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.
In four cups, rather.
Nah, a single large cup of Charged Lemonade is 390 mg of caffeine. The FDA limit is 400 mg
A cup is 8 oz. 30 oz is just under 4 cups.
Their large cups are 30oz. As in, they sold them in 30oz cups.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/panera-lawsuit-charged-lemonade-sarah-katz-death-rcna120785
To quote, and emphasis is my own:
“But at 390 milligrams, the large Charged Lemonade has more caffeine than any size of Panera’s dark roast coffee, the complaint says — numbers that the nutrition facts on Panera’s website confirm. It also has guarana extract, another stimulant, as well as the equivalent of nearly 30 teaspoons of sugar, the complaint continues, adding that 390 milligrams of caffeine is higher than the caffeine content of standard cans of Red Bull and Monster energy drinks combined. Katz had gotten the large cup, which is 30 fluid ounces, according to the attorney representing her family.”
The point is that it doesn’t have any unusual amount of caffeine for an energy drink. Saying it has the limit in a single cup is misleading when the “cup” is not a normal size.
It has a very unusual amount of caffeine for an energy drink, at 13mg per ounce. Red bull is at 9mg and monster is at 10mg.
That, and it was sold as a lemonade, not an energy drink. Lemonade typically has zero caffeine.
It’s not misleading at all. It’s literally the cup they give you, expect you to consume and then offer free refills on.
It’s absolutely typical. Here’s an article comparing 31 popular energy drinks. 3 at around 6-8 mg/FlOz, 16 of them are around 10 mg/FlOz, and the other 12 are in the range of 16-18 mg/FlOz. So that puts Panera right around the average of 12.4
Regarding terminology you might compare “hard lemonade” which has a lot more alcohol in it than is typical for lemonade…
Regarding the cup size, let me introduce you to the big gulp range with a “shocking” 690 mg per ‘cup’. It’s quite surprising but a larger drink contains more caffeine.
And how many of them come in a 30oz cup? Or come right up to safe daily intake limits in a single can? A: none of them.
And if a company sold that shit with alcohol levels slamming right against safe daily intake levels in a single cup, and placed that shit right next to their regular lemonade with basically no information on the fact that it contains a shit ton of alcohol, didn’t have an alcohol taste and allowed free refills, they’d be getting lawsuits up the ass for much the same reason.
Jesus christ you couldn’t miss the point any harder if you were piss drunk at an archery range.
It’s not in a single cup though, that was my point. It’s in a giant fucking monstrosity of a cup, and this dude drank three of them.
This is like if someone drinks a case of hard lemonade and is surprised to get drunk!
I’ll cut some slack because the dude was mentally handicapped but this is entirely predictable.
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.
How do you think terms like that get established?
Try searching for “charged drink”, you find in addition to Panera’s infamous offering: Sprecher charged lemonade, NOS charged citrus, a Coca Cola brand simply called “charged”… pretty much every single result relates to energy drinks of some kind.
It does have an unusual amount of caffeine for an energy drink, and it has an insane amount of caffeine for lemonade
I know you saw my other comment but 13 mg/oz is a little above average for an “energy drink”, not unusual at all. Most of the upper range is 300 mg/16 oz = 18.75 mg/oz. Just below that, 200 mg/12 oz is common: 16.67 mg/oz. Then there’s a lot around 160 mg/16 oz = 10 mg/oz. Anything below that and you’re pretty much outside the range of “energy drink”. Heck even regular coffee is around 12 mg/oz (95 mg /cup). So this lemonade has slightly higher caffeine content than coffee.
The only unusual thing is drinking 90 oz in one sitting.
That is unusual, but I’d say the lemonade having caffeine is actually the most unusual thing about this