Flame Out
Flamin’ Hot Cheetos
For years, a guy named Richard Montanez has been credited with inventing the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto. He was a janitor, the story goes, working in a Frito-Lay plant in California, fought his way in front of the company’s CEO to pitch his chile-covered Cheeto, and the rest is history. Unfortunately, the story is a lie:
There’s just one problem: Montañez didn’t invent Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, according to interviews with more than a dozen former Frito-Lay employees, the archival record and Frito-Lay itself.
“None of our records show that Richard was involved in any capacity in the Flamin’ Hot test market,” Frito-Lay wrote in a statement to The Times, in response to questions about an internal investigation whose existence has not been previously disclosed. “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.
This certainly isn’t the first time someone has taken credit for a thing they didn’t do, but what is unusual about this story is Frito-Lay going along with Montanez’s lie for years. Montanez wasn’t subtle about it:
Montañez has built a lucrative second career out of telling and selling this story, appearing at events for Target, Walmart, Harvard and USC, among others, and commanding fees of $10,000 to $50,000 per appearance.
His second memoir, “Flamin’ Hot: The Incredible True Story of One Man’s Rise from Janitor to Top Executive,” is out in June from an imprint of Penguin Random House.
A biopic based on his life, to be directed by Eva Longoria and produced by Christian super-producer DeVon Franklin for Searchlight Pictures, is set to begin filming this summer. Both the book and the movie were sold after bidding wars — Montañez’s story is undeniably hot.
Even in their disavowal of the facts Frito-Lay had good things to say about Montanez:
“That doesn’t mean we don’t celebrate Richard,” the statement continued, “but the facts do not support the urban legend.”
What! That is not an acceptable answer when it is revealed one of your marketing executives has been lying to the public for a decade. So what happened?
Flamin’ Hots were created by a team of hotshot snack food professionals starting in 1989, in the corporate offices of Frito-Lay’s headquarters in Plano, Texas. The new product was designed to compete with spicy snacks sold in the inner-city mini-marts of the Midwest. A junior employee with a freshly minted MBA named Lynne Greenfeld got the assignment to develop the brand — she came up with the Flamin’ Hot name and shepherded the line into existence.
Some time in the 2000s, Montanez started taking public credit for inventing the product. It wasn’t until 2018 that Greenfeld became aware and contacted Frito-Lay, who did an investigation and confirmed her version of the facts. Weirdly, the CEO of Frito-Lay at the time seems to have been in on the ruse, or perhaps Montanez had convinced him it was true:
One other Frito-Lay executive played a key role in Montañez’s Flamin’ Hot story: Al Carey, a Frito-Lay lifer who worked at the company for nearly 40 years, rising through the executive suite to the top of the corporate pyramid.
Carey appears to be the only Frito-Lay executive who worked at the company at the time of Flamin’ Hot development to publicly endorse Montañez’s version of events over the years.
Both Carey and Montanez retired in 2019, putting an end to the investigation. It’s unclear what will happen to the Netflix biopic, but if you run across it on streaming you can raise an orange-dust-coated fingertip for Lynne Greenfeld, the real inventor of the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto.
JBS
A few weeks ago, hackers disrupted one of the largest gas pipelines in the country with a ransomware attack. This led to a brief spike in gas prices and a fuel shortage, and spawned dozens of articles about how vulnerable US infrastructure is to cyber attack. Well, it’s happened again, and this time they came for our meat:
A cyberattack on the world’s largest meat processor forced the shutdown of nine beef plants in the United States on Tuesday, according to union officials, and disrupted production at poultry and pork plants. The attack could upset the nation’s meat markets and raises new questions about the vulnerability of critical American businesses.
JBS is the world’s largest meat processing company, and even a single day of disruption could “significantly impact” wholesale beef prices, which is the sign of a healthy, properly functioning supply chain. It’s unclear what the hackers compromised, but maybe it was files related to COVID-19 outbreaks at JBS plants, or their worker’s comp violations, who knows. Meatpacking is one of the worst, most dangerous jobs in the country, so at the very least the hackers gave JBS workers a day off.
Google Ads
It’s reasonable to expect that when you type something into Google like “register for an employer identification number” the first result would be an official government website. However, in many cases, Google allows private companies to run ads above government links, tricking people into paying them for free services:
[Keely Reed] clicked it and filled out her information and paid the $250 fee the site requested. She had fallen into a trap, one set by the owner of ein-gov.tax-filing-forms.com, which paid Google to show its ad in the results for her search for “online employer identification number”—and place it above the website of the IRS, the agency that distributes EINs online for free.
That stinks! It’s also explicitly against Google’s policies:
Google’s ad policy states, “Promotions for assistance with applying or paying for official services that are directly available via a government or government delegated provider” aren’t allowed. Yet The Markup found a swath of examples of ads that appear to do just that.
Right, sure. Once again independent journalists are serving as reviewers for Google’s ads. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect Google to catch all forms of ad fraud on its platform, but these scammers weren’t exactly being subtle:
Along with the site that fooled Reed, Tax Filing Forms also operates irs.gov-taxnumber.com—a URL that contains “irs.gov” but isn’t affiliated with the IRS. The Markup found ads for that site on Google in search results for “how to get ein.”
It doesn’t stop there, with scammers imitating the USPS and companies that administer COBRA health insurance for people who were laid off:
Numerous Google ads for searches like “change my address USPS” return third-party sites whose fine-print indicates they charge a high fee.
The Markup also found misleading ads for health insurance, purporting to sell “COBRA”—a type of insurance laid-off workers can buy only through their former employer, not from an online vendor.
Is this…legal? The FTC doesn’t seem to think so:
Last year, the Federal Trade Commission sued On Point Global, a company that allegedly advertised websites via Google search where you could renew your driver’s license, buy a fishing license, or determine if you were eligible for public benefits like Section 8 housing. But in fact, when people signed up for any of those services, usually for more than $20 each, On Point would send them a PDF “guide” containing publicly available information on how to complete the task through the standard government site.
This was lucrative. Selling PDF guides earned the company $63.2 million in less than two years, according to court documents. Other services, like providing “assistance” in filing change of address forms, earned $17.1 million.
In 2018 I had a run-in with one of On Point’s websites, DMV.com, when I was working to register voters in Florida. Google had given DMV.com a featured spot above Florida’s own voter registration website, essentially free advertising for a for-profit business. We brought it to Google’s attention, and they eventually removed it from search results for a number of states, but I have no idea how long it was at the top of the listings. I don’t think Google did this intentionally, but it’s yet another example of how gameable algorithms can result in direct harm to consumers, and how there is no way to hold the tech monopolies accountable for their mistakes.
What can the authorities do? One of the challenges is that the ads and listings run afoul of a whole web of different enforcement agencies, so tracking down offenders can be difficult if Google won’t police its platform. The Postal Service has gone so far as to spend our tax dollars to run ads above the scam listings:
MyMove, the company that runs the Postal Service’s online change of address portal, pays Google to appear above the private ads too. (USPS spokesperson Sara Martin said the amount was “proprietary.”)
Louis DeJoy
I have written about the USPS and its Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Last fall, the Washington Post published an investigation into alleged campaign finance violations - DeJoy encouraged executives at his logistics company to make large campaign donations to GOP candidates, and then (allegedly) reimbursed them via bonuses, which is illegal.
Now, DeJoy is under FBI investigation:
FBI agents in recent weeks interviewed current and former employees of DeJoy and the business, asking questions about political contributions and company activities, these people said. Prosecutors also issued a subpoena to DeJoy himself for information, one of the people said.
DeJoy rose in the GOP ranks by funneling company money through a number of straw donors, and it worked, since he’s now the Postmaster General of the United States. His methods were…not subtle:
A Post analysis of federal and state campaign finance records found a pattern of extensive donations by New Breed employees to Republican candidates, with the same amount often given by multiple people on the same day. Between 2000 and 2014, 124 individuals who worked for the company together gave more than $1 million to federal and state GOP candidates. Many had not previously made political donations, according to The Post’s analysis.
“He would ask employees to make contributions at the same time that he would say, ‘I’ll get it back to you down the road,’ ” one former employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Post last year.
Seems fine! DeJoy also denied the claims under oath in front of Congress last year, so he could be on the hook for that as well. President Biden is still reluctant to fire or take any action against DeJoy, for whatever reason.
Nestlé
In addition to making chocolate, Nestlé produces a lot of bottled water. Some of that water comes from forests in California, which is a problem when the state is (again) facing a major drought. The state has finally had enough, and sent Nestlé a cease and desist in April:
California water officials have moved to stop Nestlé from siphoning millions of gallons of water out of California’s San Bernardino forest, which it bottles and sells as Arrowhead brand water, as drought conditions worsen across the state.
Not only is Nestlé taking water from a state that desperately needs it, they’re taking twenty five times as much water as they have a “legal” right to:
Nestlé has maintained that its rights to California spring water date back to 1865. But a 2017 investigation found that Nestlé was taking far more than its share. Last year the company drew out about 58m gallons, far surpassing the 2.3m gallons a year it could validly claim, according to the report.
Back in 2015, environmental groups claimed the permit Nestlé was using had actually expired:
The Story of Stuff Project, along with co-plaintiffs the Center for Biological Diversity and the Courage Campaign Institute, claim that Nestlé is breaking federal law, operating on a permit expired nearly 20 years ago, in 1988 […]
This all seems absolutely crazy - the company has flouted state and federal law for years and extracted finite water resources from springs all over the country, and no one can do anything about it? While the extracted spring water wouldn’t single-handedly reverse the extreme drought conditions in California, local residents and ecosystems depend on it:
Strawberry Creek, which Nestlé has been siphoning from, is a tributary of the Santa Ana river, which provides drinking water for about 750,000 residents. The region’s watersheds also provide a habitat for deer, fox, mountain lions and threatened Alameda whipsnakes.
It is outrageous that companies can point to agreements signed in the nineteenth century to defend the extraction of public resources for profit. Nestlé pays the US Forest Service a permit fee of $2,100 a year, and doesn’t pay anything for the water. Earlier this year Nestlé sold its North American water brands to private equity for $4.3 billion dollars.
Substack
Back in March, I wrote about leaving Substack over their editorial and business decisions. In the months since, the company has made some conciliatory statements and added some good writers. I am still skeptical of their leadership and business intentions, but frankly it’s a major pain in the ass for me to move to another service, so I will stick around here for now. Sorry for the false alarm.
Short Cons
NY Post - “Rep. Matt Gaetz says he was swindled out of cash by “malicious actors” after wiring them money as part of a $155,000 boat purchase.”
NBC News - ““The crimes we allege in this indictment read like something straight out of Hollywood fiction,” FBI Assistant Director William Sweeney Jr. said in a statement. “The thieves used sophisticated tools to thwart security systems at foreign banks and tried to cover their tracks by laundering money through U.S. banks."”
Jacobin - “It’s no surprise that a company which so disdains its workers and pays lax attention to laws has had so many recent food-safety incidents: hepatitis in 2008, E. coli and norovirus in 2015 and 2016, and Clostridium perfringens in 2018.”
Slate - “Many of these fake comments were the responsibility of lead generation firms—companies intended to help policy campaigns drum up public support and comments. Instead, the report found, three lead generation firms fraudulently submitted comments themselves.”
Tips, thoughts, or Flamin’ Hot Anything to scammerdarkly@gmail.com