Carey currently sits on the board of the Home Depot, serves as executive chairman of the North Carolina textiles company Unifi and is on the board of a blank-check vehicle, Omnichannel Acquisition Corp. Many have recently been deleted. In another post, now deleted, he wrote that he worked on the Doritos Salsa Rio flavor in — a product that first hit test markets in , according to Advertising Age articles from that year.
In public statements since conducting its internal investigation, Frito-Lay has struck a cautious tone. He has previously worked as a feature writer for a number of publications including Newsweek, the Verge, and Lucky Peach.
The best side hustles for musicians and music lovers. Strike at Kaiser Permanente averted two days before deadline. Stocks close higher, but indexes still end week in the red. All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. More than a dozen former employees, the archival record and Frito-Lay itself say otherwise. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options.
By Sam Dean Staff Writer. For the record: p. Business Why are doughnut boxes pink? Lynne Greenfeld, former Frito-Lay employee. The headquarters of Frito-Lay Inc. Business You see the warnings everywhere. Business Times Investigations. Sam Dean. Follow Us twitter instagram email facebook. However, he said he was "kicked out" from product testing in the market. What do you think is the reason for the confusion? David Thomas. Entrepreneur Store. Skip to content Profile Avatar. Subscribe to Entrepreneur.
Magazine Subscriptions. The mystery of who created the Flamin 'Hot Cheetos. A company or a Chicano? By Natalia Carbonell August 24, This article was translated from our Spanish edition using AI technologies. They create a makeshift tumbler using a plastic bag meant for roasting a turkey, and they keep fine tuning the recipe. They figure out that spraying the cheetos with oil first helps the seasonings stay on the chip.
Dan Pashman: That means Richard will have his chance to give an official pitch for this new snack. The day comes, and as Richard tells it, the board room is filled with high level executives, product developers, and lots of plant workers. Over people are there, including the CEO. But he gets up in front of the group and tells the story of going to the grocery store, seeing the Mexican spices, of eating elote, and getting his inspiration.
He even pulls out an elote from under the podium and takes a bite. At the end, one of the senior execs asks, "How much market share are we talking about? But then, a vision comes to him. And he says And Roger says:. Dan Pashman: Roger Enrico is sold.
Frito-Lay starts developing Flamin' Hot Cheetos. Richard says they even base the spice blend on the one he and his wife developed in their home kitchen. Richard begins telling his story at company events, and then more widely as a motivational speaker. And he turns it into a story about inspiration and perseverance, about climbing up the corporate ladder from janitor to executive. You have my permission to be great. Dan Pashman: I should mention that we reached out to Richard multiple times but he did not respond to our request for an interview.
Gustavo Arellano: And you think, wow, that's really cool. One of us did that, like that's awesome. And so it just becomes embedded, specifically, with Mexican-American culture but Latinos at large also embrace that as one of their own, even if you're not a Mexican or Chicanos.
Like, oh, cool, like one of our cousins invented this chip that speaks to us. That's awesome. Of course, we're going to love it even more. Con mas gusto, like with more joy. Yes, the one and only food expert from Queer Eye but he wasn't the obvious choice for that role.
And then you have people who are saying that. And all you see — like, all I saw was that. I took out all of the good and I just like focused in on all of the bad. And it made me miserable. Plus, he shares his secrets for a good salad and his hot takes on pierogis. It's really a great conversation. Check it out , up now wherever you got this one. Dan Pashman: OK. Back to the show. So Sam Dean, the reporter for the L. Times we heard from earlier, gets an anonymous tip.
Well, I know how Flamin' Hot Cheetos were really invented. So he decides to look into it. Sam Dean: You know, the first thing we usually do is just a quick, you know, Lexis Nexis archive search. It's very boring. We'll add that in. Dan Pashman: And then this is all going to sound very exciting. Go on. Lexis Nexis, hit it. Sam Dean: Well, yeah. So you look up the historical stuff. We saw, like, OK, there's all this stuff about Flamin' Hot Cheetos in the early 90s and there's this — very quickly, we found this article that was just like PR person for Frito-Lay in '92 saying, yeah, they came out of, you know, Northern Division in Chicago and we rolled them out this year.
Sam Dean: So it starts with, you know, this guy, Fred Lindsay, in the field and his coworkers, who are working all the time on the up and down the street market, which is like liquor stores, corner stores, gas stations, stuff like that.
Sam Dean: And they see that other companies' spicy products are just doing really well. They're getting beat at the corner stores by these spicy things.
People aren't buying Frito-Lay stuff. Dan Pashman: So Fred says to the marketing department:. Sam Dean: We just need something spicy to compete. We're leaving money on the table. People love this. We're a giant company. We can do it, too. She visits small stores in the Midwest, works with the product design teams on branding and the flavor mix. Basically, every element of this new snack. Sam Dean: And she in her recollection and some of her co-workers say that she came up with the name Flamin Hot.
She was like, that sounds good, and she got sign off from a bunch of her bosses. A salesman in the midwest pitched the idea and a junior employee at headquarters in Texas developed it. Enrico came to Frito-Lay in She also said Roger did take a trip to the Cucamonga plant, and did specifically ask to meet Richard. Sam Dean: I don't think that the CEO of a company would get a pitch for something that already exists and say, wow, great idea, we should talk about it. Of the former Frito-Lay staffers he talked to, who worked in product development, none of them recall a meeting like that happening except one.
Al Carey. He was a Frito-Lay executive at the time, and was a mentor to Richard for decades. Richard and Al have made public appearances together, and Al says that a pitch meeting did happen, that Richard pitched a spicy snack aimed at the Latino market. Sam Dean: So Frito-Lay doesn't say much.
Executives backing him up, you know, say that, oh, yes, Richard is the guy who invented this. He's a great asset to us. But it seems like it's a lot of his own self promo, as far as I can tell. But, yeah, Frito-Lay doesn't say much. There's kind of let it grow. Dan Pashman: Were they aware internally at the time that he's going around telling the story that it wasn't true? Sam Dean: By the time he started telling the story in the, you know, publicly, most the people who worked on it are gone.
And then it seems like there's a lot of other people, the company, who genuinely just think it's true. You know, it's like they started working there in They don't know what happened 20 years ago. Like, sure, why not? Lynne Greenfeld stumbled on it in That triggered an internal investigation. Dan Pashman: But Frito-Lay did not make these findings public.
Sam knew he had a compelling story on his hands. But he wanted to run an early draft by Gustavo. The two are colleagues at the L. Sam Dean: And so I ask him just, do you think I should do this? I'm a white guy. This is a thing that a lot of Latino people love, especially in Southern California.
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