Cory Barrett: Where Are They Now?

Spoiler note: this post confirms that Cory Barrett won his season of the Spring Baking Championship.

Cory Barrett won Spring Baking Championship season 5, which ran from March 18 to May 6, 2019, as a culinary instructor out of Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a champion who treated the win as a boost to an existing teaching career rather than a ticket out of one. Here is what the record shows and where the trail leads.

The win

Barrett took the season 5 title in 2019, earning the $25,000 grand prize, with a cake and gift box as his final showpiece. Local coverage from Kalamazoo outlets, including WWMT and WRKR, documented the win and his reaction to it. As a chef instructor who competed against home bakers and pros alike, his victory was framed locally as a hometown win for a working teacher.

The baker behind the win

Barrett is a culinary instructor at Kalamazoo Valley Community College, and education has anchored his career. He is a graduate of Baker College's Culinary Institute of Michigan, where he taught before joining Kalamazoo Valley in 2017. That classroom foundation is central to how he presented himself around the win: a teacher first, competing to represent his program and his students.

Where things stand now

The clearest verified facts are his 2019 win and his ongoing role as a culinary instructor at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. Beyond the teaching, ScreenRant's roundup of Spring champions reported that Barrett launched his own consulting business, Chef Cory Barrett Consulting, after the win, and that he was opening a restaurant, described as Barrett's Midwest Bistro. Those business developments come from that reporting rather than from primary sources here, so they are worth treating as reported rather than fully confirmed, and the exact current status of the restaurant is not something to overstate. What is solid is the championship, the teaching career, and the consulting venture built around his name.

To place him among the show's other champions, our guide to every Spring Baking Championship winner lays out the full run, and Andy Chlebana, the show's first winner, is a close parallel as another educator champion.

The takeaway for fans

Barrett is another example of the teacher champion: someone who wins a national title and pours it back into a classroom and a consulting practice rather than chasing a television career. The layered showpieces he built on the show start with steady, even bakes, which is where a reliable cooling rack and good habits matter. For the wider franchise, the Spring Baking Championship hub collects every season in one place.