Seth Berkowitz says Insomnia Cookies is aiming for 1,800 bakeries without franchising

The cookie chain that began as dorm-room munchies wants to become a 1,800-bakery global machine, and Seth Berkowitz says it doesn’t need franchising to get there. On How I Built This, the Insomnia Cookies founder made the case for a slower, more control-freak version of fast growth: own the bakeries, watch demand geography by geography, and don’t confuse expansion with permission.

We’re going to finish the year with roughly 393 bakeries around the world. And that’s our major aspiration, right? We want to open up 1,800 bakeries and really be a global chain.

That is the surprising part. Not that a founder wants more stores. Founders wake up wanting more stores the way golden retrievers wake up wanting tennis balls. The surprise is that Berkowitz is still treating company ownership as the engine, not the obstacle. Guy Raz put the obvious question to him: franchising would get Insomnia Cookies to 1,800 a lot faster. Berkowitz didn’t argue with the speed. He argued with the premise.

It’s a late night delivery collegiate business, right? These are three things that are it’s highly seasonal, operates off hours, and it’s multi channel.

Translation: this is not a strip-mall sandwich shop where the manual can do half the parenting. Insomnia Cookies is built around late-night behavior, delivery logistics, college calendars, and the deeply American idea that a warm cookie at midnight is not a snack but a mood stabilizer. Berkowitz’s claim is that the weirdness is the business. Franchise it too casually, and you risk sanding off the weirdness.

The anti-growth growth plan

Berkowitz’s philosophy sounds like something a founder says right before asking for a giant real estate budget, but it’s not just vibes. He said Insomnia has already learned the hard way that opening too many stores in a market can get ahead of actual demand. His preferred brake pedal is brand awareness, market by market, not a corporate slogan about scale.

I believe you earn growth. I think you earn the right to grow consumer love gives you license, right?

The verdict: credible, but expensive. Company-operated growth gives Insomnia more control over quality, delivery, staffing, and product testing. It also means the company has to carry the pain that franchisees usually absorb: leases, managers, training, local marketing, and the thousand little ways a store can become a tiny flaming dumpster with frosting on it. A 1,800-unit owned-and-operated cookie empire is possible. It is also a logistical dare.

The rest of the Advice Line calls made Berkowitz’s worldview clearer. He kept pulling founders away from abstraction and back toward the customer standing directly in front of them. A fashion founder who lost wholesale revenue was nudged toward her best-selling dresses and smaller boutiques, not a blind splurge on Meta ads. A sauna-hat founder was told that her product needed to be seen, touched, and tried in spas, not explained to the void online. A clear-stadium-bag founder was told to think about the student carrying the bag, not just the mom buying it.

This is where Berkowitz is more useful than the average founder doing advice karaoke. He has a real allergy to bloat. When Raz asked about products that didn’t work at Insomnia, Berkowitz didn’t pretend every experiment was a noble chapter in the founder’s journey. He named the corpses.

I sold frozen yogurt. I sold cupcakes. I mean, I did everything, right? Like ultimately what won was reducing the SKUs down to the core.

That line is the cookie-chain version of a monk shaving his head. Fewer products. More repetition. More proof. Then expansion. It’s also why the 1,800-bakery claim is more interesting than a normal growth target. Berkowitz isn’t pitching the classic franchise rocket ship. He’s pitching the harder thing: a brand that scales while still behaving like it can smell the oven.

The risk is obvious. At some point, every founder who says “control” has to prove they don’t just mean “I don’t trust anyone.” But Berkowitz’s best advice of the hour was not really about cookies, or dresses, or sauna hats, or stadium bags. It was about who gets the final vote.

The consumer is the end user, regardless of who paid for it. Always.