All right. Good morning, everyone, and welcome. We're so excited to have you all here today in person and for those tuning in. Before we get started, I just wanna cover a couple of housekeeping items. Let's start with the most exciting part of our day first, reviewing the safe harbor statement. Today's presentation will contain forward-looking statements which are subject to various risks and uncertainties set forth in our SEC filings. A copy of today's presentation will be available on our investor relations webpage at investor.rbi.com following the conclusion of today's event. Today, you will hear from members of our amazing Tim Hortons Canada leadership team, as well as José Cil, RBI CEO. Following the prepared remarks, the team will be happy to take your questions.
For those of you following along over the webcast, please use the question box on the right side of your screen to submit a question. We ask that you include your name and firm when submitting a question. All right, let me pass it over to José to kick things off.
All right. Good morning, everyone. Now, whether you're joining us here in Toronto or following along on our webcast, I'd like to welcome all of you to our first ever Tim Hortons Canada Investor Day. Now, over the past few years, you've heard me talk about the Tim Hortons Canada business quite a lot, and all the exciting work being carried out by our team. Now, many of you have kept up with us quarter- after- quarter, including hearing about Tim's encouraging first quarter results on this morning's earnings call. You've seen us demonstrate our confidence in the brand, including with our support in 2021 alongside the owners behind the advertising fund. Now that said, we know it's been more difficult to monitor the progress of Tim Hortons Canada over the past few years, especially given the challenges presented throughout the pandemic.
That's why we'd like to offer you a detailed look into the business and the team that leads this brand and business every day and demonstrate why we have so much conviction that this brand is set to deliver stable growth for many years to come. Now, today, you'll have the opportunity to hear about our journey directly from the leadership team who's leading the charge. Now, I've always viewed that my key responsibility is to build the right team and work together with them to establish and focus on the right priorities. From there, my job is to clear roadblocks out of their way and allow them to dig into the details, engage directly with our guests and our restaurant owners, and deliver results. Now, over the past few years, we've done just this at Tim Hortons Canada.
We've built a strong leadership team of industry experts coupled with largely homegrown talent who are brand-led each and every day, engaging our restaurant owners and driving to build great experiences for Tim's guests each and every day in every restaurant. They behave like true owners of our business, who, like me, believe in our big dream to build the most loved restaurant brands in the world. Now, the approach here, being brand-led with the right teams and the right plans, is the exact approach we're taking across all of our brands, including Burger King, Popeyes, and Firehouse in all of our regions.
Since 2015, we've taken Tim Hortons to six new countries and grown our restaurant count by more than a thousand restaurants, from 4,250 restaurants at the beginning of 2015 to over 5,300 restaurants at the end of 2021 within existing markets and these new entries. Now, we previously updated you on good momentum at Tim's U.S. business and exciting international growth led by China, where we've now seen over 425 restaurants open in just over three years. New market entries like India, where our first Tim's restaurant will open this year on our way to 300 locations over the next 10 years. Our focus for today is our home market of Canada, where we maintain an unmatched leadership position.
Now, if you haven't lived in Canada, it's hard to understand the power of this brand here. In fact, I've been in QSR for over 20 years. It's taken me to over 70 countries, and I've never seen anything like this brand anywhere. This brand is truly part of the fabric of Canadian culture. It's been built over decades and nurtured in partnership with restaurant owners or franchisees, owners who are dedicated to delivering a great guest experience in the restaurants and who also generously give back to their communities. The power of this brand is also what attracted this leadership team to work for Tim's. Let me introduce you to that team.
First, you will hear from my partner for the last 11 years, Axel Schwan, President of Tim Hortons Canada and U.S., who'll cover the progress we've made through our Back to Basics plan that you've heard us talk about consistently since 2020. Next, Hope Bagozzi, Chief Marketing Officer of Tim Hortons Canada. She's gonna walk through how we're building on the Back to Basics with a strong guest-led marketing plan for 2022 and beyond. Our chief operating officer for Tim's Canada, Matt Moore, will provide an update on how we're optimizing our restaurant formats and portfolio and improving our already leading restaurant operations. We had planned for Markus Sturm, our SVP of Digital Loyalty and Consumer Goods, to speak about our digital journey and notably, how we're using the platforms we've built to enhance the guest experience and drive sales. Unfortunately, Markus is home for health reasons.
He was really looking forward to being here today. Matt Moore will step in for Markus Sturm, and we'll kick off that digital update with a video introducing Markus Sturm. Axel Schwan will close the session summarizing key takeaways. Now, before I hand things over to Axel Schwan, I do wanna say that I am very proud of what this team, alongside our passionate restaurant owners, has accomplished. I'm excited for you to hear directly from them on their plans to drive continued innovation and lead Tim Hortons Canada to consistent growth over the long term. As I said earlier, it's my job to put the right team in place and work closely with them to execute on our priorities.
Since taking on this role in 2019, that's been a key focus of mine, working closely with Axel to attract, develop, and retain the talent we need to drive long-term growth for this amazing brand and backing them all on their journey. That's why we're here. We're confident in this team and in their plan. Now with that, I'll hand it over to Axel.
Thank you very much, José, and thank you all for joining us here today. I'm now in my fifth year with the Tim Hortons brand and 11 years with Restaurant Brands International, and I cannot tell you how proud I am to lead this beautiful brand. I've been in the restaurant industry pretty much since I was 12 years old. That is when my parents actually opened up their first restaurant in Germany, and that is also when I really fell in love with this fantastic industry. Having grown up in the restaurant space and also having run our family restaurant business together with my twin sister for a while gives me a unique perspective on what's important from a franchisor and owner perspective because I was a franchisee myself.
It also allows me to say with confidence, having worked in the QSR industry around the world, that there's no other brand anywhere in the world like Tim Hortons here in Canada. Besides our significant penetration in this country, it is really the deep affection that Canadians have for Tim Hortons that make it so special and so beautiful. From movie stars to musicians, politicians and athletes, Canadians love their Tim Hortons. That is also what made me personally feel super excited to join this truly one-of-a-kind brand. On a personal note, my wife and two children fell in love with Canada from the moment we arrived in the country end of 2017. We are all permanent residents now, and for all the places we have lived in in the world, I can tell you that Toronto and Canada truly feel like home.
That privilege to steer this iconic brand is what drives my team and I to provide craveable food and beverages, and with our nearly 1,500 restaurant owners supporting communities across the country and delivering a great guest experience to the millions of Canadians that visit Tim Hortons every day. With over 3,900 restaurants in Canada, we are the largest and most relevant QSR player in the market with one restaurant for every 9,700 Canadians. We are the number one in market share in coffee, and we are number one in key metrics such as brand love, most trusted brand, and brand that supports communities.
We have been able to leverage this strong brand love and positioning to build a successful consumer packaged goods business in Canada, which has grown sales six times since 2014 and has lots of runway to further expand into new categories and geographies. We have a commanding physical footprint and offer unmatched convenience with our drive-through network. Our reach extends to our digital footprint as well as the most frequently used food and beverage app in Canada. These are tremendous access and touch points with Canadians every day. Our growing loyalty program, Tims Rewards, reinforces and helps further increase the high frequency nature of our business. At the heart of what drives guests to our brand is the famous food and beverages that people enjoy every day.
That said, I would like to take us all quickly back to 2019, before the pandemic, at a time when we undertook one of the brand's most comprehensive guest research studies in its history. The findings were clear. Canadians absolutely loved the Tim Hortons brand, but we struggled with 3 main issues. First, an apparent lack of consistency in how we serve our coffee. Second, the perception of the quality of our food. Third, an aging perception of our brand, although still full of love from Canadians. This led to the development of our Back to Basics strategy that you have seen us execute for over two years now. I would like to give you all a brief review of what we did. First, we invested in growing our product excellence team to focus on quality improvements to our core menu and innovating around our core to drive growth.
We hired Chef Tallis Voakes, who has worked in some of the top kitchens in the world, including at Michelin star restaurants. On the beverage side, Victoria Stewart joined the Tims team after a decade in coffee innovation in the UK. Rounding out our beverage expertise is Kevin West, a veteran at Tim Hortons, who has run coffee operations for over 25 years. Kevin and his team travel the world, sourcing the beans that we need to make our amazing blends. It was also Kevin's team that helped us tackle what we are most famous for, our coffee. We addressed the consistency of our coffee by doing four things.
