Dr. Patankar and other scientists have been investigating superhydrophobic surfaces. A hydrophobic surface repels water; a superhydrophobic surface, as one might imagine, really repels water. Inspired in part by lotus leaves, the surface of a superhydrophobic material looks rough, at least under a microscope. Water rolls up into balls, sitting on the tips of the rough surface, but mostly on air trapped between the droplet and the rough surface. The droplets roll off easily.

That technology has had some success. Rust-Oleum, for example sells a superhydrophobic treatment developed by a company called NeverWet in Lancaster, Pa. But the microscopic roughness can be damaged, and then water flows in, displacing the pockets of air, and sticks to the no-longer-slippery surface.

Because air dissolves into water, superhydrophobic surfaces can also lose slipperiness when submerged for long periods. That makes it impractical for ship hulls, for instance. But Dr. Patankar and his colleagues have shown that with a clever choice of texture, trapped water vapor could serve as the persistent layer separating the water from the surface.

LiquiGlide’s approach is similar, but it uses a liquid lubricant, not a gas.

”What could be a solution that provides sort of universal slipperiness?” Dr. Varanasi said. “The idea we had was, Why not think about trapping a liquid in these features?”

Dr. Varanasi and Mr. Smith worked out a theory to predict interactions among the surface, the lubricant and air. Essentially, the lubricant binds more strongly to the textured surface than to the liquid, and that allows the liquid to slide on a layer of lubricant instead of being pinned against the surface, and the textured surface keeps the lubricant from slipping out.

“We’re not defying physics, but effectively, we are,” Mr. Smith said.

The approach also allows them to vary the ingredients of the textured layer and the lubricant to fit the properties of different liquids — for food applications, the coatings are derived from edible materials. (The company does not divulge the specific ingredients. “We use things that are, maybe, parts of foods, you’d say,” Mr. Smith said. “You wouldn’t make a meal out of our coatings.”)

The shift from industrial applications to packaging started when Dr. Varanasi’s wife was having trouble getting honey out of a bottle and asked him, because he was an expert on slipperiness, whether he couldn’t do something about that.