Canada for Americans: Tim Hortons Coffee and Donuts Fast Food Chain

Tim Hortons is a fast food chain that focuses mainly on coffee and donuts. But it's so much more than that. Somehow, Tim Hortons has managed to become a critical part of the Canadian spirit. Canada has more donut shops per capita than any other country in the world. And sometimes it seems like 90% of them are Tim Hortons. You can't be in Canada very long without coming across one, and you can't really understand Canada without spending some time in a Tim Hortons.

Tim Horton himself was a hockey player. Of course. He started a donut shop in Hamilton, Ontario in 1964. And things snowballed from there. Horton died in 1974, the growing chain was bought out by a partner and eventually Tim Hortons became a nationwide phenomenon. There are now more than 2,700 Tim Hortons in Canada, a handful in the US and other countries - and one in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where Tim Hortons was chosen as the one piece of home that Canadian soldiers in the country couldn't do without.

Although it's a fast food chain, Tim Hortons is not McDonalds or Burger King. They don't sell burgers, fries or other American fast food staples. You can get lunch there, but it tends more toward soups and deli-style sandwiches. But the key element remains coffee and donuts, and it's this part of the business that has wormed its way into the Canadian soul.

In particular, there's the double double (coffee with two cream and two sugar) and the Timbit, which is a little ball of baked donut dough - what others sometimes call a donut hole. Anywhere in Canada, mention either of these and people will know what you're talking about. Canadians in other countries use them as a kind of secret recognition symbol. Canadian bands have written songs about "Tims." There's even an old urban legend that the chain puts nicotine in the coffee to get customers hooked on it. That's entirely false, by the way - Canadians have no one to blame but themselves for drinking so much of the stuff.

Another key element of the Tim Hortons experience is the annual Roll Up the Rim to Win contest. This is the Tim Hortons version of the McDonalds monopoly game, etc. For a couple months each year, the coffee comes in special cups. You unroll the rolled up paper rim to find a printed message telling you whether you've won a prize. The contest gives away over thirty million prizes a year, from free coffee all the way up to cars. It's so popular someone has actually invented a little tool for rolling up the rim. Rim rollers are another of those little items you find next to cash registers all over Canada.

The company itself seems ambivalent about being so deeply ingrained in the Canadian consciousness. On one hand, they're clearly eager to exploit it in advertising. Ads show Canadians overseas clinging to Tim Hortons as a sign of their Canadianness among all those Americans, or show heart-warming vignettes that link Tim Hortons coffee with the sacred Canadian virtues of family and hockey. The company also supports a minor league kids hockey program called Timbits Hockey. At least one NHL star (Pittsburgh Penguins center Sidney Crosby) came up through the program.

But, while these efforts have been spectacularly successful, they've also put Tim Hortons in a position of prominence that makes the chain part private business and part public institution. Things that wouldn't raise an eyebrow if done by any other company create controversy and hand wringing when done by Tim Hortons. A key example is, again, the Timbit.

For years there was a tradition whereby, if you brought your dog with you to the drive-thru at Tim Hortons, they'd give your dog a free (usually day-old) Timbit. The company eventually did away with that and there was some moaning about a piece of Canadiana lost, but the company pointed to health regulations. But more recently, a single mother working in a Tim Hortons in Ontario gave a free Timbit to a toddler who was having a bad day, and whose harried mother was at the end of her rope. She got fired for it.

Anywhere else, that would have been the end of it. But since this was Tim Hortons, it made the news. And people were bothered. People didn't want "their" national institution to be the kind of place where a hard-working single mom loses her job for using a Timbit to calm down a cranky toddler. The whole thing made the papers and TV news from the Maritimes to British Columbia, and the company quickly backpedaled and re-hired her.

So for better or worse, Tim Hortons is something Canadians take a personal interest, a piece of the culture. And the donuts really are pretty good...