When Levi Roots first walked into Dragons’ Den in 2007 with a guitar in one arm and his signature Reggae Reggae sauce in the other, he couldn’t even afford the taxi fare to get there.
Fast forward nearly 20 years later and the Jamaican-British entrepreneur is worth £30million according to The Sunday Times Rich List after originally receiving a £50,000 investment from Peter Jones and Richard Farleigh.
However, discussing his illustrious career, the 67-year-old has revealed one ‘deep regret’ that he still has after all of these years.
After finding fame on Dragons’ Den, Levi opened his first restaurant, the Papine Jerk Centre in Battersea, London, in 2007.
Serving as a community hub and providing lunches to nearby schools, the restaurant eventually closed in 2013 before he opened his second restaurant, the Levi Roots Caribbean Smokehouse, in 2015.
However, after it also closed its doors just six years later, Levi told Wholesale Manager: ‘I deeply regretted it closing.
‘I tried my uttermost to avoid it but all good things come to an end. But the Levi Roots brand remains highly successful in the retail sector.’
The entrepreneur also added that he would one day like to expand his brand internationally, by ‘bringing some “rastaurants” to the United States’.
Asked how it felt to secure a Dragons’ Den investment, he also added: ‘It felt like I had won the lottery. I had spent years facing rejection from banks and investors who didn’t believe in Reggae Reggae Sauce, so the deal represented a life-changing breakthrough.
‘Apart from the money itself, the experience gave me the crucial opportunity to prove I could be successful and it opened doors that had previously been closed to Caribbean food businesses in the UK.’
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Elsewhere in his interview, Levi discussed his upbringing and how when he arrived in the UK he was unable to read or write when he started school.
He also revealed how he was personal friends with Bob Marley when he lived in the UK, and they would play football every weekend together in Battersea Park.
On top of this, he recounted sharing the stage with musician James Brown in front of 50,000 people on one occasion, saying: ‘He was a cool guy, and he inspired me to persevere in the music trade.’
Discussing his rapid rise to fame, Levi previously told Metro: ‘It’s one of those magical moments that you pray for, that we all pray for.
‘We all dream about something absolutely ridiculous happening to our lives, but it always turns out to be a dream, you wake up and you realize that it’s a dream and it’s really disappointing, and you feel like going back to sleep just to get back into that dream.
‘But I suppose in this instance, it was all of that… you’re still actually living that dream, and it’s not a dream, it is actually reality. It’s fantastic, it’s unbelievable.
‘There’s no way I would have thought that something like that would have happened to myself, as a young Rastafarian man coming from Brixton in southwest London.
‘So it was unbelievable, I pinched myself a thousand times until I was black and blue all over, and the response was the same – that I did do it. I did slay the Dragons. It was fantastic. Really unbelievable.’
Dragons’ Den is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.
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