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.
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.
It is a single cup though. A cup isn’t defined as being 8 oz, a cup is a thing that you drink out of. 30 Oz is a big cup, but it’s a pretty normal amount of lemonade. Three full 30 Oz cups might be a lot of lemonade, but that much lemonade generally has around 0 milligrams of caffeine
A cup is commonly defined as 8 oz. There is no way that drinking a full 30-oz “cup” three times could be construed as “a single cup” by any definition.
So, you realize a cup is an object right? Like, this is commonly referred to as a “cup”
It is not 8 oz. It is an object that you hold in your hand that’s meant to contain liquid. A single one of those objects might be called a single cup, regardless of its size
In that sense, stating an amount of caffeine per “cup” is completely meaningless, since they can be most any size. It could mean a coffee cup (5 oz) or a 7-11 Team Gulp cup (128oz), or anything in between or beyond.
I would argue that stating an amount per 8 oz is completely meaningless, and that we should instead state the amount in each cup size that the restaurant sells
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.