Speaker 1:
Frequency Podcast Network, stories that matter. Podcasts that resonate.
Jordan:
I would like to take you back to the 1980s for a moment just to give you a sense of how far we’ve come.
1980s clip:
Enjoy the taste and flavour of a Tim Horton donut, the aroma of our coffee and the smile we save for you!
When you get the urge for freshly brewed coffee, freshly made donuts, head for your favorite donut. Shop Tim Horton. We serve only the freshest…
Jordan:
Man. Now that’s Tim’s. Coffee. Donuts. That’s all. Iconic and Canadian. What more could you possibly need on the way to a hockey practice? No, really? Let’s ask that question literally and let Tim Hortons answer it. What more could you possibly need? Tim’s
Clip 1:
Tim Hortons new beef lasagna casserole made with ricotta cheese, basil, oregano, and a tasty tomato sauce served with garlic toast. Just $4.49
Clip 2:
Made with a full serving of fruit. Tim Hortons, new real fruit smoothies and mixed berry or strawberry banana, just a dollar 99.
Clip 3:
Tim Hortons new pulled pork sandwich is made with slow roast to pull pork mixed with hickory barbecue sauce.
Clip 4:
Tim Hortons new specialty bagels, maple cinnamon french toast and mixed berry packed with flavor for just a dollar 59, or try new sun dried tomato asiago Parmesan. Always a great value.
Clip 5:
The caprese, crafted with fresh mozzarella, tomatoes and pesto aioli. Oh, there’s pesto in here! All the staples of Italy in one sandwich.
Jordan:
That is honestly just a small sampling. And a couple of weeks ago, the road to how far we’ve come reached its inevitable conclusion, Tim
Clip 6:
Tim Hortons pizza served hot on flatbread with bacon and other toppings rolling out across Canada with Tim’s promising to install new ovens.
Jordan:
Now none of this is bad necessarily unless you’re talking about the culinary quality of the items in question then they might be. But it does raise a really interesting question. What is Tim Hortons a Canadian staple that both aspiring politicians and savvy marketers use as a stand-in for what makes this country great or is it one arm of a huge global food brand with no motivation other than to suck up as much market share as possible? And if that means pizza, then pizza It is. Could it be The answer is it’s both of those things. How did that happen? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Tom Jokinen is a writer based in Winnipeg who has written for The Globe and Mail, The Literary Review of Canada, a whole bunch of other publications, and for this one, The Walrus. Hey Tom.
Tom Jokinen:
Hello Jordan.
Jordan:
Tom, I almost, I came this close to ordering a Tim Hortons pizza for lunch today, but I couldn’t do it. Have you tried Tim Hortons pizza?
Tom Jokinen:
No, I haven’t. I haven’t tried one. I’m curious. All I’ve done is I’ve looked on Reddit, right? And so people are posting reviews of the Tim Hortons pizza and posting pictures and I think the general consensus is there are worse things to eat in this life. So to be fair, it’s kind of a meh, it’s not great, it’s not horrible, it’s meh. So if that’s what they were shooting for, then mission accomplished.
Jordan:
I feel like, and I’m not saying this to be mean or anything, but I feel like that’s probably the review of a lot of Tim Hortons food staffs these days.
Tom Jokinen:
Well, yeah, I mean in fairness to Tim’s, that’s the review of a lot of fast food just because you’re going for the thick part of the bell curve and you don’t want to be adventurous by any means. It’s marketing. It’s marketing a product that has appeal to the biggest part of the bell curve and those who live on the edges of the bell curve or who like to live on the edge of the bell curve often aren’t served anything appealing by these multinationals. They have to go somewhere else for it. Some are more underground. Let’s
Jordan:
Talk about what Tim Hortons tries to present to us in terms of its place in our lives. I think most Canadians can kind of picture it. Maybe you can walk us through that marketing specifically, a couple of commercials that you talked about Named Kind Nest and then True Stories.
Tom Jokinen:
I mean, Tim’s has benefited from a fascinating history anchored in Canadian folklore. I mean, Tim Horton was a real hockey player, a defenseman for the Toronto Maple Leaf in the sixties when the least were winning Stanley Cups and as many underpaid hockey players at the time did was like, what do I do when I’m not playing hockey? I need a thing. And his thing was the donut and coffee shop started in Hamilton, Ontario and then sadly Tim Horton himself died in a car crash between Buffalo and Toronto, between games. The restaurant was bought by his business partner Ron Joyce for it was a million dollars and a Cadillac El Dorado for the widow of Tim Hortons that started the Ron Joyce dynasty of Tim Hortons. So it has, and it had that stylistic yellow and brown and red branding was always the place that you could count on in rural Canada, especially smaller towns to get the same thing that you get everywhere else, a reliable coffee and a fresh donut.
