As a bit of a foodie myself (just made Yelp Elite! screw useless Foursquare badges. I can’t eat them), I’ve always been fascinated by entrepreneurship in the food space. I still can’t believe the crap most people eat and that there aren’t better choices available for some people. People are forced to eat unhealthy take out food or junk food because of a lack of fresh, tasty options. Here are some of the coolest ideas I’ve seen to address this problem:

Gobble lets you order meals from neighborhood chefs. It’s basically a marketplace for locally prepared, healthy meals that can be picked up or delivered. Strangely, I came across this Internet startup first in the real world when they set up a kiosk outside a building I was at. The food they prepared was terrific for $9 and I would gladly use their service again if they setup outside my office building. However, after trying to use their service online, I realized there were two shortcomings still: (1) can’t sort meals by neighborhood and  (2) delivery fees are quite high. I realize the first problem may have more to do with the lack of enough chefs still given the early stage the marketplace is at. There aren’t any local options for me that I can easily pick up in North Beach or in the Financial District so I would consider delivery except I wouldn’t pay $10 for delivery for my own meal. Once this startup gets critical mass on the customer and chef sides, it will be quite powerful.

Kitchit tries to democratize fine dining by enabling you to book a top local chef to cook for you and your guests. This service certainly isn’t for everyone as it normally costs $50-$100/person but if you host fancy diner parties, it could be a great solution.

Stockbox Grocers is trying to get rid of “food deserts” — low-income areas that lack access to healthy, affordable food. There are a lot of urban areas where the cornerstore doesn’t stock fresh fruits and veggies, which leads to a lot of health problems. Their solution is unique: convert reclaimed shipping containers into miniature grocery stores which operate out of parking lots. I guess they redefine what it means to think inside the box.

These companies probably are just some of the many tackling the problem. In San Francisco, there’s a whole meetup called “Food Startups” which deals with it. Food is such a basic problem in life and it’s surprising it hasn’t been disrupted by the Internet yet, but it will.

After reviewing a number of my favorite places to eat on Yelp this weekend, I remembered my fantasy of someday opening a restaurant and a recent conversation I had with the founder of Cheeseboy, a growing grilled cheese to go chain. We discussed how different it was to run an Internet company and a brick-and-mortar business. 

The benefit of providing a web service is the lack of inventory issues and the low marginal cost of production. You have some fixed cost and then can distribute your product to anyone, anywhere and at anytime because you’re just transmitting bits of information. Internet companies can grow huge in a short matter of time. However, the same qualities that make Internet businesses so easy to succeed are the same ones that make them feel less real. There is nothing to really touch or hold in your hand. Your servers are oftentimes in co-location centers that you’ll never actually even visit.

It’s perhaps for that reason that I find Internet entrepreneurs like me wanting to someday open their own offline business. Justin Kan of Justin.TV recently launched his own clothing line called Saboteur. Seth Sternberg at Meebo once mentioned to me his own dream of starting an airline after reading Richard Branson’s book Losing My Virginity.

Richard Branson is of course the one who famously said, “If you want to be a millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.”

This quip has a worthy warning to any Internet entrepreneur fantasizing of how much better it would be to have a brick-and-mortar business. The grass is always greener, but if you still want to try, expect to feel some pain for being able to touch your product. I still want to open an offline business someday, but it’ll probably have to be well after any success I find online.