NHL defenseman Tim Horton, who began his career in 1949, first tried hamburger stands in North Bay, Ontario, with partner Jim Charade. On May 17, 1964, he opened Tim Horton Donuts in Hamilton, and Hamilton police constable Ron Joyce soon took over management, becoming a 50-50 partner by 1967. After Horton died in a 1974 car crash, Joyce bought out the family’s shares for $1 million and franchised aggressively at highway interchanges and new suburbs, until by the 1990s Canada had the most doughnut shops per capita in the world.

The corporate path ran through mergers. A 1992 combined store in Montague, Prince Edward Island, opened by franchisee Daniel P. Murphy, led to the 1995 Wendy’s merger; investor pressure including Nelson Peltz spun Tim Hortons off in 2006, and in 2014 it joined Burger King in an $11.4 billion deal by 3G Capital that formed Restaurant Brands International. Ottawa required an Oakville headquarters and a board at least half Canadian. Recent years brought backlash: franchisees cutting paid breaks after Ontario’s 2018 minimum wage rise, a 2022 privacy probe into app location tracking, heavy use of temporary foreign workers, and an August 2026 Harry Potter promotion that drew criticism from Egale Canada.

• The company dropped the apostrophe in 1993 because of Quebec’s French language sign laws.
• A Kandahar outlet run from a 40 foot trailer, subsidized with $4 to 5 million a year, served four million coffees and three million doughnuts by 2011.
• Roll Up the Rim started in 1986 when Lily Cup’s Roger Wilson pitched printing under the rim, and the first grand prize was a box of Timbits.
• The mobile app logged user locations hundreds of times a day, even when closed, and settled with a free coffee and baked good.
• About 4,000 frontline workers came through the foreign worker program before a May 2026 pledge to scale it back.