First, all of our restaurant owners invested into new brewing technology, our Fresh Brewers, replacing the old glass pot with state-of-the-art coffee brewers, customized by our coffee and equipment experts to improve accuracy and precision of our coffee brewing, leading to a more consistent cup of coffee. This also included installing the same water filtration system in every restaurant across the country. As you all know, the taste of water changes city by city. So with water being a key ingredient in a cup of coffee, it was important that we deliver the same taste profile no matter where you live or travel to. Second, we rolled out retraining in all restaurants and recommitted to our unique 20-minute fresh promise.
Third, our coffee team improved the blend and roast of our dark roast coffee, giving Canadians an even more flavorful alternative to our original blend, and resulting in the best guest satisfaction of our dark roast coffee in the history of the brand. Finally, we ensured that both our original blend and dark roast are 100% ethically sourced from the highest quality Arabica beans. The result of these initiatives has been strong and has helped grow our market share again. Despite already owning 70% of the market for hot brewed coffee when we started these changes in 2019, we grew our market share to 72% by the end of 2021, and improved product satisfaction of hot brewed coffee by two percentage points since 2020.
Now, while our coffee team was hard at work, we continued to strengthen our team of culinary experts with a focus on improving the quality of our next two largest categories, breakfast food and baked goods. In breakfast food, in mid-2020 we made improvements to our breakfast carriers, and also our bacon, and followed these enhancements in early 2021 with one of the single biggest improvements to our menu in decades, moving to freshly cracked eggs. The launch of fresh cracked eggs in early 2021 helped to grow our breakfast food market share from 57% in 2019 to 59% in 2021 and helped to significantly improve breakfast food satisfaction among our guests.
This positive momentum and our superior taste and quality has also translated into higher sales, driving breakfast food sales up 8% in the first quarter of 2022 compared to 2019. In baked goods, our bagels, English muffins, and biscuits are now baked without artificial flavors or preservatives, and we launched elevated platforms such as our Dream Donuts and our wildly successful Timbits. We also recently improved two of our most iconic donuts, the Apple Fritter and the Boston Cream. The Boston Cream, my personal favorite. Improvements like these and others are all driving quality perception of our baked goods and solidifying our leadership position, capturing around 70% market share in baked goods.
The success we saw with our investments in the quality of our core categories, including our food quality evolution, led us to believe that we could take the same journey in categories that we have historically trailed our competitors in and that are some of the highest growth categories in the industry, namely PM food and cold beverages. Hope Bagozzi will share this journey with you in just a few minutes. The final piece of our back to basics plan was addressing our guests' perception that we are a loved, but at the same time, older brand. Along with the fresh advertising perspective that Hope brought with her, we made important digital investments to modernize the guest experience on your phones and in our drive-throughs.
Our digital team, led by Matt Moore at that time, built a powerful digital loyalty program that has now become the most used restaurant app in Canada and has quickly attracted nearly nine million active loyalty members in just three years. With the addition of personalized offers, we now see more than 1/3 of all guest transactions happening through our digital channels, a remarkable stat given the fact that just a few years ago, the majority of transactions were cash tender. We have also invested in changes to our app so it loads significantly faster, which helps to make the digital guest experience even more convenient. Matt will share more details on our digital journey in just a little bit. We are very excited for the long-term impact of this work on guest engagement and sales growth. Our restaurant technology team has also worked hard to modernize our drive-through experience.
When you think about it, we really took the drive-through experience for granted before COVID. It was a concept that hadn't really changed much since the 1980s. With public health restrictions only allowing restaurants to serve guests in drive-throughs, we have seen a structural shift of our drive-through business going from just over half of all our transactions in 2019 to nearly 70% of all transactions in 2021. To improve that experience and sync up with our loyalty program, we have now replaced our old analog menu boards in almost all 2,700 drive-through locations in Canada with modern digital menu boards. We have made other changes to deliver a better guest experience in our drive-throughs.
These changes personalize the experience for our guests and help build incremental sales while our guests walk away more satisfied at the same time. We will talk more about these changes in just a little bit. Delivering this kind of turnaround in the quality of our products and the execution of operations was a large enough task to tackle. Of course, we then had the generational challenge of navigating COVID and all of the new health and safety protocols required to keep our team members and guests safe at Tim's restaurants while delivering an elevated guest experience. All of this has been possible through the constructive relationship we have been building with our restaurant owners. Throughout COVID, we communicated frequently with owners with more video meetings, Q&A time, and updates than ever before in our history.
Our commitment to communication and engagement with our restaurant owners will continue as a key foundation to our quality improvement journey. It's important to remember that at its core, Tim Hortons is a community brand. We have nearly 1,500 restaurant owners who own roughly 3 restaurants on average. These are not large corporate entities. These are individual entrepreneurs, many of whom have their entire lives and savings invested into this brand, and they care deeply about our future and are always improving the experience for our guests. Maintaining a strong dialogue with our owners is extremely important for our brand success, and our team has an organized, always-on approach to maintaining relationships and working in close partnership together. It has been a challenging two years in Canada for restaurant owners and their team members in our brand and others.
Canada has actually had some of the longest lockdown measures in the world. Coupled with global headwinds in commodity and labor costs, the profitability of our owners is always on the top of our priority list, and we are optimistic about the momentum we are seeing with increased mobility and traffic picking up. I want to take the opportunity to thank our restaurant owners. I really cannot say enough good things about them and their team members who embrace the challenges with COVID, while at the same time executing our quality initiatives. Incredibly, they did it all, and we saw our position relative to our QSR peers in overall guest satisfaction improve from rank number seven in 2019 to being second in 2021. All these efforts are only meaningful if they resonate with our guests.
That is why I'm so proud to say that we are number one for brand love and most trusted brand in Canada. A large part of that love comes from our strong commitment to our communities. As I mentioned, community is part of our DNA, and we have maintained its importance through years of growth and development. Tim's has been supporting communities throughout the pandemic and helped raise over CAD 217 million for our Tim Hortons Foundation since 1987, and over CAD 64 million for community charities through the sale of our Smile Cookies since 2014. Looking back, phase one of our Back to Basics plan was exactly what was needed, and the results speak for themselves.
We accomplished what we set out to do, and we have improved the consistency and quality of our coffee, the quality of our breakfast, and of our baked goods. We grew market share across both categories through COVID and the modern perception of our brand. All of that effort was really just the first step in putting Tim Hortons on a path to long-term sustainable growth in Canada. The cornerstone of our continued success will be remaining true to the core foundational qualities of our brand while pursuing platform-based product innovation to drive long-term growth. We are committed to being entirely guest-led in everything we do, whether it's marketing, operations or digital, and we use guest research and analytics to underpin it all. As we look ahead, we have four key priorities for phase two of our Back to Basics plan, which focuses on accelerating growth.
First, we will ensure Canadians think of us first for craveable, high-quality food and beverages reflecting great value for money in the market. Second, we want to be known for being best in class in digital to engage directly with our guests, offering them personalized value and convenience throughout their lifetime with us. Third, we will further enhance our guest experience through continued cooperation with our amazing restaurant owners and their team members and keep an ongoing focus on restaurant format optimization and excellent execution. Finally, we will be continuing to support our communities and show up for our guests when they need us with our Tim Hortons Foundation and our charitable campaigns throughout the year to raise money for causes close to the hearts of Canadians. Tim's has momentum.
That's why I'm confident that with this team and our restaurant owners, we can deliver mid- to high-single-digit comparable sales growth in 2022, with 2%-3% annual comparable sales growth over the long term. While we may fluctuate from quarter- to- quarter, we all stand behind this long-term growth outlook and feel well positioned to continue executing on our plan and maintaining our position as the most loved restaurant brand in Canada. Before I hand it over to Hope to talk about our first priority, our craveable food and beverages, let me share some of the exciting work the team has been up to over the past years.
Thank you all for joining us today. It certainly has been an exciting two plus years since I joined Tim Hortons. As a Canadian, I've grown up with the brand. From a young age, there was the post-dance class donut ritual with dad every weekend. Years later, I attended McMaster University in Hamilton, which is the birthplace of Tim Hortons, and I credit my coffee addiction and successful exam cramming to the Double-Double. After 15 years of working in QSR for a key competitor, I'm not only experienced in the industry, but also intimately familiar with brand Tim Hortons. When José and Axel called me at the end of 2019 to offer me an opportunity to join a brand that shares the best of Canada with every community it serves, I knew it would simply be too good to pass up.
It was clear to me when I joined in January 2020 that we had a tremendous opportunity to solidify our leadership position in Canada by further strengthening brand trust and love, largely by improving the taste and quality of our products and modernizing our brand. It's gratifying to see that we're already making positive traction with all categories, with the exception of brewed coffee, up over 2019 levels. At the same time, we're positioning ourselves well for continued long-term growth. Over the past two years, we've gotten to work building a talented marketing team, establishing a long-term marketing strategy, and a rolling three-year planning process. I'd like to echo Axel. I'm personally incredibly proud of the hard work of our team and restaurant owners in executing against our back-to-basics plan, even in the midst of the pandemic.
