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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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That's insane. I hope not only that they win the lawsuit, but that companies understand stimulants can be harder (even dangerous) on some people.
The way caffeine affects me does not risk my life, but it can get ugly as I have a mental health condition that gets triggered by stimulants. It is so common to rely on caffeine nowadays, and it's present in many beverages and snacks. People forget it is still a drug.
There should be labels and there should be less of a presence of caffeine (and other legal drugs) in unrelated products. I mean, it's normal if coffee has caffeine, it shouldn't be normal that a lemonade has caffeine.
I disagree. Don't get me wrong - fuck Panera in general, but I'm all for more products being offered so long as they're properly labeled which this was. Also with a name like charged lemonade it heavily omplies it's not normal lemonade. There's an argument to be made here about personal responsibilities and reading labels.
Charged lemonadw to me would indicate extra sweet not cat piss gaurana.
Well you should probably read what's in it then if you're not sure lol.
Then look at the label and see that it says its caffeine content, as well as comparing it to coffee
Like, other than not selling it at all, there's not much else they could've done here
Yeah it's a tragic story, but I don't think Panera is at fault here. What I would like for them to do is update their signage to be even more specific as a result of this. There's no legal requirement to, and I don't think a court will find them liable, but no matter how you spin it, this was an absolute tragedy for the girl and her family. Caffeine overdose is an incredibly unpleasant feeling when you drink one more coffee than you should. The poor girl. It would be kind of Panera to make changes because of it.
Agreed. I mentioned this in another comment but I'm wondering if she was picking up an online order? The article was not clear about that, but it would certainly be a different story if the lemonade wasn't properly labeled on the online menu
Very true
The beverage contains 390mg, which is equivalent to 6.5 cups of coffee. I hope this will be used as a case study for other businesses on how to properly label your drinks and further increase transparancy about ingredients used in beverages.
A typical drip coffee contains roughly 100mg of caffeine per 8 oz cup, which means a 30 oz cup of coffee would contain very similar amounts to one of the charged lemonades in question. Or course, caffeine varies wildly in coffee depending on exactly how it's brewed as well as bean origin and roast, so you could easily see well over 400mg in a 30oz drink. And let's not even get started on adding extra shots of espresso.
For what it's worth, while most of what you said is accurate, espresso contains considerably less caffeine than people tend to think it does. What makes espresso so intense on that front is the concentration per volume, and how fast espresso beverages are consumed in comparison to drip coffee. Drinking a 12oz cup of drip over an hour or two is pretty standard. A double shot cappuccino though, not so much.
Pretty standard where? Literally nobody I know drinks coffee this slow.
I don't think it's that uncommon to sit down with a mug of coffee and sip on it over the course of an hour while working or having a chat with someone but maybe my 10 years of specialty coffee experience led me astray.
After about 15 minutes coffee tastes disgusting to me. Gets so stale and gross. After an hour I would gag and spit it out.
I'm sorry but you do not sound like a coffee person. I cannot comprehend a world where I live in where I get tired of my beverage of coffee after 15 minutes because it became disgusting.
Good quality coffee should continue to develop in flavor substantially as it cools and is actually quite interesting to taste across the temperature spectrum. I'm sorry that hasn't been your experience. I do understand coffee is not for everybody, but I do believe if you have the opportunity to experience well prepared craft coffee it has the potential to change that view.
Think of cooling coffee having a similar effect as decanting wine, because high end coffee is actually extremely similar to wine. The fruit is fermented in massive containers in a very similar fashion to wine making, imparting a large volume of complex flavors. The act of roasting coffee is actually one of the most difficult sciences in the culinary world, to the point that Michelin starred chefs want nothing to do with it - it's actually that difficult to execute well. It is pretty easy for somebody to grab a bag of green coffee and absolutely destroy it. It's incredibly rare for someone to do a coffee its justice. And even then, if the person preparing it once it is roasted doesn't know what they are doing, they can take the best coffee in the world and make it taste awful.
