Alcoholic drinks have killed millions of people. No one takes them off the shelf.
They’ll pull the lemonade drink. It will be but a small incident in the big story of what people choose to consume that is harmful to themselves and others around them.
Signage, rules, laws, design studies and anything else they throw at the public be damned.
The buyer beware.
I’ll admit I’m not grasping what you mean by design in this context. We’re talking about a beverage. It goes in a container and is drunk. That’s really the only way to design a beverage. How can a beverage be designed differently? Apparently the problem was with the caffeine. You’ve already said that stopping selling this product isn’t a good solution, so what else is there?
He already suggested offering the “energy shots” separately. I’ll make three other suggestions:
I’ve been thinking about this and I can’t figure out a solution. They could lower the caffeine content but people could just drink more. It’s already about the same as coffee but less than a few energy drinks per volume. Anything else, like a doctor’s note or a release form, is ridiculous and unworkable.
Assuming that the drink killed her, which isn’t proven, she was careless like many youths.
I think that’s unlikely. Very few people drink so much cola that they consume that much caffeine. And they have time to feel the effects of the caffeine as they are doing it.
Just out of curiosity…
What do people think about the need to label drinks with warnings for the amount of sugar they contain. The Mango charged lemonade is like drinking syrup, and there are certainly vastly more diabetics than there are people with Long QT…
I would argue that this is not at all obvious.
It’s certainly possible, but “doing the right thing” doesn’t always increase corporate profitability, and corporate profitability – no matter what we think of it as Priority One – often reigns supreme.
Another thing that happens in Corporate America, all across the country, and every day, is that the various departments make their case – based on how their group sees the situation – and then somebody from senior management – having, hopefully, taken all the opinions, rationale, arguments, and recommendations into account – makes the decision that – in that person’s opinion – best meets the company’s overall objectives.
Engineering and Operations don’t always agree.
Marketing and Production don’t always agree.
Quality Assurance and Logistics/Purchasing may often be at odds.
HR, Customer Service, IT, and Finance may occasionally have inherent tension with every other department.
So, sometimes a given perspective wins. Sometimes, a given perspective loses. Sometimes, the feeling is that nobody won. Sometimes, it’s that everybody got something.
But a CEO isn’t likely to take as a given that The Middle Way is going to automatically be more profitable. They’re going to want to see a solid case made and compelling evidence and analysis presented in support of that case.
And publicly-traded companies answer to shareholders, often with significant stakes in the company. Shifting a paradigm toward “being better corporate citizens” – if it even maybe comes at a bottom-line cost – is often more trouble than it’s worth to a CEO or C-suite person.
Gotta be careful with any commercial drink product. Hell, milk in all it variations can be harmful. Of course it’s meant for baby cows (or almonds), not people.
In my world all are suspect. I drink water and plain tea. I order unsweetened, no caffeine iced tea. I’ve been served the wrong thing many times. It’s on me to determine if this is safe for me to drink. I certainly wouldn’t drink from an in store mixed container of some lemonade concoction. That dangerous on many levels.
If I had long QT, I think steering clear of any soda, sweetened or caffeine drink would be top priority.
ISTM the only “safe” form of caffeinated sweetened fruit punch is one where a slender female teen person could drink three 32oz “super big gulps” at a sitting and not get near a caffeine overdose. Because some non-trivial fraction of the soda / punch drinking public will do just that.
The problem is that for the 50th percentile customer who drinks just 8 ounces (plus 4 ounces of ice in a 12 ounce clear plastic cup), the caffeine dosage is negligible / imperceptible.
There are some medicinal drugs that are very dangerous to use because the minimum effective dose for some patients is near to, or exceeds, the maximum safe dose for other patients. These drugs have very severe warning labels on them and are managed by very aware professionals in in-patient or other well-controlled settings. They damned sure aren’t sold OTC.
IMO caffeinated sweetened fruit punch is one of those products that may in fact be too dangerous to sell OTC just because of the completely predictable frequency of customers doing a 10x or 15x overdose versus “normal” consumption of the product.
As @Beckdawrek said above, one of the problems with substances dangerous to some subset of the populace is how it gets slipped into stuff unexpectedly and without clear disclosure. So even those paying attention get fooled.
I’m diabetic. I try to consume zero added sugar in my restaurant foods. The advent of things like sriracha sauce has been a disaster for folks like me. The hot disguises the sweet flavor I need to detect if it’s served to me. Either because they mis-made the item or because I mis-ordered based on a bad guess with inadequate menu info.
Meanwhile the marketers love the stuff exactly because the hot masks the sweet and the sweet masks the hot. The food can be made extra addictive to non-diabetics while also being made extra dangerous to diabetics. Many of whom have developed a taste for hot to offset the inability to eat sweet.
Caffeinated soda / punch is selling the caffeine addiction to folks who dislike the flavor of coffee. It needs to be dosed for consumption like fruit punch, not like coffee.
Do you think the caffeine in Coke is imperceptible to half of all Americans? I don’t. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be there.
This, we all know it’s there.
