What Tim Hortons Does With Its Leftover Donuts

Tim Hortons may be headquartered up north in Canada, but it has spread throughout much of the U.S., and it is one of the larger coffee chains in the world. Aside from its java (which includes the off-menu Wayne Gretzky coffee), the chain is largely known for its food items, including a variety of baked goods, such as muffins, cookies, buttery croissants, and especially its donuts and donut holes, the latter of which are fancifully named Timbits. As you might imagine, at the end of the day, there can be a lot of donuts left over, and if you were wondering what happens to them, the answer may surprise you. It's ultimately up to the individual store manager, but most instruct their employees to trash the leftover donuts, tossing them into dumpsters.

You might be thinking that it's an immense waste of food, and why can't employees take the leftovers at the end of the day? According to one Reddit user, "[Corporate doesn't] let staff take food home anymore because they [don't] want people to overproduce food in order to take it home." Essentially, Tim Hortons doesn't want to create a surplus where there otherwise might have been none.

Plenty of grocery stores donate unsold food, so you might also be wondering why Tim Hortons doesn't make a habit of offloading baked goods to charitable organizations. According to one Redditor whose restaurant used to donate to a local food bank, the organization became "really demanding" about how the food was packaged. "It was just too much work and so that was brought to an end," they wrote.

Two different users echoed this story. One Redditor stated that a shelter receiving baked goods complained that the amount "wasn't consistent." Another commenter in the same thread said the shelter to which their Tim Hortons donated "started complaining that [the baked goods] were stale so we stopped." While there is no reason to blame charitable organizations for having standards for recipients, it does appear that, on the whole, their requirements and Tim Hortons' donations tend to be incompatible (though, of course, there are anecdotal instances where it worked out).

In a somewhat similar vein, however, Tim Hortons began partnering with Too Good To Go in 2023, a program through which grocery stores (like Whole Foods Market) and restaurants sell off their end-of-day stock at deeply discounted prices. In this way, the coffee chain is making a good-faith effort to reduce food waste by stuffing bags full of leftovers for customers to buy, with items worth roughly three times what they paid.