- 2 days ago
What started in a college dorm is now a cookie empire. Insomnia Cookies CEO Seth Berkowitz talks scale, strategy, and staying sweet.
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00:00Insomnia Cookies has gone from a University of Pennsylvania dorm room idea to a multi-million dollar business.
00:06Right in the wave of the cookie craze with ambitious expansion plans, company-owned bakeries, and the cookie market expected to hit $15 billion by the year 2033.
00:17Who better positioned to make its mark than the great Insomnia Cookies, truly one and only, especially here in New York City?
00:23Seth Berkowitz joins us now.
00:25Seth is the founder and CEO of Insomnia Cookies.
00:28Thank you for being here.
00:29Great to have you, Seth.
00:30Thanks so much for having me.
00:32It's great to have some time with you.
00:32Okay, so I got to jump right because I don't want to, like, bury the lead, as we say in journalism, which is the fact that I am sitting here and just I am so lucky to have several boxes of some of the greats.
00:44And all of us here in Lower Manhattan, we love the Insomnia Cookies locations.
00:49Take me back to the beginning, the genesis of this whole idea, because I think so many people are familiar with the brand and don't really know how it started.
00:56How did it come together, Seth?
00:59You know, so I started Insomnia 20 plus years ago as a college junior at the University of Pennsylvania.
01:04And I had a very simple thought that a warm, delicious product delivered to me through all hours of the night would be epic.
01:12And I came to that idea from it being one very cold night, having spent time playing video games, studying, hanging out with my buddies back at college.
01:22And we got a delivery and it was like the third time we got the same pizza delivered.
01:28And I got so frustrated with with my with my buddies there that I said, guys, we need something new.
01:34I'm going to I'm going to start something.
01:35And they said, what?
01:36And I said, I just want something sweet and warm and delicious delivered to me.
01:40And I actually made it happen from there.
01:43OK, so talk to me about how you were like, what did this look like while you were still on campus?
01:47Because I know you pens campus really well there in West Philly, right near 30th Street Station.
01:52What were you able to do while you were there versus how is the business able to grow once you graduated from Penn or left college?
01:58So early days was just me.
02:01I mean, I was like running around campus, handing out cookies, handing out flyers, getting access to libraries and dorms and college houses, anywhere I can really hand out a product or a menu.
02:13And the business started really growing organically.
02:15There's a huge article written about it probably a month in on the front page of the Daily Pennsylvania newspaper.
02:21And the whole thing really for me felt like at that point, not only an explosion of the business and the brand, but a real revelation that I could scale it, that I can engineer something really special on other college campuses.
02:34Because my peer set was saying, you know what?
02:35Warm, delicious cookies.
02:37That's something we're interested in.
02:38And over time, right, we've now scaled to 360 locations, over 200 college campuses now growing into suburbs.
02:45We're in cities, we're in arenas, tourist areas, Penn Station, a warm cookie delivered quickly works everywhere.
02:54And we're excited to see that expansion exploding throughout the world.
02:57Do you consider it a Philly brand?
03:01I mean, it is a Philly brand.
03:02It's a Philly-founded brand.
03:04Our headquarters is based in Philadelphia.
03:06I'm there three days a week and here in New York one day, but spend all our time with our headquarters.
03:12We call the Adventure What's Possible Center down on South Broad.
03:14So it is a Philly brand through and through.
03:17And as a Villanova graduate, I will tell you how much this meant to us when we were going through college, knowing that it did have local roots very close by there on the mainland, on the main line, rather.
03:27You know, we reach and we talk to a lot of young entrepreneurs.
03:30People have great ideas, you know, in college, shortly after college.
03:33What are some lessons of building and scaling this incredible business that you wish you had known sooner, Seth?
03:40You know, it's the amazing thing about starting in college is a direct access to an incredibly shareable and viable base of consumers.
03:50I was talking to, we consider now to be our center of the bullseye is the college, the Gen Z audience.
03:56We were able to learn so much and I did not take advantage of that, right?
04:01Speaking directly to the consumer, understanding what their expectations are.
04:05I had my theories.
04:06I had my thesis on what insomnia should be because I was a college student, but that access was so powerful.
04:12And now, now we utilize that in the way that that is necessary.
04:16And I always say to others, is there, if you're going to start something in a college, in a college environment, speak to the student, right?
04:23They're going to tell you so much of what you need to know.
04:26Let me dive back to what your team was getting us to send here.
04:29We got some great peanut butter offerings here.
04:32There's a box of vegan cookies, which very closely match the regular dairy versions.
04:37Chocolate chip.
04:38We got sprinkles.
