According to that link, a regular grande (medium) size Starbucks coffee is 310mg of caffeine, so 390 for an extra caffeinated energy drink doesn’t seem like that big of a difference that some people are claiming.
I enjoy the warnings on 5 gallon buckets. The artwork is very well done.
Too bad babies can’t read the fine print.
That needs to go on mattresses, too - minus the yard guy. No, it’s not so heavy that it will stay in place without being tied down - specially when there’s a line of them stacked on their edges. They fly like kites when the wind/airstream hits them right. (Meaning they jerk up halfway to the sky and then come crashing down in a random direction.)
But it is okay as long as you have your window rolled down and are hanging onto the edge of the mattress on your car roof, right? 
Kites need warnings.
“Caution you may discover electricity if you attach a key to the kite”
That’s a little conspiratorial, don’t you think? My guess is the reverse of that- unscrupulous plaintiffs attorneys taking advantage of grieving parents wanting to punish a big company.
I feel like this was probably garden-variety stupidity on Panera’s part, where they assumed people would actually read the labels, and adjust their consumption accordingly. Which clearly didn’t happen in this case, and I’m guessing there are thousands of people who drank way too much, but didn’t actually die, because they didn’t read the labels either. Assuming @running_coach’s picture is accurate, it was labeled (or supposed to have been).
They also probably assumed that most people have a clue about caffeine and knew that a 30 oz cup of that stuff is a colossal dose- a day’s worth in one drink. I suspect that’s probably not the case for most people. Nor is doing the math to figure out that the charged lemonades do have a similar amount of caffeine per oz as caffeine, but few people typically drink a quart of coffee at a time either.
In other words, I doubt there was anything nefarious and cover-upish, just garden variety stupidity by underestimating the ignorance of the general population.
Nope. It is the absolute reality of a poorly regulated capitalist economy.
I think we have all agreed that if that label was on the container they are fine. The issue is whether or not that was true prior to her death.
I know the McDonald’s coffee tangent was shut down as a hijack, but I think it’s very relevant here. McD’s lost that lawsuit because the prosecution proved the chain knew their coffee was too hot - they’d settled hundreds of cases where customers were burned. They decided, very straightforwardly, that the number of people they were hurting was too low to justify changing their practice.
Not a conspiracy. Just the way businesses operate.
Right. McD’s deserved to be raked over the coals. There is no evidence as of yet that Panera had a single instance of a problem before this one.
Sure, I’m just saying it’s not even a little bit wild to suggest that a corporation might prioritize profits over customer safety. That’s their default mode.
As I noted above, those signs where there when they first introduced the drinks. I saw (and read them) when they were first offered. What is new is that they added additional signs warning about consuming too much caffeine.
//i\\
I know that it happens all the time but I wouldn’t say it’s the default mode. I was a manufacturing engineer for high tech consumer products for 30 years. I never saw anything like that happen first hand. We took safety very, very seriously.
I didn’t work in every industry and not at all in food service so the default there could be different.
I’ll concede the hyperbole and downgrade it from “default mode” to “all the time.”
I think corporations actually vary quite a bit as to their “default mode”. They all care about profits, and they are all aware of customer safety. Some care a lot more about customer safety than others.
I have absolutely no insight as to where Panera stands on that question.
Screwdrivers come with an eye-protection warning sticker on them.
I know how that sort of cost-benefit analysis works, but what I’m saying is that I really doubt that it actually went on here.
I would bet that there was just a lot of ignorance about how people pay attention to signage, and how informed the public is about caffeine dosages, combined with the fact that the vast majority of people would be fine even if they drank a couple of these a day. I mean, we’ve all known people that drink LOTS of coffee over the work day; this isn’t really any different.
But they probably didn’t really think out what would happen if they had a person with a caffeine-sensitive medical condition who didn’t or couldn’t read or properly interpret the signs and do the math. For most people, it probably wouldn’t have mattered, but for her it did.
My suspicion is that it’s not a thing for restaurants. I mean, they probably are concerned with things like known allergens, and either labeling foods containing them, or just composing menus around them. But outside of that, I doubt there’s a lot of real safety concern- it’s food, after all. So I bet that they felt like as long as they kept it in the same ballpark as energy drinks (assumed to be safe, I’ll bet) , they’d be fine.
I dunno, food safety is a huge deal.
My father had a cousin who owned a small meat processing plant. They made ham and a bunch of other prepared meat products, and he gave us a tour, once. He said that he pretty much ignored the FDA inspectors because their standards were way too low. He felt that if a single incident of food poisoning was traced to his plant, he would be out of business. The reputational risk of anyone getting hurt due to his products was an extremely high priority for him.
Panera was sold to JAB Holding for 7.5 billion dollars in 2017. They’re not a mom and pop store. Thwy wouldn’t have launched a new drink without extensive market research and consulting.
It’s all pure speculation of course, but I have trouble believing that at no point, not even once was the caffeine content scrutinized. And it’s not like this is coffee. It’s lemonade with stimulants added. That means the caffeine content is a deliberate choice.
The number they landed on was deemed by somebody, somewhere, to be the right amount of caffeine. Of course safety was part of the consideration.
Related.
I think there’s a difference between “food safety” regarding poisoning and common allergens and a company being concerned about exactly how much caffeine is on their drinks. A company concerned with safety doesn’t want any food poisoning connected to their products and there are often warnings regarding common allergens , such as the “Manufactured in a facility that uses _________”. But you don’t see warnings regarding uncommon allergens like mustard and I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere where the menu or in-store signs tell you how much caffeine is in a given size of iced or hot coffee/tea. They don’t even tell you how much caffeine is in the decaf versions ( yes, there is some).
Panera certainly would have done some market research and consulting and absolutely would have known how much caffeine was in the charged lemonade ( after all, how could they sell it as charged if there was only a tiny amount of caffeine ?) but we don’t in general require manufacturers and restaurants to put up signs or labels regarding the details of everything that might hurt anyone. That business about the allergens - manufacturers are only required to list eight on the labels . They aren’t required to to specify colors/spices/flavoring even though people can be allergic to those. Restaurant are only required to provide a limited amount of nutritional information on menus - usually , just calories ( although they are required to have additional info available for customers who ask).
I saw this for the first time today - Crawford is the family’s lawyer
The Unlimited Sip Club, of which Katz was a part at the time of her death, serves as a kind of membership that allows customers to have unlimited refills for some drinks, including Charged Lemonade. Including the beverage as part of that promotion, Crawford said, suggests “it is safe to have more than one” of them.
“And that is a big problem because it is not safe to have one,” Crawford said.
That’s not really true - it wasn’t safe for this person to have more than one of them, and maybe it wasn’t even safe for her to have one. But that doesn’t mean that it’s generally not safe to have more than one. And as far as “unlimited refills means it’s safe to have more than one” - I can drink an unlimited amount of coffee with that Sip Club membership - why would it imply safety for the lemonade but not for the coffee?