Scientists Invent Product That Gets the Last Drop of Ketchup From the Bottle

There are a few techniques for getting the last few drops out of the ketchup bottle — storing the bottle upside-down, repeatedly hitting the “57” on the Heinz bottle logo — but none works as impressively as LiquiGlide, a new food-safe, slippery coating developed by a team of scientists at MIT. When it’s used on the inside of a condiment bottle, ketchup and mayonnaise magically slide out, as you can see in the video demo below.

The developers see LiquiGlide as a way to reduce food waste, estimating that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year if every condiment bottle used the coating. They say the biggest challenge was using only FDA-approved, food-safe materials, although we imagine some consumers will still be leery of a coating described as “kind of a structured liquid — it’s rigid like a solid, but it’s lubricated like a liquid.”

• Read more: MIT’s Freaky Non-Stick Coating Keeps Ketchup Flowing at Fast Company

What do you think? Would you buy a bottle of ketchup with this coating?

Related: Make or Buy? Tomato Ketchup

(Image: Baevskiy Dmitry/Shutterstock)