This is a good little video about how they got to the point they're at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ58noGoBm4
They are basically the poster child of enshittification (as far as Canadian restaurants go anyway).
There's a tiny café owned by a couple literally right around the corner from the nearest Tim's to me.
It's definitely a little pricier but FAR better quality. They've also got crapes and waffles and stuff. But sometimes I'll just go in for a cappuccino.
I've become probably their best customer since I go there so often. Despite the fact that Tim's is closer and cheaper.
Not only is it Canadian (plus some European products) it's a local business. All the better.
Edit: That being said, Tim's is cheap so that usually what I'll have when the café isn't an option. It's not American owned thankfully. I wish it was still Canadian though.
Definitely, the quality difference is unbelievable!
I find most of the people I know that complain cafés are too expensive drink drip anyways and it seems to be about the same price everywhere 🤷♂️. Its $2.16 for a large drip at Tim's here, and $2-$3 at most every local café I've ever been to apart from really bougie ones.
People just see the $4-6+ milk drinks and blended frozen drinks (with real ingredients, apples-oranges) and get sticker shock compared to Tim's fake whipped topping and sweetener sludge (sorry, "iced capp") for $4.19 when they could be enjoying much better drip in the meantime for effectively the same price.
I saw Pepsico use Canada brand advertising for Doritos. Was really confusing why they thought it would work
(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.
I worked there during the frozen donut transition. A few really cool stoner night bakers got let go from my store.
And replaced with cheap, exploitable TFWs!
The term is 'enshittification' and it's practically the default business strategy for extracting cash from brand value.
Buy/make a good company by offering a quality service and then spend the next decade cutting costs until the product is terrible.
Most people won't notice the incremental changes. It's often likened to boiling a frog.
that's not what that means
In Cobourg, Ontario, a Tim Hortons store got into the news because after the minimum wage was raised they cut their employees benefits.
The interesting part was that the store was owned by the son of one of the Tim Hortons founders and the daughter of the other founder, who had married. There was a bit of a backlash, to put it mildly.
I never cared for Tim Horton's coffee, so I didn't mind the change.
Most people don't really drink coffee they drink coffee flavoured cream and sugar. This is why the Starbucks milk drinks are so popular. The quality of the underlying coffee is less important when you double double everything.
That wasn’t a thing in Canada for the longest time
Old people (millennials +) would still associate that with Americans
Yeah, I had Mink reverse press coffee. It is amazing, and adding milk or cream hides the amazing flavour. Technically they are a chocolatier.
I do drink mine black. I like cream, but I hardly need the extra calories!
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.
people never know that our bread products are not fresh until they "catch" us putting the frozen products on the shelf.
I don't think you're fooling as many people as you think. Grocery store bread is absolute garbage. Like a packing peanut with a hard shell. Try real bread from a bakery sometime and get back to me.
Worked in a commercial bakery as well as a grocery store bakery. I promise you that bread can be heated from frozen and you would not know the difference. There’s a really good chance the bakery you are buying bread from contracts a commercial bread baker. Bread ovens are big and many don’t have the space for them and non-bread ovens for other stuff.
Like I said, if the bread/pastry tastes like shit it will taste just as shit fresh as it would frozen. Good bread/pastries frozen and dethawed properly lose an insignificant amount of quality.
Do an experiment. Take your fresh bread from a bakery, freeze it, thaw it out, and see how much the quality actually diminishes. I wager that it doesn't by much in most use cases. For example, making toast? You could not tell me you can tell a difference between a slice that was frozen versus one that was never frozen.
And, ofc, some pastries are not as forgiving when being frozen as others. But regular sliced bread, absolutely.
I wasn't saying you can't freeze bread, just that grocery store bread is garbage. I live in a town without a bakery. I take it personally lol
Fresh donuts are an entirely different experience than previously frozen. You cannot freeze many donuts well such as ones that will be filled.
Tim Hortons have been pooping (autoassume changed that from popping, but I'm fucking leaving it!) up here in the UK, not loads of locations, and weirdly not in some of the places you'd expect. First one was in Glasgow, I believe, but there still aren't any in Edinburgh, or London. I work up the Forth Valley from Edinburgh, and there's one in the town I work in, and two more within a 20-30 minute drive. So it seems to be mostly small towns and Glasgow with a Tims.
Doughnuts are the same pish quality as back home, but the (drip) coffee is surprisingly way better! Pretty sure they had to step up their game because they didn't already dominate the "pop in for a to go cuppa" market here. They're also one of the few places I've seen here in the UK where you can get a filter coffee.
I'm participating in the US product boycott from here, in solidarity with my family and nation. Just thought the difference between quality here vs home was interesting.
At this point the only Canadian thing about them is in showing how dumb we can be.
I know people who go there, complain about the coffee but go there out of nostalgia ...... on a daily basis.
They aren't buying a brand, a product or even food ... they're just buying a memory.
At this point the only Canadian thing about them is in showing how dumb we can be.
* Buys Tim Horton's.
* Proceeds to vote for Doug Ford and Pierre Poilievre.
