Skip to content
Starts With A Bang

Weekend Diversion: The great yogurt tragedy

Sick of yogurt winding up stuck to the underside of the lid? Problem solved.

“My love for you would blot out the sun like a cloud made out of yogurt. I hope you brought a spoon.” –Jarod Kintz

Sometimes, sticking together is a good thing, like when Robert Plant and Alison Krauss sing about it in their delightful song, Stick With Me Baby,

but other times, it can be one of the most annoying things to deal with. For me, personally, one of the great little annoyances of life is opening your yogurt container and finding exactly this bane: part of your yogurt stuck, irrevocably, to the underside of the lid.

Image credit: Fox News, via http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2012/03/24/8-uses-for-yogurt-containers/.

And what, exactly, are you supposed to do with that stuck yogurt?

  1. Throw it out, like the wasteful scum you know you secretly hate?
  2. Scrape the lid with your spoon, like some prissy-pants who won’t ever get all the yogurt back into the cup anyway? (Those who scrape the lid against the yogurt container: you’re in the same boat here.)
  3. Lick the lid, like the disgusting human being you were born to be?
  4. Or just give up, don’t eat yogurt, and perhaps feed it to the cat instead?
Image credit: Buzzfeed, via http://ak-hdl.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr03/2013/4/25/15/anigif_enhanced-buzz-6159-1366918621-14.gif.

Maybe none of these solutions satisfy you. Maybe, like me, you just wish all the yogurt could just be in the yogurt container, even if you accidentally dropped it on the floor like I do when I spaz out on a regular basis.

Couldn’t you just get a container that looks like this when you peel it open?

Image credit: Ta Kou Wakako, via http://www.excite.co.jp/News/bit/E1351777462752.html?_p=1.

Well, folks, it’s technology to the rescue!

The Morinaga group in Japan has developed a non-adhesion technology that prevents yogurt from sticking to the aluminum lid! No special coatings, no horrific synthetic plastics, nada. All they did was create tiny “dots” on the aluminum’s surface, and then those little dots are coated with some Indian lotus extract, which hydrophobically repels yogurt, fruit, and anything containing moisture in it.

Image credit: Toyo Aluminium, via http://asia.nikkei.com/Tech-Science/Tech/Yogurt-lid-licking-be-banished.

And so rather than sticking to the lid, the yogurt is repelled, and your lid is kept 100% clean (making recycling all that much easier) while simultaneously keeping 100% of your yogurt in the container!

Image credit: Toyo Aluminium, via http://asia.nikkei.com/Tech-Science/Tech/Yogurt-lid-licking-be-banished.

These yogurt lids are already available in Japan, thanks to Morinaga yogurts, and will hopefully find their ways into pudding cups, cottage cheese, and perhaps even a notoriously American lunchbox delicacy, tropical fruit cups.

Image credit: Morinaga yogurts, via http://www.morinaga.co.jp/english/.

But what would such a promise be without a demonstration? YouTuber Kazu Fuji has us covered, as you can see below:

Of course, if you really wanted to be clever, you might make the same demand that the top comment on this video made:

Progress, folks, one step at a time. Hope this comes our way, soon, and hope you’re having a great weekend!


Leave your comments at the Starts With A Bang forum on Scienceblogs. And catch up on our best comments by checking out the Comments of the Week here!


Related

Up Next