So they obviously wanted to capitalize on this idea of being very Canadian, many, many, many iterations later. The latest branding exercise and the thing with branding and the way I look at branding is it’s very much like what you do with cattle. It’s the branding iron. They want to burn the idea of their product into your hide. As with the branding of cattle, like if you think of cola, you are branded by a particular company that you think of immediately when you think of cola, it’s right there on your hide. The latest from Tim’s was a campaign over Christmas, very heartwarming animated story of a white goose that seemed to have lost his way from some foreign land where he met dangers and wound up in this snowy place that looked like a Thomas Kinkade painting with cottages warmly lit by fireplaces and candles and was taken aboard in a community of other birds, Canada geese, who also brought in various other animals.
And it was all very sweet and set to the soundtrack of a British pop star. The message being that Canada is a warm and welcoming place for those who are lost and from somewhere else. And this has been part of the game with the true Stories campaign. Many of them are about new Canadians coming to Canada and finding that Tim Hortons is the way that you identify with being Canadian as if that’s all it takes or that being absorbed into a different culture was what they wanted to do in the first place rather than live under the culture that they knew well and were born with. So this is a vision of Canada that I guess is one that flatters our idea of who we are. What I was interested in is where perhaps that might break down a little bit, not just in the fact that Canada is complicated, we’re not always welcoming, not to dwell on that, but it makes sense to inform yourself about the political ups and downs of things like immigration or especially reconciliation with Indigenous people.
If Tim Hortons wants to start having that conversation about how we treat each other, well perhaps we should have in depth conversations, but what Tim really wants to do is have simple conversations, heartwarming conversations in tear-jerking conversations, which is fine. They’re a business, they can do that. But if that’s the game is to try to tell you something about the country you live in, what they’re telling you is that you’re not a citizen of Canada, you are a citizen consumer of Canada because your connection to it is through the exchange of money at the counter at Tim’s.
Jordan:
Well, who are these commercials targeting with that message? And I ask this here because you mentioned the fat part of the bell curve, which I think is what we’re after here, and you raised the concept of a Tim Hortons voter. What’s that?
Tom Jokinen:
Yeah, the Tim Hortons voter. I mean, this is not on Tims. This is something that developed outside of their world that I think they happily go along with. Probably began in the 2011 election when Michael Ignatieff was the leader of the liberal party and was deeply involved in trying to shake this image that he was an elite from away, which is what the Harper Conservatives were painting him as. So he went out of his way to make sure that there would be no Starbucks cups on the tour bus. He knew that some of his staffers would drink Starbucks and he’s like, we can’t have this. I mean there is the Starbucks voter and there is the Tim’s voter, Steven Harper in another election had made it clear, he went to the Tim’s headquarters at the time was in Oakville, Ontario, and he skipped a meeting at the United Nations in New York in order to campaign out of the Tim’s HQ in Oakville and went on about how Tim’s is hockey and hockey is Canada.
And Pierre Berton understood the nature of this nation and understood the importance of Tim Hortons and he basically wrote the bible at that press conference for why Tim’s equals Canada and by definition why Tims equals the Conservative voter. And that’s how it sort of breaks down ever since the Tims voter is the Conservative voter or so the Conservatives want it to be seen and the Starbucks voter is the elite Liberal or NDP and Tory voters were more like we don’t caught into this idea of calling a coffee a Venti or a Grande. It’s a double double. So there’s a certain culture war that has taken place.
In Winnipeg, when Trudeau was here a couple of years ago, he went to a local donut shop called Oh Donuts and they make fancy donuts and it’s a local operation. So he visited the local business and took a lot of heat on social media for not going to Tim’s. So again, the elite Montrealer comes to Winnipeg, goes to Oh Donuts, and he’s not down with the folk. And as Douglas Hunter points out in the book, he wrote about the history of Tim Hortons, Tim’s didn’t have to do anything, this whole business of the Tim voter, lots of Tim Cups at the Ottawa Freedom Rally. So-called Freedom Rally and didn’t
Jordan:
Didn’t Poilievre bring Tim Hortons to them?
Tom Jokinen:
He did, and that was deliberate and I think in the next federal election you’re going to see the use of Tim Hortons as a backdrop to all campaigns. Everybody’s going to want to get in on the action of being seen to be Tim Hortons campaigner for the Tim Hortons voter, all of which is kind of funny when you consider that there’s not much Canadian ownership in Tim Hortons anymore.
Jordan:
That brand that you’ve just been discussing, even the packaging that used to be bright and yellow and everything, even that has changed and corporate ownership has changed massively. Explain what Tim Hortons really is like right now as a company.
