Barb grew up in Baltimore and spent much of her childhood in a Chinese restaurant. It was there that she developed a love for food as well as the frantic energy and deep hospitality that restaurants generate. She has an undergraduate business degree from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and a master’s degree in hospitality (MMH) from the Cornell Hotel School.
Barb has been at Mattson since 1997 and is currently Chief Innovation & Marketing Officer at North America’s most successful independent developer of foods and beverages. Mattson provides insights, strategy, innovation and product development services to retail CPGs, foodservice suppliers, ingredients suppliers, chain restaurants, and supplement companies. Barb is known as a taste, food trend, innovation, consumer insights, and product development expert.
As part of Barb’s role in the innovation projects that make up her daily job, she is required to taste food and figure out how to make it better. After more than 2 decades doing this, she’s honed her tasting skills and ability to help others make food taste better. She shared this insight with the world when her book Taste: Surprising Stories & Science About Why Food Tastes Good was published in 2013. The paperback version is simply titled TASTE.
Barb was instrumental in helping The San Francisco Cooking School integrate the science of taste into their curriculum by teaching the fundamentals of taste to each incoming class during the school’s 10 years in San Francisco.
Barb has served on non-profit boards including La Cocina, San Francisco’s incubator for low-income women of color, The Plant Based Food Association, and the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine & Food Science at the University of California, Davis, and Mattson. Barb is also a contributor to Forbes.com where she writes about the food industry.
Barb is a performer at heart, and has given dozens of talks across the food and beverage industry, as well as a short TED Talk on umami at the main TED Conference on the mainstage in Long Beach.
Barb lives with her hypertaster husband and two artisan cats, and splits her time between San Francisco and Healdsburg, in the heart of Sonoma wine country. She can be bribed with good tomatoes.
