Judge dismisses Flamin’ Hot Cheetos lawsuit

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For years, the purported origin story of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos flourished through the internet and beyond as a spicy retelling of the American Dream, with self-proclaimed inventor of the snack Richard Montanez recounting how he came up with the idea while working as janitor for Frito-Lay.

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But a Los Angeles Times investigation in 2021 threw a wrench into the rags-to-riches tale, with Frito-Lay disputing Montanez’s claim and telling the newspaper that “the facts do not support the urban legend.”

The origin story of the snack remains in dispute after a federal judge this week dismissed a lawsuit filed by Montanez against Frito-Lay and its parent company, PepsiCo. U.S. District Judge John W. Holcomb ruled that Montanez’s accusations of fraud and defamation were either largely deficient or lacking “factual support,” but wrote that he would allow Montanez a chance to fix his lawsuit “because he may be able to cure the deficiencies in his pleading by alleging additional facts.”

Montanez will have until June 13 to file an amended complaint, according to the ruling. If he does not, the court will dismiss the lawsuit.

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Attorneys for Montanez and PepsiCo did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday morning.

The complaint accused PepsiCo and Frito-Lay of causing undue harm to Montanez’s career as a public speaker and consultant. As the “Godfather of Latino Marketing,” Montanez had been booking 35 engagements a year at $10,000 to $50,000 apiece, but he stopped receiving those invitations as a result of what he describes in the lawsuit as the companies’ “open racism and blatant lies.”

According to the lawsuit, Montanez grew up in a Southern California migrant labor camp sharing an 800-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment with his parents and 10 siblings. He got a job in the mid-1970s as a janitor at Frito-Lay’s plant in Rancho Cucamonga, just east of Los Angeles, where, more than a decade later, he was 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,” his suit states.

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He and his wife started experimenting in their kitchen to create new snack flavours, particularly those that he believed he would appeal to Latinos like him, eventually coming up with the idea of applying the flavours of the elote, or grilled Mexican street corn covered in cheese, butter, lime and chili, to the Cheeto, Montanez wrote in his memoir.

He bought his first-ever tie for $3 to present the idea to Enrico, and, as the story goes, the rest was history. Flamin’ Hot Cheetos went on to become a sensation, transcending Cheetos to inspire other chili-flavoured snacks and becoming a cultural touchstone, inspiring rap songs, memes, clothing and even Katy Perry’s Halloween costume in 2014. Fueled by this success, Montanez rose through the ranks to become PepsiCo’s vice president of multicultural marketing and sales, retiring in 2019.

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Montanez’s account of the origin story of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos has been told in two best-selling memoirs and a movie released in 2023 that was directed by Eva Longoria.

“I created Flamin’ Hot Cheetos not only as a product but as a movement and as a loyal executive for PepsiCo,” Montanez said in a statement last year. “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.”

Holcomb wrote in his ruling that “Montanez and Defendants mutually benefitted from Defendants’ decades-long support” of Montanez’s story. The lawsuit claimed that the companies sent him across the country to talk about inventing the snack with high-powered politicians, captains of industry and elite academics.

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But after a former Frito-Lay employee contacted the company to challenge Montanez’s account in 2018, Frito-Lay launched an investigation, according to the LA Times. “We have interviewed multiple personnel who were involved in the test market, and all of them indicate that Richard was not involved in any capacity in the test market,” the company said in a statement to the Times.

“That doesn’t mean we don’t celebrate Richard,” the statement continued, “but the facts do not support the urban legend.”

Five days after the LA Times article was published, PepsiCo issued a statement about Montanez’s contributions, calling him “an important part of PepsiCo’s history and the success of the company.” The company noted that while “we have no reason to doubt the stories he shares about taking the initiative to create new product ideas for the Cheetos brand, and pitching them to past PepsiCo leaders,” a separate division team had also been developing spicy flavours “that were tested in market and found their way into permanent products on store shelves, including Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”

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“Different work streams tackling the same product without interacting occasionally occurred in the past when divisions operated independently and were not the best at communicating,” the statement said, according to media reports at the time. “However, just because we can’t draw a clear link between them doesn’t mean we don’t embrace all of their contributions and ingenuity, including Richard’s.”

In his lawsuit, Montanez said his former employer had “promised to continue to support, and to continue to tell the true story” of how he created Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

Holcomb wrote that status as the creator of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos “was not an express term or benefit of his employment.”

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