Brooke Buchanan has joined Panera as the chief corporate affairs officer one month after the chain agreed to the first of four lawsuits linked to its highly caffeinated lemonade.
Panera Bread has retained a top-flight crisis manager as the bakery-café chain continues to face litigation over its hyper-caffeinated Charged Lemonade and prepares for a much-delayed IPO.
Panera has hired Brooke Buchanan as its new chief corporate affairs officer, the company has confirmed to BBC News on Wednesday.
Buchanan is joining Panera from Edelman, a global communications company where she was most recently the crisis lead for the United States. She declined to comment when asked.
Best known as the ‘corporate Ghostbuster’, Buchanan was the chief public relations officer for blood-testing company Theranos during the fraud scandal that erupted after the Wall Street Journal published an expose on the company’s founder Elizabeth Holmes in 2015.
In the position which she held for less than a year, Buchanan managed the corporate communications as Theranos plummeted as a result of Justice Department, SEC, and CMS investigations.
Buchanan’s new role at Panera comes a month after the restaurant chain agreed to settle with the plaintiffs in the first of four legal cases against it over the Charged Lemonade.
The out of court settlement was with the family of Sarah Katz, an Ivy League student with congenital heart disease who died after consuming Charged Lemonade in September 2022.
Panera, which has not admitted any misconduct, said in May that it had stopped selling the lemonade across the country as part of a “recent menu change.”
All the suits were filed by Philadelphia based law firm Kline & Specter, PC and described the beverage as a “dangerous energy drink.”
Besides Katz’s death, the suits accused the drink of killing a man from Florida and causing two healthy men to suffer from permanent cardiac damage.
Those suits are ongoing, with the case of the Florida death to go to trial in November 2025, said Elizabeth Crawford, a partner at Kline & Specter.
Of the plaintiffs who claimed they suffered cardiac injuries, one is scheduled for trial in April 2026 while the other is yet to be assigned a trial date, Crawford said.
The Food and Drug Administration states that it is safe for healthy adults to take up to 400mg of caffeine per day.
The legal actions claim that Charged Lemonade had been marketed as a “plant-based and clean” drink that offered the same amount of caffeine as the restaurant’s dark roast coffee.
However, at 390 milligrams of caffeine when served without ice, a large Charged Lemonade contained more caffeine than any size of Panera’s dark roast coffee, the court documents revealed.
The Charged Lemonade also contained guarana extract, another stimulant and 29 grams of sugar in large size, according to the court papers.
After the lawsuit about the death of Katz, the Panera made some changes: the Charged Lemonade was moved behind the counter and was no longer self-serve and the nutritional value of the product was changed to reflect how much caffeine was in the beverage when served with ice.
It also had banners in stores that warned consumers to take Charged Lemonade in moderation.
Panera is based in Missouri and was acquired in 2017 by European investment firm JAB Holding Co., which delisted the chain.
Panera has for years signaled its desire to go public again and submitted a confidential registration statement for an IPO toward the end of 2023.
A representative of JAB did not respond to questions on Wednesday about when the company might go public and about Buchanan’s appointment.
Following her tenure at Theranos, Buchanan joined Whole Foods as the global vice president of communications when the grocery business was facing scandals of overcharging customers for packaged foods, which it was forced to pay $500,000 to the New York City’s consumer affairs department.
Whole Foods also denied the allegations as part of the settlement.
Buchanan also has PR experience with Walmart, JCPenney and Williams-Sonama, and she served as senior press adviser to the late Sen. John McCain in his 2008 presidential bid, her LinkedIn page shows.
She is starting at Panera at a time when casual dining restaurants as a whole are struggling: TGI Fridays closed 49 restaurants and sought Chapter 11 protection, while Red Lobster sought Chapter 11 protection earlier this year before emerging.
In November of last year, The Wall Street Journal said that Panera fired about 17% of its corporate employees before the IPO. It was also said that the company had more corporate layoffs in October of this year.