Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and the upcoming Blink (which I can't wait to read), wrote an article titled The Ketchup Conundrum for the September issue of The New Yorker.  In the piece, he discusses how Grey Poupon paved the way for the hundreds of varieties of mustard we see in our supermarkets today, and suggests that ketchup may be next. 

However, my favorite part of the article is Gladwell's explanation of how Prego (the spaghetti sauce) developed their extra-chunky sauce:

Standard practice in the food industry would have been to convene a focus group and ask spaghetti eaters what they wanted. But Moskowitz does not believe that consumers--even spaghetti lovers--know what they desire if what they desire does not yet exist. "The mind," as Moskowitz is fond of saying, "knows not what the tongue wants." Instead, working with the Campbell’s kitchens, he came up with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce. These were designed to differ in every conceivable way: spiciness, sweetness, tartness, saltiness, thickness, aroma, mouth feel, cost of ingredients, and so forth. He had a trained panel of food tasters analyze each of those varieties in depth. Then he took the prototypes on the road--to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Jacksonville--and asked people in groups of twenty-five to eat between eight and ten small bowls of different spaghetti sauces over two hours and rate them on a scale of one to a hundred. When Moskowitz charted the results, he saw that everyone had a slightly different definition of what a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like. If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people’s preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky, and of those three the last was the most important. Why? Because at the time there was no extra-chunky spaghetti sauce in the supermarket. Over the next decade, that new category proved to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Prego. "We all said, ‘Wow!’ " Monica Wood, who was then the head of market research for Campbell’s, recalls. "Here there was this third segment--people who liked their spaghetti sauce with lots of stuff in it--and it was completely untapped. So in about 1989-90 we launched Prego extra-chunky. It was extraordinarily successful."

What untapped market is there for your services?  Can you find the unserved segment and be its "extra-chunky" Prego?