London Inc. Weekly

Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

Porter adds five year-round domestic routes out of YXU

Porter Airlines is bringing a healthy dose of domestic flights from London International Airport to Halifax, Vancouver, Edmonton, Ottawa and Montreal next spring, the airline and airport announced on Tuesday. The schedule is heavy on short-hop flights, with 20 weekly flights each to Ottawa and Montreal (up to three round trips a day for each of those options, which YXU pitches as a same-day option for business travellers), 11 to Vancouver and seven each to Halifax and Edmonton, starting in April. “This will be a lot of capacity right out of the gate. It is a big commitment,” Porter president Kevin Jackson told The London Free Press. “London is very much an under-served area and there are more than two million people an hour’s drive from here.” YXU CEO Scott McFadzean was understandably pleased. “It is a game changer for the airport and the region. It is five flights, but it is the frequency that sets it apart,” he said. “London is one of the fastest growing cities in Ontario and the country, and people want to avoid the busy Highway 401 and Toronto area. Now they have an option to do that.”

The upshot: When Porter and the London International Airport made their first big announcement a few weeks ago (announcing a number of winter sun destination routes), they teased a much larger domestic partnership between the two parties in the near future, and here it is. This set of flights will offer quick access from London to a few key markets, but from a network standpoint, the big get is that it connects London to Ottawa, which is Porter’s second-biggest hub, with connecting flights to places like Boston, New York (okay, New Jersey…), Atlantic Canada, Vancouver, Aruba and elsewhere. “Porter’s new Ottawa–London route brings our communities closer and makes business, tourism and family travel more accessible,” said the Ottawa International Airport Authority’s vice-president of business development and marketing Joel Tkach. “Connecting it to Canada’s Capital Region strengthens these regional ties while giving travellers a faster, more convenient link across the province and beyond.”

Read more: London Free Press | YXU

Yaya’s Kitchen named to inaurgural Canada Small Business 100 list

London’s Yaya’s Kitchen has been named to the first-ever Canada Small Business 100, a new national list of small businesses highlighted by Mastercard, the restaurant announced in a press release on Thursday. The list’s profile of Yaya’s calls it “fine dining as cultural education, built far from the expected culinary capitals.” Co-founders Malvin Wright and Maryam Yaro (pictured) built the business around food from the African diaspora, and now run a café inside Museum London alongside its tasting dinners and catering side of the business. “We started Yaya’s with the belief that food could do more than feed people,” Wright said. “Small businesses can create jobs and economic activity, but they can also tell stories, preserve culture and create places where people belong. That is the kind of business we have always wanted Yaya’s to become.”

The upshot: It’s been a few years for Yaya’s, which went from hosting monthly supper clubs out of the London Food Incubator in Old East Village when we first wrote about them back in 2020, to being named Best of London’s Best Fine Dining establishment in 2024 to some bigger steps over the past 18 months or so. The biggest among them was the move into Museum London, taking over the previous Rhino Lounge space and giving the business a more permanent home downtown. A big part of Wright and Yaro’s mission with the business has always been culinary and cultural education, and in September, a four-person Yaya’s team cooked at Mount Allison and Dalhousie universities in Sackville, NB and Halifax, NS, then hosted an eight-course dinner in Dartmouth. “[Yaya’s] could carry stories, preserve memory and bring people together. To see something that began around our backyard table recognized nationally is incredibly meaningful.” 

Read more: Canada Small Business 100

London’s housing market shows slight improvement in September, bucking national trends

According to the London and St. Thomas Association of Realtors (LSTAR), which released data for home sales in the month of September last week, a total of 521 homes exchanged hands in the region (the LSTAR catchment area also takes in Strathroy, St. Thomas and portions of Middlesex and Elgin counties), up 5.3 per cent when compared to sales in September of 2025. On the supply side, a total of 1,615 new properties entered the market in September, bringing active listings (a total of all listing) for the month to 3,335, a 3.1 per cent hike from September 2025, with 6.1 months of inventory recorded (a measure of how long it would take to sell all current listings at the present sales pace if no new homes were added). “The marketplace continued to show signs of a buyers’ market,” said LSTAR chair Robin Tiller. The September sales-to-new listings ratio was 34.7 per cent, down from a month prior in August, which came in at 37.5 per cent. According to the Canadian Real Estate Association, a ratio between 45 per cent and 65 per cent indicates conditions of a balanced market.

The upshot: While the slight uptick in homes sold is welcome, for local realtors the most encouraging news in the numbers is likely the gain in the average price of a resale home, which had dipped well below $600,000 in August. “The average sales price saw a jump to $611,509, from $590,550 recorded in August,” reported Tiller. “Notably, London South and London North experienced the biggest gains in average sales price, month over month. In London South, the September average sales price was $608,872, up from the August average sales price of $567,783. In London North, the September average sales price was $704,858, up from the previous month, which was $668,345.” Nationally, September sales declined in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City, according to an analysis by Robert Hogue, assistant chief economist at RBC. Hogue expects improving affordability and a resilient economy to eventually bring more buyers back into the market and support a mild recovery nationally. But the picture varies considerably from one city to the next. “The road ahead is likely to be bumpy and uneven across markets,” he wrote.

