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Maple leaf and hockey sticks: Tim Hortons shrugs off the politics to go all-Canadian...

The store in Shanghai — the first of a planned 1,500 — has hockey sticks for door handles and abundant maple leaves, on cups and dusted on the tops of lattes. And that’s been around and survived 60 years “I’m not the political expert,” Tim Hortons President Alex Macedo said Tuesday. What Macedo can control, though, is how much Tim Hortons reveals about its Canadian roots to Chinese consumers. “And that’s been around and survived 60 years.” “When we tested the brand and our products, people were fine. We didn’t test anything political, I don’t think. So I think it was a good day.” The China expansion is out of the Restaurant Brands International Inc. playbook. Cartesian builds and runs the restaurants, with the option to sub-franchise them. By using the same strategy — and the same private equity firm — with Tim Hortons in China, Macedo was confident the company will surpass its goal of opening 1,500 locations in 10 years, political tensions or not. “If the Chinese government is annoyed and feels that it has unfairly dealt with, then it will respond by telling its people that the Chinese people have been hurt.” It’s not yet clear whether the Huawei episode will reach that level, he said, though news of a spike in Chinese imports of Canadian soy beans in January could be interpreted as an encouraging sign for Canadian brands in China. And one of the most obvious things that Tim Hortons can do is to basically say they’re not American.”