Calum Marsh: So much about what we all love about Tim Hortons is simple. Why can’t it be beautifully simple?

Tim Hortons is looking less and less like Tim Hortons lately. The once-humble coffee shop and donut restaurant is now a turbulent repository of vegan hamburgers and tepid lattes, of bewildering options and confused intentions. But there remains something in the current iteration of Tim Hortons that is strangely familiar. It’s looking more and more like New Coke.

On April 23rd, 1985, the Coca-Cola Company introduced a reformulated version of its ubiquitous flagship soft drink in a drastic bid to stimulate sales. Referred to simply as New Coke, it was slightly sweeter than the original, and was intended as a rebuke to the increasingly popular Pepsi, which for years had been encroaching menacingly on the company’s once-indomitable market share.

New Coke was a fiasco. People loathed this modest effort at brand modification: A soda got a little sweeter, and people responded as if the American flag had been redesigned. Sales plummeted. Coca-Cola reneged. Less than three months after the unveiling of New Coke, Coca-Cola reintroduced its traditional formula, under the auspicious name Coca-Cola Classic. And in a flourish of dramatic irony, the splashy reintroduction proved a massive boon to Coca-Cola’s sales.

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Photo by File

The failure of New Coke — and the success of Coca-Cola Classic — demonstrated with emphatic clarity the power and persistence of brand loyalty. Even with its sales in steep decline, even with a fresh and glamorous competitor seducing its customers, people still felt a great deal of affection for Coca-Cola. That affection hadn’t diminished, exactly. It simply took a sudden change for people to realize that they didn’t want their beloved Coca-Cola to go away. The reason that Coca-Cola Classic was so successful is that it reminded people why they loved Coca-Cola in the first place. And as Tim Hortons flails and languishes, it may be in its interest to do the same thing.

Sales are down at Tim Hortons. In the fall they fell 1.4 per cent — an alarming decline, for a restaurant chain of its size, particularly given that revenues of Restaurant Brands International Inc., its parent company, are up overall across the same period, owing to the continued success of Burger King and Popeyes. Its efforts at reinvention — attempts to attract a more youthful clientele, mainly — are evidently not working. The company elected to withdraw Beyond Meat from its menu just months after rolling them out at Tim Hortons restaurants across the country, at considerable expense. Last week, they announced that the president of Tim Hortons, Alex Macedo, would be stepping down from his role this March.

In the face of waning consumer interest, it seems, Tim Hortons has made many of the same decisions Coca-Cola made in a similar position 30 years ago — transformative decisions that reflect a failure to understand the value of the core brand. What might fix Tim Hortons, what might repair the damage to its reputation inflicted by novelties like its lattes and meat-alternative lunches, is a new emphasis on the fundamentals, a return to the very virtues which first made Canadians cherish the coffee and donut chain. There is wisdom in a back-to-basics approach, as Coca-Cola made clear.

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You can see the appeal. A simple, straightforward menu, competently prepared using fresh, good-quality ingredients. Appetizing donuts, made in the traditional way, baked on location in the restaurants themselves rather than pre-made and shipped in frozen. (It was done that way for years, before the company switched to centralized off-site baking for the sake of cost and consistency.) And of course coffee, whether served black or, as most Canadians seem to prefer it, loaded with milk and sugar.

There is a reason Tim Hortons is synonymous with the Double Double rather than, say, the Grilled Tuscan Chicken Panini or the Spinach and Egg White Omelette Bite, two items you can order at Tim Hortons for the time being, for some reason. It’s because the Double Double, whatever its merits as coffee qua coffee, is what Tim Hortons does well.

When Helen Rosner, the New Yorker’s food correspondent, reviewed the Popeye’s Chicken Sandwich late last year, she described it effusively, praising it as “beautifully simple,” with an “exquisite slab of chicken breast, hefty and juicy and snow-white.” She wrote that “the salt, the fat, the sharpness, the softness” came together to produce a fast-food sandwich “so intense, and so perfectly balanced, that they meld into one another to form a new, entirely coherent whole.”

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It’s impossible, as it stands, to imagine anyone describing a sandwich at Tim Hortons with similar fervour. The food at Tim Hortons is at best passable; mediocrity is the most a diner can hope for.

There is wisdom in a back-to-basics approach, as Coca-Cola made clear

But what if a breakfast sandwich or a freshly baked donut or a box of Timbits could inspire us to those raptures? It’s not unimaginable: Popeye’s did it, and did it just last year, and Popeye’s is owned by the same company that owns Tim Hortons. That’s the kind of innovation — an organic change, not a crazy novelty — that could radically improve Tim Hortons, resuscitating its reputation and reigniting the passion of ordinary Canadians. An attention to detail. A focus on flavour and taste. So much about what we all love about Tim Hortons is simple. Why can’t it be beautifully simple? Why can’t the basic elements of Tim Hortons be great?

The return of Coca-Cola in the mid-’80s was such a triumph that many suspected the company had actually wanted New Coke to fail from the beginning — that Coca-Cola had created this unsatisfactory substitute product deliberately, as a grand conspiracy of canny marketing intended to reignite interest in its flagging brand. “Some critics will say Coca-Cola made a marketing mistake. Some cynics will say that we planned the whole thing,” Donald Keough, once head of Coca-Cola, said at the time. “The truth is we are not that dumb, and we are not that smart.”

Tim Hortons has already been dumb, in its failed endeavours to get fancy and introduce extravagant new meals. But they could still be smart enough to win back their former glory, becoming once more a brand Canadians don’t simply patronize, but genuinely love. Tim Hortons needs to return to its roots. We need Tim Hortons Classic.