The Most Average Place in Canada

London, Ontario—mid-sized, multi-ethnic, and very, very ordinary—is where major corporations go to test new products. What it’s like to live in a guinea pig city.

- Nicholas D'Ascanio

It’s a humid summer afternoon and a minivan is packed with hungry children. There isn’t time to cook before tonight’s soccer game, so their father pulls into the McDonald’s drive-thru and places his order. The children whine; the vein on his left temple pulses. After a long eight minutes, he rolls down the window, and with a mumbled “sorry,” a teen hands him a family-size pizza. This is London, Ont., in the mid-eighties.

This seemingly normal scenario, which likely occurred hundreds of times, is actually not at all normal in one noteworthy way: few communities in North America had McDonald’s pizza then. London was among the first to get it before it spread slowly across the continent. People loved the pizzas; they became legendary. But a dish that took nearly 10 minutes to make wasn’t exactly “fast food.” Couple that with thousands of franchisees saddled with the cost of installing new ovens and the whole idea eventually fizzled out.

The thing is, the hypothetical father at the drive-thru didn’t know any of this. He was just looking for the welcome silence that comes from filling kids’ mouths with pepperoni and cheese. He didn’t know that London was at the centre of an ongoing experiment in North American consumer habits. And he didn’t know that, to some shadowy figures watching from afar, he and his family were considered the most typical, representative people in the country.

MOST RESIDENTS OF London go through life unaware of the part they play in a conspiracy stretching from corporate boardrooms in New York and Toronto to the fast-food restaurants of southern Ontario. London is, in fact, a principal test market for new consumer products in Canada—and even for the United States.