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Richard Montaez has been telling the story of how he invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos for the last decade.The world has been consuming it.
He was a janitor at Frito-Lay's Rancho Cucamonga plant when he dreamed up the idea of a Cheeto covered in chile.
Corporate backstabbers tried to sabotage Montaez for stepping out of line, but he out-hustled them, driven by a hunger to succeed.Montaez rose through the ranks and became an icon.
Montaez's tale of a Mexican American who overcame the corporate world is a rags-to-riches fable that has been made into a wildly popular snack.
Flamin' Hot Cheetos have inspired a lot of things.The snack has been banned by schools because of its popularity with children.Clear revenue numbers are hard to come by, but nearly every major Frito-Lay line now has a Flamin' Hot variety on the market.
Montaez has built a lucrative second career out of telling and selling this story, appearing at events for Target, Walmart, Harvard and USC, among others, and commanding fees of $10,000 to $50,000 per appearance.
His second memoir, "Flamin' Hot: The Incredible True Story of One Man's Rise from Janitor to Top Executive," is out in June.
The film based on his life will be directed by Eva Longoria and produced by DeVon Franklin for Searchlight Pictures.Montaez's story is hot and the book and movie were sold after bidding wars.
Interviews with more than a dozen former Frito-Lay employees show that Montaez didn't invent Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
Frito-Lay denied that Richard was involved in the Flamin' Hot test market in a statement to The Times.All of the personnel who were involved in the test market have said that Richard was not involved.
The facts do not support the urban legend.
Flamin Hots were created by a team of hotshot snack food professionals in the corporate offices of Frito-Lay in Plano, Texas.The new product was designed to compete with the spicy snacks sold in the inner-city mini-marts of the Midwest.The Flamin' Hot brand was developed by a junior employee with a newly-minted MBA named Lynn Greenfeld, who came up with the name and shepherded the line into existence.
Montaez lived out a less Hollywood version of his story, moving from a plant worker to a director focused on marketing.New product initiatives may have changed the path of his career.
Montaez took public credit for inventing Flamin' Hots nearly two decades after they were invented.He talked about it in speeches.The online media took his claims to be a good one.
Nobody at Frito-Lay stopped him.Most of the original Flamin' Hot team retired by the 2000s, but the few who remained let the story spread.
Greenfeld contacted Frito-Lay after seeing that Montaez was taking credit for Flamin' Hot Cheetos.That process unearthed evidence calling his account into question and led the company to the conclusion it shared with The Times: "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
The cast for the movie was announced in May despite Frito-Lay's problems.
The producers of the film did not respond to requests for comment before the article was published.
Montaez says he changed his life when he sold his idea of Flamin' Hot Cheetos to the Frito-Lay elite.In his new memoir, he lays out a dramatic scene, with more than 100 people, most of them leading executives, assembled alongside the CEO in a conference room to watch his presentation.
The Frito-Lay divisions were responsible for new product development when Flamin' Hot Cheetos were first created.Montaez describes an episode that took place.
Ken Lukaska, who worked as a product manager for the core Cheetos brand, said that if the story existed, they would have heard about it.If he is that good at fooling everyone, he should run for office.
The idea for Flamin' Hots came from somewhere other than Frito-Lay's home base in Texas.
The inspiration came from the corner stores of Chicago and Detroit.A Frito-Lay spokesman told the Dallas Morning News in March 1992 that their sales group in the northern United States asked for them.
Fred Lindsay, a retired Frito-Lay salesman from the South Side of Chicago, said that he was responsible for getting them into Flamin' Hot products.
In the late ’80s, Frito-Lay's parent company was fighting a marketing war on three fronts.In its restaurant division, Pizza Hut was trying to get into delivery to compete with Domino's.
In the decadelong Cola War, the CEO of Pepsi poured millions into ad deals with Michael Jackson and Madonna to get people away from King Coke.
The battle was just as brutal as Frito-Lay's.Since Frito Co. and H.W., the company has been the reigning champ of salty snacks.Frito-Lay was losing ground, even though Lay & Co. had first merged.
In Chicago and the Great Lakes region, Lindsay witnessed spicy products from regional competitors just blow off the shelf at corner stores and gas stations.He started playing the drum for the marketing department.Lindsay was trying to get hot stuff in the market.
His idea was taken up by the marketing department when he was promoted to corporate headquarters in Plano.
Lindsay said that he heard a year ago that someone from California was taking credit for the development of hot Cheetos.I am just trying to set the record straight.
