This City Has Become The Fast Food Test Market For America

America, as you may know, is a very big place, which makes it quite difficult to get a representative sample from its population. Countries like, say, New Zealand are small enough that their populace has a shared set of reference points, which contribute to a shared sensibility. But sometimes, it can seem like our fifty states are fifty different countries. How on earth are you going to get somebody who lives in downtown Chicago and someone who lives in rural Idaho to agree on anything? That's why, when fast food companies with new items want to see what America might think, they go to one specific city to get a good cross-section of our country: Bakersfield, California.

Bakersfield may not be as glamorous as Los Angeles or as iconic as San Francisco, but it has a few distinguishing qualities. It's an important community for both agriculture and oil production, and it spawned the Bakersfield Sound, a subgenre of country music that, among other things, gave the world Merle Haggard. And, thanks to its diverse population and relative isolation (it's a two-hour drive from Los Angeles, and a five-hour drive from San Francisco), Bakersfield is an ideal laboratory for fast food companies like McDonald's and KFC to test how new menu items might play with various demographics before the rest of the country finds out about them. (Does that mean the KFC Double Down was tested in Bakersfield? Maybe!)

If you're willing to schlep down to Bakersfield to try out new menu items before the rest of America (as a surprising number of fast food fans do), you'll want to head to Ming Avenue. It's a road that connects the residential areas of Bakersfield to both the main town and the freeways, and it's home to more than a few fast food titans: nationwide favorites like McDonald's and Taco Bell, as well as regionally popular chains such as Del Taco and the attempting-to-expand Wienerschnitzel. While we're sure most customers who frequent Ming Avenue fast food locations just get their usual, it's not uncommon to find these restaurants peddling some unfamiliar wares.

Taco Bell's Cantina Chicken? That was tested in Bakersfield. The Doritos Locos Taco, which was an unfortunately stolen idea? That got tested in Bakersfield, too. Those Del Taco Takis collaborations? Another Bakersfield special. Items that are still being tested will usually come in unbranded packaging — all the better to keep your perspective from being colored. Not everything works (those gross Sea Dogs from Wienerschnitzel were trialed in Bakersfield first), but that's what testing is for, right?