The awesome pig-shaped food truck in the above photo is Maximum Minimus, a unique dining experience in Seattle, Washington. The truck parks at different places throughout the week and customers find them, looking for their legendary pulled pork sandwiches.

Maximum Minimus isn’t the only amazing food truck serving great, gourmet food at discount prices. There’s a whole mess of them in Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, San Francisco, New York and many other cities.

Out of nowhere, food trucks have come to bring the latest, most exciting foods at very low overhead to city dwellers. The great thing about food carts is how they can specialize into really niche things. Want real Belgian waffles? Want PB &  J creme brulees? Want Czech food?

To paraphrase Apple, there’s a cart for that. There are so many things exciting about this trend but for me, the most exciting is the low cost these these food lovers can pay to get a business going. You get your exacting food obsession to the people and you don’t have to rent commercial space. The costs are so low that you can turn whatever bat**** crazy idea you have into a real business.

And it’s this trend that I think will tell us where the next businesses are going to be coming from. Successful new businesses most likely won’t need commercial real estate like previous generations have. With credit being tight, there’s no reason entrepreneurs show risk a whole bunch of capital to get started.

Think about it with your business. How can you make your business smaller (a la foodcarts)? What can you do to reduce the overhead but increase the individuality of your business?

Thinking about starting a business? How can you create a food truck like business in your niche? High-quality, cheap and very few start up costs.