Having graced the screens of various television shows, embarked on global ventures, and spearheaded a highly lucrative supermarket dumpling line, Diana Chan undoubtedly stands as one of MasterChef’s most accomplished contestants. Diana Chan’s victory in MasterChef’s ninth season has led to a remarkable collaboration with Golden Wok, a family-owned company. Together, they have rose to prominence in the market and became Australia’s top brand for small packet-sized dumplings.
Diana Chan reveals her struggles before winning MasterChef Australia Season 9
Chan appeared in a recent interview with Yahoo Lifestyle, where she talked in length about her life back in 2017 and how she was “quite broke” back then. The chef was originally working as an accountant and revealed after filming the show for straight seven months she went back to her 9 to 5 corporate job.
The chef explained, “You’re not working so you’re not getting paid. I took a sabbatical leave. I think I was 29 then and you’re only living off your savings, so you have a lot of bills to pay.”
The reason why she had to go back to her job was because the winner wasn’t announced for 3 months after the filming of the show ended. “We finished [filming] at the end of May, and then the announcement was at the end of July. So you have that three-month period where I just needed to earn money.”
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Diana Chan’s life after winning MasterChef Australia season 9
Chan recalls her life changing very quickly after winning the prestigious cooking show. “Everything started coming in and it was really really busy and I really couldn’t focus on doing my nine-to-five job,” she continues, ” lot of it was media, a lot of it was guest appearances, whether it was a talk, whether it was a cooking demo, creating menus.”
She explains that because MasterChef Australia is enormously popular outside of the country, she started getting a lot of oversea shows. “Because I’m Malaysian, I actually got a lot of inquiries to go back to Malaysia and Singapore to do a lot of gigs there. So it was quite hectic and quite mental the six months after finishing.”
Meanwhile, as far as future plans are concerned Diana is ready to launch her dumpling range in Asia and expand in the continent. With a factory already up and running in Indonesia, she wants to supply her brand into the local markets.
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