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Tim Hortons Hasn't Been Canadian-Owned For A Long Time
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this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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(Engage old fart mode)
It wasn’t that long ago that Tim Hortons restaurants baked their own donuts in house. Fresh all the time. It was their draw.
Fast forward and they truck in everything frozen from a manufacturing plant. Things aren’t made there anymore - they’re thawed and assembled. And it tastes like it.
They used to be legendary for their coffee, but a few years ago they let their agreement with their coffee supplier to lapse. McDonald’s scooped it right up which suddenly put McCafe on the map. Tim’s found a new supplier but the coffee wasn’t nearly as good.
Aren’t a bunch of their franchises also under investigation for Temporary Foreign Worker program abuse?
It’s just been death by a thousand really stupid cuts.
Hot take, but the donuts being frozen is not a bad thing. I work in a grocer and people never know that our bread products are not fresh until they "catch" us putting the frozen products on the shelf. We don't hide it, and nobody complains about the quality. In fact, they love it. If the donuts taste like shit, its because they were shit donuts, not because they were frozen. While seeing and knowing the donuts are being made fresh on site is a magical thing, you absolutely can retain 99% of the quality with frozen. Ideally, the savings would be passed on to the consumer though.
But pizza, sandwiches, and shit tasting coffee, I got nothing for that. It is meant to be a coffee shop at its core, so I don't know why the fuck they'd ruin the coffee so much. It's not like its hard either, you can make a machine do it for you. They're trying too hard to be like Starbucks. I understand trying to appeal to a new generation of Canadians, but they really missed the mark. If they wanted to seriously compete with Starbucks, they are completely half-assing it.
It's a fried good, not a baked good. Bread comes out of the freezer ALMOST as good as it went in, but it's never going to be fresh baked bread again. With fried goods, its even more pronounced. Like when you get french fries, you get a narrow window of like ten minutes before they are stale. And they're still good, but they're different. A freshly fried donut and a day old donut, no matter how it was made and preserved, are not the same thing.
That's a fair assessment. Now that you mention it, we don't actually have many frozen donuts at my location. I wonder what they do to freeze the tim horton donuts, or what could be done to make them just as good despite being frozen. Maybe thawing a "blank" and cremeing and icing it freshly? Almost makes me want to experiment at home for freezing methods.