Ruiqi Chen: Where Are They Now?

Spoiler note: this post confirms that Ruiqi Chen won her season of The Great American Baking Show.

Ruiqi Chen is the newest champion of The Great American Baking Show, winning the season released on The Roku Channel on May 10, 2026, with Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith judging and new hosts Casey Wilson and Andrew Rannells fronting the tent. Her win is recent enough that "where are they now" is really "where are they right now," so consider this a first chapter rather than a retrospective.

The 2026 win

Chen was living in Palo Alto, California when she was cast and filmed, which made her victory a Bay Area news event; Palo Alto Online and its sister papers ran the definitive local profiles. By the time the season aired she had moved to New York. The finale had a great wobble in it: her meringues cracked in the first challenge and she assumed her shot was gone, right up until Hollywood and Leith handed her the cake stand anyway. She closes out, for now, the full list of Great American Baking Show winners.

The pandemic baker made good

Chen's story is the era's signature arc, executed better than almost anyone. A Northwestern graduate (two Medill degrees, class of 2020), she found baking during the pandemic and treated it like a second education, practicing before and after shifts at her day job. That day job is its own good detail: she is a news editor at LinkedIn, and Northwestern's alumni press delightedly covered the journalism grad who out-baked the country. Both her alma mater's magazine and The Daily Northwestern ran features on her win in mid-2026.

Where things stand now

Honestly: it has been about two months since the season dropped, and the public record is a win, a press lap, and a TikTok account (ruiqichn). No cookbook, business, or media project has been announced as of this writing, and any claim beyond that would be invention. What she has is the most valuable version of the title: a very recent win in the franchise's most-watched streaming era, a media-industry day job, and an audience waiting to see what she does.

The takeaway for fans

The 2026 season is the current state of the art for the American show, new hosts and all, and Chen's cracked-meringue finale is a genuinely tense watch even knowing the outcome. Check back on this post in a year; first chapters like this one usually get a sequel.