(FORTUNE Magazine) – When Robin Southgate designed the world's first weather toaster for his final project at Brunel University in Britain, he gave himself a tough criterion: to make an informative statement on white bread.

The result: a toaster equipped with a modem and a Java-run microprocessor that hooks to the Web and browns bread with a symbol--a sun, a cloud, or a cloud with rain--indicating the local weather. "We wanted to do something that would be a benefit to mankind, and this really fit with our view of the world," Southgate says.

The toast market in America has been rapidly declining since the 1950s, the golden era of bacon and eggs. While toast is still the No. 2 breakfast food, only 14.5% of breakfasts eaten at home include toast--down from 26% in 1985. Harry Balzer, who works on the Annual Report on Eating Patterns in America for the NPD Group, blames the decline on the ascendancy of the "handheld market," which includes portable McMuffin-type meals and the bagel (which he calls "the Nasdaq of the breakfast market," since its consumption patterns eerily follow Nasdaq highs and lows).

Would importing the weather toaster change all that?

"I never eat toast for breakfast," says Southgate, who seems blithely unaware that his proclivity points to a large problem in the marketplace.

"The thing about toast is, Who really supports it?" Balzer says. "There are no major brands."

How about Wonderbread?

"I haven't really thought that one through," says Mark Dirkes, a senior VP of marketing for the company.

But Southgate has, and despite his admitted disdain for toast at breakfast--and as a main course or side dish--he still sees the potential of his creation.

"You have a screen on the piece of bread," Southgate starts out. "You have the output device" (the toaster). "It costs less." (Yes, a toaster does cost less than a PC.) So the toast is a wasted space, he says. "For anything except, maybe, eating."

Jackpot.

--Grainger David