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Guest Speaker

Matt Tom

Independent Technical Consultant

In his role as an independent technical consultant, Matt Tom focuses on engineering design and implementation—integration, testing, and validation, as well as scale-up and manufacturing—in the food and beverage industry. With experience from post-harvest to marketplace and full-life cycle testing, he specializes in new product development and commercialization, especially in the food technology space where he integrates the sciences with digital technologies to drastically reduce time to market.

Matt has been involved with bringing tasty and innovative plant-based foods to the market that are healthier and more sustainable than their non-plant-based counterparts. He’s done government research at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, collaborating with companies like PepsiCo, General Mills, Clorox, and P&G, and more recently at Silicon Valley food tech startups such as Impossible Foods, Kite Hill, Hampton Creek, and Ripple Foods. Well-versed in usability, six sigma (both process improvement and design), lean, GMP, GLP, and HACCP, he serves as a subject matter expert in food technology and food processing, both in technical due diligence efforts and as a technical advisor to early-stage startups.

He received his BS in BioSystems Engineering from UC Davis and his MS in Industrial & Systems Engineering from San Jose State University. Matt continues to mentor students, from high school to PhD candidates, encouraging them to build a better, more sustainable tomorrow through application of their STEM knowledge. He is an active member of the American Society for Quality, Board Certified Professional Ergonomists, Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society, American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, and Institute of Food Technologists.