Thank goodness there are super smart people out there at our nation’s finest universities. Otherwise we’d be stuck with these darn ketchup bottles that refuse to give up the last bits of ketchup, and that would just be unacceptable. Hurray for genius engineers!

Yahoo! News says students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are hard on the case of the viscous tomato stuff that wants to hang out in the bottom of the bottle. A team of engineers have managed to come up with a new, improved condiment bottle that won’t allow ketchup to stick to it. It’s all about a special coating.

From Yahoo!:

The secret is in a futuristic substance known as “LiquiGlide,” a non-toxic, FDA-approved coating that can be applied to the interior of bottles. According to MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith, it’s “kind of a structured liquid — it’s rigid like a solid, but it’s lubricated like a liquid.” Regardless of what the bottle is constructed of, liquid or plastic, ketchup will flow out of it nearly effortlessly.

MIT isn’t the only place with ambitious folks — there’s apparently a rival team at Harvard University working on a friction-less, plant-derived ketchup bottle.

In this case, that would kind of like getting less bang for the buck — as we won’t have to repeatedly smack the bottom of the jar to try and coax that last delicious taste from its spot. And added bonus — it could save millions of dollars in food waste a year.

MIT and Harvard in battle to create life-changing product: Non-stick ketchup bottles [Yahoo! News]

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