Today, I'm confident you'll see we have multiple levers to pull to drive consistent long-term growth for Tim's. First, we'll leverage our beverage leadership position in Canada to further extend into high-growth categories. Second, we have significant opportunity to capture our fair share of PM food day parts. Third, we continue to build off the recent momentum in modernizing our brand and remaining relevant for all guests. Finally, we'll keep the communities we serve at the center of all we do, ensuring we're always Canada's most loved restaurant brand. Before diving into details of our plan, I'd like to share a few of the ingredients that give us confidence in our approach. The team is uniquely comprised of talented individuals who've grown up in RBI and Tim's and progressed through our leadership development program.
As a complement to these folks, we also set about strengthening our bench by bringing in experienced professionals to lead key disciplines. For example, we added research, category marketing, media, and advertising expertise, to name a few. In order to hone our culinary and beverage and long-term visions, we hired Chef Tallis Voakes and beverage expert Victoria Stewart. Next, and very critically, we've taken a platform approach to innovation. Instead of in and out limited time promotions, we build permanent platforms that we can build upon and have enduring, sustaining benefits over time. We also take a very disciplined approach to category management. There are endless opportunities that could be explored, but through using guest insights, research and data, we make fact-based decisions and let the size of the prize guide our prioritization and our planning.
Finally, we work very closely cross-functionally with our internal partners, particularly our digital and operations teams, to ensure that we all have visibility into the technology, the equipment, and the executional needs of our plan, and that these are communicated effectively to our restaurant owners in a timely manner. A strong process and rolling three-year planning ensures that we have long-term visibility needed to test, refine, and execute with excellence. I'll spend the next few minutes discussing the key categories and platforms that form the backbone of our marketing plan and which we've identified through our strategic data-driven process. As the beverage leader in Canada, the underpinning of our marketing plan includes a leadership focus around beverages, hot and cold, brewed and specialty. As Axel mentioned, our important work around brewed coffee has improved our market share and re-solidified our position as Canada's favorite coffee.
While brewed coffee will always be pivotal to our business, to continue to build our credibility as a beverage leader, we must also win in espresso, which is a CAD 650 million market in Canada. Over time, our product mix will evolve to become less reliant on hot brewed coffee. Simultaneously, it's essential that we strengthen our relevance in other growing segments like espresso. Last year, we relaunched our offering. We improved our recipes with a richer, stronger espresso. We calibrated and updated our equipment. We expanded our customization offerings with additional alternative milk, such as oat milk. We've been pleased with our traction to date, increasing our espresso-based market share from 35% in 2019 to over 40% in 2021. Allowing Tim to take a leadership position in this segment and delivering a sustaining sales lift of over 26%.
We actually have the opportunity to grow the espresso category in Canada and continue our rapid market share growth. As important as it is to maintain our hot beverage leadership position, cold beverages represent a CAD 4.5 billion market in Canada, and they are critical to our efforts to modernize the brand and be relevant to that younger guest. We launched our Cold Brew in May 2021, and not only immediately established a market-leading position in this category, we also expanded the Cold Brew market in Canada by seven times. We followed Cold Brew in June with the launch of our Real Fruit Quenchers. These two platforms, Cold Brew and Quenchers, not only pair incredibly well with food, they also demonstrate the power of the Tim Hortons brand in launching new, high quality, and highly appealing products.
We're excited to have just launched the latest addition to the platform, Freshly Brewed Iced Tea Quencher and Passion Fruit Tea Lemonade Quencher. We grew market share to 24% with these launches, and going forward, a solid beverage pipeline gives us confidence that we have further growth to unlock over the years ahead. While beverages will remain a pillar of our brand, we're focused on being equally sought after for craveable high-quality food. We've made notable progress improving the taste and quality of our existing food offerings, specifically around breakfast and lunch, and we've driven sales as a result. You heard Axel speak about our core improvements at breakfast.
On lunch, we began our journey with important foundational quality enhancements in our existing lunch offering, successfully launching a new sandwich platform, Craveables, at the end of 2020, followed by core improvements on artisan sandwiches and freshly grilled wraps in 2021. It was important to improve the credibility of our current products before moving to launch new PM platforms. While we're pleased with the progress we've made to date, we know there's more work to be done for us to gain preference and extend our presence into lunch as well as dinner, which are the fastest growing day parts in the industry in Canada. PM food represents a CAD 8.5 billion market in Canada and is growing at a 5% CAGR. While our share is only 4%, this represents incredible opportunity for growth.
Today, we derive around 30% of sales from lunch and dinner, significantly under-indexing QSR peers who generate more than 50% of their sales from these day parts. We've also seen notable industry growth from these day parts over the past few years, particularly in dinner, which grew 14% in 2019. This week, we're launching our Loaded platform, beginning with Loaded Wraps and followed by Loaded Bowls later this summer. Our Loaded Wraps will extend our wrap leadership in the market by introducing a heartier, craveable, and more filling experience for our guests. Our Loaded Bowls were identified as an attractive white space opportunity, evolving and stretching our menu into high-growth segments that will not only drive PM traffic, but also appeal to that new younger guest. As with everything we do, this new platform helps further elevate our food quality credentials.
It will also help us extend beyond lunch, providing that more hearty, relevant option for dinner and delivery. As with every new major platform launch, our Loaded platform was under development for many months and was market-tested. During testing, we perfected operations and learned about the great potential of the platform, including high average check, gross margin, and product satisfaction. We're thrilled to officially launch our Loaded Wraps this week with a fast follow later this summer with Loaded Bowls. As I mentioned before, modernizing our brand is a key pillar of our strategy. Everything we do across menu innovation and partnerships, we do with an eye towards brand modernization, conveying a more contemporary image of Tims.
Launches of platforms like Cold Brew, Real Fruit Quenchers, and Loaded are great examples of our success in introducing Tims to a newer, younger guest, while at the same time driving new occasions for our existing loyal fans. We've also enjoyed tremendous success, traffic, sales, buzz, and brand momentum from exciting partnerships like Timbiebs with Justin Bieber, one of the biggest stars in the world and Tim Hortons super fan. As José likes to say, we're Beliebers, and so much so, we'll embark on a second collab with Justin coming soon. Last, but certainly not least, we're proud of our progress that we've been making on our For Good initiatives, sharing our goals and accomplishments via our guest-facing platform, Tims For Good. Tims For Good allows us to celebrate our collective efforts and broader leadership in food, planet, people, and communities.
We're proud of the progress we've been making to remove artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives from our products, improving over 1 billion units of packaging with the removal of single-use plastics, and working towards a leadership stance on our recycling platform. While we're proud of these accomplishments, we've only just begun the journey, and you should expect to see ongoing leadership moves from us over the coming years. A cornerstone of our Tims For Good platform and central to our brand DNA over- the- years has been our charitable giving. Of course, we're excited to once again raise awareness and funds for a number of charities, including our very own Tim Hortons Foundation Camps, through annual initiatives like Camp Day and Smile Cookie.
In 2021 alone, we raised more than $12 million for our own foundation and more than $12 million for local charities through these important programs. We're proud to do our part to support communities in need across the country, and we'll continue to make this a key brand priority. All of our initiatives spanning menu platform innovation, taste and quality improvements, brand modernization, sustainability accomplishments, and community outreach have helped us accomplish the goal I set out earlier of improving and growing brand trust and love. We continue to solidify our position as the most loved restaurant brand in Canada, and I'm pleased to share that we continue to lead across the majority of brand health metrics, including favorite QSR, most trusted brand I love the most.
To wrap it up, we'll continue to be obsessed with advancing taste and quality and extending into high growth categories like cold and espresso-based beverages, lunch and dinner in the years ahead. As always, we'll remain true to our strong community roots, in partnership with our restaurant owners, while also keeping an eye towards brand modernization in everything we do. I'm confident we have the right team and plans in place to continue to fuel our momentum and growth over the coming years, and I'm personally excited and proud to play my part. I'll now pass things over to Matt, who'll talk you through the important work that we're doing on operations and restaurant optimization. Thank you.
Thank you, Hope, and thank you everyone for being here today. I'm in my fourth year with the brand and first as Chief Operating Officer. Prior to Tim Hortons, I was living and working in the U.K. for almost a decade. In my last role, I was the Chief Customer Officer for Europe at another QSR brand, where I looked after digital operations and restaurant technology. José and I were put in touch through a mutual contact, and after meeting him, Josh, and the RBI team, I was inspired and proud to come home to help Tim's improve the guest experience. Initially focusing on accelerating the digital agenda for Tim's. I'm originally from Canada and was born and raised in Nova Scotia, which is a province on the East Coast.
