"a bottle coating so slick that every last bit of ketchup slides out quickly and easily"

The research institution that brought you the fax machine and GPS has come up with another potentially world-changing invention: a bottle coating so slick that every last bit of ketchup slides out quickly and easily.

In what could be a disruptive technology for the ketchup industry, an MIT professor has found a solution to getting the last sticky globs of ketchup (or honey or jelly) out of a bottle.

No word yet on how it could affect ketchup sales, but the technology uses a new type of food-grade coating that has the slipperiness of a liquid, but the rigidity of a solid. In other words, it makes the ketchup come out faster, destroying the notion of "Anticipation," the popular ketchup jingle from the 1970s.

The slick coating -- dubbed LiquiGlide -- was developed by the Varanasi Research Group, a lab run by Kripa Varanasi, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.

Varanasi's lab has put videos online showing ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard and jelly sliding right out of containers treated with LiquiGlide, urged by nothing more than a gentle tilt of the container itself.

Varanasi, who worked at GE and did research for DARPA before starting his lab at MIT, is surprised and amused by the amount of attention his upgraded ketchup bottle has generated.

"It just went completely bonkers," he said.

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-mit-prof-creates-major-ketchup-bottle-upgrade-20120524,0,2644692.story