The Truth About Hot Cheetos Is Not in ‘Flamin’ Hot’

Like Oscar Isaac, I sometimes use chopsticks to eat scorching Cheetos, a way that retains their pink mud from sticking to my fingers. It’s the best technique to preserve tempo with a superbly engineered snack, designed each to fulfill the will for its prickly warmth and violent crunch, its convincing tang and mellow sweetness, and to gas a direct must revisit it.

There are movies this yr celebrating (and satirizing) the invention of all types of client merchandise, together with the BlackBerry, Air Jordans and Tetris, however I by no means imagined that this spicy little snack produced by a multinational company might be the hero of a late-capitalist uplift saga.

“Flamin’ Hot,” directed by Eva Longoria and streaming now on Hulu and Disney Plus, is a frothy, optimistic, very American movie about Richard Montañez, a Mexican American child from San Bernardino County who grows as much as work at a Frito-Lay plant and goals up a billion-dollar concept: Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

Through Montañez, the rise of the fingertip-staining, habit-forming, spicy corn-based snack turns into a narrative of the American dream — a ’90s-style janitor-to-executive story fueled by pure grit and guts.

Is it Montañez’s biopic, or the snack’s? In the movie, there’s no distinction, and success is a blurry, feverish longing. Montañez imagines his private triumph as tousled with the product’s, and appears satisfied that company approval of scorching Cheetos will in some way translate to respect and illustration for working-class Mexican Americans. If that every one appears a bit too tidy, a bit too good to be true, nicely, it’s as a result of it’s.

“Flamin’ Hot” was tailored from the memoir-ish self-help e book of the real-life Richard Montañez. (One instance of its steerage: “You can start your journey by putting your hunger to work for you so you can move past your fears.”). Though Mr. Montañez did work his manner up from janitor to advertising and marketing govt at Frito-Lay, a Los Angeles Times investigation in 2021 totally debunked the story of his inventing scorching Cheetos.

In reality, within the late Nineteen Eighties, Frito-Lay was shedding on small-bag snack gross sales and getting determined. Testing a spicy taste line was a coordinated company technique, and scorching Cheetos have been first launched to the corporate’s check markets in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Houston, not Southern California, the place the movie is about.

Mr. Montañez’s model was admittedly far more enjoyable than the reality, however adapting it was additionally a chance to revise, reshape and in the end align the story of scorching Cheetos with shoppers.

In the movie, preparing for his pitch to the executives, he practices his traces with a co-worker on the manufacturing facility: “The Hispanic market will not be ignored!” But within the huge assembly, he softens, admitting each his technique and his vulnerability: “I want to know that I matter to you, to this company, to the world.”

Hot Cheetos are nice, however I don’t know — does anybody assume a snack can do all that? Gushers can tweet about #BlackLivesMatter, M&M’s inexperienced mascot can change from heels to flats and Skittles can print new packaging for Pride, however everyone knows that gestures from meals manufacturers are typically hole.

In “Flamin’ Hot,” the PepsiCo chief govt Roger Enrico provides away the sport: “You still think I’m investing in a janitor?” he says. “The Hispanic market is the future and this man is going to lead us there.”

It seems like a betrayal, nevertheless it’s not. It’s precisely what Montañez, who would later turn out to be often known as the “godfather of Hispanic marketing” has been preventing for from the beginning — not for individuals, however for shoppers — and the movie exalts it.

A murky and heartbreaking impulse drives Montañez from the beginning of the movie, when he realizes that the elementary faculty bullies making enjoyable of his lunch really sort of prefer it. He begins charging them 25 cents per foil-wrapped bean burrito, changing his humiliation into chilly, laborious money. Maybe he can’t get his haters to love him, however at the least they like his meals.

Later, on the Frito-Lay manufacturing facility, Montañez and his co-workers “fight” company, which refuses to spend money on advertising and marketing scorching Cheetos correctly, establishing the product — and by extension, Montañez and his crew — to fail. They discover their very own ingenious, dodgy methods to get the product off the cabinets in Rancho Cucamonga. And Enrico, in the end impressed by the numbers, calls Montañez to say he’d just like the manufacturing facility to provide 5 million instances.

The demand for extra scorching Cheetos is framed as our hero’s nice victory, however the phrases of the battle are slightly flimsy, and its setup is insincere. Let’s rewind: Factory staff confronted up towards company fits to … do what precisely? To assist these fits. To assist Frito-Lay declare the Hispanic market in Southern California and to make the corporate extra money.

Though that isn’t how issues went down, the Flamin’ Hot taste line is in truth a wild success story tied to its followers, who always broaden on the model’s attain with viral recipes like scorching Cheetos salads, elotes and fried hen, till the dishes turn out to be canon. In an interview, Ms. Longoria emphasised the sense of collective possession over the snack: “I like to say, this isn’t PepsiCo’s product, this is our product. The Hispanic community made this product popular, we made it a pop-culture phenomenon.”

Much like the “Flamin’ Hot” origin story, that’s not completely true. Though the movie romanticizes labor on the manufacturing line, factories that produce scorching Cheetos additionally make use of underage migrant staff, principally from Central America, whose lungs sting from all of the spicy mud within the air. The billion-dollar model belongs completely and patently to PepsiCo, not the individuals who purchase or make the snacks.

What “Flamin’ Hot” does get proper, in a shiny fictional origin story, is exhibiting us precisely how meals manufacturers want we might see them — healthful and innocent and fully important to our lives, their wins and successes so tousled with our personal, it’s inconceivable to inform the distinction.