Panera’s “Lemonade That Kills You” Is Really a Story About Our Broken Country – By Mark Jospeh Stern (Slate) / Dec 8, 2023
Will Panera’s Charged Lemonade kill you? That’s a reasonable conclusion to draw from media coverage of two wrongful death lawsuits accusing the restaurant chain of failing to sufficiently warn customers about the beverage’s alleged dangers. Write-ups in the New York Times, CNN Business, Time, NBC, and CBS warn that the drink—which has an unusual amount of caffeine for lemonade—is “linked to” or “blamed” for two deaths (and counting). Charged Lemonade has gone viral on social media as “the lemonade that kills you”; Panera stands by the product for now, though it has added more warnings about the ingredients both online and in-store.
The untimely death of two Panera customers is tragic under any circumstances. The link between these deaths and Charged Lemonade, however, remains highly speculative—more so, perhaps, than some breathless reporting might indicate. If the lemonade did play a role, it is unclear whether Panera can or should be held responsible—the company’s product appears to pose no meaningful health risk to the overwhelming majority of consumers.
Which is why the story of “the lemonade that kills you” is really the story of the United States’ uniquely weird and patchy regulatory regime. Rather than double-check that products of all kind are safe and healthy in advance of their release to the people, our great republic relies on these kinds of lawsuits to protect Americans from dangerous products. This is far from ideal, and it means the mere existence of such a suit has little bearing on its ultimate merit. The Charged Lemonade suits, for example, have received outsized press attention not because it’s indisputably lethal, but simply because it seems so absurd that something as innocuous as lemonade could (but probably doesn’t) kill you.
