Scraping the barrel: LiquiGlide could prevent food waste

This is the eco-friendly invention that food processors don’t want to know about.

Ever got to the bottom of a jar of Vegemite and mourned the waste? Felt dudded by the two per cent that goes into the recycle bin? That’s about $2.16 million worth of Vegemite tossed out every year, based on current annual sales of $108 million.

What about ketchup? Australians aren’t big consumers of the stuff but globally Heinz sells 650 million bottles a year, along with two billion single-serve packets, with annual sales of more than $1.5 billion. Heinz sells two products in Australia – tomato ketchup and tomato sauce – but internationally you can only find tomato ketchup.

Across all ketchup brands, sales are worth about $3.5 billion a year. Working on the same two per cent wastage factor, which may well be conservative, that’s $70 million worth of the stuff – 12.7 million litres, or just over five standard Olympic swimming pools – being tossed every year.

Put another way, that’s $70 million worth of sales that wouldn’t happen if there were no waste. Back to a more parochial pleasure, that would reduce annual Vegemite sales to $105.84 million, and the new owners of the brand, Bega, would be pretty unhappy about that.

Based on personal household consumption of about six 400g jars per annum chez moi at $5.56 each, that’s $33.36 spent and 2.4kg consumed. We almost certainly throw out about 48g or 67 cents worth of the precious spread every year. If every Australian spent what we waste, sales would be up about 15 per cent or $16.44 million.

Enough of the figures. I started pondering on this a few weeks ago when I heard a BBC World Service story on scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had invented a slippery coating for the insides of containers that will virtually eliminate all waste. A story catering to my pet peeve.

I started researching and there it was on the Beeb’s website: “Slippery bottle solves ketchup problem”. Wow, this is going to upset big business more than light bulbs that never fail, I thought. “The coating can also be used to make it easier to squeeze out the contents of other containers, such as those holding toothpaste, cosmetics and even glue,” the story said. A revolution.

But hang on. The same search brought up an article from the online magazine fastcoexist.com dated May 24, 2012: “MIT’s freaky non-stick coating keeps ketchup flowing.” CNN covered the same story a week later. Three years later, the invention was commercialised. LiquiGlide (liquiglide.com) was the brand created and The New York Times reported in 2015 “an exclusive licensing agreement for the use of such coatings in glue containers”.

Two things come to mind. The first is that the BBC has cocked up; even I can remember the ancient journalistic aphorism that goes something like: “Every story begins in the library.”

The second is: why would any processor of viscous/sticky packaged food get behind a product that might wipe millions of dollars worth of sales every year from its bottom line? This is the eco-friendly invention that food processors don’t want to know about. We’ve all been dudded, again.

So, Mr Bega, here’s my challenge. Put Vegemite in a LiquiGlide-treated container. End waste. Boost sales. Then buy back Aeroplane Jelly and Violet Crumble with the profits.