A Flamin’ Hot Cheeto starts as cornmeal that’s then mixed with water to create a batter. The batter moves through a small tube into a machine called an extruder, exposing the cornmeal mixture to extreme heat and pressure, which forces it to pop into that familiar Cheeto shape. From there, the Cheeto moves to the fryer, giving it that crucial crunch. It’s then slathered with cheese powder and spices, bagged, boxed, and delivered to store shelves.

Of course, that leaves out an important step: the magic dust, which is sprinkled on by marketing and advertising executives. The PepsiCo-owned Frito-Lay has spent hundreds of millions of dollars figuring out how to position Flamin’ Hot Cheetos—and it’s worked. The brand has become an edible meme and a full-on phenomenon, ubiquitous from grocery stores to tweens’ lunch boxes to TikTok videos. And in the process, Flamin’ Hot has become not just a snack, but also an expression of taste and identity.

Now, the brand itself is about to receive its own layer of magic dust, from Hollywood. Eva Longoria’s feature directorial debut, Flamin’ Hot, tells the story of Richard Montañez, a former PepsiCo executive who worked his way up from a Frito-Lay factory janitor to a leading figure in the company’s marketing department, and who claims to have come up with the idea for Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. The film, which premiered at SXSW in March and debuts on Hulu and Disney+ on June 9, has not been officially sanctioned by Frito-Lay, and its plot skirts around certain elements of the product’s development that are debated. Nevertheless, it offers the kind of pop-culture treatment that has been known to elevate a brand, and its origin story, into the stuff of legend.

Although Flamin’ Hot Cheetos first hit shelves in 1990, it was only in the past decade that the brand really caught fire. Frito-Lay launched a pop-up restaurant in New York in 2017 called the Spotted Cheetah, which served dishes like Flamin’ Hot Limón Chicken Tacos and Cheetos Mix-Ups Crusted Chicken Milanese. A year later, the company partnered with chef Roy Choi for another pop-up, in Hollywood, called the Cheetos Flamin’ Hot Spot. Today, in addition to 11 Flamin’ Hot Cheetos products, Frito-Lay’s proprietary Flamin’ dust can be found on Doritos, Ruffles, Lay’s, Funyuns, Smartfood, and even in a limited edition of Mountain Dew (all PepsiCo products).

Frito-Lay acknowledges that all of this—the new products, the restaurant pop-ups, the recipes it posts on its website for dishes like the Flamin’ Hot Bacon Ranch Cheeseball, the TikToks—stems from the passion of people sharing their creative ideas online, where a single Flamin’ Hot Cheetos-related video can draw more than 16 million views. PepsiCo declined to make a top executive available for this story, but Frito-Lay’s chief marketing officer, Brett O’Brien, told Fast Company in February that encouraging people to use Frito-Lay products as culinary ingredients has become a big part of its overall strategy. It’s a proven (remember the Frito Pie?) and effective playbook: In PepsiCo’s fourth-quarter 2022 financial results, the company reported that Frito-Lay’s North American business overall delivered 18% organic revenue growth, and 17% for the entire year. These gains are partially due to inflationary price increases, but snackers are clearly undeterred.

The film’s debut, and Flamin’ Hot’s rise, coincides with a change in American taste buds, which have grown increasingly tolerant to spice. The shift has a generational component. “Spicy flavors are being driven by millennials and Gen Z, who are much more multicultural,” says Darren Seifer, a food and beverage industry analyst at analytics firm NPD Group, “and a lot of the food culture comes along with that, which impacts the rest of the population.” Meanwhile, food memes and short-form cooking videos have proliferated on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, with “extreme” foods—the ones that turn your mouth to fire—drawing the most attention.

It’s a fortuitous trend line for Flamin’ Hot, which received positive early reviews. Longoria says it has been scoring well with under-25 males: “The focus group people said, ‘I can’t believe it, you got the group nobody gets. Unless it’s Marvel or Star Wars, nobody gets that group.’”

For Longoria, however, the film is less a biopic about a spicy snack than an inspiring tale about Montañez, who represents to her the struggles of many Latino Americans, and their capacity when given sufficient opportunity. She was drawn to his story about rising through the ranks at Frito-Lay. “The theme of the film is how opportunity isn’t distributed equally,” she says. “Your whole life, certain people will say that certain jobs aren’t for people like you. Ideas don’t come from people like you. And he kept asking, ‘Why not?’ His naivete was his superpower.”

Not long before Desperate Housewives made her a household name, while she was starring on The Young and the Restless, Eva Longoria hosted a fundraiser for farmworkers’ rights that had been organized by labor leader and activist Dolores Huerta. As Longoria delivered her scripted remarks to the gathered crowd from the stage, she had an awakening.

“Here I am, saying, ‘We have to help farmworkers because the rights we gained in the 1960s have been dismantled!’” Longoria recalls. “And I was like, ‘They have?’” After she got off the stage, she pressed Huerta for more information about what she’d just said, and Huerta “talked to me about the history of immigration, the dependency on migrant labor, and all these issues.” Then she remembers Huerta telling her, “One day you’re going to have a voice, so you better have something to say.”

