Easy: Just shake a bit of water in the bottle
Or don't buy Heinz.,
Problem solved.
What’s your favorite strategy for getting ketchup out of the bottle? Do you do that trick of hitting the “57″ with the heel of your palm? Do you grab a utensil and probe it up into the bottle? Or, have you forgone glass ketchup bottles altogether in favor of squeezable plastic containers?
No matter what your choice, you’re probably still expending more effort than you’d care to devote to dispensing a condiment. And, you’re likely still left with a fair amount of wasted Heinz when you finish the bottle.
MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith has a solution for you, Co.Exist reports. He’s developed a food-safe super slippery coating that can be applied to the inside of food packaging, allowing condiments to slide right out of the bottle.
Smith calls his product LiquiGlide. Co.Exist’s Austin Carr explains:
As Smith describes it, LiquiGlide is a surface that’s unique because it’s “kind of a structured liquid–it’s rigid like a solid, but it’s lubricated like a liquid.” It works with many types of packaging–glass, plastic–and can be applied in any number of ways, including spraying the coating onto the inside of bottles. Now, thick sauces that would normally move like sludge seem to just fall out of LiquiGlide-coated bottles, as if they were suspended in space. “It just floats right onto the sandwich,” Smith says.
Here’s a video demonstration:
LiquiGlide came in 2nd place in MIT’s $100k Entrepreneurship Competition. Smith is currently discussing his product with a number of bottle companies, though a similar coating that debuted last fall has yet to be seen on shelves.
Smith says that if all condiment bottles used his coating, we could save about one million tons of wasted food a year.
Now all Smith needs to do is figure out a way to get that last bit of toothpaste out of the tube.
[via Co.Exist]
Photo: Steve A. Johnson/Flickr
Video: Coexist
