MIT’s Freaky Non-Stick Coating Keeps Ketchup Flowing

MIT’s Freaky Non-Stick Coating Keeps Ketchup Flowing(fastcoexist.com)

57 points by wito 13 years ago | 37 comments

brianwillis 13 years ago |

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!".

arethuza 13 years ago | |

"A group of people wearing safety goggles so they can pour ketchup out of a bottle."

They look to me like they are in a lab and its generally a really good idea to stick to safety rules in materials labs.

001sky 13 years ago | |

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

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

darrhiggs 13 years ago | | |

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?

nnq 13 years ago |

...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

veemjeem 13 years ago | |

Sounds like you should stay at home and grow your food on your own farm. Lots of cooking tools use hi-tech research, from non-stick pans to heat resistant spatulas. I understand your concern, but there's no need to freak out over technology applied to food. There are more opportunities for less visible man-made technology to become dangerous in non-culinary situations, such as your home's insulation, or materials used in microchip packaging. There's less regulation there and higher chances of "science" having ill effects on you. If you don't live in California, there's a higher chance that you could be buying non-RoHS compliant manufactured goods that can be more hazardous to you than any culinary equipment.

jonnathanson 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago | | |

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.

pm90 13 years ago | |

Take a close look at the "preservatives" and "coloring" section of most processed foods. They consist of industrial chemicals invented for that very purpose only in the last century or so. We're already consuming an inordinate amount of this stuff (More so in developing countries actually, where regulation is slightly....lax)

h4pless 13 years ago |

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

dochtman 13 years ago | |

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

jchernan 13 years ago | | |

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010762

andrewcooke 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago | | |

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... - 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.

ck2 13 years ago |

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

BPA was happily used for years by industry.

kmfrk 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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

rmc 13 years ago | | |

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

arctangent 13 years ago |

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

ygra 13 years ago | |

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

shirro 13 years ago |

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

ricardobeat 13 years ago | |

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

adaml_623 13 years ago |

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?

adaml_623 13 years ago | |

Never mind I've figures it out from a patent covering the subject:

From https://www.google.co.uk/search?tbm=pts&hl=en&q=EP19...

Surface 12 (Figure 1) comprises at least one material selected from the group consisting of a ceramic, an intermetallic, and a polymer. Suitable ceramic materials include inorganic oxides, carbides, nitrides, borides, and combinations thereof. Non-limiting examples of such ceramic materials include aluminum nitride, boron nitride, chromium nitride, silicon carbide, tin oxide, titania, titanium carbonitride, titanium nitride, titanium oxynitride, stibinite (SbS2), zirconia, hafnia, and combinations thereof. In certain embodiments, the surface comprises an intermetallic. Examples of suitable intermetallic materials include, but are not limited to, nickel aluminide, titanium aluminide, and combinations thereof. Polymer materials that may be used in surface 12 include, but are not limited to polytetrafluoroethylene, fluoroacrylate, fluoroeurathane, fluorosilicone, modified carbonate, silicones and combinations thereof. The material is selected based on the desired contact angle, the fabrication technique used, and the end-use application of the article.

jbuzbee 13 years ago | |

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 13 years ago | | |

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

patrickgzill 13 years ago |

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 13 years ago | |

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