Almost a decade later, as Desperate Housewives was nearing the end of its eight-season run, Longoria enrolled in a master’s program in Chicano Studies at Cal State, Northridge. “I needed to know where we’d been to get a sense of where we should be headed,” she says.

Since then, Longoria has devoted much of her professional energy to empowering the Latino community in the United States. Her production company, UnbeliEVAble Entertainment, has helped build a Latino talent pipeline to Hollywood, working to hire talent both in front of and behind the camera for productions like Grand Hotel and Devious Maids. Her philanthropy, the Eva Longoria Foundation, raises money to fund Latino-focused efforts in education and entrepreneurship. Her PAC, Latino Victory Fund, supports Latino political candidates, civic literacy, and get-out-the-vote efforts in largely Latino communities. Her nonprofit digital media platform, She Se Puede/Poderistas, offers community and support for Latinas. Even her cookware line, Risa, Spanish for “laughter,” is inspired by Longoria’s memories of her parents’ kitchen. And then there’s Flamin’ Hot.

Longoria was dedicated to telling Montañez’s story from his point of view. Flamin’ Hot is based on his 2021 memoir of the same name, which he published a year after retiring from Frito-Lay, following four decades with the company. To gain his trust, she ventured about five times to his home in Rancho Cucamonga, California, urging him for further details about his gang- and crime-filled years before landing a job at Frito-Lay. “He’s not that person anymore, so I had to show him that I understood that, while also convincing him that I needed to show that trajectory,” she says. “I wanted to show him the power of that journey. I’m a Latina. This is a Latino story. If this doesn’t do well, the message will be that stories about Latinos told by Latinos don’t work. We get very few at-bats.”

Born in Corpus Christi, Texas—her father was a U.S. Army veteran and her mother a special education teacher—Longoria is a ninth-generation Mexican American; her ancestors became American when the United States annexed Texas in 1845. As Longoria put it during her speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, “My family never crossed the border, the border crossed us.”

The Flamin’ Hot Ecosystem: Enter At Your Own Risk

Longoria, who studied kinesiology at Texas A&M University–Kingsville before pursuing acting, has always considered herself both 100% American and 100% Mexican, though she didn’t learn to speak Spanish until 2012—and it’s her third language, after English and French. She took pride in her ability to, as she puts it, “straddle the hyphen” in “Mexican-American,” but her dual identity could also be a hurdle. In December, she told the podcast In Her Shoes that when she would audition for Latino roles, she couldn’t do enough of an accent, and when she’d audition for white roles, she was too “brown.”

After she became famous from Desperate Housewives in 2004, she was bombarded with requests from philanthropies asking her to lend her voice (and face) to their causes. With the words from Dolores Huerta still fresh in her mind, she read Occupied America, by activist and scholar Rudy Acuña, and began auditing his classes at Cal State, Northridge. Then she enrolled for her master’s degree, which she completed in 2013.

Most of her classmates were writing their theses on immigration, and she thought she might do the same. But then her adviser asked if immigration was going to be her life’s work, and she had to think. She decided she was more inspired to follow her mother and focus on Latina education. “When I told my adviser, she said, ‘What Latinas? Young Latinas? Old Latinas? Who?’ I said, ‘Well, the ones who don’t have access to secondary education.’ And she asked, ‘What kind of education?’ She really made me narrow it down. So my thesis ended up [being] about Latinas and the lack of diversity in STEM fields.” Today, the Eva Longoria Foundation has raised more than $1.95 million for its microloan fund for Latina entrepreneurs, helped more than 2,000 participants in its L.A.-based STEM programs, and graduated more than 5,000 parents from programs that help them get involved in their children’s education.

As traditional interruptive advertising has become increasingly avoidable, brands have been getting ever more creative. Product placement in shows, films, and games (witness Vans, Gucci, and Nike setting up shop inside of Roblox) has become a $23 billion industry. So you’d think that an entire film revolving around a Frito-Lay product—with the brand name even in the title—would give Frito-Lay a massive appetite to be involved. But it wasn’t—not in the filming, financing, or marketing. At first, that might seem curious. But there’s a reason.

Flamin’ Hot was already in production when the Los Angeles Times ran a lengthy investigation in May 2021 reporting that, though Montañez may have shared ideas with top Frito-Lay executives and wound up working at the highest levels of the company’s marketing department, he did not, as he has claimed in speaking engagements and in his memoir, actually generate the idea for Flamin’ Hot anything. The concept, the article reported, was originated by Frito-Lay’s R&D, sales, and marketing teams when Montañez worked in the factory. Other elements of Montañez’s story failed to check out as well, including the timeline of his interaction with then CEO Roger Enrico in relation to the product’s development and the fact that Flamin’ Hot Cheetos rolled out regionally in small stores across Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Houston in 1990, according to the L.A. Times, not in Montañez’s local market of Southern California.

