If you’ve ever tried to get ketchup out of a bottle (and I’m betting you have), you probably noticed long ago that it’s a real pain in the ass. Banging the bottle with knives, or smacking it that certain way your grandmother taught you still never results in a nice, smooth pour. Queue Brian Solomon and Adam Paxson of the Varanasi Group at MIT. They felt your pain, and decided to do something about it by creating LiquiGlide.
Using a novel, plant-based coating that adheres to almost anything, the duo may have just spared our children’s generation the pain and suffering we face each time we eat a plate of fries, or garnish our hot dogs at the local street vendor. Who says science isn’t amazing?
LiquiGlide Ketchup Bottle Example
That’s pretty neat, right? It gets even better. Notice how almost nothing stuck to the inside of the bottle? All that extra ketchup poured out means less ketchup that you waste as a consumer. It may sound silly, but we waste a shit-ton of condiments simply because we can’t extract them from the bottle. There’s that stubborn layer that just won’t come off, and that means we either wash the bottle out profusely to remove it, or simply toss the bottle in the trash out of laziness – neither option being very friends to our wallets, or the environment. Again, go science!
As fantastic as this technology is, it won’t be very useful unless manufacturers adopt LiquiGlide directly. Though the Varanasi Group could no doubt release this as a consumer product on its own (much like the Liquipel coating for consumer electronics), it wouldn’t be much use in the kitchen, as condiment bottles already come pre-filled. In order for manufacturers to actually adopt this, the price point of the technology would have to be low enough for them to do so without cutting into their bottom line. Let’s hope that’s the case.
If you’re interested in seeing more videos of condiments smoothly sliding out of bottles, head over to the LiquiGlide website. The team said this can be applied to almost anything, and if you’ve got a mind as dirty as I have, the possibilities are endless.
