When Joe Biden welcomed actor-director Eva Longoria to the White House for a screening of her Flamin’ Hot drama-documentary last week, the president hailed the story of the Mexican-American one-time janitor Richard Montañez as a tale of “courage”.
“When I think about tonight’s movie, I think about courage. So many of you, your ancestors left behind all that they knew to start a new life in the United States,” Biden told the crowd, before the president gave the Desperate Housewives star a hug and made an incomprehensible joke about when she was 17 and he was 40.
Longoria told the gathering that Montañez’s story inspired her because during her career she has been told “no” – or that ideas don’t come from people like her – and that she couldn’t do certain jobs because she is a woman.
First lady Jill Biden said Montañez helped change the way companies think about Latino customers, adding: “This film isn’t just about Richard. It’s about everyone who has been overlooked or underestimated.”
But the Disney+ film has now revived questions of whether Montañez actually came up with the spicy Cheetos Flamin’ Hot recipe while working at a Frito-Lay plant in Rancho Cucamonga, California, in the late 1980s – he has claimed his idea was ripped off by company executives – or if the chilli-covered snack was the work of uncredited company workers for which he took credit.
According to an LA Times story in 2021 and another last week, the janitor turned executive for Frito Lay didn’t invent Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. But he has built a lucrative second career out of telling the story as a paid corporate speaker at Target, Walmart, Harvard and the University of California, among others, and in two books, 2013’s A Boy, a Burrito, and a Cookie: From Janitor to Executive and 2021’s Flamin’ Hot: The Incredible True Story of One Man’s Rise from Janitor to Top Executive.
Montañez, as he tells it, got some plain, unflavored Cheetos from the factory. He and wife Judy developed spicy seasoning, applied it to the Cheetos and sent samples to Frito-Lay executives.
But the LA Times contradicted his claims, citing interviews with employees that pointed to the spicy snack originating in 1989 in Plano, Texas, before Montañez was an employee. It was another Frito-Lay employee, Lynne Greenfeld, who developed and named the product, the company said.
In a statement to Eater last year, Frito-Lay – a US subsidiary of PepsiCo – said that “spicy salty snacks have spiked in popularity in recent years with the category growing 12% in the last four years”. According to surveys, the company added, over half (55%) of US consumers have tried Cheetos Flamin’ Hot and 46% of Gen Z-ers say they love them.
“We value Richard’s many contributions to our company, especially his insights into Hispanic consumers, but we do not credit the creation of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or any Flamin’ Hot products to him,” the company told the outlet.
But it acknowledged that Montañez did work on a line of snacks for the company in the early 1990s dubbed Sabrositas. “I’m not even going to try to dispute that lady, because I don’t know,” he later told Variety. “All I can tell you is what I did. All I have is my history, what I did in my kitchen.”
Montañez also said that he’d felt “pushed out” of the test marketing process. In another 2021 statement, he acknowledged that “different work streams tackling the same product without interacting occasionally occurred in the past, when divisions operated independently and were not the best at communicating”.
But by that time, Longoria was already working on Flamin’ Hot and has said that the LA Times story “never affected us”.
“Feels like LA Times would have better resources dedicated to more important things,” she told the paper in March. “We never set out to tell the story of the Cheeto. We are telling Richard Montañez’s story and we are telling his truth.”
Longoria added that she preferred to concentrate on Montañez’s rise through the Frito-Lay ranks. “His genius was the fact that he knew the Hispanic market and he knew how to mobilize them,” she said.
But the LA Times returned to the disputed spicy Cheetos genesis account last week in the form of a review. And it may have kicked off the spicy controversy anew when columnist Gustavo Arellano wrote that “the details of history don’t matter to Longoria; Mexican pride does”.
“Flamin’ Hot is the type of feelgood treacle that high school teachers screened for their Mexican American students when I was coming of age in the 1990s to make us feel better about ourselves,” Arellano wrote. “Teachers today will no doubt do the same for their students. That’s what makes Flamin’ Hot not just pandering but pernicious.”
The White House later defended its decision to screen the film, with an anonymous official saying it was not a documentary but an opportunity for Americans from different backgrounds to see themselves reflected in film and celebrated by the president, according to the Associated Press.
“Richard Montañez disrupted the food industry in the ’90s by channelling his Mexican American heritage to help turn Flamin’ Hot Cheetos into a multibillion-dollar brand today and a cultural phenomenon,” Longoria said. “We are telling a story that celebrates the American entrepreneurial dream without sidestepping the fact that the dream isn’t available in the same way for everyone.”
