Originally published at: LA Times: The janitor who invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos actually didn't | Boing Boing
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Flamin’ Hot Cheetos? Apparently one of those “I dare you” foods.
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(sigh)
The sad reality of democracy.
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It’s weird that it is an argument between two marketing people as to who came up with it. I would have thought that the “inventor” of flamin’ hot cheetos was a chef/food scientist. It’s one thing to say “We should have a spicy variety of cheetos” and another to do the actual work to make the product.
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The very short version is this fellow called the CEO and said, hey, make Cheetos with spices – the CEO liked his chutzpah and invited him to pitch the idea – then Frito Lay liked it and did the rest of the work. I’m not going to dig in further, but these two stories are not incompatible.
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not so much a dare as with those “Carolina Reaper Paquis” that are sold by the single chip.
dare ya to mix one of those into a bag of nacho Doritos!
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All I can tell you is what I did. All I have is my history, what I did in my kitchen."
Since when does a multi-national food company accept foods from people that made shit in their home kitchens? A product like that is complex and the production side is just as important.
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The sad reality is you don’t even have to be that good at it to fool enough people.
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When I was in elementary school, I toured the Frito-lay factory in Topeka, KS. I had a still warm Cheeto fresh off the conveyor belt.
I loved Cool Ranch Doritos, and they had huge 50lb bags of the spices.
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I mean, the details of the story this guy tells do change things - this guy was a janitor who supposedly saw an opening the market for the company to appeal to Hispanic customers, took it upon himself to make some sample product, got a meeting where he pitched the idea and they used his samples directly as the basis for the commercial product, and this ultimately led to him going from janitor to executive. I’m not sure how it squares with the company denying he had any role in the process. I could see how he might have done his pitch, the company said “hot Cheetos is a good idea” and handed it over to Lynne Greenfield to develop it and bring it to market (without her knowing where the idea came from), but they seem to be denying that’s what happened. So…?
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Weird that Frito-Lay would now deny it – it’s really the proverbial “too good to check” story.
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Yeah, it’s all very weird. I mean, I keep thinking: if his story isn’t true, how did this guy go from janitor to executive? I could see his story being largely true, other people did the product development and marketing roll-out, and the people debunking his story didn’t know about his early part in the process. But if his story’s true, why aren’t the people at his pitch meeting coming forward to verify it?
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I thought this sounded fishy…
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No one with an actual background in the culinary arts would have unleashed such a thing on humanity.
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From what I can tell they didn’t comment on it directly, but did credit Greenfield for the product. As well as crediting Montañez for efforts with the Hispanic community.
But Montañez has a book coming out, and there’s a movie adaptation in the works. All pitched around “inventing” Flaming Hot Cheetos. He only seems to have started claiming Flaming Hot Cheetos more recently.
Greenfield seems to have started challenging the claim when the movie was announced. And Frito Lay seems to have only responded to back up Greenfield.
He apparently really did spearhead marketing to the Hispanic market, and Frito Lay does credit him with making the hot Cheetos a thing there.
But it looks like the official line is that they were already in development and being test marketed when Montañez’s big moment happened. They’re very specifically not challenging his overall story.
That washes to me, I remember a brief fad for spicy versions of chips, including Doritos and Fritos around the late 80’s early 90’s. And apparently Montañez didn’t claim to have invented the Cheetos till about 10 years ago.
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they are delicious. whoever came up with them, thank you.
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And spicy chips go back even farther. We snacked on these in the mid-80’s and I very much doubt they were the first:
The basic premise was awesome. No fancy flavoring. Just chips with a crap-ton of chili powder on them. Not lightly dusted like the bag shows now.
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Link to this… anywhere, anyone, please?
An internal promotional video for the Cheetos brand from the first quarter of 1991 serves as further proof that Flamin’ Hots were already out in the world.
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 touting the latest and greatest snack aimed at kids, Cheetos Paws. At one point, two DDB Needham advertising executives perform a “New Jack City”-era rap about the coolness of Chester himself. 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, Cheetos Curls and Cheetos Light.
What I find interesting (and a little annoying) here in Tijuana is that Nacho Cheese Doritos are actually Hot Nacho Cheese Doritos in the USA, while Cool Ranch Doritos are barely marketed here, if at all. USian levels of mild chips are everywhere – regular potato chips, regular Cheetos, Fritos, etc. – but no Cool Ranch Doritos, and no mild Nacho Cheese Doritos.
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In the olden days of Tijuana circa 1976, I had my first street taco on Revolution Ave, near the old Long Bar. The guy was a riot of a character, replete with phony Pancho Villa mustache and a pink sombrero like 4 feet in diameter. The tacos were 4 for a US dollar and mini coke tossed in. Before departing he sold us a huge garbage sized bag of tortilla chips, and some salsa. When we hit our place in Ocean Beach, US side, we opened the bag of chips, it was packed in the middle with news papers with the chips carefully placed around the news paper so’s not to arouse suspicion. Laughed so hard I needed my asthma meds.
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