For those of you who don't know it's just across the water from Maine, and I've had countless debates with my American friends about who has the better lobster. For the Canadians in the room, I'm not only a proud Maritimer, but also a proud Queen's Engineering grad. This was a dream opportunity for me as a Canadian to move back to Canada for what I feel is the most iconic Canadian brand. My role for the last four years was leading the digital team, evolving our app, and launching our loyalty program. Earlier this year, I returned to a broader operational role as COO, and now head up our field, operations, restaurant development, and franchising teams. Over the last 20 years, I spent my entire career at the intersection of operations and technology, with the last decade focused heavily on digital.
I'm excited to bring this experience deeper into our restaurants, using it to further improve operations for our owners and our team members. Today, I'd like to walk you through how we are working with our restaurant owners to ensure each and every guest has an exceptional Tims experience, and how we are working to drive profitable growth through format innovation. We know that having the craveable menu of quality products that Hope just walked you through is not enough. We also need quality execution at the restaurant level. While our marketing team is passionately at work in the kitchen, my team is spending time working closely with restaurant owners, providing tools and procedures to support excellent operations and in fostering engaged workforce. Fortunately, our system is already in a position of strength from an efficiencies and operating satisfaction perspective.
We run one of the most efficient drive-throughs in the business, and are number two in the restaurant industry in Canada in terms of overall guest satisfaction, up from seventh rank in 2019. Over the last three years, we have worked hard to improve key drivers for guest satisfaction, our most important operational metric. We have a number of initiatives underway to drive continued improvements to run an even more efficient system than we already have. For example, our field team visits restaurants to work with owners and their team members in what we call shoulder-to-shoulder visits. This is about working together with our restaurant teams to improve operations. This time jointly spent together in restaurants has proven to drive 7 points of improvement in overall satisfaction compared to restaurants that have not been through the process yet.
The marketing and operations teams also work very closely together to ensure we can successfully launch and execute new products in all of our restaurants. This partnership begins in the innovation kitchen, where we work out product builds and procedures side by side, collaborating to balance op simplicity with menu innovation. When a new product launches, we work together to develop training modules to ensure we hit on critical execution points. Our field team then uses these materials to train restaurants on the new procedures and menu builds, taking a hands-on approach. As the marketing calendar progresses, our teams are also in lockstep to ensure we have the right equipment to support excellent execution of our food and beverages.
Like we did with our fresh brewers and advanced water filtration, it's about equipment that can help restaurants deliver a consistent experience at Tims from coast to coast, from St. John's to Victoria, and every restaurant in between. In addition to fresh brewers, in the last three years, we've launched dairy and sugar machines that are more accurate and consistent, redesigned our beverage stations to support continued innovation, as well as redesigning our kitchen footprint to optimize flow and efficiencies. As Axel mentioned, the switch to freshly cracked eggs in our breakfast sandwiches was one of the biggest product changes we've made in decades. We spent the time to make sure we had the right egg cooker and custom prep station to deliver fresh cracked eggs consistently and safely.
Everything we do ultimately relies on working closely with our restaurant owners, so we are constantly communicating with them. Recently, we wrapped up an 18-city cross-Canada tour where the leadership team met with owners from coast to coast. That's on top of our regular communication touch points that happen every week. We are also in frequent contact with the 19-member owner elected advisory board, where we get feedback in input on areas from equipment to the marketing calendar to new format testing. The last two years have been challenging on our restaurants, but at the same time, in some ways has worked to bring us closer together, focusing on what really matters, to be there for our guests and maintain profitable sales for our owners. We got through the last few years together and will continue to work through the post-pandemic headwinds.
We all know that at the heart of every Tim's restaurant is its team members. As a franchise system, employment rests with our owners. We support them with programs and tools designed to help them attract and retain staff. We've run two national paid media recruitment campaigns in the past six months, along with always on campaigns on our social media channels. We also know that competitive wages and benefits are key factors in team member retention. Good management at restaurant level, flexible schedules, and even the quality and style of uniforms are also important criteria to retain good staff. We work with our owners in all of these areas. Now let me shift to the restaurants. As we look across our overall footprint, we see an opportunity to increase profitable sales through portfolio optimization.
There are multiple ways we can do this, including prudently closing underperforming restaurants and developing new freestanding sites, always keeping sales growth, sales recapture, as well as restaurant profitability in mind. To increase the capacity and throughput in restaurants, one of the most important portfolio optimization tools is our drive-thru lanes. Drive-thrus are critical service modes for our restaurants. We believe the addition and conversion of drive-thru lanes is one of the most powerful comparable sales drivers. We see that annual restaurant sales at restaurants with drive-thru lanes are double sales versus restaurants without a drive-thru. When we've converted single drive-thrus to double lanes, we've been able to drive additional throughput and see profitable sales uplift. It's clear the addition of a drive-thru lane, when possible, is a no-brainer investment with a high return for our restaurant owners.
We've been actively working to convert more and more restaurants and have already increased drive-thru footprint to about 2,700 locations today, at least 1,000 more than anyone else in the country. We have no plans to slow down as we work to meet consumer demand. As Axel mentioned, our pre-pandemic drive-thru mix was 51% and now has grown to 68%. Two years of mandated restrictions in Canada disrupting in-store dining, our guests have become accustomed to using our drive-thrus more frequently. With this trend, we took the opportunity to fully digitize almost every drive-thru menu board in the country. This means that we can centrally control content shown in our drive-thrus and change it on a moment's notice.
We can also look to customize content at each individual restaurant for things like the weather, switching to highlight cold beverages on an unusually hot day or vice versa. You'll hear more shortly on some exciting future opportunities on these digitized menu boards to drive further sales. We are also testing express drive-thru lanes for mobile ordering and tandem drive-thrus with two menu boards in a single lane to facilitate faster speed of service. Here, it's simply adding another outdoor digital menu board where a second guest can place an order in the same lane at the same time as the guest in front. These tandem drive-thrus are proving to be great additions in sites where double drive-thru option is physically unrealistic given space constraints. Again, we've already seen sustainable comparable sales uplift and speed of service benefits where we've installed these conversions.
For our in-restaurant or walk-up guests, we know that mobile order and pay, as well as delivery, are becoming increasingly important service modes. For these guests, we've been working on additional format innovations outside of our drive-thrus, including mobile pickup stations and Tim's walk-up windows. Our walk-up window is designed for mobile order, delivery pickup, as well as in-person ordering from outside the restaurant. Last September, we launched our first Tim's walk-up window in Ottawa and saw positive sales lift in comparable sales. While I wouldn't expect to see these innovations across all of our restaurants, it's important for us to always test new concepts, keeping the brand at the forefront of QSR innovation. I'll close out by reinforcing that we know that great guest experience and increased sales are highly correlated. We're proud to put our operational metrics and guest satisfaction scores up against anyone in the industry.
We have put in place the right team, right tools, and right practices to successfully launch new products. We are maniacal about maintaining high service levels guests have come to know us for. Our restaurant owners and their team members are well-positioned to enhance the guest experience. Finally, our continued focus on optimizing our system, especially through drive-thru experience, will only further support our efforts to drive long-term profitable sales for our business. With that, I'd like to now hand it over to Markus, who's gonna join us virtually, and I'll be back in a minute for the digital section.
Thanks, Matt. As José mentioned, I'm not able to be there with you today. I was really looking forward to it, but for unfortunate health reasons, I'm staying home. I'll shortly hand it back to Matt to cover the topics I had intended to present. Much of our digital journey and success that we're gonna share with you today was under his leadership, so there's no better person than him to talk through it. Before I do, though, I wanna take a quick minute to introduce myself, starting with my passion for Tim's, which has always been a big part of my life. The daily Tim's routine, called the Timmy's Run by us Canadians, started my childhood and stuck with me ever since. Rain, shine, or as often is the case in Canada, snow, my day always starts with a large black original roast coffee.
On a personal level, being able to say that I've worked at Tim's for most of my professional career is something that I'm really proud of. Building off my previous roles at Tim's as the Canadian CMO and more recently as a CFO, today I'm privileged to lead digital loyalty in our consumer goods teams. A few years ago, I volunteered to Matt that he could showcase my loyalty profile to our restaurant owners at our annual convention, highlighting the power of the program. He did just that, and to everyone's amusement, he noted that I was within the highest percentiles of loyalty members for number of transactions at Tim Hortons. José and Axel will not admit this, but I think that might have something to do with why I now lead our loyalty efforts.
My team and I are excited to share our digital progress with you today, and we're confident about the opportunities ahead to further our digital journey. Looking forward to seeing everyone in person next time, and with that, I'll hand it back to Matt.
Thanks, Markus. I'll divide the digital discussion into three main chapters, our digital leadership position, digital's continued contribution to growing sales, profitability, and engagement, and the future potential of our digital platforms. Digital sales are particularly important because of our ability to learn from individual guests their behaviors over time, coupled with the ability to communicate with them one to one. This allows us to deepen our guest relationship and to encourage incremental frequency and spend at Tim's. Let's start by quickly recapping our digital journey thus far, starting in 2018 when our app only facilitated mobile order and pay, and we only had around 600,000 Canadians using it each month. Digital represented a mere 0.5% of total sales.
In 2019, we started our digital journey by launching our Tims Rewards loyalty program as a simple visit-based program with hot beverages as the only item a guest could redeem. When it launched, we had three steps in the loyalty evolution in mind. First, acquire as many guests as possible. Second, encourage frequency of use. Third, drive incremental sales and traffic through personalized experiences. In 2020 and 2021, we evolved our program to be a digital one and launched new features to encourage more frequent use. Let's turn to a video that showcases some of those features. Our efforts in close partnership with restaurant owners over the past two years have been paying off. We now have over 4.3 million monthly active users in our app, nearly nine million active loyalty members.
As Josh and José mentioned this morning on our earnings call, in the most recent quarter, we reached the highest ever digital sales at Tim's Canada at over 36% of sales. Our 4.3 million monthly active users in Q1 represented the largest app user base within the food and beverage industry in Canada. That user base implies that over 11% of the entire Canadian population use our app at least once a month. That's two to five times the adoption levels of our largest coffee competitors in the U.S. Competitors who've been focused on digital for much longer than our three-year journey thus far. Not only do we have the largest user base in the country, we also have the highest frequency of app usage. At an average of 24 days active during Q1, nearly two times as frequent as our peers.
Beyond just food and beverage in Canada, our app has also become among one of the top most used apps in any industry in the country. For perspective, at the end of March, we had the second most used e-commerce enabled app in Canada, second to only Amazon, with more monthly active users than other large established Canadian retailers and grocers. As it relates to downloads, we were also the number one most downloaded app in Canada across any industry for 10 weeks of 2021, and we're glad to have received the Editors' Choice Award from the App Store. The primary reason people use our app is to access our loyalty program, so it's no surprise that Tims Rewards is the largest food and beverage loyalty program in the country, and also one of Canada's largest loyalty programs overall. Experts agree on the strength of our program.
We're proud that just recently, the Loyalty360 Awards recognized Tim's as having the number one best overall loyalty program, the number one in loyalty strategy, and the number one in innovation and personalization. To have beat out strong contenders in all across North America with large established loyalty programs is a testament to the strength of Tims Rewards beyond just programs in Canada. It's all made possible thanks to the efforts of restaurant owners and their team members who have encouraged guest adoption of loyalty. Switching to delivery, while it's still a much smaller portion of our overall sales, it has proven highly incremental, with more than 1,800 of our locations in Canada offering delivery. With delivery available both in our app as well as from third-party aggregators, Tim's is Canada's broadest restaurant delivery network.
That only matters if it's driving incremental sales, traffic, and profitability. We've made a lot of progress in this area, but there's still more work to be done. With our shift to a digital platform, requiring verified emails to register loyalty accounts, opening up our full menu as possible redemption options, and by investing in CRM, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to drive incremental guest behavior, we have significantly improved the impact of loyalty, both on sales and profitability. Even though we're still very much in the early days of our digital business, including loyalty, personalized offers, delivery, and outdoor digital menu boards, has driven positive sales for the last several quarters. These positive sales are translating into bottom-line restaurant profitability as well. Generally, though, restaurants with higher levels of digital adoption are performing better on both top and bottom line.
We are working closely with restaurant owners to optimize performance with a focus on personalized offers and delivery to improve levels of digital adoption across the country. We're really excited about the progress we've made. We know based on watching what others have been focused on, who are digital leaders longer than us, there's a ton of potential remaining. We want to share with you why converting our program to a digital one and why driving more and more guests to digital platforms is so valuable. What we are seeing is that personalized offers, even to guests who already are most loyal, are driving further increases in spend and traffic. These numbers are telling. Digital loyalty guests spend four times more than non-digital guests and visit five times more frequently. Personalized offers are a big part of these results.
Our current digital offer library has more than 100 offers, and we currently deploy 4-5 offers each week per guest. This gives us the ability to deploy 1.5 million unique offer combinations, optimized through machine learning to drive incremental sales and traffic. As an example, we may send a lunch offer to a breakfast-only guest to drive another occasion. If we know a beverage-only guest likes their beverages sweet, we might send them a baked good offer with the goal of increasing their check size. Aside from further improving the performance of our offers, our team is working closely with restaurant owners to build up personalized in-app challenges. The video shared earlier highlighted several of the videos.
The video shared earlier highlighted several other features launched in our app over the last few years, each of which have helped to drive our digital scale and guest engagement. The specific features launched have each served a strategic purpose in supporting our digital flywheel. Our flywheel focus on app features that both attract more Canadians to join our growing user base and then keep them coming back for more and more. This helps us keep Tim's top of mind for guests every day. The most impactful feature we've launched so far is Roll Up To Win, our fully digital evolution of an iconic analog game. It has been a huge success in driving over 2 million cumulative app downloads, and at its peak, drove our highest-ever digital sales of 41%.
Our Tims NHL hockey game has also proven to be a successful driver of traffic and engagement, with almost a million Canadians playing the game each season. We've seen high adoption and engagement in other in-app offerings too, like our 12 Days of Tims holiday campaign and our community-oriented features such as Tims It Forward, where guests can send their loyalty rewards to others anywhere in the country. Why are all these features relevant? Not only do they drive digital engagement, we've also seen a very strong correlation indicating that the more features our guests are using, the more they spend at Tims. For this reason, we plan on continuing to roll out even more engaging features in our app.
Together with our restaurant owners, we have built valuable and growing digital assets that can do so much more over time to deepen our relationship with our guests and drive sales and traffic to our restaurants. We have one of the largest and most captive loyalty bases in Canada with rich customer data and one-to-one communication enabled. Looking at a longer horizon, we see a lot of untapped potential. This could potentially include partnerships, app integrations, or entirely new features. In the more immediate term, our focus is on enhancing and growing existing features and on integrating digital seamlessly in-restaurant and in drive-thru operations. As I shared in the operations update, we've now completed our drive-thru digital menu board rollout. With that infrastructure now in place, the digital team is very focused on the content that we surface on those boards.
Let's take a quick look at the type of experiences drive-thru menu boards are enabling today or that we plan to enable in the future.
We're excited about the potential for our outdoor digital menu boards and wanted to double-click on two specific features highlighted in the video. First, our digital baked goods showcase, which represents an opportunity to drive check and grow sales. Baked goods have historically under-indexed in our drive-throughs because our in-store showcases are not visible. We developed and tested a dynamic virtual baked goods showcase on our drive-through digital menu boards, including live updates based on what's available in the restaurant. We believe this has the potential to increase our baked goods sales in the drive-through. We're excited for this feature, which is set to start rolling out this week. The second feature I wanted to emphasize is the powerful suggestive selling engine that we built and enabled within the drive-through digital menu boards. We're really excited about this.
We expect this technology will further increase drive-through sales when we're able to entirely customize the menu boards on a one-to-one basis, leveraging data from a guest's previous purchase history, just as we do today in the app. In summary, thanks to the hard work of our restaurant owners and their team members, we've come a long way in three years. The digital team is excited and confident about the opportunities ahead to further our digital journey. We're an undisputed digital leader in Canada. Digital is driving guest engagement in incremental sales and profits to our business, and we have a ton of untapped potential to drive further sales and profitability from digital. Thank you all for the time, and I'll hand things back over to Axel.
Thank you very much, Matt. As you have heard from the team, we have made significant progress in recent years to strengthen our foundation, be recognized as the most loved restaurant brand in Canada, and position ourselves well to grow profitable sales for the years to come. To quickly recap a few key highlights, phase one of our Back to Basics plan has been successful. We increased our hot brewed coffee market share from 70% in 2019 to 72% in 2021. We brought our breakfast food market share to 59% in 2021, the highest it has been in over five years. We've improved our guest satisfaction versus our peers from seventh place in 2019 to second in 2021. We launched and grew our loyalty program to over 4 million monthly active members with digital sales now representing 36% of all sales.
We increased key brand health metrics around coffee, food quality and taste, community, and brand connection. I'm very proud of the team for staying so focused on delivering on what we committed to, and I'm grateful to our restaurant owners and their team members for their service to guests and their commitment to their communities. As we look to the future, we are now fully into phase two of our Back to Basics plan, growing our PM food day parts through craveable wraps and bowls, growing our espresso-based and cold beverage platforms, accelerating personalized marketing efforts through our loyalty program to drive incremental traffic, sales, and profitability for our restaurant owners, providing a valuable and relevant experience for our guests while continuing to support communities across the country. We have the right strategy in place, the right team to lead it, and the right restaurant owners to execute it.
Over the next few years, we'll remain focused on expanding into high-growth day parts and products, enhancing our leading digital ecosystem, maintaining our leading operations, and optimizing our restaurant formats, all while staying true to our core as a community-focused and sustainable brand. I would like to repeat what I said off the top. We are all confident about the plan we have in place, which is why we feel comfortable with the outlook of mid to high single digit comparable sales growth in 2022 with 2%-3% annual comparable sales growth over the long term. With that, I would like to welcome José and the rest of the team back up, and we would love to open it up and answer any questions from the live and the virtual audience. Thank you very much.
All right. I'd like to thank everyone, all the presenters, for such a great job and with that, I think we have time for some questions live here from the audience.
Also, I think some have come in through our webcast. Why don't we get started?
Sure.
Oh, Axel, yeah. Sounds good.
Yeah.
Thank you. Brian Mullan, Deutsche Bank. Thank you for everything today. Thanks for the positive mid-single digit to high single digit comp guidance for the year. You shared a lot of encouraging stats around the growth of digital and loyalty programs. Could you just tie those two things together? Meaning is loyalty in a place for Tims Canada where it'll be a meaningful contributor to sales growth this year? Then can that tailwind actually build over time? How did you think about that in the 2%-3% annual growth for the long term?
I can jump in. Look, yeah, it is. I mentioned it earlier, certainly as we look at our sales growth potential, we are seeing benefits from digital. If you look across all the elements we have between offers, the stickiness of the base program to hold our guests, as well as things like delivery, where it's simply a new occasion. It is an important criteria. We see it really reinforcing between what we're doing there and the calendar, as well as the execution that we have in restaurants as well.
Thank you. Again, thanks for all the detail today. Brian Bittner from Oppenheimer. As it relates to the portfolio optimization strategy, I think you said 2,700 stores have drive-throughs today. I think that's around 69% of the asset base, and you wanna continue to plug along, either convert one lane to two or convert. Just in general, how many more conversion opportunities are there with the rest of the, call it 30, 31% of the portfolio? And can you also give us some sense of how much of a sales lift you do see when you do this? Because, you know, ultimately, I think it'd be a pretty big sales driver if you continue to have a runway of optimizing these assets.
Yeah. I guess before Matt jumps in, one is we've got a sizable portfolio already and presence from a drive-through standpoint, 1,000 plus more than anybody else in the market. You know, I think the short answer is we wanna do as many as we can. We don't have a number that we're gonna share publicly, but we're working closely with our real estate teams and with our development teams, as well as with the owners, to find opportunities to optimize the drive-through offering, the off-premise offering, which has been so important for the business over the last couple of years.
With all the efforts to modernize it, I think it's one of those things that we believe in long term, and the impact it'll have on same-store sales, we think will be similar to loyalty. It's gonna be one of the contributors alongside the menu work, alongside the operations work, alongside some of the expansion of new day parts. It's part of the plan and an important part that we're working closely with the owners. Matt, I don't know if you had or Axel.
Yeah, look, I can just add a little bit. You know, we're opening new restaurants every year, not big numbers, but every restaurant we look to open almost always is a freestanding drive-through restaurant. Sometimes, that's in a location where we might have had an existing non-drive-through restaurant. We can see a pretty meaningful bump there, as I mentioned earlier. You know, the lift obviously isn't as much when you're adding what we've seen in testing tandem or double drive-through lane, but certainly it does help with the bottleneck we can get at the ordering point to get more velocity through the drive-through.
I think we have a question that came in through the webcast. I'm gonna take that one. It's from Jeffrey Bernstein at Barclays, and the question is, please share similarities and more importantly, differences between Tims Canada and the brand in the rest of the world. Axel, you wanna touch on this?
Yeah, happy to do. First of all, maybe starting with Tims here in Canada, it is, yeah, like I said earlier, it's part of the fabric of this country. I have personally never seen a brand like this anywhere in the world. It's something very special, something very unique, and something very beautiful. You have, over decades, this brand grew community by community, and, yeah, it is now what it is today, the most loved restaurant brand in the country. Yeah, also, when it comes to serving communities, we are perceived as the number one in the country. There is decades of brand building, mostly driven really through the hard work of our owners in their communities. Now we are bringing this beautiful brand around the world.
What we always do is starting with, of course, the brand positioning, what it means in Canada, but also looking at what is relevant in each market around the world. Really finding the right balance between global consistency and local relevance. Especially when it comes to the menu, it's very important that we always start with research and identifying the right menu, for each market. Of course, always taking into account our iconic products here from Canada, but then adding products that are relevant for the local tastes, around the world.
What we've seen in terms of similarities, the beverages transfer well. The food side is a bit more local. We've done Timbits in China that are salted egg yolk Timbits. We probably wouldn't bring those to Canada, but they work quite well in China. There's a lot of unique applications. But overall, what works across the board in Canada and internationally is a great beverage offering at an everyday great value with tremendous service and a really strong community feeling. The Canadian brand and the Tims brand translate all around the globe, which is one of the most positive learnings over the last couple of years. Thanks for the question.
Hi, it's Mark Petrie from CIBC. I guess two questions, maybe first one for Hope. You talked about sort of building or gaining relevance with younger customers, with a lot of your marketing work. Wonder if you could just sort of give us some examples of how that has played out, maybe with specific programs and maybe leveraging the loyalty program to understand that a bit more, more deeply. Second question, not sure who will take this one, but just specific with regards to the portfolio optimization, there were some closures in Q1. What was the nature of that? Is that something that continues? Is that or is that pretty much sort of get you where you wanna be?
Any color on the types of locations that were closed, and then expectations for net restaurant growth in Canada would be helpful. Thanks.
Great. You wanna take the first one?
Yeah, sure. Yeah. I'll kick it off. Our loyalty data is obviously a wealth of information about all our segments, and we're happy to see that with the new platforms we've been introducing, that's working well across all our segment groups. With a particular emphasis on over-indexing with that younger guest. Specifically, some of the platforms like Cold Brew Quenchers and Timbiebs, for example, are three programs and platforms that very much over-index with a younger cohort and that younger segment. Timbiebs, for example, is you know, 25% over-indexed with that younger group in particular.
Very much, you know, we're looking to bring in platforms that appeal to all of our guests, but we do know that part of brand modernization is building that guest pipeline of tomorrow and making sure that we're relevant for the younger segment. Very much the loyalty data can sort of point to the fact that we're doing really well across these new platforms.
Great. Thanks, Hope. On the second question, Mark, our focus is on building the top line, and so a lot of the work you saw over the last couple of years and what the team shared this morning is work focused on really modernizing the experience, addressing throughput and capacity, expanding the menu where appropriate, simplifying where appropriate, and really deploying digital as part of you know, the everyday transactions that customers have in our restaurants. In that regard, from a portfolio standpoint, we're trying to move, as Matt shared and Axel did as well, we're moving towards more off-premise drive-through interactions, and we're trying to optimize in that regard.
We've seen over the last couple years several opportunities to optimize the portfolio with some of our non-drive-through locations and non-traditional locations, whether they're in universities or airports or other travel sectors. The quarter one closures were timing. We don't expect any material shift in NRG one way or the other that's gonna have an impact on kind of the broader performance of the business. I think I have one here online, and then we'll come over here. This is from Fred Wightman at Wolfe. Within the plus 2%-3% Tims long-term comp guidance, do you expect a divergent performance across urban and suburban locations?
Does that relative performance change over the short term versus the mid long term? I think maybe I can touch on one aspect of that and maybe, Axel, you can jump in as well. As we touched on earlier this morning at earnings, we've seen the business. When you look at it from an urbanity standpoint, we've seen super urban begin to grow at a faster rate the last two quarters. Although you know, really positively, all urbanities are growing over the last two quarters.
