In a fast-food world of often-complex sandwich builds, labor-intensive fresh salads, and other high-maintenance menu items, wouldn’t it be great to find a transaction-generator that’s relatively cheap to prepare, simple to store, already familiar to consumers, and capable of being rendered in near-limitless combinations of flavors and styles?

Welcome to the wide, but still largely unexplored, world of quick-serve soups and stews. For years, Wendy’s signature chili was about the only high-profile entry in this category, which seems a bit strange, given the widespread popularity of broths, bisques, chowders, consommés, and other hot liquid or semi-liquid delicacies.

Soup is a universally beloved comfort food and virtually every culture serves some variation on the basic theme. From Vietnamese pho to Japanese udon noodle broths, Thai curry and lemongrass concoctions, Mexican tortilla soups, and spicy Korean tofu stews now common in Los Angeles, the options are dizzying in their range and flavor profiles.

And Americans, it should be noted, down more than their fair share of the stuff. Market research firm Technomic reported in March 2007 that the number of soups on the nation’s top 250 restaurant menus increased more than 6 percent in recent years, while most other menu categories grew a relatively paltry 3 to 4 percent.

Soup is also one of those rare foods that gets a fair amount of credit for qualities it may or may not actually have. We tend to think of soup and salad as the quintessential healthy dieter’s meal. Likewise, soup ladled piping hot out of a great, big pot has the halo of freshness even if it was frozen solid just hours before. And adding fresh ingredients at the last minute, from crispy tortilla chips to grated cheese to cracker bits, only heightens this perception.

From a quick-serve standpoint, soup’s only real liability is the difficulty associated with consuming it on the run. Science has yet to give us a soup you can hold comfortably in your hand; the scalding-hot broth tends to trickle straight through your fingers, leaving only a residue of noodles, meat chunks and vegetables, and this makes for a messy—to say nothing of painful—lunch hour. This is why many of the more interesting things happening on the soup front are taking place either at fast-casual chains such as Panera and Qdoba, where dining in is the norm or in urban settings where workers tend to walk to lunch and have the freedom to eat something in a bowl at their desks.