Soup’s On

At home or away from home, soup is back on the front burner. Soup accounted for 30% of all new menu items introduced in the nation’s top restaurant chains in the second half of 1999, according to the Chain Account Menu Survey. Consumer food product marketers—touting portability, pourable portions, meal kits, and more—kept pace, introducing 254 new soup products in 1999 and 119 in the first half of 2000, according to New Product News!

Although soup is still sold primarily as an appetizer or first …