April 15-21, 2004

food

In the Night Kitchen

Chipping away: Insomnia Cookies, delivering varieties like chocolate chip and chocolate chocolate chip to students, has "hit a niche," says co-founder Jared Barnett. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Two local students offer fresh baking for when you're too hungry to sleep.

by Alex Koppelman

Seth Berkowitz and Jared Barnett get offered sex for cookies. At this point, it doesn’t seem to even faze them.

Then there are the people who call up late at night asking for "special" cookies and brownies, with marijuana baked into them. "At least twice a night, someone calls for "special cookies,’" Barnett says. "Some people will call with passwords. One time someone calls and they go, "Anomalous.’ And I said, "Excuse me?’ And they said, you know, "Anomalous.’ One of their friends had told them that was the password. And I said, "I’m sorry, we don’t do that.’"

Berkowitz and Barnett are partners in a new business that is sweeping college campuses in Philadelphia: Insomnia Cookies, they call themselves. Call them up or go online to campusfood.com anytime between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m., and you can order a mix of over 30 varieties of fresh-baked cookies and brownies, from plain old chocolate chip and sugar cookies to mint chocolate blondie brownies, to arrive at your door within an hour.

The thing is, though, Berkowitz and Barnett are still in college themselves.

Berkowitz started the business in fall 2002, the first semester of his junior year at the University of Pennsylvania, running the operation out of his bedroom. The enterprise went on hold for a semester while he went abroad to study, but last summer the two, friends since their freshman year, decided that this was something that could go places.

"We were always talking about things we could get involved in with business," says Barnett, a senior American history major at Penn, of the plans he made with his freshman year hall-mate. "He and I started a stock-selling business and had fun with that. We stopped doing that for two years, and then last year, I had lunch with him. I knew about Insomnia Cookies already, and we decided that if we could do it together, it could be really big."

At first, the two handled everything themselves. Berkowitz did the baking, Barnett did the deliveries; they both handled various aspects of the business end. It got to be too big to run out of Berkowitz's kitchen, though, and too much work for the two to handle on their own, so they had to expand.

Their new building, at the corner of 23rd and Walnut, smells like your grandmother's kitchen -- that is, if your grandmother could ever bake this well. The place itself is a little industrial -- hard floors, fluorescent lights and lots of metal -- but the aroma makes up for it. There are supplies along the wall, baking soda, chocolate chips, big bags of flour, tubs of shortening and vats of dough, out of which workers scoop cookie-size portions.

On this particular night, neither Berkowitz or Barnett are working because it's the Jewish holiday of Passover, so their employees, Jim Gilboy and Jannine Versi, are running the place. They are college students too -- Gilboy is in his fourth year at Temple, while Versi is a freshman at Penn. Gilboy came on board in January after seeing an ad on craigslist.com. Versi joined the staff in mid-February.

"My friends and I used to order from Insomnia Cookies all the time," Versi says. "I saw a flyer and thought it would be fun, and it is . I used to want a whole tray every night, but I've gotten a little bit better."

Each order of cookies takes about five to seven minutes to make, according to Gilboy and Versi. Adding more toppings slows baking down, and brownies take about twice as long, but a big industrial oven speeds the whole process up. From the raw dough in its big plastic container to a batch of warm cookies, boxed up and placed in an insulated bag ready for delivery: Within minutes, they're ready for delivery by one of the independent drivers Berkowitz and Barnett have hired.

But even this seemingly efficient system will be abandoned soon as the business continues to grow. The location at 23rd and Walnut will become the business office and call center as the two partners seek out retail locations. "We're actually looking for some retail real estate at Penn," Barnett says, "and we're going to four or five other schools this summer . This is definitely what we're going to do for the next few years. It's too lucrative. We've hit a niche, and we've dedicated ourselves to that entirely. What we've seen in college makes us feel that it's going to be pretty successful when we're done."

But no matter how big Berkowitz and Barnett's little operation gets, they still want to keep their eyes on what got them into business in the first place.

"We cater to drunk people. We love them. The business was started just because of the lack of late-night options," says Barnett. "The only thing I could choose was College Pizza, so we saw our niche being an alternative delivery to pizza. We'd like to see ourselves as something like a Domino's, but dessert delivery. So we give people alternatives late at night."

For information on Insomnia Cookies or to order online, call 215-496-0777 or go to www.campusfood.com.