Tom Jokinen:
Well, I mean it has changed a lot. I mean from Ron Joyce buying it for a million dollars on a Cadillac. In 2014, it was bought out by Burger King then by, they formed a company called Restaurant Brands International, which had a 51%, a majority ownership by a capital private equity company from Brazil. So in fact, there was that period where Brazilian equity owned a majority of Tim Hortons. Now it’s since spread. They’ve bought up Popeye’s and a Firehouse Submarine sandwiches, the ownership of 3G, the Brazilian companies down to 32%, but they’re still the biggest shareholder and then everybody else is the shareholders spread out. We’ve all got it in our mutual funds and so on, but it is like most multinationals, it has its eye on the rest of the world right now. It’s looking and it may be satisfied that you prefer just a double, double and a donut from Tim’s, but they’re trying these pizzas out on you, not because they think it improves their brand as a Canadian company, but because they want to establish themselves more outside of Canada and particularly outside of North America. They’re in India among other places. Where do you get a hot lunch if it’s not McDonald’s or Taco Bell? They want a piece of that game. So they’re trying things out like chili chicken crunchy sandwiches and chili chicken bowls and so on that you don’t really associate it with the kind of idea of Tim’s presented in those True Story commercials.
Jordan:
Does that Tim Hortons from those commercials still exist? And I don’t mean that in the sense of it’s obviously not what the giant global brand is now, but are there Tim Hortons restaurants still in those small towns serving just coffee and donuts that are still those gathering places for the local community, et cetera, et
Tom Jokinen:
Cetera? Oh, definitely, for sure. I mean, it wasn’t long ago. I was at a Tim’s in Stonewall, Manitoba, and the clientele was baseball capped. What they were slinging was coffee and donuts. Nobody was buying chili chicken wraps or anything like that. I don’t even know if they had them on the menu. I didn’t take a look, but the vibe in the place was very much, well, this is a Tims, this not a city timms. It’s a smaller town timms and frankly early in the morning, if you’re working hours are such that you have to get somewhere early. And even Steven Harper pointed out, if it’s 6:00 AM and you got to get the kids to hockey, where else are you going to go to get coffee and a bunch of TimBits. It’s a romantic image, but he’s right. It’s true. There is no other place where you’re doing that. So it does serve that purpose and you can find the real Tims in there, but remember just that the corporate goal goes beyond you, but it’s still there.
Jordan:
I think some people listening to this conversation or maybe even reading your essay in The Walrus, which is called Tim Hortons is brewing an idea of Canada that no longer exists, might take this as criticism of Tim Hortons, but is it?
Tom Jokinen:
No. I mean yes and no, but it’s not really, it’s a criticism of being expected to be the consumer citizen being expected to participate in transactions in order to find your national identity. It’s cynical, I think what corporations do to brand themselves with the flag, and I think you just want to be a little more educated about it, but it doesn’t ruin the experience that I have at Tim’s when I want to have a Maple Dip donut, which is excellent. The direction that they’re taking in marketing and the direction that they’re taking and trying new foods and so on, as I said, is taking you away from the old Tim’s experience. So it may be disappointing, but I just don’t think that people should treat their coffee shop the way they treat their hockey team or the moose on the highway. There’s an agenda there. That doesn’t mean that what they provide isn’t good because it is, but just think about it.
Jordan:
Last question, and I don’t know if you can answer this, but what was it that made the connection in our minds or in a lot of people’s minds to treat this coffee shop like a hockey team? We don’t do this for any other Canadian restaurant. We don’t do it for Swiss Chalet. That’s a Canadian institution, at least in English Canada.
Tom Jokinen:
I’m not sure, except I did come across Patricia Cormack, who’s a professor of sociology at St. Francis Xavier University, has written about Tims and cites a study into the biography of baking in Canada, if you can believe it. And that certainly historically when Canada was a much more agrarian country and people were working outdoors and in the fields that there were community supports. The ones that she cited were in Nova Scotia where mostly women would bake and prepare coffee in a church, and that became the social hub of the community. I mean, I don’t think that necessarily was what triggered in Toronto Maple Leaf defenceman Tim Horton’s mind, but it might’ve, who knows? But it’s interesting that there is that history in Canada, and even if they’re not connected, it’s just like it makes sense more than a place that serves chicken, that there would be solace to be found in a place that serves slightly guilty pleasures and strong coffee, and you’re warmed up from the cold environment and it’s simple. The simplicity is what made Tim’s and we’d hate to see the complexity break it.
Jordan:
Tom, thank you so much for this, a fascinating chat.
Tom Jokinen:
Thank you.
Jordan:
Tom Jokinen writing in the Walrus. That was The Big Story. For more from us, head to TheBigStorypodcast.ca to let us know what you think of Tim Hortons or what you think of what we think of Tim Hortons. You can send us an email to hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca, or you can call us up while you’re sitting in Tim’s with your buddies having just coffee and just donuts and leave a voicemail. The number’s 416-935-5935. Joseph Fish is the lead producer of The Big Story. Robyn Simon is also a producer here. This episode was produced by our editorial assistant, Chloe Kim. Stefanie Phillips is our showrunner. Diana Keay is our manager of business development. Mary Jubran is our digital editor. Sound Design this week was done by Kristie Chan, Christian Prohom and Robyn Edgar. I am your host and your executive producer, Jordan Heath-Rawlings, all of us together make up the Frequency Podcast Network, which is a division of Rogers. Have an absolutely wonderful weekend. We’ve got a couple things in the feed for you while we are relaxing, and we’ll be back with a fresh, big story on Monday.
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