Sharon Owens, a product manager in the Single Serve group, received the assignment to create spicy competitor products.Unlike the mainline brands, Single Serve was organized around a format: individually wrapped products made for cramped mini-marts and customers with just a few quarters to spend.
Greenfeld was fresh out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when she started at the company.Business degrees were required to get in the door at PepsiCo in those days, but rare exceptions were made for people with B.A.s from Babson College.
The Single Serve team worked on beef sticks, sweet snacks and other odd products that would sit by a mini-mart register.Lecuona said that Greenfeld was on the small-bag business.
Lecuona said they would go on a field marketing tour and bring home 50 different bags of chips that they had never seen before.
Greenfeld went on market tours of small stores in Chicago, Detroit and Houston to get a better idea of what consumers wanted.She worked with Frito-Lay's packaging and product design teams to come up with the right flavor mix and branding for the bags.She remembers going with a chubby devil holding a Cheeto, Frito or chip on a pitchfork, depending on the bag's contents.
The product entered the test market in 1990.August is listed as the month when the Flamin' Hot product made its debut in Frito-Lay's trademark.
According to a Dallas Morning News article, Fritos, Chee tos and Lays have hit small stores in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Houston.
As early as 1989, there were regional competitive spicy products on the market, including a bright-red potato chip from the Chicago snack company, according to Frito-Lay.
Frito-Lay launched a test market in Chicago, Detroit and Houston in August of 1990.
A product or flavor extension is the work of a number of people across functions as diverse as R&D, sales and marketing, all of whom are proud of the products they help create, according to Frito-Lay.
There is an internal promotional video for the Cheetos brand from the first quarter of 1991.
The nearly nine-minute video, which Lukaska shared with The Times, is a Day-Glo green-and-pink time capsule, with Frito-Lay execs in fashionably baggy suits promoting the latest and greatest snack aimed at kids, Cheetos Paws.Two DDB Needham advertising executives performed a rap about the coolness of Chester.Flamin' Hots appear in the video for less than a second, in a rapid-fire slideshow set to MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This," alongside two other minor brands of the day.
The test markets proved that Lindsay was correct.Flamin' Hot Cheetos and Lays became a cult hit in 1992.
Greenfeld, who now goes by her married name, Lemmel, said she is proud of leading the team that put Flamin' Hots into the world.
She said it was disappointing that someone who didn't play a role in the project would profit from it.
Montaez did not respond to multiple requests for comment via email, phone, direct message, attempts to reach him through a publicity agent, and questions delivered to a family member in his name.
After the initial publication of the story, Montaez posted a video to his account, addressed to all you young leaders.
There is always someone in the room that is going to try to steal your destiny.Montaez says to the camera that they may say you never existed.If you don't write down your history, someone else will.Remember that.It is the best way to destroy a positive message.Don't allow that to happen to you.I will not allow it to happen to me.
The record of Flamin' Hot Cheetos first entering the market in 1990 points to an impossibility at the heart of Montaez's story.
Montaez says that after watching a motivational video from the CEO of the company that encouraged all Frito-Lay workers to act like owners, he felt inspired to invent Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
He says that the CEO he called to pitch his idea was the one who flew out to Rancho Cucamonga to see him in person.Montaez states in his new memoir that his name appears 60 times in the text.
When Flamin' Hot products were developed, Enrico did not work at Frito-Lay.His move to Frito-Lay was announced in December 1990 and he took over control at the beginning of 1991.
Frito-Lay was led by Robert Beeby when the Flamin' Hot line first entered test markets.The parent company was run by Wayne Calloway.The company in the Cola Wars was led by the president and CEO, Enrico.
The first mention of his "I Own the New Frito-Lay" campaign came in a May 1992 feature in Ad Day.He died while snorkeling in the Cayman Islands.The Times did not find any public comments from him on Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
Montaez remembers calling her office to speak with Enrico once he was already leading Frito-Lay, as he moved from the beverage business to the top of the parent company.
Al Carey, a Frito-Lay lifer who worked at the company for nearly 40 years, rose through the executive suite to the top of the corporate pyramid.
Carey worked for Frito-Lay at the time of Flamin' Hot development and publicly endorsed Montaez's version of events over the years.
Carey was the vice president of national sales at the time.Carey was promoted to division president of Frito-Lay West, based in the Bay Area, at the end of 1992, after he was appointed to oversee a new vending machine and warehouse division.