04:39We got a whole bunch here.
04:40Talk to me about some of your favorites for you and the team and how do you go about deciding what to add onto the menu?
04:47How important are things like real-time customer feedback over the years?
04:52You know, so insomnia was built on a classic set of products.
04:55We have our classic nine cookies.
04:57We have six deluxes.
04:59We have brownies.
05:00We've introduced new platforms and new innovations based on what the consumer tells us.
05:06We sold ice cream for a long time.
05:07It was super complimentary.
05:08The feedback we got was, it's not exactly insomniified, right?
05:12There's something missing.
05:14And so we took our cookie and we threaded it through the ice cream product.
05:17And now we sell the cookies and ice cream offering that is growing dramatically, that it's unbelievably delicious and connects to who we are.
05:25When we do limited time offerings, we do innovation products, it's the same approach.
05:30You know, we're going to launch a Cheez-It cookie in April, which is totally out there.
05:34But the consumer says we want something unique and interesting and delicious.
05:39And it is all of those three things.
05:40So it's always based on what the audience is telling us.
05:43So I want to make sure I heard that correctly.
05:45You said a Cheez-It cookie, correct?
05:47I might have.
05:48You might.
05:50Okay.
05:51Well, I'm excited to try that one out right down the street here from the Stock Exchange.
05:54Talk to me about the decision to keep these company owned rather than the franchise model.
05:59And what are those key points, a differentiation there?
06:02I think a lot of people have their favorite brands they shop at, may not actually know who really owns the individual location that they go to, whether it's a pizza hut or anything else.
06:11It seems like you're all doing things a bit differently.
06:14You know, I think starting as the initial operator of Insomnia, running the business, delivering the cookies, I understood a couple of things.
06:21One, experience matters in every element.
06:23And if I could help drive a moment where a warm cookie makes your life better, I want to be able to control that and support that and innovate around it.
06:31And so the whole business has been engineered on this idea of warmth.
06:34I don't know if I could have held that standard if we didn't keep it in a controlled environment.
06:38So having bakeries where we can train our people, we can talk to them directly, we can compel them to speak to the consumer in a different way, to drive experience, it's been really powerful and the economics have stood up to it.
06:51So there's a lot to be excited about the way we built our business.
06:55It's a little bit more capital intensive, but not too much.
06:59And it allows us to innovate in every element of the business.
07:02Yeah, I think everyone agree there's not much more in life that makes you happier than a fresh, warm cookie, especially one from Insomnia.
07:10What a treat.
07:11You know, we also have, you know, on the backdrop here on Wall Street with a lot of publicly traded companies or companies like yours, you know, we are on the backdrop of we hear a narrative of consumers trying to be more and more health focused.
07:22There's a big conversation right now about GLP-1s and what that means for the future of snack brands, whether that's a headwind, whether it's a tailwind.
07:32How are you approaching those kind of long arc conversations, knowing that the kind of general health and wellness space may look a lot different even a few years from now than it has been in the past?
07:43And what does that mean for Insomnia?
07:45Insomnia has always been, we talk about it in the terms of like how you dream it brand.
07:49So if you want a classic, simple, small indulgence, you can get a small, you know, it's not a small cookie.
07:56You can get one delicious cookie for yourself as you walk by.
07:59If you want to get a box and share it, we go more indulgent, right?
08:02We introduce our deluxe products and, you know, you can turn a cookie into a cookie, a cookie and ice cream into a cookie witch.
08:08So we give our insomniacs room and opportunity to try it in the way that they want it.
08:15And so we think that the best way to really combat any sort of moving trend is choice.
08:22We think choice is going to be the solution.
08:24And that's how the business has been created over time.
08:28And before I let you go, any of the key ways that you most expect or most hope that the company continues to evolve even just the next few years, Seth?
08:36You know, we've launched into international markets now.
08:39We have stores in the UK and in Canada, and we have a real ambition of being a global brand.
08:44We think the warm cookie certainly extends borders, but we want to see it, you know, showing up in every continent in the world and most of them.
08:52And we are we're certainly focused on turning into something more iconic and global than we are today.
08:58And there's a lot of excitement around that.
08:59Listen, even if you did manage to put one of these in Antarctica, they would be popular there, too, somehow.
09:06I proudly consider myself one of your many, many insomniacs around the world.
09:10Big fan.
09:11Thank you for sending these over.
09:12The great Seth Berkowitz, founder and CEO of Insomnia Cookies.
09:15Congratulations on all the success.
09:18Seth, best of luck for 2026.
09:20I really appreciate it.
09:21Have a great rest of your day.
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