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“A lot of our employees are students that only work one or two days a week. So every time they come in, you’ve got to kind of retrain them on everything that’s going,” Murray said. “I think it became operationally very complex for our team members.”

That made for slower drive-thru times — a crucial metric at Tim Hortons. The standard is 25 seconds from the time a customers pulls up to pay at the window, to the time they pull away with their order. If the average time takes longer than 25 seconds, franchisees can expect a drop in sales.

Photo by Postmedia

“There’s a high correlation between speed of service and sales,” Fulton, at RBI, said. “By reducing the number of LTOs this year and focusing on the products that we’re famous for … it’s going to improve service levels, it’s going to take complexity out of the kitchens.”

With its condensed roster of LTOs in 2020, Tim Hortons is temporarily giving up its chase of market share at lunchtime. The chain has been intent on increasing its lunchtime performance, taking chances on items that would traditionally have fallen well outside of the Tim Hortons realm, such as burgers. Fulton said for most, Tims is still a place to stop for coffee and a baked good on the way back to the office, after having lunch somewhere else.

“Our long-term plan for lunch is we need to have a menu that is going to attract people,” he said.

A team is working on that strategy “behind the scenes,” he said, but it won’t be ready to roll out in 2020. Instead, Tim Hortons will focus this year on growing sales and making improvements in its core categories: coffee, baked goods and breakfast.