“I’m probably the most uneducated, brilliant person you will ever meet,” Richard Montañez (played by Jesse Garcia) declares at the start of Flamin’ Hot, a new film about the creation of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos now streaming on Hulu and Disney+. It’s something the real Montañez once said in an interview, a phrase that reflects the rags-to-riches fairy tale he’s spun as the self-proclaimed inventor of the titular billion-dollar spicy snack.

Montañez is a former janitor at Frito-Lay who climbed the corporate ranks, moving from cleaning machinery at the Frito-Lay plant in Rancho Cucamonga, California, to eventually become a vice president at Frito-Lay’s parent company, PepsiCo. For years he’s been selling the story of his rise at corporations and prestigious universities, for appearance fees of $10,000 to $50,000 per speaking engagement. 

According to Montañez’s original lore (and the movie), Montañez was raised in Southern California. He struggled to learn English and support his family before landing a job at Frito-Lay’s Rancho Cucamonga plant in 1976, he said in a 2021 interview. More than a decade into his tenure at Frito-Lay, Montañez said, Pepsi’s newly instated CEO, Roger Enrico (played by Tony Shalhoub in the film), inspired him to “act like an owner.” Soon, Montañez noticed similarities in shape between elote (grilled corn on the cob topped with chili powder) and Cheetos. Inspiration struck. Montañez then brought unseasoned chips home for experimentation. After toting a trash bag of naked chips from factory floor to his home kitchen, he, his wife Judy (Annie Gonzalez), and his family stumbled upon crunchy, dusty, burning eureka. 

Unaware of company protocol (“I don’t think I could spell the word at the time, let alone know what it meant,” he told CBS), Montañez said he cold-called Enrico to pitch him Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in 1991. The only snag? CBS reports that the name Flamin’ Hot had already been trademarked by Pepsi, and according to the Los Angeles Times, the product was being test-marketed in cities including Chicago, Detroit, and Houston. 

It would be another two decades before Montañez’s account was challenged. In May 2021, shortly before the release of his second memoir, titled Flamin’ Hot: The Incredible True Story of One Man’s Rise From Janitor to Top Executive, the Los Angeles Times published an exposé. After conducting interviews with more than a dozen former Frito-Lay employees and poring through company archival records, the paper concluded that Montañez’s claims were embellished, if not totally false. “Montañez made it, from rags to riches, from factory floor to corporate suite,” reporter Sam Dean wrote. “He just didn’t make Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”

In reality, according to the Times, the spicy snack’s origin dates back to 1989, thousands of miles from Southern California, at the corporate offices of Frito-Lay’s headquarters in Plano, Texas. Lynne Greenfeld, then a junior employee who’d just earned an MBA, was tasked with developing the product. While Montañez has been touting his triumph since the late 2000s, Greenfeld tells the Times that she didn’t know this until 2018, when she contacted Frito-Lay and triggered an internal investigation. “It is disappointing that 20 years later, someone who played no role in this project would begin to claim our experience as his own and then personally profit from it,” she told the Times. 

Montañez’s narrative is littered with inaccuracies, according to the Times. Enrico, who died in 2016, joined Frito-Lay as CEO at the start of 1991, nearly six months after Flamin’ Hot Cheetos were being tested in select cities. Patti Rueff, Enrico’s longtime secretary, confirmed to the Times that Montañez made a call to her boss, but estimated it was in 1992 or 1993. 

It is true, according to a US News and World Report article from December 1993 cited by the Times, that Montañez may have had a direct hand in the creation of Flamin’ Hot Popcorn, which debuted in stores four years after Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. He was also involved in a Sabrositas (a subsidiary of Frito-Lay) line that included Flamin’ Hot Popcorn, two types of Fritos—Flamin’ Hot and Lime and Chile Corn Chips—and a Doritos version branded as buñuelito-style tortilla chips, according to the Times. 

“We value Richard’s many contributions to our company, especially his insights into Hispanic consumers, but we do not credit the creation of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or any Flamin’ Hot products to him,” Frito-Lay wrote in a statement to the Times. The company added, “None of our records show that Richard was involved in any capacity in the Flamin’ Hot test market…. That doesn’t mean we don’t celebrate Richard, but the facts do not support the urban legend.” After publication, parent company PepsiCo would tell Variety in a statement that what’s “far from being an urban legend” is Montañez’s “remarkable 40-plus-year career at PepsiCo.” While the company might not have been able to “draw a clear link between” Montañez and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, it does “attribute the launch and success of” the product “to several people…including Montañez.”

The fable was allowed to flourish in part because “most of the original Flamin’ Hot team had retired by the 2000s,” according to the Times. Montañez himself retired in March 2019 after Frito-Lay’s investigation, as did his corporate confidant Al Carey. Although recollections of why and when they met differ (Montañez writes in his second memoir that it was the late 1980s; Carey told the Times it was December 1992 and under completely different circumstances), Carey is one of the only prominent Frito-Lay execs to endorse Montañez’s narrative. “Of course stories grow, and the longer we get away from the date the stories evolve,” Carey told the Times. “I’ll bet Richard’s added a little flavor to it.” 

Carey also said he attempted to curb Montañez’s tendency toward theatrics. “I said this is a fun story; this shouldn’t be a controversial story; your inclination to dramatize the story a little bit, you’ve got to keep away from that,” he told the outlet. As Montañez told CBS, “[PepsiCo] would even tell me, ‘Richard, in your speeches you need to say it was a team effort.’ But in reality it never was.”

While Montañez did not comment for the Times article, he spoke to Variety about its findings. “I’m not even going to try to dispute that lady, because I don’t know,” he said of Greenfeld. “All I can tell you is what I did. All I have is my history, what I did in my kitchen.” Montañez further claimed that he was “pushed out” of the test-marketing process and said Frito-Lay lacked documentation on his contribution because he “wasn’t a supervisor,” adding, “I was the least of the least.” 

Producers of Montañez’s biopic, first announced in 2018 and adapted from his 2013 memoir, A Boy, a Burrito, and a Cookie: From Janitor to Executive, were alerted by Frito-Lay of the controversy in 2019, according to the LA Times. But production forged ahead with director Eva Longoria, who told People that her directorial debut was “never telling the history of the Cheeto.” It is “Richard Montañez’s story, told from his point of view,” Frito-Lay said in a statement to People. That’s also been the sentiment of the film’s screenwriters, Lewis Colick—who maintained that Montañez “should remain the face of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos”—and Linda Yvette Chávez, who said, “You just know what is true in your gut, and Richard’s story…I know that story in my heart.”

There is no mention of that article, investigation, or ensuing controversy in the film, which regurgitates much of the origin story Montañez has told, from selling bean burritos to classmates for 25 cents a pop to having his wife fill out his Frito-Lay application. 

Flamin’ Hot does, however, acknowledge that Montañez’s idea could have coincided with the convergent development and testing of a similar product at Frito-Lay’s corporate headquarters. “While we were trying to remember everything our abuelitas taught us about chile, apparently in the Midwest they had already been spicing things up for a while,” Montañez says in the film. “Except their ingredients came in test tubes and syringes.” The Montañez family’s humble experimentation—using bright, fresh tomatoes, onions, and peppers—is then contrasted with the clinical approach of a group of lab coat-wearing white people pouring liquid samples. 

“I don’t know what’s going down over there. All I knew was our ingredients came from the ground, our roots,” Montañez continues via voiceover. “Me and Judy had that spice in our DNA.”

But the film doesn’t rewrite which recipe made it onto store shelves. When Enrico visits the Rancho Cucamonga plant later in the film, he doesn’t entertain producing Montañez’s Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Instead, he announces that Frito-Lay will send 5,000 cases of the existing version to his local market. “Well, it’s not Judy’s. But it’ll do,” Montanez says after plucking one of the corporate-approved chips off a conveyor belt. 

When the product gathers dust and (not the cheddar-y, delicious kind), Montañez’s undisputed powers in selling to the Hispanic community kick in. He fires up a grassroots effort in his Southern California neighborhood, getting Flamin’ Hot Cheetos into the hands of people including the real Montañez and his wife, Judy, who briefly appear at the end of the film as prospective customers. In the movie’s end credits, Montañez is labeled the “godfather of Hispanic marketing”—at least one title of his that has yet to be disputed.