Lifestyle
Flamin’ Hot Scam: Did the Self-Proclaimed Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Creator Sell a Spicy Lie?
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Mild spoilers for Flamin’ Hot ahead.
“I’m probably the most uneducated, brilliant person you will ever meet,” Richard Montañez (played by Jesse Garcia) declares at the start of Flamin’ Hot, a new film about the creation of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos now streaming on Hulu and Disney+. It’s something the real Montañez once said in an interview, a phrase that reflects the rags-to-riches fairy tale he’s spun as the self-proclaimed inventor of the titular billion-dollar spicy snack.
Montañez is a former janitor at Frito-Lay who climbed the corporate ranks, moving from cleaning machinery at the Frito-Lay plant in Rancho Cucamonga, California, to eventually become a vice president at Frito-Lay’s parent company, PepsiCo. For years he’s been selling the story of his rise at corporations and prestigious universities, for appearance fees of $10,000 to $50,000 per speaking engagement.
According to Montañez’s original lore (and the movie), Montañez was raised in Southern California. He struggled to learn English and support his family before landing a job at Frito-Lay’s Rancho Cucamonga plant in 1976, he said in a 2021 interview. More than a decade into his tenure at Frito-Lay, Montañez said, Pepsi’s newly instated CEO, Roger Enrico (played by Tony Shalhoub in the film), inspired him to “act like an owner.” Soon, Montañez noticed similarities in shape between elote (grilled corn on the cob topped with chili powder) and Cheetos. Inspiration struck. Montañez then brought unseasoned chips home for experimentation. After toting a trash bag of naked chips from factory floor to his home kitchen, he, his wife Judy (Annie Gonzalez), and his family stumbled upon crunchy, dusty, burning eureka.
Unaware of company protocol (“I don’t think I could spell the word at the time, let alone know what it meant,” he told CBS), Montañez said he cold-called Enrico to pitch him Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in 1991. The only snag? CBS reports that the name Flamin’ Hot had already been trademarked by Pepsi, and according to the Los Angeles Times, the product was being test-marketed in cities including Chicago, Detroit, and Houston.
It would be another two decades before Montañez’s account was challenged. In May 2021, shortly before the release of his second memoir, titled Flamin’ Hot: The Incredible True Story of One Man’s Rise From Janitor to Top Executive, the Los Angeles Times published an exposé. After conducting interviews with more than a dozen former Frito-Lay employees and poring through company archival records, the paper concluded that Montañez’s claims were embellished, if not totally false. “Montañez made it, from rags to riches, from factory floor to corporate suite,” reporter Sam Dean wrote. “He just didn’t make Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”
In reality, according to the Times, the spicy snack’s origin dates back to 1989, thousands of miles from Southern California, at the corporate offices of Frito-Lay’s headquarters in Plano, Texas. Lynne Greenfeld, then a junior employee who’d just earned an MBA, was tasked with developing the product. While Montañez has been touting his triumph since the late 2000s, Greenfeld tells the Times that she didn’t know this until 2018, when she contacted Frito-Lay and triggered an internal investigation. “It is disappointing that 20 years later, someone who played no role in this project would begin to claim our experience as his own and then personally profit from it,” she told the Times.
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Savannah Walsh
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