BATON ROUGE - Raising Cane's hedged their bets on the Mega Millions lottery twice this week, spending a total of $200,000 on tickets for employees in the hopes of winning and sharing the $1.28 billion jackpot.

The fast food company initially spent $100,000 on 50,000 Mega Millions tickets — one for each employee — for Tuesday's drawing.

After not hitting that jackpot, a second investment of $100,000 was made ahead of the Friday night drawing, according to People Magazine.

"Our crew members were so stoked the last time, so we decided to try our luck again," co-CEO AJ Kumaran told The Washington Post. "And now we're all just excited, waiting and crossing our fingers for a win."

When asked why the company made the decision to stock up on tickets, Kumaran said they planned to split the money among their employees to hopefully help them out.

"Look, I hear from our crew members all the time, and things are really tough out there," he explained. "This was an opportunity to have fun but at the same time, hopefully make a little bit of extra money for our people."

And though $100,000 might seem like a lot to risk, Kumaran said when divided by everyone in the company, "it's just a couple of bucks" for the tickets. "I don't think of it as $100,000. It's really $2 per crew member."

"As soon as we heard how big this jackpot prize is, we couldn't miss out on the chance to win the Mega Millions jackpot and share it with our crew who always stand together," CEO Todd Graves said in a release Monday after buying the first set of 50,000 tickets.

Ultimately, though, the $1.28 billion jackpot — the third-largest lottery prize in the nation — would be awarded to one lucky ticket holder in Illinois following Friday's drawing.

The jackpot's cash-payout option was $747.2 million. If one of the restaurant chain's tickets would have won, that would have amounted to nearly $15,000 awarded to each employee.