Tim Hortons' Smile Cookie campaign raised more than $50,000 for Inn From the Cold and local owners said the cookies were flying off the shelves.
Owners of Tim Hortons in the Aurora and Newmarket area gathered at the restaurant in East Gwillimbury to present a cheque for $50,831.49 to Inn From the Cold's capital campaign.
"It’s huge," owner Perry Thornton said of the annual Smile Cookie campaign. "Every year it seems to just get better and better.”
“Everybody comes together for this campaign and it just keeps growing and growing,” he said.
Cherilyn Wall, another local owner, credits the customers with the success of the campaign.
“We wouldn’t be as successful without all the community, though. This is their way of giving back, too, and it’s kind of a win-win for everybody,” she said.
All the owners agreed the special cookies with blue and pink smiley faces are a top seller during the week-long campaign, which ran from Sept. 19 to 25, and at times they were flying off the shelf. They also said they would get calls coming in for large orders by the dozen.
“In one of our stores, 20 dozen went out on the one morning and that’s just one order,” said Chris Alexander, owner of a number of Newmarket locations.
Ann Watson, executive director of Inn From the Cold, said a dozen or two cookies were delivered to the shelter every day of the campaign and joked that she ate way too many of them.
She said the donation will contribute greatly to the All Inn! capital campaign to build a new shelter in Newmarket.
“Every dollar counts. We have to raise $2.5 million, so this is one of the bigger contributions,” she said. “It just helps drive toward that goal of the new shelter but more importantly those 18 units of transitional housing.”
Watson said these units will "eat away" at the number of people experiencing chronic homelessness in Newmarket, which is on the rise.
“Those people can be housed, they can be housed successfully. We’ve proven that. This is the community's contribution to making that happen so it's really exciting," she said.
The Tim Hortons owners also credited their baking teams, other staff, and volunteers with making the Smile Cookie campaign a success, especially amid ongoing labour shortages.
“We’re feeling the pinch there as well," Thornton said.
They said they hope that they'll have even more people to help out for the next campaign, which will happen in spring 2023. Proceeds from that campaign will also go toward Inn From the Cold.
The owners are, as Alexander said, "excited to see how we do next year with it.”
