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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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390mg of caffeine on the lemonade. Who ever expects lemonade to have caffeine let alone 390mg? It's fucking insane. A can of coke has 35mg and thats enough to give me anxiety, sweats and tension. If I drank that thinking it was lemonade I would be fucked at another level.
To be fair that is frankly a ludicrous reaction for a healthy adult to have to 35mg of caffeine.
Thats not the point though, 390 mg is a lot even for a healthy adult.
On top of that, it wasn't labeled well at all. It sounds like they did not stat the caffeine content on the dispenser, but even if it did, not everybody has a good reference of how fucking much 390mg is.
It pretty much just looks like any other mundane nutrition facts. it doesn't call your attention to the amount at all or give any indication that 390mg might be high. I assumed it would be on the level of tea until I couldn't sleep at all the night after I had one (and I had it at like 2pm too, not even in the evening), and I still didn't make the connection until I later saw it in the news. I don't recall any other brand marketing using the term "charged" to indicate caffeine so I don't get people saying that everyone should understand that "charged" means caffeinated. "Spiked" and alcohol content sure, that's obvious, but "charged" is so vague.
Break it down on how much caffeine per ounce.
Because you're being intentionally dishonest with people acting like the lemonade and a can of coke are the same.
the 35mg of coke, comes in the 12oz can. The ~390, is from a 30oz drink.
Of the 3 flavors listed, none of them get to 390mg of caffeine, they all top out at 240 mg. But lets say it's unlisted now and the regular lemonade was 390 @ 30 oz.
You get about 100mg of caffeine from an 8oz of coffee.
Now before someone goes citing some different numbers, all levels of caffeine are subject to change will all sorts of variables, generally it's going to be lower, not higher.
So a can of coke is ~3mg of caffeine per ounce. A cup of coffee is 12.5 per ounce. And the lemonade is 13 per ounce @ the reported (but not listed on their website). If we go with the 3 flavors available, we get 8 mg per ounce.
So it's more than a coke, but around coffee. People need to stop acting like this is a small drink that is just packed with caffeine. Because the 30oz drink is effectively ~4 cups of coffee.
Just for kickers. Starbucks (because everyone knows that brand), sells a 30 ounce drink, the cold press, and it's listed at 360mg. https://www.starbucks.com/menu/product/2121255/iced/nutrition
So idk, maybe people could stop being disingenuous.
Comparing it to caffeine per ounce, and saying "it's just a little bit higher than coffee" is not the defense people think it is. I've quantified caffeine in drinks using NMR. Caffeine in coffee is a lot to begin with, out of all the drinks that we tested coffee was easily in the lead (with the exception of 5 hour energy drink that had 300mg per shot). And my biggest takeaway from the study was the incredible amount of caffeine that was in a simple cup of Starbucks tall coffee (upwards of 300mg). If we had tested the charged lemonade at the time, I would not have said "oh, it only has a little bit more caffeine than coffee", instead I would have said "holy shit it has more caffeine than coffee"
I don't drink caffeine, and I always work hard to avoid it. I keep track of which flavors and brands of sodas generally carry caffeine. If I were to drink an 8oz cup of coffee right now with "only" 100mg of caffeine it could very easily send me into a panic attack. Now imagine if I drank charged unknowingly, Probably would be drinking a lot more than 8oz if I thought it was just lemonade. The whole charged lemonade is just bonkers and Panera should have known better. They weren't selling a drink. They were selling a supplement.
Except it is. People are trying to compare a 30oz drink to that if 8 to 12oz drinks. So it's fair to being it down to a proper compatible value.
And there a decent amount of signage that the drink has caffeine. There's certainly no way you'd order online from Panera and not see that it has caffeine. If you were there in person you would have to have completely ignored the sign that's on the drink itself. And then chugged 30 oz of drink fast enough as to not notice the caffeine.
I have a fairly high tolerance to caffeine and even I can tell even after a single cup of coffee it's effects, before I finish the first cup. So if someone has no tolerance for it I would have to assume you'd notice sooner. Well before downing 30oz worth.
We'll see how it plays out. I personally think it was a bad idea to begin with but I probably have a bias do to my sensitivity to caffeine. I can see other people who are are used to it and who drink a lot of coffee not being able to see potential issues.
35mg caffiene shouldnt cause that
There is a reason I don't take caffeine
You mean 35 mg of caffeine doesn't do that to you. Food safety laws aren't written for the average person they are written for the more vulnerable.
35mg caffiene alone should not cause any notable symptoms to an adult that doesn't habitually consume caffiene who does not have any prexisting weight concerns or conditions. This was recently confirmed to me by an endocrinologist. It's about half of a latte. Being vulnerable would be the cause of the issue in your example, not the caffiene.
That's the point, actually some people are extremely sensitive to caffeine, so it needs clear labelling. That labelling is not for you.
A can of monster has around 300mg per can. People walk around drinking those like waters everyday. The first death made national news. Then they put a warning label onto the product. AND they put a warning label on the drink dispensers. At that point if u manage to hurt yourself with the product despite all those warnings that's your fault. Its like saying we should beable to sue somebody who's selling coffee if they have a customer that drinks 10 cups in a morning and has a heart attack.
McDonalds was sued for their hot coffee burning a customer. They put lids with caution hot warnings on them and put it on the cups. After that all burns incurred are not their problem. Same case should apply here and likely will in court.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the issue is that the specific amount of caffeine was not originally disclosed - people with heart conditions would naturally exclude themselves from drinking energy drinks (which, although abused, should also NOT be drunk like water), but nobody would expect a panera bread lemonade to have that much caffeine.
The Mcdonalds lawsuit is an interesting parallel, because there is a lot of myth and legend around the specifics of the case. Mcdonalds are pretty unanimously regarded to have been in the wrong on this one AFAIK. Check out Legal Eagle's video on the topic here: https://youtu.be/s_jaU5V9FUg
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.