The days of tirelessly smacking the ketchup bottle, only to have it explode on your plate, are finally over.   Dave Smith, a Ph.D. candidate at MIT, has spent the last two months at the Varanasi Research Group developing a slippery non-toxic coating that will end all of your ketchup frustrations.

The coating, named LiquiGlide, keeps condiments like mayo or mustard from sticking to the inside of the container, so that they smoothly slide onto your plate.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

LiquiGlide is a "kind of a structured liquid - it's rigid like a solid, but it's lubricated like a liquid," Smith told Fast Company.

"It's funny: Everyone is always like, 'Why bottles? What's the big deal?' But then you tell them the market for bottles - just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market," he said, "And if all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year."

The LiquiGlide group came in second at MIT's $100k Entrepreneurship Competition.

Take a look at the product in action: