Canadian Navy: It’s Timmies or nothin’, eh?
November 4th, 2009 | Chow Foreign navies Life at Sea Morale | Posted by Phil Ewing
U.S. and Canadian airmen unloaded a mobile Tim Hortons from a C-17 at Kandahar Air Field, Afghanistan. Tim Hortons coffee fuels Canada's military in the same way that F76 and JP-5 fuel the U.S. Navy // Canadian Forces
Why do Canadians love Tim Hortons so much? Good question. Why do boatswain’s mates wear those funny hard hats? These are mysteries to which there may never be good answers, but their effects are quite plain — especially that first one. Canadians love their “Timmies,” as they call it, in the same way they love power plays and those French fries with that weird gravy on them. Well indeed does Scoop Deck remember spotting a Tim Hortons, dispensing piping hot coffee, on a 115-degree afternoon at Kandahar Air Field, Afghanistan.
The Canadian Forces needs its Timmies so bad that it has issued a solicitation for the coffee in Halifax by name. Starbucks, Peet’s, Gevalia — none need apply, the CBC reports:
“There shall be no acceptable substitute,” according to the tender issued Monday. “Tim Hortons has been determined by MARLANT” — the navy’s Maritime Forces Atlantic command — “as the product of choice based on expressed customer taste and preferences for boosting morale in Afghanistan, Sudan and Sierra Leone.”
You can’t get a much bigger endorsement than a nation’s military requesting your product to the exclusion of all those other hosers. Is there an equivalent coffee in the U.S. Navy? Or do you rely on command ingenuity to create a distinctive product — i.e. “boat coffee?”
H/T: Springbored (who praised the U.S. Navy’s decision to shed “fru-fru, gold-plated, 5th Generation stealth coffee.”)