It aligns with my experience. Tolerance to caffeine is extremely common. Most people I know can drink soda just before bed and be fine. These people don’t really notice the caffeine anymore. If you ask them why they like a soda, they’ll say it’s for the taste. It’s those of us who don’t drink caffeine who pay attention to it. If anything, I’d expect it’s more than half of people who don’t really notice it.
As for why they’d include it? Well, imagine no one could tell about caffeine. It would still be an addictive substance that elevates mood. You have something that not only makes people feel better when they consume your product but feel worse they they don’t. Heck, I’m pretty sure that was the original reason for adding caffeine to drinks, and why it gets put into drinks that don’t normally have it, like orange soda.) or root beer.
And I agree that the obvious solution is just to reduce the amount of caffeine. I would very much doubt the specific level of caffeine is the goal. They probably just want it to have more caffeine that the usual sodas.
Their goal here is presumably to use the caffeine and the refill club to get people to come by the restaurant more often and buy their food there. Having it be more caffeine than you’d get elsewhere would be important to that. But there’s no reason they need to have more caffeine in a single physical cup than is in most energy drinks. Especially when they provide free refills.
Prohibition of caffeine is not the answer.
This rarely works.
And, if they are gonna prohibit this, why not a gazillion other additives?
In what way was the design bad? The example back in post 18 shown signs hanging on the containers clearly showing that the 20oz servings have 260 mg of caffeine and the 30oz has 390mg. I/we don’t know for sure that this was the setup at the store in question, but if the signs were missing, that’s the fault of that store, not Panera in general.
What would be a better design? Having the consumer sign an affidavit that they’re aware that the drink has caffeine before unlocking the nozzle? Have an employee standing there advising them that the drink is caffeinated? “I’m required to let you know that this charged lemonade has caffeine. Do you understand?”
I do agree that additional signage does nothing but further protect them from litigation, but the existing signage was sufficient notification of the contents.
I still say the most obvious thing is to not put so much caffeine in the drinks. That was also a design decision, and one that was unlikely to be necessary for their goals. None of their marketing seems to say their intent is to compete with energy drinks, saying you go to Panera instead of buying that Red Bull.
I still say having a 32oz drink with nearly the maximum recommend amount of caffeine per day while heavily incentivizing refills was a bad design decision. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened.
Though other ideas include changing the color of the drink. Don’t call it lemonade, but “lemon energy drink.” Specifically market it as dangerous. (Yes, you can make it appealing while doing that.) Make it come out slower from the dispenser, and use cups for it that look larger than they are. Do what most energy drink companies do and make it not taste that great. Maybe even actually have it in cans without free refills.
Granted, some of those ideas would go against what I think their intent was—to have a slightly more addicting drink that got people to come to Panera more often, and thus more likely to use them as their usual fast food place.
But that’s why I think the obvious move is just to not have them contain so much caffeine.
Since you have some experience in manufacturing, think about how in manufacturing, there are still going to be dangerous parts, the goal is that humans are aware which are the dangerous activities and walk in being aware of the risk. If people still want to do something dumb being fully aware of the risk, that’s a choice and is on them vs making a mistake of not understanding the risk due to a design mistake on your part.
eg: one thing I’m a little bit familiar with is with robot arms and how humans occasionally have to be within the range of them do to maintenance, etc. So what do we do? We put giant yellow and black tape lines that mark out the exact bounding box a robot arm can reach and we establish a consistent standard across the world so no matter where you go, if you see a yellow and black tape line, you think twice before walking over it. We put giant red lockout buttons next to equipment that can suddenly cause issues like lathes and robot arms so as soon as you see a lockout button, you are thinking of the ways that this thing can kill you and how you’re meant to hit the lockout button if something happens. We establish procedures that someone is always on the outside observing ready to hit a lockout button because we know people in the middle of maintenance can often be too deep in concentration to notice anything. We put a ton of red lights everywhere that are only on when the robot arm is completely turned off so it’s immediately obvious when it’s safe to approach one and we develop gut training that it feels extremely dangerous to ever approach one if the multitude of red lights are not all on.
So say, for example, you put 3 beverage dispensers side by side, and they go “No Charge”, “Normal Charge”, “Fully Charged”. And there’s the following copy:
No Charge: Our standard uncaffeinated version of the peach lemonade you know and love.
Normal Charge: For those who want a boost, our normal charge version will help get you going with the same jolt as a cup of coffee and then there’s a big icon of a cartoon 18 oz cold drink container with straw and an equals sign and then a cartoon of a standard 6oz sized coffee mug.
Fully Charged: With more xtreme branding: Something that will really get you going, our fully charged <blah blah, marketing message Panera wants to promote> and then a big icon of a cartoon 18 oz cold drink container with straw and an equals sign and then three cartoon of a standard 6 oz sized coffee mug. Also, our no charge and normal charge beverages are eligible for our unlimited beverage program but unfortunately, our fully charged one is not.
Even though this is the same factual information as “this drink contains the same amount of caffeine as coffee”, do you see how that’s 1000% clearer to the end user how to interpret that info? Hell, even just using the pictures and showing a cold cup with a straw = 3 hot cups in caffeine is better than saying it in words.
