John Rivers, of the 4Rivers Smokehouse in Orlando, Florida, is opening a bakery alongside his barbecue restaurant, dubbed the 4Rivers Sweetshop. Why is this bakery interesting, you ask? It’ll be featuring such classic, all-American family favorites as Mountain Dew and Doritos cupcakes, and Coca-Cola and Ruffles cupcakes. You know, the kind of treats a loving family shares while huddled around the fireplace on a cold holiday night.

Obviously, this camel needs an endorsement deal.

(via Daily Picks and Flicks)

Your move, Coca-Cola: Yesterday, Pepsi showed off a new type of bottle made entirely from plant material. According to the AP, the bottle as currently made incorporates switch grass, pine bark, and corn husks, though Pepsi plans ultimately to incorporate “orange peels, oat hulls, potato scraps and other leftovers from its food business.” While the bottle isn’t yet poised for wide rollout, Pepsi says it will begin limited testing in 2012, and, if successful, will begin to convert all of its bottling to the new material.

The bad news, and the good news, about this new material is that it’s not really new: The material produced by Pepsi’s process may be made from plant scraps, but it’s actually PET plastic, a common packaging material. This may be reassuring for consumers in that they know that their newly-packaged Pepsi won’t taste like corn husks, but the packaging will be functionally identical to what they’re used to. But PET is not biodegradable or compostable, though it is recyclable.

Still, this is an upgrade in that PET is normally made from fossil fuels: Though Coca-Cola makes a bottle using thirty percent plant material, a 100% plant material bottle is unmatched in the industry, and its adoption by a giant like Pepsi could spur competitors to move towards petroleum-free packaging.

(CS Monitor via Reddit)

Producers of the radio show This American Life are claiming they’ve discovered the safely-guarded recipe for Coca-Cola in an interesting way: A direct picture of the recipe in a 1979 newspaper article within Coca-Cola’s hometown newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. According to the radio producers, the picture used for the article is a hand-written copy of the original recipe for the beverage, supposedly written in a leather-bound recipe book by one of creator John Pemberton’s friends, and passed down for generations. Head on past the break to see the supposed recipe, and the results of a taste test performed by the This American Life team.

I’m not sure which is weirder: That YouTuber railok saw the latest Christmas-themed Coca-Cola commercial and thought “hey, this would go really well with the Inception music” or that it actually did. Snow globes within snow globes is too unstable.

(via TDW)

After purchasing the second ever promoted tweet, Coke saw astounding results. In just the first 24 hours after the promoted tweet went online, the ad saw over 85 million impressions. Not only that, but the ad saw a 6% engagement rate, as opposed to the usual .02% estimated with other web-based advertising. That’s over 5.1 million people who interacted with that ad in just a 24-hour span.

This could be just what Twitter needs for advertisers to see that it’s a useful medium for getting the word out; Twitter just has to be cautious not to let it get out of hand down the road, as too many promoted tweets could spoil the microblog for everyone.