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Newton's Law of Cooling
Basically what it says is that the farther the object's temperature is from the ambient tempeture, the exponentially faster it approaches the ambient temperature. So as an object gets closer, it slows down.
Thus, if you put the soda can in the freezer it has farther to go and thus cools faster.
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Yes, but this is only true when the test objects are the same temp. I had an idiot of a friend in college (no idea how he even got accepted) who used this to try and prove that hot water will freeze faster than cold water if we put them in the freezer. I laughed and laughed. He was so adamant about it that we decided to run an experiment, but not before I got my bet in for a week of lunch. Let's just say that the following week, my food bills were a lot less!
There are many sudies about this and in fact many do show that warmer water DOES in fact freeze faster than colder water SOMETIMES depending on the situations. This is called the Mpemba effect. But my friend was an idiot and REALLY wanted to prove his point so he put his water in the microwave for 5 minutes to get it almost boiling and I took mine out of the water jug in the fridge. It wasn't even a fair fight! I did not give him any clue that he was actually onto something as he was taking something he heard and making it extreme which blew the properties of the effect out of proportion.