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Who Created Flamin’ Hot Cheetos? A New Movie Seeks Answers

Like Oscar Isaac, sometimes I Eating hot Cheetos with chopsticksThis technique prevents the red powder from sticking to your fingers. It’s the cleverest way to keep pace with perfectly crafted snacks that satisfy your craving for that tingly heat and intense crunch, compelling acidity and mild sweetness, and you’ll be revisited in no time. Designed to stimulate the desire to

There are movies coming out this year that glorify (and satire) the invention of consumer products of all kinds: Blackberries, Air Jordans, Tetris, etc., but this spicy little snack produced by a multinational corporation is a late-society. I never imagined that I would become a hero of The story of the rise of capitalism.

flamin hotDirected by Eva Longoria and currently streaming on Hulu and Disney Plus, the film follows Richard Montanez, a Mexican-American boy from San Bernardino County who grows up working in a Frito-Lay factory, dreams, and bubbles. It’s a positive, optimistic, very American movie. A Billion Dollar Idea: Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

Through Montañez, the rise of addictive, finger-staining, spicy corn-based snacks tells the story of the American dream. It’s a ’90s-style janitor-to-executive story fueled by sheer grit and guts.

Is it a Montañez biopic or a snack biopic? Nothing is different in this movie, success is a vague, fanatical yearning. Montañez imagines his personal triumphs intertwined with product triumphs, and that corporate endorsement of hot Cheetos is somehow a tribute to working-class Mexican-Americans. It seems that he is confident that he will lead to the representative. If that all seems a little too neat and a little too good to be true, that’s because it is.

“Flamin’ Hot” memoiric self-help book The real Richard Montañez. (An example of that guidance: “You can start your journey by letting hunger work for you to overcome fear.”). Although Montañez rose from Frito-Lay janitor to marketing executive, Los Angeles Times Survey In 2021, he thoroughly debunked the story that he invented Hot Cheetos.

In fact, in the late 1980s, Frito-Lay was losing out on snack sachets and was desperate. Testing spicy flavor lines is a coordinated corporate strategy, and Hot Cheetos was first released to the company’s test markets in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Houston, rather than in Southern California, where the film is set.

Mr. Montañez’s version was certainly far more entertaining than the truth, but adapting it was also an opportunity to revisit, reframe, and ultimately reconcile the hot Cheetos story with consumers.

In the film, as he prepares to pitch an executive pitch, he practices the line “The Hispanic market will not be ignored!” At important meetings, however, he softened his demeanor, acknowledging both his own strategy and his own weakness. “I want to know what is important to you, to this company, and to the world.”

Hot Cheetos are the best, but I don’t know.Who thinks snacks can do it all? Tweet About #BlackLivesMatter, M&M’s green mascot can switch from heel to flat skittles can print new packing But we all know that food brand gestures tend to be hollow.

In “Flamin’ Hot,” PepsiCo CEO Roger Enrico distributes the game. “You still think I’m investing in janitor?” he says. “The Hispanic market is the future and this guy will get us there.”

It sounds like a betrayal, but it’s not. That’s exactly what Montañez, who would later be known as the “Godfather of Hispanic marketing,” fought from the beginning for the consumer, not the people, and the film celebrates it.

From the beginning of the film, Montañez has a dark and heartbreaking impulse when he realizes that the elementary school bullies who make fun of his lunch actually like it. He began charging them 25 cents per foil-wrapped bean burrito, turning his own humiliation into cold cash. Maybe he can’t get people who don’t like him to like him, but at least they like his food.

Later, at the Frito Lay factory, Montañez and his colleagues “fight” against companies who refuse to invest in properly marketing the popular Cheetos, and the product, and thus Montañez and his friends, fail. They find their own ingenious and dangerous ways to get products from Rancho’s Cucamonga shelves. And Enrico was finally impressed with the numbers, and called Montañez and asked him to make the factory produce 5 million cases.

The call for hotter Cheetos is framed as the hero’s great triumph, but the combat conditions are a bit flimsy and the setting disingenuous. Let’s rewind. A factory worker faces a corporate lawsuit and…what exactly will he do? To help that suit. To help Frito-Lay capture the Southern California Hispanic market and increase the company’s profits.

Things didn’t work out that way, but the Flamin’ Hot flavor line is actually a great success story that connects with fans who are constantly expanding the brand’s reach with viral recipes like: increase. hot cheetos salad, Elotes, fried chicken, until cooking becomes canon. In the interview Longoria emphasized. A sense of collective ownership over snacks: “I would like to say, this is not a PepsiCo product, this is our product. It’s become a phenomenon.”

As with the “Flamin’ Hot” origin story, it’s not entirely true. While the film romanticizes work on the production line, the factories that produce the hot Cheetos also employ underage immigrant workers, mostly from Central America, who use the spicy flavor in the air. The fine dust hurts my lungs. This billion-dollar brand is wholly and clearly PepsiCo’s, not the people who buy and make snacks.

What “Flamin’ Hot” gets right is exactly what a food brand is like in a glossy fictional origin story. wish We shall see them – wholesome and harmless, utterly integral to our lives, and so intricately intertwined in their triumphs and successes with ours that we will discern the difference. is impossible.

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