A former janitor claimed he invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos more than 30 years ago after a factory machine broke down and he took home an unflavored batch of the knobby sticks of puffed corn, sprinkling them with bright red chili powder.
Frito-Lay, the snack company that makes Cheetos, said he had nothing to do with it.
Those clashing origin stories are now the subject of a lawsuit. Last week, Richard Montañez sued Frito-Lay and its parent company PepsiCo, accusing them of defamation by writing him out of the history of how Flamin’ Hot Cheetos came to be.
In a 62-page complaint filed Thursday in San Bernardino Superior Court, Montañez accuses PepsiCo and Frito-Lay executives of lying about his indispensable role in the snack’s origin story and feeding that disinformation to the Los Angeles Times, which used it to publish a “defamatory and misleading article” with the headline “The Man Who Didn’t Invent Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”
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Montañez claims the article was the start of the decimation of his career as a public speaker and consultant, work he took up in 2019 when he retired from a 43-year career at Frito-Lay and PepsiCo. As a public speaker, he was booking 35 engagements a year at $10,000 to $50,000 a pop, but because of the companies’ “open racism and blatant lies,” those have all but dried up, he alleges in his lawsuit.
“I created Flamin’ Hot Cheetos not only as a product but as a movement and as a loyal executive for PepsiCo,” Montañez said. “PepsiCo believed in me as a leader because they knew people would follow me, and they did because they knew my soul is my community. We built this into a $2 billion industry, and I cannot let them take away my legacy or destroy my reputation. I will not let them silence me,” he said in a statement.
PepsiCo and Frito-Lay declined to comment on the lawsuit. The L.A. Times, which is not a named defendant in the lawsuit, also declined to address the allegations.
Montañez’s rags-to-riches story starts in a Southern California migrant labor camp where he grew up sharing an 800-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment with his parents and 10 siblings, according to his lawsuit. Then, while working at a car wash in the mid-1970s, he got a job as a janitor at Frito-Lay’s plant in Rancho Cucamonga, just east of Los Angeles, it says.
Montañez worked there for more than a decade until, inspired by a combination of a company program paying workers $1 for helpful ideas and CEO Roger Enrico encouraging all his employees to “act like owners,” he started experimenting with his wife in their kitchen to create new snack flavors, his suit states. Of Mexican heritage, Montañez focused on flavors that he thought would appeal to Latinos like him, among them lime, chiles and cinnamon, according to the suit.
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Then, one day in the 1980s, a Cheetos machine broke down, and Montañez took home an unseasoned batch of the puffed corn snacks, the suit says. Instead of neon orange cheese dust, Montañez sprinkled a neon red chili powder inspired by elote, a Mexican dish of grilled corn slathered in a mayo cream sauce and seasoning, it adds.
Montañez eventually found himself pitching his spicy creation to Enrico as a snack that would appeal to the growing yet untapped market of Latinos, the suit says, and Enrico was sold.
Flamin’ Hot Cheetos became a sensation and a billion-dollar brand in its own right, transcending Cheetos to inspire other chile-flavored snacks including Fritos, Funyuns and Doritos. Meanwhile, the snack often referred to as “Hot Cheetos” embedded itself into the zeitgeist, inspiring rap songs, memes, clothing and even Katy Perry’s Halloween costume in 2014.
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Montañez kept coming up with snack ideas and climbed the corporate ladder from janitor to Frito-Lay’s Southern California business manager and eventually PepsiCo’s vice president of multicultural marketing and sales, the suit says. He published two memoirs about his journey, including “Flamin’ Hot: The Incredible True Story of One Man’s Rise from Janitor to Top Executive” in 2021.
And last year, Searchlight Pictures released “Flamin’ Hot,” a biopic about his life directed by Eva Longoria.
Frito-Lay capitalized on Montañez’s rags-to-riches story for decades, sending him across the country to talk about inventing the snack with high-powered politicians, captains of industry and elite academics, the lawsuit states. In doing so, they allegedly allowed him to highlight how at Frito-Lay a literal janitor could become an executive with great ideas and a little pluck.
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“For decades, [Frito-Lay] recognized Mr. Montañez as the creator of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos,” according to the lawsuit.
But in 2018, a former Frito-Lay employee contacted the company to challenge Montañez’s account, claiming she had led the effort to develop the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, the Times reported. Frito-Lay launched an investigation and, after interviewing former employees and reviewing internal records, found no evidence that Montañez had been involved in developing the product, according to the L.A. Times.
“That doesn’t mean we don’t celebrate Richard,” the company said in a 2021 statement, “but the facts do not support the urban legend.”
On May 16, 2021, the Times published a 5,500-word article based on that internal investigation. Business reporter Sam Dean spoke with 20 people who worked at Frito-Lay’s divisions responsible for creating new products in the late ’80s and ‘90s and none of them remembered anything like the pitch meeting between Montañez and Enrico.
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“If that story existed, believe me, we would have heard about it,” Ken Lukaska, who worked as a product manager for the core Cheetos brand when Flamin’ Hots were rolling out nationally, told the Times. “This guy should run for office if he’s that good at fooling everyone.”
Frito-Lay told the Times in 2021 that its investigation revealed that the effort that culminated in the creation of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos started in 1989 with a team of snack food professionals at the company’s headquarters in Plano, Tex. Six former Frito-Lay employees told the newspaper they remembered that the product was meant to compete with smaller regional competitors’ spicy snacks that were flying off the shelves at corner stores in Chicago and Detroit.
But Enrico’s executive assistant of more than 20 years attests that the meeting did occur, Montañez’s lawsuit states. After the story ran, Patti Rueff allegedly sent an email telling Montañez detractors that she took the then-janitor’s call more than 30 years ago and, inspired by his pitch, patched him through to Enrico, who then asked her to set up a meeting with Montañez.
“And the rest is history,” the email reads.
A history that remains hotly contested.
