It seems that social gaming giant Zynga is to roll out a strange promotion that will see real-world food branded with the names of some of its more popular games and offering free in-game items.

Farmvillefreak managed to confirm the deal with espionage style shots

While details at the moment are fairly rough, Games.com is carrying word that Farmville is to cross over with US chain 7-Eleven to offer a range of various snacks and drinks that carry the branding of Zynga’s Facebook-based Mafia Wars and FarmVille games. If nothing else, it’s an interesting move for Zynga, and one that has for the most part only been open to bigger publishers until now.

Given the fact that so very much of its business is conducted through the medium of social networking service Facebook, it’s very impressive indeed that Zynga has managed to amass the player base that it has, with a valuation earlier this week putting estimates of the company’s worth at somewhere around the $4 billion mark.

It’s curious to see such a large scale move towards real-world products from Zynga, but given the broad appeal of its games and the genuinely staggering audience it has access to (given both the number of Facebook users and the fact that FarmVille and Mafia Wars should run on just about any machine from the last ten years), the company stands to benefit very neatly indeed from the deal.

With the announcement yesterday that erstwhile megapublisher Electronic Arts is to launch a new FIFA game directly through Facebook, it seems as though there’ll be plenty of eyes on Zynga’s deal with 7-Eleven with a view to capitalising on a similar arrangement.