We expect to have, as Axel mentioned in the morning, you know, from time to time, these are not smooth growth rates, but we have confidence in the plan long term. We think it'll be a broad-based growth plan, both in terms of urbanity as well as in terms of format. That's kinda how we're thinking about it. Axel, I don't know if you have any additional
It's exactly right, José. When you think of it in the short term, mid-term, long term. Short term, we are seeing now coming out of Q1, mobility returning, like I mentioned. Canada had some of the longest lockdowns really in the world. Coming out of Q1, we see positive momentum, traffic picking up, people being out and about again. That will be, of course, having influence, especially on our super urban urban areas. Then, our back to basics plan, really the priorities that we just laid out, we are very, very confident that these priorities, starting with credible food and beverages and the digital engagement, the restaurant experience, really making sure that we deliver on that.
The combination of mobility returning, executing together with our owners, our back to basics plan, we are very confident that over time we will deliver on these results.
Great. Sir.
Hi. Morning. I have a question to start with Hope, if I can. It's Peter Sklar from BMO Capital Markets. Hope, in your presentation, one of the areas of focus that you mentioned is gonna be focusing on these day parts where you under index, which are lunch and dinner, and I assume some of the other later day parts. I guess my question is, when you think about the Tim Hortons brand, obviously Tim Hortons is one of the most powerful recognized brands in Canada. It also has a long history, so it's well entrenched. How do you know that the Tim Hortons brand extends into some of these other day parts that you're pursuing? And how do you know that Canadian consumers are not gonna be resistant to that brand extension in terms of these other day parts?
Do you have, like, data to back that up, consumer research, et cetera?
Thank you for the question. We absolutely everything we do is grounded in consumer insights and research. As I mentioned, when we're, you know, strengthening the bench of our team, we really invested in bringing in a really strong consumer and business insight team. Everything we do sort of then helps inform when we're building these rolling three-year plans, where should we go? Where do we have permission to go? Where can we stretch to evolve, to grow? Really what we learned from that is that consumers are telling us, our guests are telling us they're interested in us having more options for them throughout the day, that they are really pleased with our baked goods and our breakfast offering, our hot brewed coffee, our espresso, how those are evolving.
Later in the day, they are looking for different types of choices. Their tastes and what they have available in the marketplace has evolved. We really wanna make sure that we're keeping pace and actually leading in that regard and offering more choice throughout the day. That's very much what we heard from guests. Everything we do is grounded in the lens of, is there a white space, is there a size of prize? Should we play, and then how should we play, all informed by data and facts.
Okay. José, if I could just ask you one follow-up question. You touched on this a little bit during the call this morning, but in terms of inflation, now as part of your disclosure, you don't say how much pricing is on the menu board, but I think what you were saying is that in Canada, expect us to pass through, you know, something in and around CPI. Is that how we should think about price increases on the menu board?
Yeah. It's what I mentioned earlier today is that we've, you know, we do a lot of work, we do a lot of research, we spend a lot of time thinking about and testing where we can go from a pricing standpoint. We're very cognizant of flow through and ensuring that we don't have an impact on the consumer demand from a traffic standpoint. Hope and her team have been very thoughtful on pricing initiatives here in Canada, and we've stayed roughly within CPI and inflation in Canada, and we'll continue to have that as a checkpoint. The things we look at are where inflation is, where commodity headwinds are, where the consumer is and what impact it's having on the franchise profitability.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks for the question. Gregory Francfort. I had a two-part question. It's just on the operational side of loyalty and also digital ordering. I think one of the big challenges has been as you go through the drive-thru, one, how do you identify the customer before they order, and two, how do you get digital work through the drive-thru while it's sort of single lane process? Can you offer thoughts on maybe how you unlock either of those and what you're focused on in terms of license plate reading or whatever you think the big move is? Thanks.
Matt, you can go ahead and talk about that, but don't share too much, all right?
Yeah, look, I think I'll take the first part. Two parts, I guess, identifying the guest at the menu board and then the second one on pre-ordering, right, in the drive-thru lane. I guess maybe I'll take the second one first. Like a lot of the times it's getting guests to change with their behavior, right? Our guests come so frequently to them. That's one of the things we found, and we actually did some research on it about trying to get our mobile order up. A lot of times guests are just happy we run really efficient operations. If you think about it, even in restaurant, if a guest is paying contactless, getting a Double-Double, like it's really fast.
The bar for digital ordering and for Tim's. I came from a Pizza World, it's a totally different experience, right? I think it pushes our team to be really, really efficient with it, and again, even more challenging when we heavily rely on the drive-thru. I think I won't share too much, but it's very much top of mind to try to, how do we get guests to change their behaviors? The second thing is identifying guests at the menu board because we shared some of that. We've looked at a variety of ways to do this. We also know what people are exploring. We're testing a lot on scanners, scanning the barcode at the drive-thru. We have quite a few locations across the country where we're doing that already.
I won't share any more, but that's where we're focused on and what we have out there today.
Thank you.
Hi, Dennis Geiger, UBS. Thanks to the team for putting this together. I wanted to ask a little bit more about the comp composition looking forward, based on all the drivers that you've highlighted and based on the growth target that you provided and even beyond. Can you talk a little bit about the traffic component and the check component as you think about it going forward, given the elevated market share that you already have within Canada? Really specifically on that check opportunity. It seems like a lot of what we just heard, premiumization, the attached potential, so maybe Hope, José, you know, certainly Axel, if you could just kinda talk about how to think about that going forward and the opportunity ahead for that.
Hope, you wanna take that one?
Yeah, sure. We're really looking at it as a balanced approach, you know, with sales, you know, coming from both, you know, check and traffic and really having both, you know, come back nicely. We're seeing that across the platforms where we focused in phase one of back to basics. We're seeing that across, you know, our beverage business, we're seeing that across breakfast, baked goods, loyalty is contributing nicely to that. We're seeing that, you know, as traffic and mobility start to come back, those are improving over time and focusing more on food-led platforms, and some of these, you know, beverages and the baked goods that are provide nice accompaniments. That's also helping us, you know, as the traffic and mobility comes back, it's also helping fuel the check.
All are contributing to the sales uplift we're seeing.
Thank you. I think we have a question online here from Chris O'Cull with Stifel. Two-part question. Am I taking both parts or just one part? Okay. We're taking the first part of a multi-part question. I know you compared how frequency between loyalty and non-loyalty users compares, but can you share metrics on how you've impacted loyalty users over time via your offers and customer journeys? What do you think, Matt?
I can take it if you want. Look, we look at this, the beauty of having, as I mentioned earlier, that if you have the loyalty data, you can understand what a guest spends over time, just like any digital e-commerce provider. Look, we look at the value of an existing digital guest or loyalty guest, what they're spending last year to what they're spending this year, and the sort of composition. Look, and then we, as I mentioned, we have pretty advanced tools to kind of continue to drive same customer sales over time. We do it in a very similar way that any sort of pure play digital player will do.
No.
This is Danilo from Bernstein, Danilo Gargiulo from Bernstein. This morning you started and you touched on the direct to consumer business and the traction you had. I was wondering if you can expand on the D2C and if you can please talk about where are you seeing some traction, where do you see some untapped opportunities, and what goal are you setting for your teams?
If I understand the question, it's on CPG?
Yes.
Okay. You wanna touch on it?
The CPG business is we have been really getting into it in 2014. We have been growing our CPG business since 2014, six times here in Canada. It started really with coffee. That's where we started. We now have different formats, pack sizes, et cetera. Really having the right offer for every Canadian and their needs. Then we started expanding it into other categories, namely soups. We're actually the number two player in the country in canned soups. Now we're going into ice cream. We just launched it. I can only encourage everybody to try it. It tastes fantastic. We have five fantastic flavors. I'm a little bit biased, but I think it's really worth trying them.
We have plans to expand into other categories. We really believe that we're just getting started with our CPG business, and we believe that there's a lot of room for growth. I'm not going to get into details here today, but we're happy to share more over the years to come.
I think what's encouraging as well for the CPG business is, as we've expanded down, you know, south of the border to the U.S., it's been an indicator of markets where we think we can actually bring the brand to. For example, we announced recently that we're gonna be opening in Houston, Texas, and also in Georgia. Part of that plan was driven by the success and the share gains that we've seen from the coffee business in particular through either retail sales or online sales. Thank you.
Thanks for taking the question, Christopher Carril at RBC Capital Markets. I wanted to return to the PM business, given it seems it's one of the more significant opportunities you highlighted today when just taking into account the size of Tim's share as well as the size of the overall category. Can you expand a bit more on the go-forward strategy there, and maybe specifically how it differs from past efforts to grow the PM day parts?
