Renee Loranger: Where Are They Now?

Spoiler note: this post confirms that Renee Loranger won her season of the Halloween Baking Championship.

Season 7 of the Halloween Baking Championship ran from September 13 to October 25, 2021, and its champion, Renee Loranger of Waveland, Mississippi, arrived with one of the best comeback stories the show has aired. Here is what happened to her after the win, and it is the rare where-are-they-now with a genuinely storybook ending.

The baker behind the win

Loranger is entirely self-taught, trained on the job rather than in culinary school, and she worked her way up to executive pastry chef at the Hollywood Casino on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a role she earned in 2012. Then the spring of 2020 hit, the Coast casinos shut down, and she was let go. She went into the Halloween Baking Championship not as a professional with a kitchen behind her but as a laid-off chef with something to prove.

The win

She proved it. Loranger took the season 7 title and its $25,000 prize, with Mississippi outlets from Magnolia State Live to The Dispatch celebrating the hometown result. For a self-taught baker who had lost her job eighteen months earlier, the timing could not have been scripted better.

Sugar Pop Baking Company

Here is the storybook part: she put the win directly into bricks and mortar. By December 2021, barely two months after the finale aired, Gulf Coast station WLOX reported that Loranger had opened Sugar Pop Baking Company, her own full-service bakery with custom cakes in Waveland, operating out of the town's Ground Zero Museum building. The laid-off casino chef ended the year as a Food Network champion running her own shop in her own hometown.

The win kept paying dividends beyond the bakery. The Fresh Market grocery chain featured her in interviews and its seasonal publications, running Bake Like a Champ features built around her recipes, small national touches for a baker whose whole story is local.

Where things stand now

The well-documented arc runs through the bakery opening and the features that followed; her public profile since has stayed modest and Waveland-sized, which fits everything about her. Loranger's chapter is the franchise's cleanest before-and-after: unemployed pastry chef in 2020, champion in 2021, bakery owner by Christmas.

She took the title the year after Sinai Vespie and the year before Blayre Wright, and the full champion roll is in our guide to Halloween Baking Championship winners. The season-by-season record, with every finalist, lives on the show hub.