Barb has been at Mattson since 1997 and is currently chief innovation & marketing officer at the country’s most successful independent developer of foods and beverages for the retail food, industrial ingredient and chain restaurant channels. 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 drinks and figure out how to make them better. After more than 25 years of 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 What You’re Missing was published. Later, the paperback edition was released under the simplified title Taste. Barb was instrumental in helping The San Francisco Cooking School integrate the science of taste into their curriculum. She taught the Fundamentals of Taste to each entering class. She is also a contributor to Forbes.com where she writes about the food industry. In the past, Barb has sat on the advisory board of the Plant Based Foods Association and on the Board of Directors of the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science at the University of California, Davis and La Cocina, the San Francisco food incubator for low-income women of color. 

Barb lives with her hyper-taster husband, 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.