Two decades ago, Seth Berkowitz was a college student with a late-night craving for a “warm, delicious treat.”
Today, he’s the CEO of Insomnia Cookies, the company he co-founded as a college junior and grew into a chain with more than 260 locations by satisfying that very craving for customers around the world. Insomnia was most recently valued at more than $500 million, following a 2018 majority-stake acquisition by Krispy Kreme.
It brought in over $200 million in revenue last year, according to the company. “I just thought a warm cookie worked,” Berkowitz, 43, tells CNBC Make It. “It was a craving that I was looking for, and it was clear that it was something that resonated with others.”
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Berkowitz started Insomnia at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, baking cookies in his college house and personally delivering them around campus in the early hours of the morning. In one semester, he made roughly $10,000 in profit, he says.
By the time he graduated in 2004, Berkowitz signed a lease to open Insomnia’s first brick-and-mortar location, near another college campus in Syracuse, New York. Stores in Champaign, Illinois and College Park, Maryland soon followed.
Now, with Krispy Kreme looking to sell Insomnia, Berkowitz says he’s “grateful for the journey.”
“That warm, delicious moment is really working for us,” he says. “So, the goal is to just keep going.”
School by day, cookies by night
In the days before Grubhub and Uber Eats, college students had limited options for after-hours food delivery — and Berkowitz got tired of eating the same Papa John’s pizza “every night,” he says.
The economics and history major estimates he spent roughly $150 on ingredients to start baking cookies in the “really small kitchen” he shared with eight friends in college housing. Taking orders on his cellphone, Berkowitz drove deliveries around campus as late as 4 a.m. some nights.
Running a late-night business while attending…
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