Prepared Foods' 21st Annual Spirit of Innovation Awards

Lisa has 26 years of experience as a market research leader at Circana, uncovering strategic insights and shaping growth strategies for a diverse client base. As one of the original innovators in big data, Circana integrates the world’s largest set of otherwise disconnected purchase, media, social, causal and loyalty data to help CPG, retail, over-the-counter health care and media companies grow their businesses. Lisa is currently Principal and leader of Circana’s Innovation Practice, focused on helping manufacturer and retailer clients improve the odds of new product success, leveraging the proven accuracy of predictive, behavioral insights with the richness of consumer feedback. She is co-presenter for Circana’s annual review of New Product Pacesetters which highlights the top 100 food and beverage and the top 100 nonfood CPG items of 2022.

Since 1977, Barb has been at Mattson, a Silicon Valley-based insights, strategy, and development firm. She is currently President and Chief Innovation Officer at the country’s most successful independent developer of foods and beverages for the retail foods and chain restaurant industries. 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 in 2012 when her book TASTE WHAT YOU’RE MISSING was published (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 now teaches the Fundamentals of Taste to each entering class. Barb is a regular contributor to Forbes.com where she writes about the food industry. She serves on the Advisory Board of the Plant Based Foods Association, and was previously on the boards of the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, as well as La Cocina, the San Francisco-based food incubator for low income women of color. Barb lives with her hypertaster husband and two artisan cats, and splits her time between San Francisco and Healdsburg, in the heart of Sonona wine country. She can be bribed with good tomatoes.

Sowmia Sridhar is a Senior Director of Demand Science at Conagra Brands. She brings nearly two decades of experience building innovation rooted in data-driven insights. In her current role leading Conagra’s Predictive Science team, Sowmia leads identification of emerging demand signals to uncover future growth opportunities, and drives enterprise-wide communication of those demand signals to inform strategic activation as well as sell-in across retail and e-commerce channels. Her prior experience at Conagra spans roles leading identification of new demand and innovation strategy across the International, Foodservice, and Frozen businesses. Previously, Sowmia led development of global innovation and communications strategies for Similac and Pediasure at Abbott Nutrition International, and built up a new category management capability at Cavendish Farms in Toronto, Canada. Sowmia built her career in Consumer Goods at Procter and Gamble, where she spent 9 years developing commercial and innovation strategies to unlock growth opportunities for iconic brands such as Bounty, Tide and Downy. Sowmia holds an MBA from Xavier University and Bachelor's degrees in Business Administration and Linguistics from The University of Texas at Austin.