Read more: LSTAR | Real Estate Magazine

KGK Science branches into family medicine

KGK Science Inc. is getting into the family doctor biz. The London clinical research firm, which runs human trials for supplement and nutraceutical companies, says it is opening a family health clinic in its downtown space at 275 Dundas Street, a move which comes a couple of months after Chicago-based Maxim Partners bought a stake in the company. “There’s a need in the community. There’s a lot of people in London that I speak to that don’t have a family physician, there’s definitely a demand,” KGK president Najla Guthrie told The London Free Press. The clinic will be called the Wellington Family Health Centre and will be owned by KGK but run separately from its clinical trial business, the company said. Right now, the business is aiming to staff the clinic with three family physicians, serving 4,500 to 5,000 patients (it has not hired any doctors yet). Guthrie said that following Maxim’s investment, KGK is looking to expand its clinical trial business into the Toronto market, and possibly other Canadian locations in the future. “We have what we need from a resource perspective to be able to get there, whereas doing it organically would have taken too long,” she said. Renovations are set to wrap up by the end of October, and Guthrie hopes to open the clinic before the end of the year.

The upshot: Some sort of expansion was obviously in the cards when KGK announced that a stake in the company had been bought by Maxim, though an expansion into family medicine might be seen as a bit of a curveball for a company that is mainly involved in clinical research (and even within that, they’ve historically worked with supplement and cannabis companies, and briefly on psilocybin research). Guthrie told the Free Press the new family health clinic would be “synergistic” with the company’s clinical research, though it’s not exactly clear what that might mean in terms of the actual services being offered. Maxim doesn’t have any established history as a financial backer in Canadian family medicine (nor does KGK Science), so it may be that this is a KGK-initiated side quest as the company looks to scale up its clinical research business and expand into larger market. Nonetheless, anyone hiring family doctors right now is definitely filling a need, so it will be a welcome addition to downtown healthcare. 

Read more: London Free Press

Appetronix’s kitchen robots head to Toronto

Appetronix, the London startup behind a pizza-making robot, is about to install its first robo-cook in Canada (although it won’t be making pizza). The robot is set to go into a yet-to-be-finalized spot in Toronto’s financial district next month, where it will make Mexican-style bowls, CEO Nipun Sharma told The London Free Press. “The food is identical to what you would get at Chipotle. It’s the same process. You get to choose the rice, the beans, the meat, the salsa. It’s all sequential,” he said. The company’s first machine, built with U.S. chain Donatos Pizzeria, has sold more than 15,000 pizzas in about 10 months at the airport in Columbus, Ohio, the company said. Appetronix was also one of 40 companies recently named to the Canadian Food Innovation Network’s Foodtech Frontier, its second year on the list. Co-founder Ray Schott told CTV News London the robot could be appealing to restaurateurs looking to address staffing challenges. “From labour shortages to shrinking profit margins to just being able to staff it, and to be able to do these on the off-peak hours, that’s a challenge,” he said. “This technology allows [restaurateurs] to bridge that gap. I don’t need anybody to be manning this machine, so it’s available to be used 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

The upshot: Robot-made food has limited success in North America, so it will be worth keeping an eye on whether Appetronix’s pizza and bowl making automations can truly gain market traction. Thus far, robot cooks have been viewed skeptically by consumers — one 2024 study found that “there seems to be a general societal opposition” to automated food production, and over four controlled studies found that “consumers have more negative expectations of food when it is prepared using automated processes because automation removes the perceived love that goes into the food creation process.” However, it is certainly plausible that consumer attitudes on this question are evolving in 2026, and a real-world test of Appetronix’s robot in a downtown Toronto food counter will be helpful in gauging demand for the tech. While their proof-of-concept pizza machine in the Columbus airport has been relatively successful, it’s a different ballgame when you’re talking about a captive market (hungry flyers without many options) versus competing against a hundred other lunch counters in Toronto’s financial district.

Read more: CTV News London | London Free Press

Chamber launches Power Hour speaker series

The London Chamber of Commerce is launching a new speaker series next month, called Power Hour. It’s launching on November 4th with a talk from London Police Chief Thai Truong, in a format that the Chamber says will be a “short presentation followed by an interactive Q&A” that will give Chamber members and guests a chance to engage directly with local leaders in various sectors. “Whether the conversation is about economic development, infrastructure, government, innovation, investment, workforce or the future of our city, Power Hour puts chamber members closer to the people and conversations helping shape what comes next,” the Chamber wrote in a press release. “We wanted it to be a more intimate, conversational format that gives attendees a chance to learn from leaders who are shaping our community and making an impact in London,” said Chamber COO Kristen Duever. The first event will be held November 4 at the Chamber of Commerce from 8:30 a.m. to 10 a.m.

The upshot: The success of event series such as this depends on a few things: getting the format right, allowing for something a more interactive and engaging than a simple lecture and inviting engaging speakers, with something interesting to say and a willingness to really involve the audience on the subject. Chief Truong is good first guest to go with. Downtown safety, policing and some of the ongoing social issues have been a hot-button issue in the municipal election, one that certainly elicits a lot of different opinions among business owners and downtown stakeholders, which should make for an interesting session. It will be interesting to see who else the Chamber can lock down as a speaker for future events.

Read more: London Chamber of Commerce

Dispatch: October 9, 2026

A summary of recent business appointments and announcements, plus event listings for the upcoming week.

View listings here

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