Insomnia Treats: The Award-Winning Coffee Scheme That Describes Its Own Reward Twice

You're at the till in an Insomnia with a reusable cup in your hand. The barista scans the QR code in your app, and thirty cent drops onto your account as credit. It's a small, well-designed nudge: the reward is immediate, it's tied to a behaviour the company actually wants, and it converts to a cash balance you can spend on anything in the shop bar a gift card. Most Irish loyalty schemes would struggle to point at a mechanic that clean.

Then you read the terms, and things get crowded.

Five mechanics wearing one coat

Insomnia Limited, operating out of Francis Street in Dublin 8, runs Treats on a third-party engagement platform, and the terms and conditions enumerate the reward structure as five numbered "Customer Loyalty Features".

The first is the keep-cup credit above. Next comes a prepay wallet: top up between €5 and €50, non-refundable, non-transferable, no cash back. Third is gifts and coupons, which carries the headline promise that "for every 9 Insomnia beverages ... you will receive an Insomnia Beverage of your choice", redeemable for 365 days. Fifth is a flat 50% off oat, coconut and Sproud milks, which is a genuinely useful benefit aimed squarely at the customers who order most often.

The fourth is where it falls over. It's titled PUNCH CARD, and it says: "This loyalty feature allows you to collect virtual cups on the punch card on the app. When you've collected 9 cups you will be eligible to get a free coffee."

So the document promises a free drink after nine purchases in its third feature, and again in its fourth, as two separately numbered mechanics with their own rules, their own exclusion lists and their own descriptions. Nothing in the terms says whether these are two rewards or one reward written up twice. Read literally, a member who buys nine coffees is owed two free ones. Read charitably, the punch card is just the interface through which that third feature is tracked, and someone documented the display and the entitlement as separate products.

I'd bet on the charitable reading. That's not the point. The point is that a member cannot tell, and this is the most award-decorated coffee loyalty scheme in the country: Insomnia took Retail Loyalty Programme of the Year at the 2025 Irish Loyalty and CX Awards in May of that year, and the programme page claims a second win in the Restaurants and QSR category for 2026. A scheme running since 2014, with awards on the shelf, still can't state its central promise once.

If you run a programme, when did you last read your own terms straight through, in order, as a member would? That's where duplicated mechanics live, and they don't show up in a redemption dashboard.

The stores that aren't in it

The other thing the terms give away is where Treats doesn't work, and the list is long enough to be strategic rather than incidental.

Excluded are Insomnia's concessions inside SPAR, EUROSPAR, MACE, LONDIS, Fresh and Maxol, plus named sites at Tallaght Square, St Stephen's Green Shopping Centre, Artane Shopping Centre, Glenageary, Cabra, Drogheda Town Centre, the Newcastle Airstream, and Dublin Airport. Every self-service machine is out too.

Look at what that removes. Forecourt concessions, shopping-centre units and an airport are precisely the sites that generate high-volume, low-intent, one-off coffee purchases. They're the places a chain picks up customers who don't yet have the app. Treats is switched off in all of them, which means the scheme can only reward people who were already going to a full Insomnia shop. It compounds loyalty among the loyal and does nothing at the point of acquisition.

There's a defensible reason for that, and it's almost certainly the franchise and concession model: you can't fund a free tenth coffee out of a till you don't own. Fair enough. But it's worth naming honestly, because plenty of Irish brands sign concession deals without working out that they've just carved a hole in their own loyalty footprint, and by then the contract is signed.

The expiry rules are stricter than the friendly tone suggests. Credit is "only redeemable for 12 months from the date it was awarded", so the thirty cent you earned for bringing a cup has a clock on it. Go twelve months without a purchase and the balance may expire and the account may be cancelled. Seasonal gifts only go to members who transacted in the last six months, and the birthday drink needs a purchase in the previous twelve. Return a product and Insomnia may "cancel your last punch". None of that is unusual, and for a daily-habit product a twelve-month window is barely a constraint, but it does mean the sustainability incentive is perishable, which sits oddly against a benefit the company frames through its environmental values.

One detail I liked, oddly. The terms state that only one gift can be redeemed per transaction, then immediately tell you how to get around it: "Customer can do two separate transactions to use two gifts." An operator documenting the workaround to its own restriction is either unusually candid or has decided the restriction is a POS limitation rather than a commercial rule. Either way it's more honest than most schemes manage, and it's a reminder that the sort of gamified, app-led structure covered in our piece on loyalty programme gamification still lives or dies on what the till can actually do. There's more on how the sector approaches this in our look at restaurant loyalty programmes in Ireland, and on where Treats sits against its peers in our ranking of Irish loyalty programmes.

The operator takeaway is about documentation discipline rather than mechanics. Insomnia has built a good scheme: immediate rewards, a behaviour-linked incentive, a real discount for frequent orderers, and enough app-side variety to keep a daily habit interesting. Then it wrote the whole thing up as five parallel features and let its core promise appear twice. Keep one canonical statement of each entitlement and have every surface point at it, rather than restating it per feature, because restatement is how two versions of the same reward end up in circulation. Map your exclusion list against your acquisition sites before you sign the next concession, not after. And put a date on the terms so somebody owns the next read-through.

If you're running a scheme that's grown a mechanic at a time and now needs the whole thing to say one thing, Brandfire builds loyalty programmes that stay legible as they get bigger.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does the Insomnia Treats reusable cup credit work?

You get 30 cent of credit when you order any barista made drink and present a reusable cup instead of taking a sit-in or takeaway cup. The credit converts to a cash balance on your account and can be spent on anything in store except gift cards. It is not awarded when you are redeeming a gift such as a birthday drink or your 10th free coffee.

Does Insomnia Treats credit expire?

Yes. Credit is redeemable for 12 months from the date it was awarded. Separately, if you make no purchases for 12 months your balance may expire and your account may be cancelled, though you can rejoin at any time. A free drink earned through the 10th coffee reward stays redeemable for 365 days.

Which Insomnia stores are excluded from Treats?

Insomnia concessions inside SPAR, EUROSPAR, MACE, LONDIS, Fresh and Maxol, plus Tallaght Square, St Stephen's Green Shopping Centre, Artane Shopping Centre, Glenageary, Cabra, Dublin Airport, Newcastle Airstream and Drogheda Town Centre. All self-service machines are excluded too.

How many purchases do you need for a free Insomnia coffee?

Nine. Buy nine qualifying hot or iced beverages and the tenth is free, loaded automatically onto your account. ICECAPS, milkshakes, ice cream, seasonal beverages and pre-packaged drinks do not count, and neither do drinks bought as part of a meal deal or another in-store discount.

Can you use two Insomnia Treats rewards in one transaction?

No. Only one gift can be redeemed per transaction, so buying two coffees will only make one of them free. The terms state the workaround directly, which is to split the purchase into two separate transactions.