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A year after the launch of the short-lived Coca-Cola Spiced, Coke is adding another new flavor to its lineup. Coca-Cola Orange Cream is scheduled to go on sale Feb. 10 in the U.S. and Canada. It will be sold in regular and zero sugar varieties. Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. said Monday that it developed the soda, which mixes cola with orange and vanilla flavors, in response to growing consumer demand for the comforting, nostalgic flavor. Orange cream first introduced with the Creamsicle ice cream bar in 1937 has enjoyed a recent renaissance. Olipop, a probiotic soda, introduced an orange cream flavor in 2021. Carvel reintroduced its Orange Dreamy Creamy ice cream last year for the first time since 1972. Wendys also debuted an Orange Dreamsicle Frosty last spring. Coca-Cola has been experimenting with new flavors to help keep customers engaged with its signature product. In 2022, it launched Coca-Cola Creations, a series of limited-edition Coke flavors in colorful cans and bottles. Coke added hints of coconut, strawberry and even Oreos to the drinks. The company introduced raspberry-flavored Coca-Cola Spiced last February, saying the offering would be a permanent addition to its lineup. But the company abruptly pulled Coca-Cola Spiced off the market in September, saying it would be replaced with a new flavor this year. Coke said Coca-Cola Orange Cream wont be a permanent flavor but would remain on sale at least through the first quarter of 2026. In an interview last year, Coca-Colas North American marketing chief, Shakir Moin, said it used to take the company at least a year to develop a new product. But it’s trying to move more quickly. Consumers are moving faster. The market is moving forward faster. Weve got to be faster than the speed of the market, he said. Dee-Ann Durbin, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
On Tuesday, Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.), suggested that kids who benefit from federally funded free lunch programs, like Head Start, should consider getting jobs to pay for their own lunches. The comments were made during an interview with CNN’s Pamela Brown, after the congressman was asked about Trump’s order to pause federal grants, loans, and other assistance programs, while the administration reviews how the funds are being allocated. Who can actually go and actually produce their own income? Who can actually go out there and do something that makes them have value and work skills for the future? McCormick asked rhetorically. Before I was even 13 years old, I was picking berries in the field before [the] child labor laws that precluded that. I was a paperboy, and when I was in high school, I worked my entire way through.” The congressman continued: Youre telling me that kids who stay at home instead of going to work at Burger King [and] McDonalds during the summer should stay at home and get their free lunch instead of going to work? I think we need to have a top-down review.” Brown pushed back, urging McCormick to acknowledge that many of the children who receive free school lunches are elementary schoolers, and therefore well below the legal working age. The terms of Trump’s executive order were laid out in an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo from Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director, OMB. It explained that federal funds should be “dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending ‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again.” After releasing the memo, OMB sent a document to around 2,600 agencies that receive federal funds, including school meals for low-income students, U.S. Agency for International Development foreign assistance, the WIC nutrition program for pregnant women and infants, a reintegration program for homeless veterans, and others, asking for explanations on what exactly the programs do. In her first White House press briefing on Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to quell worries by insisting the freeze was only a “temporary pause” to make sure these organizations receiving funds don’t conflict with the new administration’s policies. Leavitt also said that she would provide a list of the organizations affected and emphasized that eliminating funding to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs (DEI), or other “woke” programs are a priority of the administration. Head Start, which provides pre-school funding for low-income children, told CBS that the freeze has the “potential to severely disrupt the ability for Head Start programs to serve nearly 800,000 children and their families nationwide.” Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that students eligible for free or reduced price school meals cannot legally be charged processing fees starting in 2027. Trump’s executive order was later temporarily blocked by U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan until Feb. 3, after a lawsuit brought by the National Council of Nonprofits, the American Public Health Association, the Main Street Alliance and SAGE advocates for LGBTQ+ told the court the impacts of the freeze would be “catastrophic.” At least six other attorneys have filed similar suits. At a news conference Tuesday, Letitia James, New York Attorney General called out Trump’s executive order, saying, “This policy is reckless, dangerous, illegal and unconstitutional.”
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E-Commerce
Chinese tech company Alibaba on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3. The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition. “Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta’s most advanced open-source AI models. The Jan. 10 release of DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the Jan. 20 release of its R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese startup’s purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States. But DeepSeek’s success has also led to a scramble among its domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models. Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to its flagship AI model, which it claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions. This echoed DeepSeek’s claim that its R1 model rivalled OpenAI’s o1 on several performance benchmarks. DeepSeek versus domestic competitors The predecessor of DeepSeek’s V3 model, DeepSeek-V2, triggered an AI model price war in China after it was released last May. The fact that DeepSeek-V2 was open-source and unprecedentedly cheap, only 1 yuan ($0.14) per 1 million tokens – or units of data processed by the AI model – led to Alibaba’s cloud unit announcing price cuts of up to 97% on a range of models. Other Chinese tech companies followed suit, including Baidu, which released China’s first equivalent to ChatGPT in March 2023, and the country’s most valuable internet company Tencent. Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek’s enigmatic founder, said in a rare interview with Chinese media outlet Waves in July that the startup “did not care” about price wars and that achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) was its main goal. OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks. While large Chinese tech companies like Alibaba have hundreds of thousands of employees, DeepSeek operates like a research lab, staffed mainly by young graduates and doctorate students from top Chinese universities. Liang said in his July interview that he believed China’s largest tech companies might not be well suited to the future of the AI industry, contrasting their high costs and top-down structures with DeepSeek’s lean operation and loose management style. “Large foundational models require continued innovation, tech giants’ capabilities have their limits,” he said. Eduardo Baptista, Reuters
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E-Commerce
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