By Bel Hernandez
The “Los Angeles Times” headline of the 5,385-word article by Sam Dean, a business reporter for the Los Angeles Times covering the technology industry in Southern California read, “The man who didn’t invent Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”
With that, Dean infers Richard Montañez lied when he wrote his book “A Boy, A Burrito, and a Cookie“. In his book, Montañez recounts how he started off working at the California Frito Lay plant in Rancho Cucamonga as a janitor who moved up through the company ranks to become their Executive VP of Marketing and Sales and their expert on how to market to Hispanics.
Dean continues to present his case to justify the headline he chose for his article.
In his article, Dean claims Montañez did not invent the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos as verified, “according to interviews with more than a dozen former Frito-Lay employees…” and further claimed by this direct statement from Frito-Lay:
“None of our records show that Richard was involved in any capacity in the Flamin’ Hot test market. We have interviewed multiple personnel who were involved in the test market, and all of them indicate that Richard was not involved in any capacity in the test market.”
“That doesn’t mean we don’t celebrate Richard,” the statement continued, “but the facts do not support the urban legend.”
This statement is unclear. It claims Montañez was not involved in the “Flamin’ Hot test market.” It does not say that he did not invent the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
Montañez has been telling his story of how he came up with the idea of the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos for over a decade. I read his book; I heard his speech live. I am sure that Frito-lay’s CEOs and top executives also listened to the story. However, not once did this powerful corporation, Frito Lay, worth $28.2 billion, send a cease and desist letter because they felt Montanez was taking credit for something he did not invent.
In Montañez’s book, he writes about how he came up with the idea. It was when he bought an ear of corn on a stick covered with mayo, butter, cheese, and chili powder from a Mexican street corn vendor. This snack is popular all over southern California and many parts of the Southwest with large Latino populations.
However, according to the L.A. Times article, it was not Montañez who came up with the idea for Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. It was “A junior employee with a freshly minted MBA named Lynne Greenfeld [who] got the assignment to develop the brand — she came up with the Flamin’ Hot name and shepherded the line into existence.”
The LA Times claims they spoke “…with 20 people who worked at the Frito-Lay divisions responsible for new product development 32 years ago when Flamin’ Hot Cheetos were first introduced into existence. None recalls anything like the episode Montañez describes taking place.”
The article takes great pains to get the facts right about where Greenfeld went to school. Posting this correction after the article was published, “An earlier version of this article said Lynne Greenfeld and Miguel Lecuona attended business school at Northwestern. The business school they attended was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”
The article then goes on to quote some of the, then workers to prove Montañez’s deceitfulness:
“If that story existed, believe me, we would have heard about it,” said Ken Lukaska, who worked as a product manager for the core Cheetos brand when Flamin’ Hots were rolling out nationally. “This guy should run for office if he’s that good at fooling everyone.”
Finishing off with, “The idea that grew into Flamin’ Hots didn’t come from Rancho Cucamonga, or California, or even Frito-Lay’s home base in Texas.”
The article then states: “That process unearthed evidence calling his [Montañez] 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 Flamin’ Hot products to him.”
Greenfeld then goes on to drive her point home by saying: “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.”
It is not until two-thirds of the way down in the article, that Dean mentions Al Carey, a Frito-Lay lifer who retired as the FritoLay CEO and his support for Montañez’s version of the story.
In the article, Montañez is quoted as saying he met Carey, when he, “was working as vice president of national sales out of the Plano offices. When Enrico came in, he promoted Carey to oversee a new vending machine and warehouse division in early 1992 and then to a division president of Frito-Lay West, based in the Bay Area, at the end of that year.”
“Carey appears to be the only Frito-Lay executive who worked at the company at the time of Flamin’ Hot development to publicly endorse Montañez’s version of events over the years,” Dean writes in the article.
He and Montañez met in the early 1980s. The article goes on to say, “When the exec was taking a tour of the Cucamonga plant. When Montañez later called him for advice on pitching his idea for spicy Cheetos, he says Carey encouraged him to call Enrico directly”. The article continues, “Carey insisted that Montañez is the creator of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. ‘The product that we know today as Flamin’ Hot Cheetos was definitely not out in the market’ before his meeting with Montañez, Carey said. “That product was developed by those guys in the plant,” Carey told the L.A. Times.
Carey added, “I can promise you for sure there was no brand development, no brand launched called Flamin’ Hot Cheetos,” adding that “if there was a prior spicy product on the market, it was reformulated to match Montañez’s sample product. The ingredients, that’s the magic of the product,” Carey said. “Without Richard, this thing would not be out there,” he concluded.
