Bottle Caps 2: Electric Booga-Dew.

Last week, I blogged about a new bottle cap design being used by a Pepsi bottler for Mountain Dew.  Yesterday, I was surprised to see yet another design in use.  The third design was for an August 2, expiration date while the second design was from a bottle marked July 26.

Notice the difference between the July 26 cap(left) and the August 2 cap(right).  The newer cap places the threading closer to the bottom of the cap.  Also notice that the plastic ridge from the 2nd design is now more pronounced in the 3rd.

Here is a much clearer pic that starts to give away the most significant difference between the 2nd and 3rd caps.

As I mentioned last week, the 2nd cap(center) was ever so much shorter than the original(left) and probably saved the company money as for as cost of the product and transportation cost.  Now look at the difference between the 2nd cap and the 3rd(right).  It seems this cap is even shorter and more dramatic in design, especially if you compare it with the original.  Is this a supply issue or market testing?  The 3rd design looks a lot like the short bottle caps that Coca Cola switched to for their 20 oz bottles.  My only complaint is that the caps slip away from the fingers pretty easy when attempting to unscrew and take a drink with one hand while steering my car with the other.

In other pop news...

Coca Cola brought back Mello Yello and gave it a retro themed can.  I love the can's design.  It's very pleasing without looking too extreme.  They kept the formulation the same, as far as I know, and I was surprised to see they didn't switch to cane sugar as Pepsi did for it's Throwback products.  Of course, Mello Yello was replaced by Vault, which has the exact(or nearly exact) formulation.  I'm glad to see an established brand back on the shelves.