While Anthony himself helped me create my perfect You Bar, he also has a staff of experts who have created hundreds of thousands of made-to-order nutrition bars and are available to provide phone or email support. "We get requests for all sorts of ingredients. If we don't have them already, we will try to get them and then formulate the You Bar to exactly their specifications."

When I called Anthony, he told me that as a marathon runner, nutrition has always been one of his passions. He was in his senior year at the University of Southern California when he and his mother, Ava Bise, a snowboarding instructor, started the company two years ago.

"I was a finance major and am especially happy now that I didn't go into that," he told me. "All of my classmates are unemployed now."

The genius of Anthony's creation was combining his love of good nutrition with customization. "Originally we thought that it would be just people who were finicky eaters like my mom and myself," he told me. "And then we found that people who had various allergies and various diets -- like low-carb diets -- started loving it."

Later, as people requested the newest ingredients, like goji berries, they added them. The newest development is gifts. "We never expected that," he says, "but because you can place somebody's name on it, You Bars become a personalized gift, and people give them all sorts of clever names."

Starting a food company was a natural for Anthony because of his personal passion for good nutrition. But how did he pair that interest with customization?

"I got the idea of customization from the Dell computer website," he says. "I had just bought a Dell computer and customized it."

I told Anthony that his using the Internet to customize nutrition bars reminded me of Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail. "I'm reading that book right now!" he replied. "The future of business is selling more of less, and that is what the Internet makes possible."

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, coined the phrase "The Long Tail" to describe niche strategies, such as those of Amazon or Netflix, that sell a lot of items in quantities far too small for any brick-and-mortar store to carry. I am a big fan of both of those sites -- Amazon especially for my unusual taste in books and Netflix for my offbeat taste in movies.

With food customization Anthony sees the sky as the limit. He has already expanded beyond nutrition bars to customizable protein shakes. If people want them, he will include vegetables into the bars and shakes.

As his company grows Anthony's goal is to becoming price-competitive with the Clif Bar. "Even now we can make a fresh product, exactly tailored to the person, with their name on it, delivered to their house for almost the same price as a bar that has been on the shelf for six months."