Also Andy Capp’s hot fries (70’s), and spicy pork rinds (?). My grandfather’s preferred trailer trash foods to bring golfing.
I know they brand them “American Flavor” in Europe. Apparently “ranch” isn’t as recognizable a flavor outside the US and Canada.
Regular, O-gauge Cheetos are the perfect junk food.
So it sounds like his version of the story fundamentally isn’t true, then. (He had this whole narrative about putting together the spice blend, etc. for this novel new product that got him in the door.) That’s such a strange thing to claim on his part… stranger still that it took this long for anyone to push back on it. In order for his story to be true, he would have had to have been unaware of the product already in development, done a pitch for what was essentially a duplicate product and no one told him it was already in the works (and he never found out), which doesn’t seem believable. I wonder what’s going to happen with the movie… this revelation makes its claims rather embarrassing.
It’s not all that strange, from what I can tell it hasn’t been all that long. There have been multiple articles running around on the subject. He only seems to have initially claimed credit about 10 years ago. So about 20 years after they were created, and right around when hot Cheetos started to go viral.
And then supposedly his claims about the hot Cheetos expanded over time. Going from him coming up with the idea, to the kitchen and it being core to his advancement much more recently. He’s apparently been almost entirely dropping this as an anecdote in corporate speaking gigs. Where as now, he’s pushing a book titled after it and there’s a movie in the works.
The full on version we’re talking about now seems to be from or directly connected to the book.
It seems like a pretty standard example of the tale growing with the telling. From a guy with a background in marketing, who currently works as a motivational speaker.
From Frito Lays’ statements it seems that the rest of his overall story is true. He did start there as a Janitor, was involved in expanding marketing to Hispanic and minority markets, that did get him bumped up from Janitor, and he did finish at the company as a VP.
The LA Times writer goes to some length verifying with people who were there around the time Flamin’ Hot flavours were invented. He did a lot of related research comparing print ads and Ad Age articles with Montañez’s timeline…and discovered the man’s account didn’t line up entirely.
Perhaps one of the saddest sentences in the entire column is “Over the decades, the institutional memory had been lost.” (Meaning, FritoLay didn’t confirm nor deny dude took a team’s credit and made it his alone to use on his motivational speaking gigs.)
I was going to quote the same line, and add
He must be a rethuglican.
That is hysterical! 
I saw this guy give his speech, and it’s pretty much what you described. I didn’t find it that implausible that he got an idea, pitched it, and possibly even created a prototype version, but the part where the CEO actually listened to a Hispanic janitor seriously and rewarded him for the idea instead of stealing it always seemed too good to be true. And NOW the story is that the improbable promotion part actually happened… but for no particular reason? Huh??
This is what I’m having difficulty with. A major corporation randomly promoted a hispanic janitor to an executive position… for nothing? That just doesn’t ring true.
That isn’t the story though. It’s not that he went from janitor to VP in one go. He started as a janitor and worked his way up to marketing VP over many years.
I don’t think there’s anything hard to believe about the janitor getting and entry level marketing position, and then being good at it.
Janitor, Hot Cheetos, VP is the book jacket summary.
In the spirit of “That’s not a knife … this is a knife”, I gotta say not-so-much. I get this variation on the theme every time I get back to Texas:
Ah. That’s certainly not the way the story is being presented in many venues. If he gradually worked his way up the chain, after someone actually listened to a janitor, and realized that he was capable of marketing, then that’s an unlikely, but not unbelievable, success story.
Apparently he was a machinist or production maintenance worker or something rather than a janitor. Seems to be a few other exaggerations in his story.
But the core of it seems to be true, he was working a manual job in the factory. Managed to figure out a chance to pitch some shit to the right person and got bumped to the marketing department.
I think the other thing to remember is it was the 90’s. Marketing, particularly for consumer packaged goods, was less college degree for tweeting and data mining than it is now. Frito Lay back then primarily distributed through vendor drivers. A guy who owns a truck buys the rights to a route and is responsible for both selling in, and delivering and shelving the product. Chip and soda companies still do a lot of that. So do bread companies. A lot of the base marketing was and is in sales staff personally pitching things to retailers. I work selling craft beer and it’s still the base line for a lot of this. The primary marketing strategy for new beers is often still about placements in target markets.
In that context. If a guy walks into your office and says, you have spicy snacks. Latinx people like spicy snacks, and spicy snacks from Latin America can be tricky to get but post huge sales in X,Y and Z . If you make these additional spicy snacks, and send Spanish speaking staff into these kinds of stores around X, Y and Z. Your spicy snacks will be way more successful.
All it really takes to know that. Is being from those neighborhoods.
I can tell you right now that those mostly white sales reps or vendor drivers weren’t (and still aren’t), going to walk into an Ecuadorian market in “that” part of town. Often times when they do (which I do), they won’t have much success unless they speak Spanish (I don’t, or at least only well enough be embarrassed). Aside from the fact that a lot of the staff in your bodegas and immigrant groceries aren’t comfortable with English. A lot of these businesses just prefer to deal with some one from within their community.
White executives and management at Frito Lay in the early 90’s probably didn’t even realize that was a problem.
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