I, for one, despise coffee.
Me too though I do drink hot black tea.
What ever happened to the Buyer Beware thingy in this world?
We decided it’s better in the long run to put the burden of safety on the multibillion dollar corporations who otherwise have very little to lose if they kill off a few customers here and there.
It’s about the same per ounce. Someone who drank two cups of coffee would get the same caffeine.
If the lawsuit loses, but prompts Panera and other companies to more obviously label super-high caffeine products, the lawsuit will have done some good in the world.
Maybe that will be the settlement?
They have already changed the labeling according to reports. I’m still not concerned the lawsuit has any merit.
This.
And on a different note it wouldn’t be a bad idea if the FDA ramped up research on this trend because it’s either driven by or aimed at younger people.
I really wish highly caffeinated beverages weren’t labeled or marketed as “energy drinks.” Caffeine doesn’t increase cellular energy production, and it doesn’t provide fuel. It makes us feel more awake, or, to be more accurate, keeps us from feeling as tired as we are. I suppose you could argue the high sugar content provides energy, but there are diet “energy” drinks.
Nobody calls black, unsweetened coffee an “energy drink,” do they? Whence this practice of adding caffeine to all sorts of beverages? And who started referring to those beverages as “energy drinks”? Why does the FDA allow it?
We’ve millennia of experience to show buyers aren’t wary. They’re not always aware, either.
Eh, Starbucks:
Tall (12 oz): 260 mg (How Much Caffeine in a Cup of Coffee? A Detailed Guide)
I frequently see people drink two of those if thry’re hanging out or having a meeting, hence consuming over the recommended caffeine limit. Kind of like yesterday when I was at a Panda Express and watched people get a double orange chicken with fried rice and a soda–490 + 490 + 520 + 510 + 121 for the fortune cookie = 2131 calories for lunch (using Panda’s numbers).
To expand on this a little…
With coffee, the darker the roast, the lower the caffeine content. So French roast, espresso, etc… are all generally lower in caffeine than the lighter roasts from the same producer.
This whole thing strikes me as a situation of unscrupulous plaintiff’s attorneys taking advantage of grieving parents wanting to take it out on a large, faceless corporate entity, instead of admitting that their dear daughter may have just screwed up in a fatal way.
I would imagine the lawyers know they don’t have a case, and expect to settle out of court. Which is good for them- they get their cut and don’t actually have to prove anything. The parents get a payout, and will probably be more rational by that point. The only real loser is Panera, who will likely settle to limit legal fees, rather than fight it out and win, because settling early will cost them less than winning in the overall analysis.
Whatever you do, don’t start adding up the saturated fat in your regular diet, especially if you have a fondness for ribeye steak, pizza, and/or ice cream (not even all at once—although…).
I think the crux of the issue is how a reasonable person would interpret “as much caffeine as our coffee”. I think it’s fairly clear that she thought it meant the entire volume of the drink had as much caffeine as a regular cup of coffee, when it actually meant that caffeine was at the same concentration as the coffee. If you compare it to alcohol, generally that’s measured by “standard drinks” which is the amount of alcohol in one mixed drink, one glass of wine, or one pint(?) of beer, which despite having alcohol in different concentrations, the difference in volume of the serving makes them have roughly the same amount of alcohol. I don’t drink alcohol, but that’s what I remember from being warned about drinking and driving and such.
So it might be expected that this person when confronted the wording that it contained as much caffeine as the coffee, that it meant on a per serving basis, not a per volume basis. I think that’s a reasonable interpretation that most people would have. She probably was used to having one “serving” of caffeine, which her doctor presumably said was fine.
That said, I think it’s entirely irresponsible to be drinking any caffeine anywhere close to the lethal dose for you. So I don’t really think the parents really deserve any money out of this, but Panera (and everyone else who has such drinks) needs to be much clearer about how much caffeine is in beverages they’re serving.
In the US, it’s 12 oz beer @5%, 5 oz. wine@ 12%, 1.5 distilled spirits@40%.
No, of course they don’t. They don’t deserve any money, they deserve their daughter. That or deserve’s got nothing to do with it. Regardless, I strongly suspect that money as money has even less to do with it.
IME the new line of “zero sugar” soda products taste very close to the full sugar kind. They taste nothing like the traditional nasty-tasting “diet” products.
As a late-acquired diabetic I have enjoyed the advent of the “zero” products which I can drink while enjoying the full-sugar taste I grew up with.
Whether that helps you easily enjoy a familiar soda taste that’s harmless for you, or it prevents you from realizing when someone has switched “zero” for full-sugar and you’re inadvertently getting full frontal HFCS is up to you.
I’m also diabetic, and while I do appreciate the wide variety of zero stuff…I still miss eating a real peanut butter cup sometimes.
It’s a sad statement, but clearly in the USA today suing is the only method by which a consumer can enforce responsible behavior on a corporation. And only after they have caused extreme harm.
Corporate spin doctors like to try and make us all believe that when we are doing this we are just being greedy, or wasting the court’s time. But when we try to enforce corporate responsibility by imposing reasonable regulations on them, they say “Let the market forces run the market.”
Well, here they are, bucko. Enjoy the ride. If you want to put a drink out there with 200mg more caffeine than anybody would ever expect, and you don’t go to the trouble of labeling it, and somebody dies, here comes the market force, just like a big 'ol mack truck. I hope you are ready for it.
I’m quite certain we’ll find out that somewhere in the Panera corporation there’s a memo delineating the cost comparison between sales lost by labeling the drinks vs paying off a few families. That’s how these things usually turn out.