MIT’s Freaky Non-Stick Coating Keeps Ketchup Flowing

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

...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<p>...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<p>...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

This feels like very old news... <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7is6r6zXFDc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7is6r6zXFDc</a>

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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>it's a small point, but it bugs me. sorry.<p>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?

What does it do to your blood when you digest traces of it?<p>BPA was happily used for years by industry.

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.

For anyone interested in the science, here's a paper:<p><a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C2CP40581D" rel="nofollow">http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C2CP40581D</a> [subscription required]<p>and the Masters thesis from the PhD student mentioned in the article:<p><a href="http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/69783" rel="nofollow">http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/69783</a> [open access]<p>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.

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!

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.

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

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

<i>Smith says. "I can’t say what they are, but we’ve patented the hell out of it."</i><p>I'm curious as to whether anyone knows what's in the patents that means the coating is patented but still secret?

Most ketchup these days is made with HFCS and is loaded with sugary non-goodness.<p>My solution is a lot simpler: I cut ketchup out of my diet.