Jason Smith: Where Are They Now?

Spoiler note: this post confirms that Jason Smith won his season of Holiday Baking Championship.

Jason Smith won the third season of Holiday Baking Championship on Food Network in 2016, taking the title in that year's finale. A big-personality baker from Grayson, Kentucky, he did not stop at one win. Of the champions covered on this site, he has one of the fullest and best-documented post-show television careers, because he kept winning and kept getting hired. Here is where the years since took him.

Two titles in two years

The Holiday Baking win was just the start. In 2017 Jason went on to win Food Network Star, the network's competition to find its next on-air talent, giving him back-to-back Food Network titles and, crucially, his own path to hosting. Winning Food Network Star is a rare launchpad, and Jason converted it into ongoing work rather than a single show that quietly disappeared.

A career as host and judge

Since then Jason has become a recurring Food Network face. He has served as a judge on Best Baker in America and co-hosted a bakers' competition, appeared as a judge on holiday cookie and baking-war programs, and stayed a familiar presence across the network's baking slate. In 2024 he broadened out further, competing on a streaming reality competition where he finished near the top. He has also leaned into his Kentucky persona with a cookbook and branded products.

His baking is warm, decorative, Southern-inflected work, the kind that rewards a full set of cake decorating tools and a reliable piping bag set.

Where things stand now

Jason's trail is one of the more solid ones in this series: two Food Network competition titles, a run of hosting and judging credits, a cookbook, and a 2024 streaming competition appearance. The usual caveat applies, that specific show credits come and go season to season, so the honest framing is that as of his mid-2020s appearances he was clearly still a working Food Network personality. What is solid is the double win and the durable on-air career it produced.

The takeaway for fans

Jason's story is close to the best-case version of a baking-show win: he used it as a springboard to Food Network Star, and turned that into a lasting career as a host and judge. If his decorative, celebratory bakes have you inspired, a good cake stand and a set of piping bags are where the showmanship starts.

For other champions, Jennifer Barney opened a beloved Wisconsin bakery and Julianna Jung kept baking as a hobby, while the Holiday Baking Championship winners list has the rest.