Every BBQ and fast food fan will know this feeling. The bottle is almost empty but all shaking and beating will not break the last bit of ketchup of the bottom. A group of nano researchers and mechanical engineers from MIT might have found a solution to that.
MIT student competition
Brian Solomon, one of the MIT students that invented this new technique, explained: "We had a glass bowl and we coated the glass bowl and put a drop of ketchup, and we played with it looked at it for a couple of minutes and it works." The result called LiquiGlide can be viewed here.
Concerns over food safety were dealt with carefully: "If you wanted to, you could scrape the coating off and eat it and be completely safe," stated Solomon. The ketchup coating invention was outcome of this year's MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition where students draw up business plans and present innovations.
$17 billion bottle market
Little is known of how LiquiGlide is created. Another team member, MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith, explains that they employed a "structured liquid--it's rigid like a solid, but it's lubricated like a liquid. I can't say what they are, but we've patented the hell out of it."
"We were really interested in--and still are--using this coating for anti-icing, or for preventing clogs that form in oil and gas lines, or for non-wetting applications like, say, on windshields. Somehow this sparked the idea of putting it in food bottles. It could be great just for its slippery properties. Plus, most of these other applications have a much longer time to market; we realized we could make this coating for bottles that is pretty much ready. I mean, it is ready."
"It's funny: Everyone is always like, 'Why bottles? What's the big deal?' But then you tell them the market for bottles--just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market. And if all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year."