Longoria insists that she wasn’t fazed by the exposé. “The L.A. Times article had zero impact. Zero,” she says, reiterating the film’s plot: “Richard told [PepsiCo] that they were ignoring the Hispanic market. He told them to make products for us. He didn’t come up with the name and the recipe. His genius was in his grassroots marketing and knowing his community. I never set out to make a movie about the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, I set out to make a movie about this incredible man and his journey, and that was always my vision.”

Frito-Lay seems surprisingly unruffled, as well. A company spokesperson told Fast Company: “Flamin’ Hot is Richard Montañez’s story, told from his point of view. His contributions to Frito-Lay are highlighted throughout the film, specifically his insights and ideas on how to better serve Hispanic consumers and engage the Hispanic community, a legacy PepsiCo continues today. We are grateful to him for that and hope people enjoy the film.” The Los Angeles Times does cite a source who credits Montañez for helping develop marketing campaigns for its Sabrositas line, which catered to the Latino market near Los Angeles in the 1990s. These included Flamin’ Hot Popcorn and Flamin’ Hot Fritos and a cinnamon-sugar variety of Doritos that evoked a buñuelo. Frito-Lay CMO Rachel Ferdinando told CNBC in 2020 that Montañez’s “insights into the Hispanic consumer really helped us shape and think about how we should talk to that consumer,” adding that his insight “was something we relied on very heavily.”

Factual disputes are nothing new in the pantheon of films “based on a true story,” and movies revolving around business history or corporate leaders are no exception. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak publicly criticized the portrayal of his business partner in 2015’s Steve Jobs. The film The Founder incorrectly credited Ray Kroc with the idea of franchising McDonald’s. Ford v Ferrari took liberties with how Lee Iacocca and Carroll Shelby first teamed up. And as soon as the trailer for Ben Affleck’s film Air dropped in February, about Nike’s courtship of Michael Jordan, rumblings of inaccuracy began. Longoria’s challenge with Flamin’ Hot is to make sure that the overriding message and emotion of Montañez’s tale outweighs any potential back-and-forth about the snack’s invention.

In her hands, the film deftly tiptoes around the disputed elements of the story, using a number of creative techniques to convey that not only is it told from Montañez’s perspective, but also that he’s been known to spin a yarn or two in the service of a good story. Scenes depicting Frito-Lay executives at the company’s Plano, Texas, headquarters talking like street-level gangsters convey in an over-the-top way that much of the corporate side of this tale is just Montañez’s impression of what happened, since he wasn’t there and couldn’t have known “what they were actually saying,” she says. “I decided to go with what he thought they’d be saying.” For those scenes, Longoria, whose comedic work on shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Saturday Night Live, and Black-ish rarely gets the attention it deserves, cites Drunk History as a major influence. “It’s my favorite show,” she says. “That’s where I got it!”

When we spoke in March, Flamin’ Hot wasn’t the only major project Longoria had premiering that month. Searching for Mexico, a spin-off of Stanley Tucci’s hit CNN Originals show, Searching for Italy, was also about to debut. “When people see the beauty of this country—its people, its culture—and realize why Americans love tacos and margaritas so much, it comes from here,” she says. “So you should treat that country with kindness and compassion.”

When asked how she decides which projects will be worth her time and energy, she says her first criterion is its potential for lasting impact. “Some people say we should remake Desperate Housewives,” she says. “And my answer is, ‘Why?’”

Take tequila. Longoria says she’d been approached several times over the years about partnering with a tequila company, but always said no. Most tequila branding was rooted in a macho image she wasn’t interested in. (Dwayne Johnson, Mark Wahlberg, Michael Jordan, Nick Jonas, Carlos Santana, Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, and George Clooney and Rande Gerber all have their own lines.) But in 2021, she agreed to cofound a brand, Casa Del Sol, and hired women for the roles of master distiller, president, and head tequilero.

Unlike other celebrity-driven booze brands, Casa Del Sol isn’t centered on Longoria herself. It focuses on sustainable production methods (such as using agave biomass to fuel the distillery’s cooking process) and tequila’s role in Mexican culture. Its vegan leather bottleneck covers are made by local artisans in Jalisco who work from home. The company sends them the material to cut, stamp, and sew, and Longoria is proud of how this helps support that local economy. “Our distillery is also 100% Mexican-owned, while most others are owned by U.S. conglomerates,” she says, a fact that “really surprised me.”

As for Flamin’ Hot, she believes that its lasting impact will be twofold, with viewers being inspired by its example of Mexican American success and with the film itself being a showcase for Latino and Latina talent, including not just lead actors Jesse Garcia and Annie Gonzalez, but screenwriter Linda Yvette Chavez (who cowrote with Lewis Colick), director of photography Federico Cantini, production designer Brandon Mendez, and costume designer Elaine Montalvo.

“People think Hollywood is so progressive,” she says. “It’s not. If you look at the number of female directors this year compared to last, it’s down. If you look at the number of Latinos on-screen, it’s down. There’s this illusion of progress. As soon as a report comes out that says there’s been more Latinos on TV, the foot comes off the gas. Same thing on voting. We have one good turnout and people start to ease up. But no! It happened only because of strong grassroots organizing. You can’t stop because of one success.”