
MIT’s Freaky Non-Stick Coating Keeps Ketchup Flowing - wito
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679878/mits-freaky-non-stick-coating-keeps-ketchup-flowing
======
brianwillis
That last photo is just hilarious. A group of people wearing safety goggles so
they can pour ketchup out of a bottle. Those lab coats also look brand new.

You can just imagine the photographer saying "quick! everyone! do science!".

~~~
001sky
Q: how many MIT scientists does it take to pour Ketchup out of a bottle?

A: !+!+!+!+!+!=6

~~~
darrhiggs
Did it never occur to them that they could just turn the bottle upside-down?
Is that not why they designed the lids like that; so you could just stand them
up on the lid?

~~~
pm90
Imagine that: we changed the way we store bottles _just_ so that all the
ketchup would all come out. Its a simple solution that works, but I think I
would still prefer the slippery coating though.

~~~
adam-a
I don't know if you're being sarcastic but Heinz have been selling ketchup in
upside down bottles for years now.

[http://blog.infotrends.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/04/Heinz_...](http://blog.infotrends.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/04/Heinz_Ketchup.bmp)

------
nnq
...somehow the fact that it's only made out of FDA approved ingredients
doesn't make me feel save at all. it's a lot of dangerous stuff that is
approved for food and drug use in certain quantities... but it's always about
the quantity and nobody can even begin to test the effects of the
combinations. and it clearly spells out the fact that some non-negligible
amount of it ends up being ingested, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to
use only FDA approved stuff. patent it or whatever but until they publish the
exact formula and expected daily intake from foods packaged using it so I can
search the safety studies for the substances in it I'm doing my best to stay
the hell away from food packaged using it ...hell, even canned soda freaks me
out a bit because I know it has a layer of "coating" sprayed on the inside to
keep the juice from corroding the can

...I like high tech stuff, but not in my food. if it's gonna make me live
longer or cure cancer than I can balance risk/benefits ...but my not so short
foray into medical research thought me to be very very very worried (actually
freakin scared to the point that I have to ignore much of what I've learned
just to keep on living as a normal person eating "normal" food and taking
"safe" otc drugs) about what we think we know about chemicals safety and how
"safety" is define

...just my 2 cents for people "less in the know": don't approach innovation
regarding food, health or anything biomedical the same way you approach it in
software engineering or other field of engineering ...it's a whole different
ball game and there's a reason why it take 1 billion USD to brink a drug to
market (besides bureaucracy and buggy "peopleware" that probably makes up 50%
if the cost) ...anyway, the point is that it's this kind of thing you need to
approach with the "we're building a nuclear reactor" type of mentality, not
the "let's hack together a cool robot and show off" type

~~~
jonnathanson
You're making a lot of assumptions here. Perhaps they're founded, and perhaps
they're not -- but either way, you seem to be using these folks' work as an
effigy for a broader complaint with the food industry, or with the FDA. The
industry may be shady, and the government _does_ allow a lot of frightening
substances into our food without adequate testing. But let's not burn some
enterprising young kids for those mistakes.

Now, there are a lot of things we don't know about LiquiGlide. Maybe it's just
a carbon-polymer matrix that keeps the ketchup flowing by mechanical action,
and not by chemical action? Whatever it is, I would imagine that anyone
designing such a substance would realize that ketchup is fairly acidic;
therefore, LiquiGlide would need to be chemically inert when positioned next
to an acid. I am not an organic chemist, but I imagine these guys had one, or
consulted with one, or at any rate, know a lot more about the subject than I
do. So if this stuff's occurring to me, no doubt it occurred to them.

To be fair, that doesn't mean the substance is safe. In fact, I'd probably
share your skepticism about consuming ketchup from a bottle made with _any_
nonstick coating, as the history of nonstick coatings is riddled with unsafe
chemicals. That being said, I consider these kids and their work to be
innocent until proven guilty.

Finally, if you don't want artificial ingredients in your food, then don't eat
Heinz ketchup in the first place. :) Complaining about chemical additives to
what is basically a sauce of chemical additives is a little like saying that
you want your deep fried ice cream to be low-fat. Very little of what's in a
bottle of Heinz ketchup even came from a tomato in the first place.

~~~
ubercore
You're _also_ making assumptions though. The ingredients in Heinz ketchup are
pretty banal. The most "chemically" thing I see is high fructose corn syrup.

------
h4pless
This feels like very old news... <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7is6r6zXFDc>

~~~
dochtman
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's been on HN before (although I can't seem to find it
now).

~~~
jchernan
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010762>

------
andrewcooke
the article is misleading ("we could save about one million tons of food from
being thrown out every year") because it's using absolute numbers to boost
what is a relative saving.

there are a lot of sauce bottles. even an unimportant saving will, totalled
over all of them, add up to an impressive sounding number. but unless the
fractional amount of each bottle is important, it's really not significant:
saving a million tons of food in an industry that produces thousands of
millions of tons of food is neither here nor there.

this is the same problem as residual current in phone chargers. if everyone
unplugged their phone chargers when not in use we could save some impressive
sounding amount of energy. except that, compared to total annual energy
consumption, it's not impressive at all - it makes no practical difference to
the very real issues related to energy consumption (because your phone
charger's residual current is absolute peanuts compared to that vacation you
took by plane).

it's a small point, but it bugs me. sorry.

personally, i would tend to prefer a glass container (glass seems like a nice
stable chemical that i have evolved in the presence of (think rocks)). and if
the world really needs to save ketchup maybe i could just eat a little more
healthily and skip a serving once a month?

~~~
RobAley
Actually, when considering things like climate change, these small
contributions are important, because they don't sit on their own. Most plans
for significant carbon emission reductions that don't significantly change our
standard of living rely on aggregating the savings made by many many "micro"
reductions in production/consumption like this.

