Manny Martinez: Where Are They Now?

Spoiler note: this post confirms that Manny Martinez won his season of the Halloween Baking Championship.

Season 10 of the Halloween Baking Championship ran from September 16 to October 28, 2024, and it could not have found a more on-brand champion. Manny Martinez co-owns a bakery in San Antonio, Texas called The Grim Bakers, which is to say he was baking Halloween year-round before the show ever called. Here is his story and where it stands now.

The win

Martinez went into the finale as one of four finalists and took the title with a vampire-themed showstopper cake that San Antonio's KENS 5 covered as a hometown victory. The prize was $25,000, and his stated plan for it was as grounded as reality TV gets: he told local media he was putting the money toward a down payment on a house. Texas Public Radio had followed his run through the season, so by finale night the city was openly rooting for him.

The Grim Bakers

The bakery is the heart of the story. The Grim Bakers is San Antonio's spooky-all-year bakery, trading in the macabre, playful aesthetic that made Martinez a natural fit for the franchise. Winning the show's tenth season was effectively a national commercial for the concept, and Martinez moved fast on the momentum. Within weeks of the win, KENS 5 reported that The Grim Bakers had announced a new location at the Wonderland of the Americas mall, an expansion announcement timed squarely to the championship glow.

Where things stand now

Martinez's post-win chapter is young, his season only aired in the fall of 2024, but the documented beats are all pointed the same direction: the title, the expansion announcement, and a bakery whose entire identity got validated on national television. He did not need to reinvent himself after winning a Halloween baking show, because he was already the Halloween baker. That makes him one of the franchise's cleanest matches of champion to format, alongside the haunted-hotel prize winners and coffin-cake builders who came before him.

He took the title the year after Hollie Fraser became the show's first Canadian champion, and the year before Melanie Bjork-Jensen won season 11. The full roll of every winner is in our guide to Halloween Baking Championship winners, and the complete season records live on the show hub.