Erin Roberts — A Day In Her Life

This week, we're sitting down with Erin Roberts, vice president of her family's third-generation Coca-Cola bottling company, writer of the Substack What Erin Cooks, and mom of three in rural Missouri. Erin shares what it's like to wake at 5:10am for a basement workout, have groceries delivered to her office (stores won't deliver out to her house), and plan dinner from two deep freezers.

In this week’s conversation, Erin opens up about growing up in a Coke family (she's never tried a competitor's product), talking her parents into hiring her at 22, and why her family's directness makes working together work. We talk about kids who pack their own lunches, the old-school "try bite" that ended a picky-eating standoff, nightly sauna time with her husband, the cookbook she's writing, and why dinner with her family is the best part of her day.

What We Cover:

Why she describes her days as joyful, educational, and focused, and the 5:10am alarm that gets her into the basement gym before anyone needs her.
The family lore behind a third-generation bottler: a grandpa who bought the plant in 1978, a five-and-dime store Sam Walton once came in to measure, and a dad who tried to talk her out of a business major.
What it means to "run the place" at a small bottler (payroll, purchase orders, and every national account call bigger bottlers split across a team), and how the Enneagram helps her work with her parents (she's a one, her dad's an eight, her mom's a nine).
Life in a rural county and living on "dinner revisited" from a big Sunday cook.
Kids ages 8.5, 7, and 2.5 who pack their own lunches, clear the table, weed eat, and babysit their little brother, plus the "try bite" that turned her pickiest eater into the kid asking "Where's the broccoli?"
Nightly sauna sessions with her husband, a cookbook club inspired by this very podcast, and the college friends who come every July.
The cookbook proposal with 60 recipes in progress and her dad's mantra: "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing."
Eating dessert every day without the guilt, chasing 30 plants a week, and why her younger self (who scored the lowest possible on openness to new experiences) would barely recognize her.

References:

Listen for the Lie — the fiction she's reading before bed
How to Read the Room by Pamela Meyer — the nonfiction she's listening to on the treadmill and her commute
You Can Just Do Things by Cate Hall — a recent finish she loved
Live, Laugh, Love by Kristin Kobes Du Mez — next up in her lineup
Nori — the AI calendar app she's test-driving, now home to the Kansas City Chiefs schedule (and where to watch it)
Morpheus — the heart rate strap she uses for a quick morning HRV and resting heart rate test
WHOOP — what she wore for a year before getting tired of tracking herself all day
Barefaced — her skincare line for a nightly routine she's "serious about"