Coca Cola 2009 Christmas Bottles

I found these cool Coca Cola Christmas bottles at my local Walmart recently. There are two different (plastic) bottles which both look like round Christmas tree ornaments. One has Santa drinking a Coke and the other has a mother and baby polar bear also drinking a Coke. They look pretty small, but are actually 400 ml, making them slightly bigger than a traditional Coca Cola can. People were snapping these up like crazy, and I heard a few of them talking about giving them to family members etc as stocking stuffers. They have certainly made a great addition to my Coke collection.

New Aluminium Coca-Cola Bottles

Here are a couple of great new Coca-Cola bottles my wife picked up for me at the T & T Asian Market. They are silver aluminium cans with a shiny red outside coating and white Coca-Cola logo. These are 250 ml bottles. As usual, the cost is about double that of a regular bottle or can of Coke, but somehow they always seem to taste better when not from a plastic bottle or regular can. I have not seen these for sale anywhere else so far, but if I do, I will be sure to buy enough to fill the fridge!

Pepsi Unveils New Logo & Bottles

I saw this posted on The Fire Wire Blog and found it kind of interesting. Pepsi is redesigning its globe logo. A ’smile’ will characterize brand Pepsi, while a ‘grin’ is used for Diet Pepsi and a ‘laugh’ is used for Pepsi Max.
The company will spend $1.2 billion over three years to change everything about its brands – “How they look, how they’re packaged, how they will be merchandised on the shelves, and how they connect with consumers” - which will be done by the Arnell Group.
I don't know about you, but these new bottles and logos look pretty generic. They remind me of the generic store brands of Coke and Pepsi that my local grocery store carries. The logos always try to look kind of like the original without being a blatant rip off, but somehow always look very 'generic'.
After seeing this on the Fire Wire blog, I surfed over to the Pepsi web site expecting to see a big splash page announcing the "New Look", but found nothing on the site mentioning anything about a change, which leaves me wondering where the Fire Wire blog got this info. Real, or fake... you decide!

It looks like we've got another mystery on our hands

I blogged previously about the fact that Coca Cola BlaK had finally arrived on store shelves in my area. And then yesterday I mentioned that I got a bunch of free samples of Coca Cola BlaK at the cranberry festival in Ft. Langley. Well, tonight I noticed something curious. The original bottles that I purchased say "Cola Coffee Fusion Beverage" on them, and the bottles I got yesterday say "Carbonated Fusion Beverage". Everything else about the bottles is exactly the same.
I used to love playing the game "Clue" where you had to solve the mystery of who done it, in what room, with what object. I also used to love watching Scooby Doo (actually I still do) as they solved all those great mysteries. Well gang, it looks like we have another mystery on our hands.
Let's pretend this is the end of the game and/or the end of the Scooby episode. Here is my explanation of what happened:
First, Coke came up with the brilliant idea of fusing Coca Cola with coffee, two of the most widely consumed beverages. What could be better than mixing them together to make one super money making drink. Next they came up with the packaging, a nice Coke shaped bottle with the name Coca Cola BlaK, and the slogan "Carbonated Fusion Beverage". They then started shipping them to store shelves. As consumers began to find these bottles in their local shops, they began to wonder just what fusion had been added to their beloved Coca Cola? After some initial confusion as to just what this new Coca Cola BlaK was, Coke does a quick tweak to the packaging, and "Cola Coffee Fusion Beverage" bottles begin showing up on store shelves, to which consumers happily buy up all the bottles of this new coffee cola concoction. That explains why Coke was giving away the original bottles of "Carbonated Fusion beverage", to get rid of the remaining stock of non "Cola Coffee Fusion Beverage" bottles, and also why they had the 'Coke Team' there to hand them out, and answer everyone's questions of "What is this stuff?".
And there you have my friends, mystery solved... or is it?

Coca Cola BlaK

Tonight at my local 7-11 I picked up a new addition for my Coca Cola collection called Coca Cola BlaK. It says its a 'cola coffee fusion beverage'. I don't know what that is, but since I don't drink coffee, I don't think I will enjoy this drink. I do plan on trying it just so I know what it tastes like, but not tonight, as its too late at night to be trying some cola coffee fusion beverage.
It comes in a cool classic shaped glass coke bottle, which has a plastic covering over the entire bottle. The only place you can actually see the glass bottle, is at the very bottom where there is no plastic covering the bottle. It has the traditional Coca Cola logo with the name BlaK, and a brand new logo which looks like a leaning zero with a small swoosh / slash through it.
If this is like most other odd ball flavours Coke has come out with, this will become a great collectible in a year or so, as it becomes yet another soon to be forgotten flavoured Coke product.

Coke Side of Life

I found this posted on the Cartoon Brew web site.
"A couple weeks ago Coke unveiled the second CG ad in their new "Coke Side of Life" campaign, which is essentially a parody of the videogame GRAND THEFT AUTO. It's directed by British duo Smith & Foulkes of Nexus Productions. These guys have one of the best track records in recent years and possess an uncanny ability to take simple, even mundane, agency concepts and execute them to perfection. Take for example their Abba to Zappa spot for the Observer Music Monthly, the 'black ink' obstacle course for the VW Touareg, or Motorola's "Grand Classics" spot—conceptually, none of these ideas is particularly special yet Smith & Foulkes somehow make each one work. The same can be said of their current Coke spot which manages to turn video game parody into great art."
It's a very clever ad. Check it out here

Bert Collects Bottle Caps Too

Question: What brand of bottle caps does Bert from Seasame Street like to collect? Check out the answer below.

One of the very first collections I can remember starting was my bottle cap collection. It started innocently enough. One day when I missed the bus on the way home from school (this was a routine occurrence), my friends and I had some time to kill while we waited for the next bus. While waiting, I found a few bottle caps on the ground and before we knew it, we had started a competition to see who could find the most bottle caps. I won the contest and got to keep all the caps we had collected. Although most people would have probably tossed them all way, I brought them home and found a nice shoe box to keep them in, and continued to add to the collection over the next 10 or so years.

I can remember when I used to go to the drug store for a Coke, the bottles would be in a cooler with a lift up lid. You would have to look down at the caps and find the drink of your choice by the cap, so I guess that made the caps pretty important. And of course the first thing you would do when you popped off the cap was to dig out that grey rubber cap liner to see if you were a winner. Unfortunetly, more offten than not you would see something along the lines of "Please try again".
Whenever someone we knew would go on vacation, I would always ask them to bring me back some exotic bottle caps for my collection. Everyone always thought this was a strange request, but most brought home a few choice additions to my collection.
To this day, if a bottle has a metal bottle cap, I have to save it and add it to my bottle cap collection, which is now in a couple of large ice cream buckets.

Answer: Bert collects Figgy Fizz soda bottle caps. To date, he has
an amazing 368 caps in his collection!