In God We Crust: Panera’s Charged Lemonade is Bread on Arrival

Satirical opinion by Jonas Polsky, Odd News Show

Asleep, passed out, and unresponsive. It’s not the sidewalk in front of a fentanyl clinic, it’s the interior of your local Panera Bread! But these zonked-out customers aren’t on drugs; they’re trapped in a carbohydrate-induced stupor from eating way too much Panera!

Panera has a single business objective: to stuff your body with as much bread as humanly possible. With its famous bread burritos (bite-sized dinner rolls wrapped in a tortilla) and the classic carb martini (liquid dough with a crouton garnish), the average Panera meal packs enough carbohydrates to knock out a baby hippo. With Panera employees bringing out plate after plate of hot, crusty bread, it’s impossible for its customers to stay awake.

From patrons falling forward and passing out into a soup-filled bread bowl or crawling under the table to nap on a giant piece of Texas toast, Panera Bread’s sleeping patrons are a huge headache. In one extreme case, a comatose customer’s body spontaneously grew a protective baguette cocoon while their body slowly digested their Panera for the next 3,000 years.

To make matters worse, Panera Bread’s sales had dropped 2%.

Panera Bread’s CSO (chief sourdough officer) quickly realized that you can’t sell chocolate chip focaccia bread to an unconscious person, so they needed to find something to keep customers awake during a carbohydrate overdose. It would need to provide energy on par with an adrenaline shot, something that would jolt their drowsy customers back to life after eating their weight in bread.

The solution was CHARGED LEMONADE.

The process for creating Charged Lemonade was simple. Plant a lemon tree on top of the grave of a deceased Limp Bizkit fan, water the seeds with Red Bull, and then wait for the tree to be struck by lightning. The end result was a refreshing lemon beverage that when ingested felt like you’d been hit by a speeding car and electrocuted with a taser at the same time.

It would’ve been too dangerous to test Charged Lemonade on animals, so they just fed it to Panera customers.

The first sign of side effects was when a child wanted a refill of Charged Lemonade, so he blink-teleported across the restaurant to the soda fountain. It’s also worth noting that after his first sip of Charged Lemonade, that child never needed to sleep again. Another Panera patron accidentally slashed their hand open with a knife, but when Charged Lemonade was spilled on it, the skin rapidly knitted itself back together.

Someone figured out that you could actually pour Charged Lemonade into your gas tank, and the car would run, but after doing the math, they realized it wasn’t a great substitute because it was about ten times more expensive than gasoline.

The news that Charged Lemonade was quite literally performing miracles spread quickly on social media. People began pouring Charged Lemonade onto dead bodies (bringing them back to life) or pouring it onto inanimate objects like books or skateboards (to turn it into a living thing).

Now the Panera Bread dining area was overflowing with dancing books and rapping skateboards. This was objectively worse than before.

The point at which the “Reanimate Two Dinosaurs and Make Them Fight Challenge” began trending on TikTok; it was time to pull the plug. Panera Bread understood that as much as it was helping sales, putting the power of a God into a cup was hurting the public’s perception of the Panera brand. They did the responsible thing by disposing of the remaining Charged Lemonade somewhere safe, by dumping it into the ocean. Now just a footnote in the brief —but fascinating—history of fast casual dining, Charged Lemonade is no longer available, no matter how much you beg.