Hey Tim. Tim Hortons (I’d call you Timmies, like everyone else does, but it seems so juvenile and so… plural). We need to talk.

The other week, I was doing some light reading and came across the late Canadian icon Pierre Berton, who wrote, “In so many ways the story of Tim Hortons is the essential Canadian story. It is a story of success and tragedy, of big dreams and small towns, of old-fashioned values and tough-fisted business, of hard work and of hockey.”

And, you know, that’s obviously the way you see yourself — as a Canadian institution. You sold out to a big US chain, but you were founded by a hockey player, to start. And you’ve got those commercial campaigns based on homesick Canucks gone abroad without their Timmies, you’ve got a war relief effort to provide Canadian troops in Afghanistan with your brew and then there’s the slogan on your website: “More than a business. A way of life.” Add it up and I see what you’re going for: a totem of the Great White North.

And, of course, many Canadians see you that way too: over a million Canadians start every day in a 15-minute lineup in one of your 3,221 stores. It’s no secret you’re the fourth largest quick-service restaurant chain in North America, and the largest in your native land. You’re so gosh-darn popular the Canadian Oxford Dictionary inserted a definition for “double-double” in 2004. (Can “Rrrroll up the rrrrim” be far behind?) NHL rinks across Canada bear your logo, TTC streetcars display your smiling cookie ads, our parks and suburban streets are littered with your “please do not litter” cups and if I read that we’re a “Timbit Nation” one more time, I may need something stronger than coffee to help me forget it.

But, I’ve got a few bones to pick with you. See, despite your iconic status, you don’t seem to be a positive big brother. Sure, you sent 13,000 poor kids to camp for a few days, and you donate free coffee to local charitable events, but considering you’re selling Canadian identity in a cup, the amount you’re doing isn’t making a difference in the grand scheme of things. The shame is that you could make a difference. This is especially true in terms of environmental sustainability.

Let’s start at the “Sustainable Coffee” webpage you referred me to when I emailed you to get in touch. You boast of assisting Guatemalan coffee-producing families by providing them with education on how to run a business. Forgive me for being blunt but WTF? Your environmental program is to take 340 families — of the 25 million worldwide coffee producers — and educate them about business?

On the same web page, you write that you refuse to get the Fair Trade label because “some programs may require certification on behalf of the farmers which is an expense they cannot afford.” By some programs, I assume you mean Fair Trade Labelling Organization (FLO) since it is the only program of its kind in the world. I’ll forgive your poor math since you were founded by an athlete, but the price to certify a farm is $250 Canadian — almost nothing. (And, you know, if it’s such a burden on the farmers, you could take some of the $1.9 billion in revenue you earned last year and help ’em out, if you wanted.) And the price of Fair Trade coffee by the pound is US$1.31 versus the varying price of non-Fair Trade, which is never more than a few cents cheaper.

The other day I spoke to a mutual acquaintance of ours, Howard Daugherty, the ecology professor from York University’s faculty of environmental studies who had proposed you sell and support Las Nubes, a brand of Fair Trade/sustainable coffee from Costa Rica. Apparently your CEO responded, “We don’t need to switch.”

Now, I see what you’re thinking — you’ve got out-the-door lineups, and that $1.9 billion in revenue to prove the demand for the non-Fair Trade/non-sustainable product, so you don’t care whether the business is green, black or Lake Ontario yellow, right?

Here’s where we come to the opportunity — one maybe unique to you in this country. With your market share and the buying power that comes with it, and given the potency of your brand as a Canadian symbol — next to the beaver, the toonie and poutine — you could make a difference in the world while earning significant profit, mending your tarnished image and changing the way every other coffee company will do business in Canada forever.

The most pressing change you could make is shifting from the non-sustainable coffee plantations you buy from to sustainable and organic plantations. Your current farms harvest sun-grown coffee which, ignoring its serene name, is an environment killer that was genetically modified to be monocropped in lowland, ruined terrains that won’t grow any other product. This species requires heavy use of artificial fertilizers and expensive herbicides and pesticides that flow into the water table. Plus, taste is affected because the beans are picked before they’ve matured (hence, I guess, the popularity of double cream and double sugar).

The alternative, shade-grown coffee plantations, have various species of trees throughout the farm mirroring a natural ecosystem, which not only encourages biodiversity, but the roots of the trees stabilize sediment and soil, the likelihood of plague is lower and, most importantly, there’s less need for those expensive fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides.

It’s complicated, but it boils down to this: “Harvesting sun-grown is the equivalent of clear-cutting forests, while shade-grown coffee, which requires matured trees planted throughout the plantation, is on the same scale as selective logging,” as Howard Daugherty puts it.

There are other areas you can improve on as well, such as your notorious litter problem. I got in touch with city hall and it just so happens that beverage containers make up one fifth of Toronto’s total litter, a significant portion of which is your cups. This isn’t a GTA phenomenon either, as Nova Scotia found 22 per cent of all litter was exclusively Tim Hortons cups.

Your representatives have made statements in the past that research is underway to create a recyclable or renewable cup, but in the meantime you have the initiative of 10 cents off coffee for travel- or ceramic-mug customers. These customers still make up an insignificant portion of your clientele however, leaving us to demand those cups that are, you say, in the works. Funny thing is, Timothy’s World Coffee, your similarly named competitor, already has compostable, corn-based cups and many other cafes have other vegetable-based biodegradable containers, so you might want to get on the bandwagon before your petroleum-lined biohazards fill up the landfill.

It doesn’t stop here. You have the market muscle to buy Fair Trade/sustainable sugar. You can sell your composted coffee grounds for profit. You could remove those carbon-emitting drive-thrus, insist on water and grey-water recycling in your suppliers’ roasting and drying factories, switch to solar driers (or just energy-efficient ones), recycle the pulp of the coffee plant as fertilizer and prune the shade trees in your plantations as firewood for the roasting stations. I’m just getting started here — you could be green and fair in every detail.

The thing is, Tim, doing this could be good for your business. The green trend is being strutted everywhere, all you need to do is pick up a newspaper and look at the headlines about Al Gore or David Suzuki’s latest enviro-fit. Ian Rowland, associate professor of environment and resource at the University of Waterloo, pointed out that the green movement currently in motion “will likely hit its peak and soon consumers’ product decision-making will be heavily influenced by environmental impact.”

You can seen this effect in a poll done by Environics Research during the 2007 elections finding that voters’ first concern was the parties’ environmental platforms. Even MBAs are getting on the bandwagon: a recent study showed that companies with attractive environmental policies are bringing in more talented, high-level workers than those who neglect green issues. “Labour workers have been proven to desire work at socially aware companies,” Rowland says.

And consider the potential carbon taxes or a cap-and-trade system — when one of those things comes, simply being green alone would yield a hefty bit of revenue while polluting will be a financial liability.

And finally, if you were to go green, you would sail with such a wind of press behind you, all other quick-service restaurants in Canada would need to do the same or else be weeded out of the market.

“It raises the bar,” Rowland says about big corporations going green. “All companies keep eyes on each other to see where the advantages are, and if you don’t keep up you’ll perish.”
Now I know Nick Javor, your senior vice-president of corporate affairs, told the Toronto Star in a 2007 interview about your litter problem and a potential tax increase on non-recyclable cups, “We’re not a waste-management company.”

Of course you’re not, but in this climate of climate-change awareness, you need to cement your business as a civic icon and a profit factory before the green movement forces you into the wasted-opportuntiy management business.

If you truly want to be “more than a business” and justify your place in the heart of Canadian culture, you need to make changes — sustainability had better grow some roots in your chain.
Thanks for the chat. Now get rrrrolling.