Sure. I think the way I would characterize it is we need to be strong and walk on two legs. We're strong in the morning part of our business. We need to be equally strong on the food, you know, side and the PM part of our business, and that's really where we'll focus over the coming years. Not to say that we'll take for a minute our eye off the AM part of our business. We have momentum. We have market share growth. We have, you know, everything, the wind in our sails there in the AM. It's gonna be a balance. We wanna obviously protect what we have in the morning. At the same time, walk in a balanced fashion and be equally strong and offer more choices in the PM. Hence the importance of long-term strategic planning.
The fact that we have a view of rolling three years what we wanna do, morning, afternoon, beverages, food, helps us, you know, work with owners. We test, we model those things. We're constantly looking at the menu, but the focus on seeing the opportunity and our, how small our share is today, where the growth is, really we're focused on being equally strong across the morning and the afternoon part of our business.
Yeah. Right.
This is just a follow-on question from Chris's question. As some from south of the border may not be aware of the competitive marketing dynamic that Tim Hortons Canada has had to endure over the past decade. When you look at Tim Hortons Canada marketing spending, given your experience as CMO at Tim Hortons Canada and the brand before, on the breakfast daypart, the major competitor spent the last decade, it would seem, attacking the breakfast daypart segment. So much so that my 11 and nine year old think they sell coffee, bagels, and muffins and kind of sell Big Macs and fries on the side. Because there's no real competitors of scale for the fast food part in Canada, I'd say.
As an investor, how should we think about this lunch PM day part and making headway there actually benefiting your breakfast day part because of the way the marketing spend has been at this major competitor? Do I have that impression wrong that this is what's been going on in the market? Maybe just give a bit of history there. Then can your other brands, maybe José, like BK and Popeyes actually be beneficial to this whole equation? Do you think like that from an organization-wide as you'll think about the fast food market here in Canada?
Yeah. Let me just start with that last point. You know, we have one of the things we wanted to do today was share the you know the high-quality talented team that we have for Tim Hortons here in Canada led by Axel with Hope and Matt, and there are many others. We think about the business at the brand level. We're brand led. The work that the team is doing here is all about gaining share for the Tim's brand in Canada. I think that's the starting point for everything we do.
I think, Hope, maybe you can touch on or Axel as well, you can touch on how we think about it. It's kind of a follow-on to Chris's question on how P.M. food can be complementary and additive to what we're doing, not like a pivot where we're moving on from our morning day part.
Yeah, I would just impress that I think across the industry, you know, most QSR look to be strong in the morning and the afternoon. I think that that's generally a strategy that is sound to be, you know, strong in your morning part of your business, but also in your afternoon, late. Like, that's sort of the beauty, is having a well-balanced daypart approach and bringing in different guests. Different times of day appeal to different need states and usage and, you know, different guests. Some will come back multiple, you know, for multiple dayparts. Others were, you know, missing out on opportunities because we're not, you know, as developed in the afternoon. I think, you know, that that's works well across the board, and that's something that we wanna take advantage of.
At the same time, never taking our eye off the importance of the morning part of our business. That will always be critical, and I think, you know, with the right media investment in our ad fund and the right fuel in the market, we're able to sustain a strong leadership presence in the morning. At the same time, start to grow over time a stronger leadership presence in the afternoon.
I think there was an additional point on competition. Look, the reality is our space is highly competitive. In Canada, it's gotten more competitive over the last probably 10, 15 years than it was, you know, 30 years ago, which I think is great. It's what's fun about this industry, that every morning you know exactly how you did the day before. The team here is always looking at what's happening from a competitive landscape standpoint and staying ahead of that, both in terms of the product offering, the way we message it, and then operationally, the work that we do day to day to deliver great experiences there. I think we're well positioned long term.
It's why we're so excited to share the journey that we've been on and the path that we think we have in front of us. Thanks for the question, Brian. There's one online here from John Glass at Morgan Stanley. Two parts. One is, can you talk about the current state of the store portfolio? Is there a meaningful relocation opportunity given the age of the brand? The second one is commenting on current speed to service times versus pre-COVID and how the menu has evolved and opportunities. Matt, you wanna touch on that?
Yeah. On the first one, it kinda links back to what I mentioned. Look, as we're opening, we don't open a lot of new restaurants in Canada, certainly there are some that we open every year, almost entirely on drive-through restaurants, freestanding drive-through restaurants. Again, some of those are on locations where we have an opportunity to close a non-drive-through and replace it, so recapture the sales. That's a big focus for us, is recapturing the sales in a location and potentially adding more, knowing how guest behavior changed. Is it a meaningful opportunity? It's sort of double-digit numbers is sort of what we've been operating at, and we'll sort of expect to remain the same going forward.
On the speed of service times, look, we, you know, we did see some changes in speed of service times. Obviously, as we added new procedures, it was more complicated for our team members. Obviously, there was more, you know, things they had to do when executing our drive-through. We've seen that improve. We've seen it as we've rolled off some restrictions. Not all have fully rolled off yet. Yeah, there's some element of mix, but generally speaking, we're happy with the direction of speed of service overall for the brand.
Just to be clear on the first point, relocations or opportunities to improve our offering to the consumer and the drive-through space that we currently have, we think the offering will improve over time. Relocations will be one part of it. Remodels and adding drive-through lanes will be another part of it. Overall, we think it'll have a positive impact, but we haven't gotten into the details of what the numbers are and what the specifics are of that. But we'll keep you posted on the progress over time. I think we have time for one more question. Where's it coming from? Oh, you got it. Okay. Vim.
Great. Thanks for squeezing me in. Thanks for the numbers around what you think comparable sales growth will be in 2022 in the long term. I'm wondering if you can share some thoughts on the bridge, kind of the three to five year bridge when you have phase two of the back to basics plan to accelerate growth. You shared a number of great initiatives. I'm trying to understand the bridge from this mid- to- high-single-digit on the recovery from COVID in 2022 to a long-term growth of 2%-3%, which is kind of no share growth, industry inflation growth. With all the things you're talking about, are you able to provide some sort of context or a buildup of this base 2%-3% and what you can expect from phase two?
If you have any thoughts on investments that you need to make alongside, would love to just hear some color on the growth and the additional expenses. Thank you.
The idea today was to share, to give you a glimpse into the team and the great work they've done to get us to where we are today through a very difficult moment. I think some important investments that we made, both in terms of capital and digital, as well as people and ultimately investments directly that we made alongside our owners into the ad fund. We wanted to share that confidence.
Every time we've over the last few years that we've shared that confidence, the question's been asked, "Hey, what, you know, what does that look like in terms of comps?" Although it's not something that we've ordinarily done, we felt it was important to put kind of a bracket on that for 2022, and then give you a perspective on what we think this would look like over time. There are a number of different initiatives and areas that we're focusing on and investing with alongside our owners to be able to drive that type of growth over the coming years. The idea today was to share all of those. We didn't provide a bridge because we didn't think that was necessary at this stage.
We felt it was appropriate more to really share all the different exciting initiatives that we're working on over time. As Hope and Axel and Matt shared, we, you know, we're gonna let the consumer kind of dictate where we go. We think we have a pretty clear view of what that looks like over the coming years, and we have a lot of confidence in the team that we have, the relationship that we have with the owners, and the important approach that we're taking with them, side by side to weather the near term challenges from an inflationary standpoint, to be able to drive long-term growth in the business. We're excited. We're looking forward to continuing to update all of you on our progress.
With that, I'd like to say thank you to all of you. Thank you to the team for spending some time with all of you. I hope you enjoyed the opportunity to hear directly from Axel, from Hope, from Matt, and the Tim Hortons Canada team. As I said, we're confident in our long-term plans for Tims in Canada and the exciting opportunity for growth that we have ahead of us. We're excited to provide you with updates on our progress in the coming quarters. Again, to all of you online and here physically with us in Toronto, thank you for joining us this morning and afternoon.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We're thrilled to showcase the following menu. You heard me talk about the loaded platform, so you're gonna get to try it today. Fresh and hearty Loaded Wraps and Loaded Bowls, featuring three different recipes in either a bowl or wrap format. There's a Habanero Crispy Chicken, there's a Cilantro Lime Cooked Chicken, and vegetarian options. They're prepared fresh to order. We launched our Loaded Wraps just this past week, and they have hearty grains, your choice of either crispy or slow-cooked grilled chicken, and then the sauces that I mentioned, habanero with a little bit of a kick or a cilantro lime. We'll also accompany that with some cold beverages, so you'll get to taste some Quenchers, which are sort of the refreshing, sort of feel-good beverages with natural fruit flavors.
There's Strawberry Watermelon, there's Peach, and the Passionfruit Tea Lemonade. We also have Cold Brew, our latest innovation, which is amazing. It's a Hazelnut Cold Brew with an espresso infused foam. I saw a few of you actually.