How I Built This · Oct 24, 2026 · 44m · 35m saved
With Seth Berkowitz, Founder and CEO, Insomnia Cookies
Insomnia Cookies will finish this year with roughly 393 bakeries and wants to reach 1,800 worldwide — without selling a single franchise.
Most food chains hand stores to franchisees to grow faster. Seth Berkowitz, founder and CEO of Insomnia Cookies, keeps nearly every bakery company-owned instead, with just four licensing deals total, covering an airport and three stadiums.
"I believe you earn growth. I think you earn the right to grow. Consumer love gives you license."
Seth built that approach over the roughly 25 years since he founded Insomnia Cookies, after an early overexpansion into a couple of markets taught him what happens when store count outruns local demand.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 44 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 7 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Insomnia Cookies will finish the year with roughly 393 bakeries and is targeting 1,800 worldwide, without selling a single franchise
Owning every bakery lets the chain test and roll out a new product chainwide with no franchisee pushback
Seth says growth has to be earned from customers first, after an early overexpansion into a couple of markets outran local demand
250 of Insomnia's roughly 400 bakeries sit on or near a college campus, and the brand follows those customers into cities and suburbs
He told fashion founder Kahindo to build from her three to five bestselling pieces instead of running ad campaigns aimed at 300 million people
He told sauna-hat founder Tara Gilman that rising paid-social costs make in-person demonstrations a better bet than digital ads
He questioned whether managing 90 separate university licenses was more complexity than stadium-bag founder Carol Desden's business could support
1. 1,800 Bakeries, No Franchise
Guy Raz, host of How I Built This's Advice Line segment, opened by asking Seth where Insomnia Cookies stands on its growth plan. Seth said the chain will close out the year with roughly 393 company-owned bakeries, up from about 300 two years ago. The global target is 1,800.
The 1,800 figure came from modeling where Insomnia's existing bakeries already work, not a target picked in the abstract.
"We're gonna finish the year with roughly 393 bakeries around the world. And that's our major aspiration, right? We want to open up 1800 bakeries and really be a global chain." — Seth Berkowitz
He said the number came from "a data dive" projecting the business's expansion from cities to college towns, suburbs, train stations and stadiums across the US and international markets. Only four of Insomnia's locations run under licensing deals, covering an airport and three stadiums; every other bakery is company-owned.
Franchising would help the chain scale faster, Seth said, but a late-night delivery business running across multiple channels is hard to hand off.
"It's a late night delivery collegiate business ... it's highly seasonal, operates off hours, and it's multi-channel." — Seth Berkowitz
That combination of seasonal demand, late hours and multiple sales channels is why he has kept franchising off the table even as Insomnia nears quadruple digits of locations.
