Adam Riggio: They’re Not Our Doughnuts Anymore, Son
Credit: (The Post Millenial/Google Images)
Written By: Adam Riggio
There’s nothing more Canadian than a coffee and a doughnut at Tim Hortons, maybe a croissant or a muffin if it’s breakfast. That’s what most all of us growing up in Canada learned.
It was never a lesson. There was no teacher in our school houses talking about how important Tims is to the Canadian people as one of the material factors binding the country together. There were no boxes of Timbits for me back in elementary school that we’d rip open, with the sleek sound in the background of the older boys’ skates carving blade-thin curves in ice. The “Canadianness” of Tim’s is something that we absorbed growing up in Canada, as we grow up into any belief or value set in our community.
But that image of Tim Hortons as the heart of the Canadian hearth falls short of today’s reality, and always had its darker sides.
A Base in Small Town Canada for Owners in Rio de Janeiro
Tim Hortons has actually been a Brazilian company for several years now. In 2014, the corporation was bought by a conglomerate called Restaurant Brands International (RBI). RBI is a holding company owned and controlled by 3G Capital, one of Brazil’s leading hedge funds.
Often at the time, news of this purchase was explained in mainstream media as Tim Hortons being bought by Burger King. Burger King and Popeyes are also owned by RBI, and now make with Tim Hortons the three flagship brands of that company. But 3G, through RBI ultimately control what all these companies do. Whether that explanation was a genuine common mistake in reporting, or a public relations ploy to keep 3G’s role relatively quiet, I don’t yet know.
The hedge fund’s plan to expand its three brands internationally, especially to China (中华), is behind many of the changes in the style of Tim Hortons’ menus. The experimental doughnut designs, and menu additions like banana bread are elements of that plan: Canadian markets provide customer feedback on whether those experiments are worthy of store shelves in 中华 (China), while patriotic attachment to Tims itself means that even the most grotesque such experiments will not hurt the customer base.
A Volatile Economy Threatens Canada’s Favourite Fast Food
The problem that Tim Hortons faces as a company going forward is that patriotism seems to be its only market advantage left. The brand is squeezed from multiple directions. Having once held a nationwide lockdown on convenience food, the rise of app-based delivery has undercut their sales considerably in only five years. As well, rising minimum wages and wholesale food costs have been corroding margins for several years.
Wage issues in particular have resulted in a serious loss of popular faith in Tims as a brand. Many Tim Hortons franchise owners responded to increases in Ontario’s minimum wage by cutting staff positions, benefits, and breaks. Franchisers themselves are often painted as greedy, but that’s another trope to let 3G Capital off the hook for their own plans to maximize short term profit yields from RBI-owned companies.
The hedge fund’s priority to keep prices low and profit margins high at existing stores, all while forcing franchise owners to bake and sell experimental doughnuts of increasingly doubtful quality. Long term trends toward assembling fast food meals with robotic machinery may soon scuttle the wage issue in the industry altogether, as kitchen automation drastically reduces the need for actual humans on staff.
Even so, those global expansion plans may be sputtering, if 3G’s recent sale of a quarter of its stake in Restaurant Brands International is a genuine sign of the hedge fund’s aversion to growing risk in the fast food field.
Pieces of Patriotism in Frozen Doughnuts and Burnt Coffee
There isn’t anything too profound in how Tim Hortons snuggled into the core concepts of Canadians’ love of our country. That success begins with the brand’s deep connection with hockey culture, which defined the popular leisure of the entire country when the company began in 1964.
Miles “Tim” Horton co-founded the company when he was a popular hockey player transitioning out of full-time professional sports. Canada was, a few enclaves aside, an entirely white country. Several decades before amplified climate catastrophe set in, Canadian winters remained cold enough across the country to support outdoor rinks and pickup hockey in every community. From its inception, Tim Hortons began sponsoring hockey youth leagues and camps, organizing and professionalizing those neighbourhood rinks.
Even the core food of Tim Hortons itself is deeply integrated with the experience of playing and watching hockey. Tims never grew its menus beyond coffee and donuts until the early 1980s, so it established itself by perfecting the food precisely tuned to the desires of people watching a hockey game. A hockey rink must be kept cold enough to maintain the ice. High-calorie doughnuts kept our metabolisms burning, and hot coffee cups warmed our hands while we sat shivering on the seats and benches. With our conscious attention riveted to the game itself, we ate doughnuts that had no sauces, crumbs, or garnishes to spill on ourselves. We held our food in our fingers, our drinks in our palms, and warmed our hearts while absorbed in the drama of the ice.
That association with hockey and hockey culture continued after the downhome experience of the rink disappeared from many Canadians’ daily lives. Alongside the hockey camps came NHL superstars in advertising and promotional material. As long as Canada remained a hockey country, Tims could rely on that athletic patriotism locking our people into the brand.
Canada’s Cultural Reckoning
Canada is not that hockey country that it once was for so long. Neighbourhood rinks in many cities no longer hold together as well as they once did through our more turbulent winters. The cost of hockey gear has grown so high that many families can no longer afford the sport whose expense now makes it an increasingly elite instead of a working class pastime.
Canadian culture is also confronting the ugly side of our traditional love of hockey. Despite the popularity of the sport among our largest immigrant demographics like Punjabi-Canadians, hockey has become a core plane on which fascistic conceptions of Canadian identity proliferate. The sport is becoming a symbol of a traditional, culturally conservative, exclusionary vision of a European Canada, validating hyper-masculine gestures of dominance.
However much we would like, the Canadian people can’t just lay all the blame at the feet of Don Cherry. It’s tempting, would constitute the ignorance our own complicity in enjoying the sport as it has grown more dangerous and violent. Just as its twin in the restaurant world built its brand on cozy patriotism, its corruption at the hands of profiteering piracy has made a lie of whatever comfort that vanishing life once offered.
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