6.5 thimble-sized cups. Compare to an average large coffee (431mg/20oz from Dunkin), or to the average amount consumed by coffee drinkers (~200mg for adults on average, with the 90th percentile being 300-400mg depending on the age group).
This touches on yet another conflating factor. The personal tolerance to caffeine varies wildly from person to person. Some can't have even one cup a day, while others will down an entire pot and just shrug.
This is an absolute tragedy, but Panera is not legally liable. They should however respect her death by improving their signage and giving much more information. A warning that high consumption can be fatal with rare, unknown conditions seems appropriate.
Yeah, I agree. "As much caffeine as our coffee" should be replaced with an explicit number in milligrams and be presented in a standardized label format. It's important information.
Holy crap, just imagine if they accidentally got the mix ratio on the machine wrong and somebody got a higher concentration of syrup.
Panera needs to lose this lawsuit and they need to lose it really hard.
No, the responsibility is solely on the consumer. It's clearly labeled as having caffeine. No one is forcing anybody to ingest anything against their will. It's not the company nor governments responsibility to protect oneself against their own stupidity.
Anything can kill you, but quantity matters. Any reasonable person would assume a product marketed towards them would not have an amount remotely high enough to kill without an explicit warning at the very least.
Per the FDA, caffeine in amounts under 400mg/day is not generally associated with harmful effects for healthy adults. The largest option for this drink (30oz) has 390mg. It's not remotely high enough to kill unless you have a heart problem or other severe abnormal caffeine sensitivity. It is clearly labeled as having as much caffeine as coffee. Similarly to how products with peanuts are labelled as "contains nuts," not "contains enough peanuts to kill you."
And for most people it's fine. This unfortunate person had a heart condition. If you have a medical problem you had better know what you are and aren't allowed to do. People with allergies don't sue jiffy for selling peanut butter
There's not remotely enough caffeine in this beverage "to kill". A dose of caffeine considered fatal is something like 10,000 mg. You'd have to drink more than five gallons of this lemonade to get a fatal dose of caffeine.
I'm not trying to blame the woman and agree that it should have been labeled (mostly because of the quantity of caffeine in the drink and less that it was there at all) but if a product is called "Charged Food Item" and you knew you were under doctors orders to avoid certain things wouldn't you ask what was in the item to make it charged?
Charged could represent electrolytes. Naming schemes can be nonsensical sometimes. What is the "extreme" in extreme burrito? Would that also be caffeine? Or more cheese, a different type of cheese? Some other ingredient? What about chocolate delight? Is delight an ingredient? Is there an ingredient that specifically makes the "delight" part? Sometimes naming schemes are about the process used to create it rather than what is in the food itself; see Triscuit
Someone with food restrictions absolutely has some due diligence on their plate, but calling out a name to divulge or suggest a specific ingredient (when the ingredients name iself is not used) is a hindsight "obviously that's what it means" take.
Bugles is another great example where I do not expect instruments in my food. But there is the sweet sweet music of the crunch
It's a bullshit lawsuit, there are signs in front of the lemonade which clearly say "contains as much caffeine as our dark roast coffee" also it's in all their in store advertising of the product. These parents just want someone to blame, that's it.
honestly the statement "contains as much caffeine as our dark roast coffee" is misleading since that would be comparing an 8oz coffee to 8oz of lemonade. if you drink the coffee you're most likely getting a cup that is 8-16oz. however the standard soft drink size is 20-30oz which would mean one cup is basically your daily serving of caffeine.
if i saw the sign saying "same strength as our coffee" i would assume it's one cup of coffee is equal to one cup of lemonade. who would only fill their cups half way? it's insane to sell one cup that is almost 100% the daily value while it's known bad side effects can happen after 400mg.
That cup is the largest available. I think other large coffee beverages might be in a similar quantity. There are smaller cups and sizes you can order.
The root of everything here is that hidden heart condition. Isn't there a way we can make screening for it more common or mandatory?
Panera sells their coffee is a 16 and 20 fl oz sizes, not 8-16. For the dark roast coffee in a 20, it has 268 mg of caffeine.
