MasterChef season 6, where are they now: one finalist changed his name, one cooks with cannabis, and one teaches at an art school

Twenty-two home cooks, twenty episodes, one $250,000 check. Eleven years on, the four who made the final stretch have ended up in four businesses that barely overlap.

Season 6 ran on Fox from May 20 to September 16, 2015, and is the season where the judging panel changed shape: Gordon Ramsay and Graham Elliot stayed, and Christina Tosi replaced Joe Bastianich after five years. The premiere pulled 3.39 million viewers and the season peaked at 4.94 million in episode 13. Claudia Sandoval, a 31-year-old events manager from La Mesa, California, won it.

The winner built the most conventional career of the four

Sandoval took the $250,000 and the cookbook deal and turned both into a standing business. Claudia's Cocina: A Taste of Mexico came out in 2016. She joined MasterChef Latino as a judge, appeared on Food Network programming including Chopped, opened a Mexican bakery, El Cochi Dorado, in 2020, and runs Claudia's Cocina as an executive chef and consultant. She has raised more than $450,000 for charity, and she was a single mother when she competed.

The runner-up has a different last name now

Derrick Peltz was a 28-year-old drummer from Fort Myers, Florida, when he finished second. He married Kimberly in 2017 and took her surname, so the man in the season 6 credits and the man working today are listed under two different names:

• Derrick Peltz, 2015 — runner-up, drummer, no professional kitchen experience.
• Derrick Fox, now — traveling pop-up dinners and high-profile private events, a brand ambassadorship with THOR Kitchen, and host of the podcast A Bunch of Losers, which brings back former contestants from across the franchise.

He also helped open a restaurant in Los Angeles in the years immediately after the show.

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Third and fourth went in opposite directions

Stephen Lee, who finished third, works in California as a private chef and caterer and runs an operation called Food Dept., built around locally sourced dining experiences. It is the most straightforward post-MasterChef career of the group: cook for people, get paid.

Nick Nappi, who finished fourth, co-founded Nappi Roots with his wife Jenelle. The business is cannabis-inspired cuisine, with virtual cooking classes attached — a category that did not meaningfully exist as a legal food business when season 6 was filming.

Four finalists, four models: a media chef, a traveling performer, a private chef, and a cannabis kitchen. None of them opened the restaurant the format implies.

The one who went back to fashion and ended up on faculty

Tommy Walton was the oldest competitor in the season at 53 and was eliminated in episode 15. He was a Chicago fashion designer before the show and he is still one — but the teaching is the part that sticks. He is faculty in the Fashion, Body and Garment program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has chaired design at the National YoungArts Foundation in Miami. He came back to the franchise for season 12, Back to Win, in 2022.

Elsewhere in the cast, Hetal Vasavada built Milk and Cardamom into a food media platform and a cookbook and launched an Indian-inspired bakery during the pandemic. Amanda Saab, the first contestant to wear a hijab on the show, runs Butter Bear Shop in Livonia, Michigan, and has been written up in the New York Times.

The youngest competitor that season was Justin Bannister, who was 18 and went out in episode 5 — the widest age gap in the cast was 35 years.

For the record: Walton teaches at an art school, Nappi cooks with cannabis, and the runner-up's name on his own podcast doesn't match the name on his season 6 chef's jacket.

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