Frito-Lay North America was headed by Carey.In 2007, Montaez began telling his story in public, and the pair have made joint appearances at a number of public events over the course of their careers.
In his new memoir, Montaez writes that he met Carey when he was taking a tour of the CuCAMonga plant.Carey encouraged him to call Enrico when Montaez called him for advice on his idea for Cheetos.
Carey initially said that Montaez pitched him a set of products for the Latino market after he became division president for Frito-Lay West.Carey insisted that Montaez is the creator of Flamin' Hot Cheetos when asked how that timeline fits with the 1990 trademark and test market.
Carey said that Flamin' Hot Cheetos was not in the market before his meeting with Montaez.Those guys in the plant created that product.
Carey was asked to explain the news clippings and former employee accounts that place Flamin' Hot Cheetos in the market two years earlier.Carey said that there was a spicy Cheeto in the Chicago, L.A., and Houston markets.
He said that he had the most experience in the company.Carey said that if there was a prior spicy product on the market, it was reformulated to match Montaez's sample product.Carey said the magic of the product was the ingredients.
Frito-Lay disagreed with its former CEO.According to our records, Frito-Lay received the first samples of the Flamin' Hot seasoning from McCormick on December 15, 1989.Frito-Lay uses the same seasoning.
Carey was unsure how to account for that contradiction.He said that there was a test market for a spicy product in 1990.I will be surprised if it was the same ingredient, but it could have been.
Carey said that Enrico wasn't at the meeting that was central to Montaez's account.
Carey said that stories grow and evolve as we get away from the date the stories evolve.I bet Richard added a little flavor to it.
If Montaez wanted to pursue his career as a motivational speaker, memoirist and film subject, he should retire in 2019.
Carey said that if you are still a part of the company, you shouldn't be giving a speech and being paid for it.You have to keep away from dramatizing the story a little bit, I said this is a fun story, and this shouldn't be a controversial story.
He said that Montaez was key to Flamin' Hot Cheetos' success.He said that many products have grown into hits after a charismatic leader came along.He said that the energy that goes behind this thing and the positioning was invented by them.
Beneath Montaez's story about Flamin' Hot Cheetos, there is a real story of a man rising up the corporate ladder, from factory floor to marketing executive, pitching some products along the way.
Montaez was born in Ontario to a Mexican American family that lived in the unincorporated community of Guasti, a cluster of buildings and shops centered on vineyards east of Los Angeles, where some of the men in his family picked grapes for a living.
He has claimed in the past that he dropped out of school after the fourth grade, or before the sixth in his new memoir.Montaez is listed in the freshman class section of the Chaffey High yearbook in 1972, but he disappears after that.
Montaez worked at the Frito-Lay plant in Rancho Cucamonga.Frito-Lay's records show that Montaez was promoted to operator by October 1977 after he was hired.In his new memoir, he writes that he spearheaded a program to reduce waste at the assembly line.
A single news clipping featuring Montaez provides a glimpse into his career after he moved to Frito-Lay.
The December 1993 article in the U.S. News and World Report focuses on empowering employees.The section on Frito-Lay talks about the plant in Rancho Cucamonga, where manager Steve Smith took up Enrico's initiative and got more front-line workers thinking about how to improve the business as a whole.
Richard Montaez, a veteran machine operator, became so excited by Smith's new operating style that he developed a new ethnic-food concept aimed at the Hispanic market.Montaez came up with the idea of Flamin' Hot Popcorn after testing recipes and outlining a marketing strategy.
According to an industry news wire, Flamin' Hot Popcorn hit the shelves in March 1994, four years after Greenfeld and her colleagues first introduced the line.
Montaez was working on a line of products for the Latino market in the Los Angeles area.Two types of Fritos and a variety of tortilla chips are included in the images that Montaez has posted to his account.
Roberto Siewczynski remembers Montaez being very involved in the process of creating the test market.
The recollection of the marketing campaign by Siewczynski is in line with what Montaez describes in his memoir.
Siewczynski was surprised to learn that the project was being led by production and distribution workers, not the marketing department, as a community-driven campaign focused on the Latino market in Los Angeles.They cut out a lot of the traditional management because the plant really wants to do this.
Montaez was liked by all of his co-workers at the plant and he remembers him as a colorful, engaging storyteller.He remembers a creation story that focused on Lime and Chile Fritos.
Montaez told a story about how he used to put lime and chile on his Fritos when he was a kid.
