Eva Longoria's Flamin' Hot Project

How her new film aims for Latino empowerment

- Jeff Beer

EXPOSING THE CORNMEAL MIXTURE to extreme heat and pressure that 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 tween lunch boxes to TikTok videos. And in the process, Flamin' Hot has become not just a snack but 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 June 9, has not been officially sanctioned by FritoLay, 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.