~~~
andrewcooke
i'm not going to argue here because <http://www.withouthotair.com/> makes the
point better than i ever could.

see, for example,
[http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c19/page_11...](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c19/page_114.shtml)
\- _Don’t be distracted by the myth that “every little helps.” If everyone
does a little, we’ll achieve only a little. We must do a lot. What’s required
are big changes in demand and in supply._

and, of course, we may be talking at cross purposes - there is some middle
ground where a large-ish number of small-ish things can help. i am not arguing
against maths, but i am saying that our natural assessment of what is
significant without actually doing the maths is often misled by absolute
values, as here.

anyway, if you haven't read that book, i recommend it.

~~~
RobAley
Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes. I'm not saying "every little helps",
more like "ALL little helps". Saving 5% of my ketchup doesn't help me save 5%
of my carbon emissions. Saving 5% of the ketchup, 3% of the mayonnaise, 10% of
the plastic bags, 7% of the car fuel etc. etc. does help.

I could probably meet my individual targets by simply taking a big action like
scrapping my car. But I'm not going to do it (for various reasons), and most
people won't either. I'm much more likely to meet them by skimming a small
amount of the top of a lot of other things than changing my lifestyle
significantly in one or two areas.

Big change is needed, but it can come from a few big things or many little
things. I disagree with the sources that you cite only in so far as I think,
given the society we live in, the little things route is much more likely to
succeed, particular in the consumer arena.

I think we both agree that just a little bit of a little bit isn't going to
help.

------
ck2
What does it do to your blood when you digest traces of it?

BPA was happily used for years by industry.

~~~
kmfrk
Still is where I live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Ironically, with BPA, the only container you know does not have traces of it
is a glass container.

Not even that might be safe anymore. No wonder kids reach puberty earlier and
earlier.

------
kybernetikos
This is the sort of thing that scifi films usually get wrong. It must be hard
to do a scifi film where most of the common mundane stuff we do in life is the
same but subtly easier.

------
Osmium
For anyone interested in the science, here's a paper:

<http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C2CP40581D> [subscription required]

and the Masters thesis from the PhD student mentioned in the article:

<http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/69783> [open access]

I believe they're the most relevant publications, but please correct me if I'm
wrong (this isn't my area of expertise). I'm sure this specific technology is
still a trade secret, but it at least shows the direction that group took to
lead to the discovery. As always, these things aren't developed in a vacuum,
and it's always interesting to see how they come about.

------
k2enemy
I wonder if food companies will embrace a bottle that ends up decreasing the
number of bottles of ketchup consumers need to buy? I suppose if one company
adopted the bottle then it would give them an advantage in the marketplace
over their competition and possibly increase sales, but if everyone adopts the
bottle then the whole industry loses (assuming prices don't change).
Prisoner's dilemma!

~~~
goldfeld
Many technological advances happen like this, where the first few to use get
an edge, then everyone else uses as it becomes a requirement rather than an
edge--and the situation is then irreversible because anyone trying to opt out
of the trend would be at great disadvantage (unless some really clever
marketing and rationale is employed, of course).

But if somehow everyone opted out together they would be better off for it
(sometimes even consumers, though arguably not in this case). It's commonly
referred to as "smart for one, dumb for all."

------
arocks
Forgive my naivete but can't this by achieved by using opaque teflon-coated
insides? Teflon is already used as non-stick coating for pans. It might not
lower friction as much as the video suggests but it should be better than
glass.

~~~
jules
Too see that this doesn't work, pour ketchup in a teflon pan and try to get it
out again.

~~~
rmc
I love simple scientific, experimental responses like that. Thanks :)

------
arctangent
Waiting for the ketchup to come out is an important part of the experience.

~~~
ygra
And finding the right moment between “not coming out” and “plate full of
ketchup” to turn the bottle upwards again.

------
shirro
My wife looked at this and said "shampoo bottles, conditioner bottles..."

~~~
ricardobeat
You can just pour water into those and use them to the last drop. The same
doesn't apply to ketchup, AFAIK.

------
adaml_623
_Smith says. "I can’t say what they are, but we’ve patented the hell out of
it."_

I'm curious as to whether anyone knows what's in the patents that means the
coating is patented but still secret?

~~~
jbuzbee
Isn't the whole point of a patent so that you do say how you did it and what
you used? Otherwise it would be a trade secret?

~~~
epaik
I think the the case here is that they applied for patents, rather than their
patents having been accepted.

------
patrickgzill
Most ketchup these days is made with HFCS and is loaded with sugary non-
goodness.

My solution is a lot simpler: I cut ketchup out of my diet.

~~~
greedo
This has far more uses than simply ketchup bottles. Imagine a urinal or toilet
coated with this.