Montaez wrote that he used the local network of Tupperware parties to get Flamin' Hot Cheetos out to customers in Southern California as a way to bolster the struggling test market.
Siewczynski remembers the same story.He said that the product was rolled out without advertising or mass media.He recalled a presentation he made as a 22-year-old ad man to a room of hundreds of Tupperware ladies, who ribbed him for being so young and handsome.
According to Frito-Lay records shared with The Times, Montaez was promoted to a quality-control tech services specialist from 1998 to 2002, then left the plant and became a director-level position.He was praised by both community groups and the CEOs of both companies.
After climbing the corporate ladder, he retired in his 60s.From the factory floor to the corporate suite, Montaez made it.He didn't make Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
Flamin' Hot Cheetos were a cultural phenomenon in the 2000s.In 2005, school administrators considered banning them in the classroom because of their popularity with students, and in 2012 Pasadena schools banned them.Their first meme moment came in 2012 when a group of kids performed a song called "Hot Cheetos and Takis" in an after-school program in north Minneapolis.The years since have seen pop-up restaurants and fashion lines, and countless Flamin' Hot Cheetos menu items at restaurants across the country.
The story of the janitor who invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos became fodder for online videos.Montaez has over 100,000 followers on his TikTok account.
The people who worked on the original Flamin' Hot line weren't watching videos or reading food websites.By the early 2000s, most of them had left the company.Most had retired.
The story of the janitor who invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos was not told to Greenfeld until the summer of 2018?
Someone took credit for a product that Greenfeld had worked on.She asked if anyone at Frito-Lay had heard of the Montaez story, and if they knew anyone who was claiming to have invented Flamin.
According to a letter written by the chief counsel in the human resources department, she and the legal team were aware of Richard's book and movie projects, but were unsure what problem, if any, there was with his story.The institutional memory was lost over the years.
The company launched an investigation after Greenfeld sent the initial email.
The general counsel at Frito-Lay North America wrote in a December message that she didn't think there was any question that the Flamin' Hot test market predated the Cucamonga meeting.
Greenfeld was asked if she remembered who invented the name in an email from another Frito-Lay lawyer.Greenfeld came up with the name on his own.
An effective dead end came from the investigation.Montaez retired in March.Carey retired in the same month.
Frito-Lay will continue to take the position that Flamin' Hot Cheetos was created by a team of people and, as with all of our products, we do not credit one person with a product invention or flavor extension.
Carey accepted a lifetime achievement award from the East Los Angeles Community Union in June of 2019.In a video created for the event, Montaez changed his story, saying that it was Carey who created the motivational video that inspired him to create Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
Carey is the executive chairman of the North Carolina textiles company Unifi and sits on the board of a blank check vehicle.
Indra Nooyi, who was chairman and CEO of PepsiCo while Carey was running Frito-Lay and the beverage business, has blurbed Montaez's new memoir, calling it a "tour de force."The book was blurbed by Tom Greco, who took over at Frito-Lay after Carey left.Nooyi and Greco worked for Frito-Lay in Canada.
According to his social media accounts, Montaez has spent much of his time since retirement working the speaker circuit, delivering keynotes at in-person and virtual events for organizations such as the Philadelphia Eagles and Indeed.
Montaez has continued to post to his social media accounts photographs of what he claims are original design materials for Flamin' Hot Cheetos after he retired.Many have been deleted recently.
There are four pieces of lined notebook paper labeled "mild," "reg", "hot" and "extra hot" with Cheetos piled on top of each.Montaez wrote his name on the bottom of the one.
He wrote in a deleted post that he worked on the Doritos Salsa Rio flavor in 1998, a product that first hit test markets in 1987, according to Advertising Age articles from that year.
Frito-Lay has struck a cautious tone in its public statements.
Frito-Lay helped the film's producers piece together the historical information that exists on Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
A product or flavor extension is the work of a number of people across functions as diverse as R&D, sales and marketing, all of whom are proud.
In April 2020, a new chief marketing officer, Rachel Ferdinando, appears in a CNBC video feature about Flamin' Hot products.She doesn't call Montaez the inventor of the product.
She named Montaez, saying that his insights into the Hispanic consumer helped shape and think about how we should talk to that consumer.
Two years ago, the filmmakers were warned of potential problems with Montaez's story.Frito-Lay's legal team forwarded a letter that Greenfeld wrote to Franklin detailing her version of events.
It is not known if the producers ever told the director, who is set to direct the film.The movie could use Montaez's story as a jumping-off point for a fictional story.