Start Your Day With A Bang

Not getting enough of a kick with your Starbucks extra-whip-double-shot-caramel-mocha-soy-latte? Looking for that little something extra in your coffee, to carry you through a tough morning?

Try a coffee bomb!

Early in 2005 Wolfgang Puck, the celebrity chef who has his own line of canned soups, cookware and frozen pizza, licensed his name to WP Beverage Partners, a company in Newport Beach, California, for use on cans of latte that heat themselves.

But Puck now says there have been reports that the cans are exploding, melting or overheating in consumers' hands. In response, his company, Wolfgang Puck Worldwide, said it had asked retailers to withdraw the product until it could complete a safety assessment of the cans. Robbie Vorhaus, a spokesman for Puck, said that. "we want to do an investigation ourselves and find out exactly what's going on."

The technology was developed by OnTech Delaware, a company based in San Diego, and relies on a mixture of water and quicklime, which is mostly calcium oxide. When a button on the can is pushed, water is released inside a sealed inner cone filled with the chemical. The reaction produces enough heat to warm the latte to 145 degrees Fahrenheit (63 degrees Celsius) in six to eight minutes. The latte cans hold 10 ounces, or 29.6 centiliters. OnTech says it has no direct evidence of cans' exploding or otherwise malfunctioning.

"The cans do not explode," said its chief executive, Jonathan Weisz. "This is a commercial dispute. The highest number of complaints we've gotten is people saying the coffee didn't heat up fast enough."

Can you picture it? Some poor java-junkie is standing there, an exploded can of Puck-a-Joe in his hand, his body drenched in coffee waste...and he goes:

"Heyyyyyyy...this coffee is COLD!"