From what I remember, the cooldown ensures it goes into the guild and is synced between all instances of the guild, its members and UI panels.
Adding ascended food is done the same way, except adding that via the NPC seems faster than how adding siege currently works. It also has an error state, such as being added too quickly, it returns a food/guild item token in inventory to double-click to try again.
currently, I have 8000 skirmish boxes across several characters to go through to get tactic tokens. and I don't want to because of this issue.