Tim Hortons: a donut shop turned Canadian icon

People walk past a Tim Horton's cafe in Manhattan in New York City. Photo: AFP

Coffee and donuts giant Tim Hortons grew from a single store opened in 1964 by a National Hockey League defenseman into an iconic Canadian brand only to now merge with American fast food chain Burger King.

Horton himself died in a tragic car crash a decade after lending his name to the enterprise, but the chain has expanded year after year.

It now operates 3,630 restaurants across Canada -- beating Starbucks for coffee market share and maintaining a stranglehold on donut sales -- as well as another 1,000 stores in the United States and the Middle East.

Tim Hortons restaurants can be found in Canadian hospitals and universities, on downtown corners and along highways stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

The company even opened a counter at Canada's military base in volatile southern Afghanistan in 2006 in response to a request by Canada's then chief of the defense staff.

Servers were trained on how to handle a potential nuclear or biological attack before working at the Kandahar military base.

Some Canadians have bemoaned Timmy's rise as a national symbol while others, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, have sought to capitalize on it.

Canadian author Pierre Berton once wrote: "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."

In 2009, Harper turned down an opportunity to speak at the United Nations General Assembly in order to attend a Tim Hortons event and praise its repatriation, which he credited to his government's corporate tax cuts.

The company had been purchased by another American fast food chain, Wendy's, in 1995, but regained its independence when it was spun off into a separate firm 11 years later. Its reorganization to become a Canadian public company was completed in 2009.

In an editorial this week, the daily Globe and Mail noted that one in two Canadians self-identify as being Tim Hortons coffee drinkers -- it's now also sold in supermarkets.

Tongue in cheek, the newspaper suggested that the Harper government should now block the foreign takeover of this Canadian icon, which is "way bigger than (Canadian singer) Anne Murray."

Burger King agreed to pay $11.4 billion (CAN$12.5 billion) in cash and stock for Tim Hortons, based on the closing share price Monday.