Magnolia Bakery’s CEO reveals her daily routine for whipping up the next viral banana pudding recipe
Bobbie Lloyd is the mastermind behind many of Magnolia Bakery’s signature desserts, including its monthly banana pudding creations. Here’s her daily routine for whipping up new recipes.
Transcript
00:00 So Magnolia Bakery didn't create banana pudding, but we did put it on the map.
00:04 So the original store was one owner, one store, and I call it a sleeper because they only made
00:10 so much a day, and when it was gone, it was gone. The people who loved it, our employees loved it,
00:15 we had fan favorites who loved the banana pudding. But my old partner and I bought the bakery in 2006,
00:22 we're like, "This product is really good, we need to make more of it." And it just kind of
00:27 built upon itself that the more we made, the more sold. So we just made more and then it sold and
00:32 we made more. I think we now have probably 35 to 40 different flavors of banana pudding that we try
00:39 to rotate in periodically. Hi, I'm Bobbi Lloyd, I am the CEO and CBO, Chief Baking Officer of Magnolia
00:46 Bakery. I'm 66 years old and this is my daily routine. So my daily routine starts with what
00:53 time I get up in the morning, it all depends on what time I go to bed the night before. But I
00:57 usually get up somewhere between 6 and 6.30. The very first thing I do when I wake up is drink a
01:03 glass of water. I've been told my entire life that that helps to clear your brain and set your body
01:08 for the day. So I'm not a coffee drinker first thing in the morning, I actually wait until I get
01:12 to the office to have coffee, so water gets me going. I like to do my little yoga routine about
01:18 15 to 30 minutes depending on the day. And I almost always walk to work, which is about a one
01:24 hour walk. That's when I clear my head, set the tone for the day, read the trades, read the
01:29 newspaper. During the pandemic, I really had to reset my amount of time. I actually did go to my
01:35 office every day, I was the only one there and I needed that time, that one hour in the morning to
01:40 just clear my head. And I started to really enjoy it, it let me see what was going on in the city.
01:45 I would pick different paths every day, different avenues to walk on to see what businesses were
01:50 open or what was closing or what was reopening. And then I get to work, start with my big cup of
01:55 coffee and take it from there. So I usually get into my office around eight o'clock, depends on
02:02 how long it takes me to walk, somewhere between 8 and 8.30. Once everybody's in the office at
02:06 nine o'clock, it's usually meeting start at that time, team group meetings start. The mornings
02:12 tend to be very meeting heavy. And then the afternoon tends to be more development structure,
02:18 sitting around with individual people having one on one meetings. I'll have anywhere from
02:23 four to eight meetings a day, depending on which hat I'm wearing for the day. If I'm a CEO,
02:29 then it's about meetings, I can do zoom calls from my office. I also have all my printers and
02:34 computers and all the tools that I need. But if it's a day where I'm wearing my CBO hat,
02:38 Chief Baking Officer, that's when I can utilize my test kitchen, which is a lot of fun. So I've
02:43 been with Magnolia Bakery for almost 18 years. And throughout that that 18 year period, I've worn a
02:49 number of different hats. I was president, I was COO for a while, and then became CEO. I've always
02:56 worn this other hat, which is I made up the title, Chief Baking Officer. I was always involved in the
03:02 food development side of it, whether it was product creation, training, development, really
03:08 anything that we're doing that's food related. So I kind of made up the title, Chief Baking Officer,
03:12 mostly so that my team would know which role am I covering right now. But as CEO, it's really more
03:18 about running the company and the fundamentals of the company. So my day tends to end somewhere
03:24 between six and 8pm. Rarely is it 6pm. Because it's so meeting heavy during the day, I do like
03:31 to take the end of the day to kind of sit down, recapture what I was working on for the day,
03:36 look at emails again, because I don't check emails while I'm in meetings, and really kind of set the
03:40 tone for the next day. Is there something I missed? Did I not answer somebody's email? Did I not get
03:44 back to someone with the right information? Depending again on the day of the week, Fridays,
03:49 I like to get out of there by five o'clock if I can. It's a long day, but I absolutely love what
03:55 I do. And so the day goes by so fast that you don't realize it's suddenly 730. So typical after
04:02 work day for me is really depending on the time of day. Not only do I meet with friends, go out for
04:08 dinner, workout, massages, those kinds of fun things, take care of my own self, but I also sit
04:13 on a couple of different boards for charities. I'm going to actually say I don't relax that much. I
04:19 kind of stay at a pretty high level other than my walk to work in the morning. I consider that my
04:24 relaxation moment. I always talk about running as being my form of meditation. Other people may not
04:29 say that about running, but for me it's about resetting the brain. But when I go to my house
04:34 upstate, I have 15 acres and I have a giant garden with eight raised beds, and I have had a lot of
04:40 fun learning how to garden. I am not that good. I am still learning how to do it, but it relaxes me
04:47 enormously. Plus I love to entertain, and so I love spending my day in a kitchen cooking all day.
04:53 That is a form of relaxation for me.
04:56 [Music]