Get ready to roll, Canada.
Tim Hortons’ popular Roll Up The Rim promotion returns Monday. And the iconic Canadian company revealed to The Huffington Post Canada that it’s adding a new prize of 100 pre-paid MasterCards loaded with $5,000 each.
Other prizes include 40 Toyota Rav4s, 1,000 Napoleon grills, 25,000 Tims gift cards worth $100 each, and 47 million food and beverage prizes.
Sadly, there will be no Priestly doughnuts involved in the giveaway.
The list of prizes is quite similar to rumours reported by several blogs in the weeks ahead of the hotly-anticipated launch.
In the days leading up to this year’s contest, which runs as long as supplies last, Canadians took to social media to express their giddiness. One tweet counting down the days to the launch had been retweeted 794 times as of late Friday.
But Tims fans in the Twitterverse aren’t the only ones enthusiastic about the 27th annual event. Roll Up The Rim is also the most anticipated event of the year for employees, says Dana Brochu, the company's brand director for coffee and tea.
“We do look at it as the biggest celebration of the year where we get the opportunity to really thank our guests for buying our coffee.”
And it’s not just the prospect of winning one of those 2013 Rav4’s, which retail starting around $23,000, that have java enthusiasts buzzing, she notes.
“What’s very interesting about the contest is there’s a lot of excitement, obviously, for all the major prizes that we offer our guests, but there’s also an equal level of excitement around what we call the everyday prizes like the coffee and the doughnuts."
Still, it wasn’t a free coffee that had Danielle D’Angela jumping for joy after she unfurled the lip of her cup during last year’s contest.
The 23-year-old nurse in Sarnia, Ont., took her last sip then unceremoniously rolled up her rim during a movie night with her boyfriend and discovered she had won a Toyota Camry.
“We rolled it up as you would do after you drink your coffee, and it said ‘Camry’ so we were like ‘Oh my God, we just won the Camry.’ We were like 'Is this real?'"
The couple picked up the phone to call their friends and family and posted news of their score on Facebook.
“Nobody would believe it until we showed them the picture of the roll up the rim. We went into the Tim Hortons and they didn’t believe it either, so we showed them the ticket of course and they were more excited really than us.”
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Roll up the Rim to Win: A History
The daily coffee drinker and her boyfriend were both saddled with student loans. They ended up selling the car back to the dealership for $27,000. The couple, who already had a car, used the money to pay off debt and put a lump sum away for a down payment on a house.
D’Angela’s win has only made her more intent on buying at least one coffee a day during this year’s campaign, though her friends tell her if she wins again, she better pass on her good fortune to them.
The odds of winning at least a coffee or doughnut are one-in-six, says Brochu, adding that winning cups are distributed by a third party and scattered throughout the cup cases, which are randomly distributed in an attempt to ensure no one restaurant gets more winning cups than another.
Tims is also holding a concurrent online contest, Rockin' RRRoll Up Roulette, which offers 10,000 more prizes. That promotion ends March 17. Winners of both contests have until May 19 to claim their prizes.
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