smile cookies tim hortons

Toronto Tim Hortons customers are being served very disturbing smile cookies

The bi-annual return of Tim Hortons' smile cookies sets social media ablaze with humorous and disturbing faces staring back at us with lifeless grins as they await their fate.

Timmies employees have worked in overdrive for brief stretches each year since 1996 to produce these smile cookies — donating 100 per cent of proceeds to over 600 local charities and community groups — but, occasionally, the haste of production shows in their work.

Every year, customers share the cookies' widely varied facial expressions on social media, and 2023 is no different. Several photos have been shared from the Toronto area since the cookies' May 1 launch, offering a window into the baked good's apparent range of emotions.

Some customers who expected the advertised icing smile were instead met with unenthusiastic yet oddly relatable expressions.

However, this year's overarching smile cookie theme appears to be a Greek mythological beast in the Cyclops. Or perhaps a pirate missing an eye patch, because subjectivity is the true beauty of abstract art.

One customer even claims to have been served three different one-eyed smile cookies, and some “questionable five-heads,” the latter depicted with a photo of a cookie sporting an unusually broad forehead.

But cyclops-pirate and five-head cookies are just the tip of the iceberg, and customers who at least got some discernible visage — regardless of eye count or placement — were lucky in comparison to others who wound up with pure nightmare-fuel cookies.

There's a certain level where it stops being a face let alone a smile.

Tim Hortons' smile cookies are available across Canada until May 7. Whether or not yours actually smiles, well, you'll just have to try your odds.

Lead photo by

@TippyToes2920/@Charzonit


Latest Videos



Latest Videos


Join the conversation Load comments

Latest in Eat & Drink

Toronto man's side hustle making calzones leads to new restaurant gig

Toronto bakery known for its croissants opening second location

There's a food festival in Toronto for a good cause next month

Ontario restaurant has people obsessing over its fried chicken

Toronto has a new street food market in a surprising location

The history of what was once Toronto's most luxurious restaurant

Thousands of people want to boycott Loblaws stores 'indefinitely'

One of the most anticipated Toronto restaurants of the year is now open