The design is bad when it violates the users expectations. If a user expectation is violated, then by definition, it’s “bad” in a certain way. Just because a design is “bad” doesn’t mean that there exists a better design or that it’s worth implementing, just that you should notice when such things occur and enter the design loop. You first evaluate what is the scope of the problem and whether it deserves fixing, then you ideate a bunch of possible solutions based on design expertise, you select a few of them to test to see if it fixes the problem and you do this in a loop until the problem is fixed to a degree of satisfaction.
Where people go wrong is in the assumption that the loop is complicated and must involve some kind of tradeoff and they imagine the tradeoffs the loop might have as an argument against this and 99% of the time, this is not the case. Again, that’s so far down the road from this it’s not even worth considering now, the problem is noticing you have a problem and caring to fix it.
I’ll give you an example, a few years ago, I was on an ecommerce site and realized it had a parsing bug where the order form gave an error if you put in CA as the state and only CA (I’m guessing it first through all the country codes and applied some logic before going through state codes so when you type in CA, it assumes you are shipping to the state of Canada and gets confused). I couldn’t figure it out so I went and bought the same thing from another site. Then a few months later, I remembered how bad the site was so I went back and tried again and the bug was still there.
Now, what the situation here is clear, right? You can’t argue that there’s some secret business reason for this company to refuse to ship to California, it’s straightforward incompetence. Nobody noticed that the entire company had never made a sale to the entire state of California and wondered why, and nobody cared enough to find whatever bug it was and fix it. The entire design loop is trivial, the hard bit was the noticing. And if they’re not noticing something as basic as this, what else aren’t they noticing, right? What other incompetence is going to be afflicted on me by this company because they didn’t bother to put in the relevant analytics to surface this problem to them.
People keep asking what the fix I propose is and I keep telling them the fix is the trivial bit at the end of the process. The hard part is building up that culture where you first notice and then when you see a problem, the goal is to fix the problem rather than do anything else. If you have that mindset, it’s not that difficult to fix most of the problems you newly start to notice.
Sorry, but you’re going to have to unpack this further for me. I what way were user expectations violated? I see a sign that this drink has caffeine and I expect this drink to have caffeine. Are you suggesting that they should have expressed the caffeine content in cups of coffee… ie. 2.75 and 4.1?
They’re not gonna do all that. They’re not gonna make it taste bad, that’s just silly. They’re gonna end up pulling it off the menu. Outta sight, outta mind.
It’s not Paneras signature item. It’s a drink.
Yep, it’s gone.
It doesn’t matter that you understood the situation clearly. Empirically, some statistical number of people either
a) believed the drink didn’t have caffeine
b) believed the drink had a low level of caffeine
c) didn’t correctly understand the impact that amount of caffeine would have on them.
As a result, they had a negative customer experience at Panera to the detriment of both Panera and the customer.
There’s no “should” in problem fixing culture, you’re not allowed to say well they should have read the sign or they should have understood effects of caffeine or they should have been more responsible. Regardless of any possible shoulds, the empirical fact is that these things happened and this is a problem.
The extent of the “why” is only important insofar as it helps us lead to a solution. The why doesn’t have to be empirically correct, just effective at leading us to potential solutions. Then, we try a solution out and ask did it help us solve the problem? Did it decrease the incidence of a, b & c? You can try a sign as a solution, maybe a different sign would decrease a, b & c somewhat but not completely to zero. But if you keep on trying more and different signs, eventually you reach a point of diminishing returns where no possible amount of signage can continue to reduce a, b & c so you need to start looking at other solutions. You keep on trying different stuff until you solve the problem to the extent that is no longer an important problem and you can focus on the next problem.
For a problem like this, the rate of a, b & c that you want to hit is zero and the available solutions for it are easy to find. People automatically assume that just because there is a process, that means the problem must be tricky. Same way as the solution to a leaky ceiling is obvious and fixing the problem reduces the risk of someone slipping from dripping water down to zero, not some small number, actual zero. In this case, we can’t know what the solution is because we don’t have the internal context or parameters of Panera, just that a solution obviously exists.
The point I want to emphasize is that the hard thing is noticing there is a problem and being in the problem fixing mindset. And the hard thing about that isn’t noticing any individual one problem, it’s that you are either in a general problem solving mindset culture or you are not and most of the planet in most of the things are not, so yes, they miss tricky, thorny problems that require deep thought, but they also miss stupid simple obvious problems that are easy wins and they miss a lot of them to the extent that I have no problem diagnosing this as one of them.
And again, think of this not in terms of lemonade but in terms of car accidents. A car accident happens and we are all like, who’s to blame? who’s at fault? who was impacted? why did they do this? This is not a problem fixing framework. Car accidents exist, we would like less of them to exist, let’s just continue to introduce new designs, see if they help fix the problem and then keep on doing that. It turns out there’s thousands of stupid simple wins in every city every day. You start on the process and build the culture and you eventually reap the rewards in the long term.
I don’t see any change that will work if someone chooses to ignore clearly posted information. You don’t see peanut ingredients listed as well as Panera listed caffeine. It’s far more dangerous to someone with peanut allergies.