That's it! .... that's the reason! ... fanatical conservatism in the Tim Horton's coffee!!!!!
Burger King owns them
Restaurant Brands International owns them along with Burger King, Popeye’s Chicken, and Firehouse Subs. They are headquartered in Toronto, Canada.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restaurant_Brands_International
And they are almost wholly owned by 3G Capital, a Brasilian conglomerate. RBI is just a technicality.
30% according to Wikipedia. Where's your info from?
Oh, is that why Popeyes has been crap for a long while now?
So as a non Canadian that frequents Ontario and BC, are there any Canadian-owned coffee places I can look for?
I liked Timmy’s because they even have one in Blue Mountain village and a lot of the middle of nowhere roads I have to drive to get there
They're based in Mississauga but have changed hands a lot in their history.
I think Balzac's is Canadian too. There's are kids of independent coffee shops that are good.
They are Canadian, but I really hate their coffee.
There aren't many left in Montreal because independent coffee houses / shops are competing hard with them.
As a VERY casual coffee drinker, will I notice?
Eh, maybe not. I also think Tims' coffee is undrinkable, so YMMV.
Twiggs Coffee Roasters
Northern Ontarian detected
BC has Waves, Serious Coffee, Island Grind, Blenz, JJ Bean, and more but thats what I can recall off the top of my head.
Ottawa has Bridgehead
Waves and Blenz are a crapshoot for decent coffee, but they have good blended drinks. Turks, JJ Bean, Kafka's and Palette, and Matchstick(though I've heard some bad gossip about an owner) are all great for coffee and espresso.
I don't even try to navigate the mess of corporate ownership. There's always a little shop ran by a guy with an espresso machine.
It won't be drive thru but the coffee will taste good
Tim Horton’s is still Canadian. Burger King did not buy them. The two share an owner who is headquartered in Canada.
Returning from Europe to Canada one of the first things that strikes me is how crappy Canadian fast food all is. Even in the UK, which was once famous for bad food, there are all kinds of places now to get good food and drinks on the go. When you get back to Canada it's so grim to see only Tim Hortons in the airport, with its overpriced stale pastries, leathery donuts and tasteless coffee.
It's because they can afford to. I remember pre-covid a local gem restaurant bought up a spot in the airport, did well. Covid hit and they didn't have the money to support a location while air travel was at a low. Plus extra costs associated with running a restaurant during a pandemic.
There were other, complex reasons, too. The owners were assholes, some employees spoke out about working conditions, and they had a PR nightmare. But honestly, it was good food.
Still, all those problems would be a blip on the chart for a company like Tim Hortons who can get away with shit quality and shit conditions ad infinitum.
The only decent fast food I've had lately is A&W, specifically their breakfast.
They at least make their breakfast the same way I would at home, so it's decent.
McDonald's is awful and has only gotten more expensive. Tim's is meh, I get tim bits and hot chocolate occasionally.
I've found Canadian pastry does not compare with European, which is unfortunate. I think the extra moisture content in our butter means traditional pastry recipes do not translate as well.
I guess I'm mostly a Harvey's guy as far as Canadian fast food chains are concerned. Pizza, subs, shawarma, etc. are up there too, though there are too many of those to list.
My daughter took me to Odd Burger when I was up in Ottawa and I could totally get into that if only we had one where I am.
I live in the UK, one thing I'll say on this specifically, McDonalds here tastes like it's shit food that's too expensive. In Canada it tastes like shit, but it almost tastes like you're not being bent over the counter and having your pockets turned out.
There's definitely some cities here that have a massive selection of different take away places. London, the only thing I miss about London is the variety of different foods. If I get stoned and drunk and feel like Ghanaian at midnight, it's likely I'll be able to get it. Might be cold, but it'll turn up. I'm in Edinburgh now, and while there's definitely a growing selection of foods, it's still mostly variations of greasy white people food.
Take away in the vast majority of medium to small cities is exactly like Canadian cities of similar size, Chinese delivery, 1 or 2 pizza shops almost certainly one will be Domino's, some Indian delivery, 3-10 chippies, and McDonald's, Burger King or both.
I have to agree unfortunately. I've spent a lot of time in the states and have eaten my fair share of McDonalds while living here. I visited my home town in Canada a bit ago, and the Mcdonalds tastes so weird. It wasn't bad perse, but it wasn't exactly good either.
Frankly, probably for the best. Have Canadians save money cooking for themselves or going to places more deserving. Always explore your local non-chain options.
This one’s easy. There are countless small coffee shops, breakfast restaurants, cafes, and small roasters in Canada.
I buy all my coffee whole bean from Canadian small roasters. They buy their coffee directly from the small farmers who grow, harvest, process, and dry the coffee.
If you don’t have the time to grind and brew your own you can also order pre-ground coffee. Or if you just want a pre-made coffee you can go to one of the aforementioned shops, restaurants, or cafes!
Either way, there’s not much reason to get coffee at Tim Horton’s unless you live in a very rural area and they’re the only game in town. Though in that case I’d still order coffee online from Canadian roasters (they usually offer free shipping if you order 3 or more bags).
A community dedicated to buying Canadian products.