Everyone has had the experience of trying to scrape the last of the peanut butter or mayonnaise from the bottom of a glass jar without getting your hand sticky.

It’s a similar situation with lotions and shampoo in plastic bottles and tubes -- to get your money’s worth it’s not uncommon to cut open containers with scissors to ensure you use everything you paid for in a container.

An inventor by the name of Ron Jidmar thinks he has a solution to all of that nonsense with a flexible jar design that can be squeezed with one hand to lift contents from the bottom to the top of a jar or container, leaving the other hand free to scoop the contents out cleanly. The jar also has a ring that indicates how much of a product is left without having to open the container.

Jidmar posted a video on YouTube demonstrating his design with the title “Jar Invention Lifts It All!” You can check it out here and see the container used in various scenarios:

The container Jidmar invented isn’t just meant for food. The video shows household cleaners and similar products also being squeezed out of the tube. Moreover, the containers can be reused with prepackaged refills, reducing the amount of jar and container waste in a household.

Jidmar is currently looking for business partners to back his idea, so the flexible lift jar isn’t yet available. But you can imagine how handy it would be to help us get to the hard-to-reach bottoms of many of our commonly used containers.

Design engineers and professionals, the West Coast’s most important design, innovation, and manufacturing event, Pacific Design & Manufacturing, is taking place in Anaheim, Feb. 10-12, 2015. A Design News event, Pacific Design & Manufacturing is your chance to meet qualified suppliers, get hands-on access to the latest technologies, be informed from a world-class conference program, and expand your network. (You might even meet a Design News editor.) Learn more about Pacific Design & Manufacturing here.

Elizabeth Montalbano is a freelance writer who has written about technology and culture for more than 15 years. She has lived and worked as a professional journalist in Phoenix, San Francisco, and New York City. In her free time she enjoys surfing, traveling, music, yoga, and cooking. She currently resides in a village on the southwest coast of Portugal.

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