Still, the article headline does not say, “There is doubt that the man invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos,” quite the contrary. The L.A. Times article reverberated and trended on social media. It was picked up by three other major media outlets who repeated a version of the L.A. Times headline that same day. One of the outlets referred to the L.A. Time article as an “expose.” However, the article was no such thing because it was not definitive if you believe Carey, the only person who had first-hand knowledge of Montañez’s actual involvement with Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
Further evidence of Montañez’s involvement is the reference to the article of the “U.S. News and World Report” reference in Dean’s article: “The U.S. News and World Report article from December 1993 focuses on businesses finding success by empowering their employees. The section on Frito-Lay talks about the plant in Rancho Cucamonga, where manager Steve Smith had taken up Enrico’s initiative and gotten more front-line workers thinking about how to improve the business as a whole.” The quoted article goes on to say. “Veteran machine operator Richard Montañez, 37, became so energized by Smith’s new operating style that after listening to salesmen, he developed a new ethnic-food concept aimed at the Hispanic market, After testing recipes and outlining a marketing strategy, Montañez burst forth with a kernel of an idea: Flamin’ Hot Popcorn, which will soon make its debut.”
Since the printing of the L.A. Times article by Dean on Sunday, May 16th, NPR reporter, Sarah Aida Gonzalez, has also been in touch with Frito-Lay, and it seems that Frito-Lay is rethinking some of what they told Dean. Here Gonzalez posts the latest of Frito-Lay told her on Twitter:
Gonzalez’s Twitter post (13/14) states: “At the time of the Ranch Cucamonga meeting, FLNA was divided into divisions, with each division operating independently with its own executive team. As such, the West Division may not have been aware of the Metroline products/test.”
Followed later that day Gonzalez posts again: “Update: Frito-Lay told me they first talked to the LA Times on Thurs. after our episode published. They said they gave the same information to them as they gave to me. But said they “Learned things yesterday” from the story and that “additional facts were brought to light.”
Sam Dean’s article seems to have its sights on discrediting the actions of a hard-working janitor who goes on to become one of the highest-paid Latino marketing executives in Frito-Lay’s history… A man who has inspired many persons, young, old, and of different races, across the country with his story.
When Dean writes, “Montañez 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,” Dean seems to imply that this is somehow a bad thing to do when this is a practice many corporate executives engage in.
As stated already, if Frito-Lay, with all its resources, felt Montañez was spreading lies, they could have easily threatened him with a lawsuit. Yet they didn’t. They just keep promoting him up the corporate ladder.
Montañez is a Christian and a committed philanthropist and founder of Onelite, a nonprofit that provides hundreds of high-need families in the United States with food and school supplies. He believes in giving back for all the good fortune he has made for himself.
He is devastated that a company he worked for and promoted for over forty years would react the way they have.
“I have all my documents, letters from the CEOs, even Al Carey,” Montanez told Latin Heat Entertainment.
He is quoted in Variety saying “I was their greatest ambassador,” referring to Frito-Lay. “But I will say this, you’re going to love your company more than they will ever love you. Keep that in perspective.”
When asked about Greenfeld’s allegations, Montañez told Variety, “In that era, Frito-Lay had five divisions. I don’t know what the other parts of the country, the other divisions — I don’t know what they were doing. I’m not even going to try to dispute that lady because I don’t know. All I can tell you is what I did. All I have is my history, what I did in my kitchen.”
If anyone expected Montañez to back down in light of the “bad press” this article has brought upon himself and his family, they were wrong. He has an Instagram account, and he is not shy about using it. On Sunday night, he posted:
“I don’t care what room you’re in; there’s always somebody in the room that’s going to try to steal your destiny. They may even say you never existed,” Montañez says to the camera. “I want you to do this: Write down your history because if you don’t, somebody else will. Remember that. And also, remember this, the best way to destroy a positive message is to destroy the messenger. Never allow that to happen to you. I’m certainly not going to allow it to happen to me.”
He has already written his history twice. Once in his first memoir, “A Boy, a Burrito and A Cookie,” and his next book “Flamin’ Hot: The Incredible True Story of One Man’s Rise from Janitor to Top Executive,” which will be published by Penguin Random House and goes on sale June 15.
As for the biopic of his story based on his first book Flamin’ Hot, the studio, the director (actress Eva Longoria), and the producers were all alerted in 2019 about the Frito-Lay findings, and they are going ahead as planned. They will begin shooting in June in New Mexico.
And, there is also the ongoing reporting by NPR’s Gonzalez and more recently, a podcast was announced that will delve deep into the “facts”.