They sell the charged lemonades in 20 and 30 do oz sizes. The 20 size generally has 260 mg of caffeine, slightly less than an identical volume of coffee, with the exception of the drive-through servings which is even lower due to ice.
What reasonable person would not consider a nearly identical caffeine per volume to be a fair interpretation of “contains as much caffeine as our dark roast coffee” when both can be ordered in the same 20 ounce size?
Source
And there's pictures going around of stores where those signs are missing.
I'm defending Panera in a lot of my replies here, but it's because we don't know if it's a bullshit lawsuit. All we know is that the OP article is bullshit and I caught it in a lie.
Ok well even if somehow this particular Panera was devoid of any information about the lemonade, which let's be honest that is going to be hard enough to prove since the person who was there that day is dead. That doesn't negate the fact that if you have some kind of health problem associated with certain foods, in this case caffeine, then you should be checking every ingredient of anything you eat especially from a restaurant. If you are buying a product called "charged lemonade" you shouldn't just expect its going to be standard fare when you had no hand in making the product. Literally anyone with a food allergy deals with this shit on a daily basis, and the only time the restaurant should be to blame is if you specifically asked if said ingredient was in the food and they lie or forget to omit it from the dish.
Sure. I bet there are witnesses who would say one way or the other, but you're mostly right.
In fairness, that's not realistic. If I order a lobster and it has lobster in it, that's on me. If I order french fries and they secretly infuse it with lobster without advertising it, then it's on me.
The argument many people are making is that Lemonade "doesn't have caffeine in it". And she wasn't restricted and unable to consume caffeine, she was restricted from large quantities (enough that some folks aren't sure she even died from the drink, but that's another discussion). Expecting a random beverage to have coffee-level caffeine with NO notice is definitely unreasonable.
As many have said, "charged" is often used to refer to electrolytes. I mean, look at this.. The word "charged "alone really is not enough, just like the word "house special" added before fries doesn't mean I should expect there might be lobster in them.
Except still happens, and if I did my due diligence, the restaurant is usually responsible. That's why they have nutritional-content menus and a well-trained restaurant worker takes you VERY seriously if you mention a food allergy. The issue is that sometimes it shouldn't be on you to mention food allergies. I like lobster allergies as an example. Should I immediately say "I have a lobster allergy" when I walk into an Ice Cream Parlor? Is it my fault if I have an allergic reaction to lobster when I order the Chocolate Chunky Monkey?
It did have a notice, they are advertised as having caffeine. So one of two things is going on here: either she just didn't think it was going to harm her, or she was completely oblivious to all the marketing for it. There is really no proof that the lemonade is what killed her; this is just her parents wanting someone to blame. Unless they can prove without a doubt there was negligence on Panera's part and that it led to their daughter's death, then this lawsuit is frivolous.
Or three, there's more to the case than was reported to us. If the marketing was missing (some stores it is) she might have a case. The article makes no mention of that.
You don't need to look for "proof" in civil cases. If the lemonade is more likely than not to have killed her, that's enough. And I think any good lawyer can push a case like this across that bar for a typical jury.
Maybe. We don't know all the details. I'm the one arguing in favor of Panera in most comments, but I'm really arguing in favor of common sense and not inventing a clear win for either side off a small article that was lying to us.
That's not how the law works. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" is a criminal standard. "Preponderance of evidence" is the civil standard, and it's a low bar. Honestly, if we ignore all other evidence and only point out other reasonable people in this thread who were confused about the caffeinated nature of this beverage, we would have it.
So if it hit court (it won't), Panera would likely show evidence of its marketing. The girl's parents would perhaps show evidence the marketing collateral was placed wrong or (from the article) suggest they were misleading with the "Dark Coffee" claim in the way quoted. There's several tactics they could take, honestly.
I would say this lawsuit is a lot of things, but frivolous isn't one of them. It's not intended to harass or delay. It's intended to win.
Tbh, that's what I assumed from the headline. Expected something like that "water" that accidentally included Hydrazine due to the woo-woo they did to make it special