Great business ideas usually emerge from problems and that was certainly the case for Adrienne Applegate. She won first prize in a Central Nebraska business idea competition for her invention which is a peanut butter jar with lids at each end. Who of us hasn’t struggled to get the last bit of peanut butter or other food out of a jar? Any one of us could have come up with this idea, and yet it took someone who looked beyond a problem for a solution to come up with a winning idea. So what’s bugging you at the moment?

Here’s a video of the winning pitch:

There seems no end to the range of specialised restaurants on offer. The latest thing we’ve seen is  a broth restaurant opened by fine dining chef Marco Canora in New York. Broth is something you might more typically associate with convalescence but the popularity of eating plans like The Paleo diet is giving the concoction something of a lift.

If you’re interested in going into the fast food business, it’s worth pausing for a moment and thinking beyond the obvious of burgers, pizza and the like. There could be a lucrative opportunity to do something really different.

When  twin brothers Gary and Alan Keery were discussing what kind of restaurant they wanted to eat at one day, they decided that what they’d really like was a simple bowl of cereal. That was the catalyst for their new business – a London restaurant that serves over 50 different breakfast cereals from all around the world with a  choice of over 30 different kinds of milk. The restaurant specialises in hard-to-find brands, and trades heavily on nostalgia with posters and advertisements for  products customers will remember from childhood.  The restaurant has already generated a lot of free publicity because the concept is so different, and the early signs look promising.

It shows that there are fast food and restaurant concepts still to be discovered and marketed. So what could you do? Anyone know if there is a porridge restaurant anywhere? With healthy eating being high on many agendas, I can see that standing a chance.