 30oz charged lemonade, depending on flavor.
The article states they changed the caffeine amount since the lawsuit
A large charged lemonade has 4 times the caffeine content than a cup of coffee according to wapo which I won’t bother linking because it’s paywalled. It’s about twice the size of coffee and twice the concentration of caffeine.
because people buy them. especially kids.
look at death water. it’s like $5 a bottle and it’s super popular.
Liquid Death isn’t even caffeinated. They have a line of iced teas that have caffeine from the tea but their main flavors are all water or seltzer.
And Liquid Death is the best bottled/canned water I have ever drank. Not a fan of their flavored or carbonated stuff. My son likes their teas though.
Do you mean Liquid Death? That is just water and it’s not caffeinated.
Water plus a bit of fragrance so you can smell something while drinking water.
They’re pretty refreshing in my experience. I actually recommend Liquid Death.
this is why we can’t have nice bad things.
The stuff was a good product imo, just horribly displayed/advertised. Now the brand for it is rightfully tarnished.
I mean, based on the image, it does say the caffine content prominently up front. Just doesn’t run around saying “EXTREME” or the like on it, and I dunno how many people have a feel for how many milligrams does what, because other stuff doesn’t normally indicate caffine content like that.
I’d never bothered trying it at my Panera’s, as I prefer zero-calorie drinks, but I didn’t think of it as being an energy drink.
I mean, based on the image, it does say the caffine content prominently up front.
It wasn’t always labeled so prominently.
It sucks I love that stuff for mornings when I’m tired I just pour some into my ice tea in my Stanley
I once tried an energy drink that had 300mg of caffeine, and I deeply regretted it. Apparently one of the people who died from Charged Lemonade drank three of them. Just imagining having that much caffeine is giving me heart palpitations
Just have the same lemonade with no caffeine added. It was delicious
Killer.
They should sell a canned version and call it “Killer Lemonade”
Come play the lemonade roulette!
People are already dieing in the store, where they can administer first ade!
Charged Lemonade tasted like crap anyway. Good riddance.
Panera’s regular Lemonade and regular sweetened Green Tea tastes great. So I’m still overall happy with their drink options. But whoever the chef was who created this “Charged Lemonade” stuff needs to be fired.
Me and some of my buddies went to go try it. Disappointing. I was expecting to be able to say something cool like “I can hear colors” instead it was just an energy drink.
Ughh, yet another case of the few ruining it for the rest :/
First they reduced it to <300 on the caffeine and put signs literally everywhere about it. But apparently people still can’t read
You can just buy powdered caffeine, its cheap.
Or just take pills if you need it that bad. But that might be a sign you need to cut back really.
I wouldn’t call taking lemonade made from concentrated sugary syrup and filled with caffeine in a place that touts itself selling things like ciabatta sandwiches and “healthy” salads off the menu ruining it for anyone except maybe you.
