Levi Roots

Roots was born Keith Valentine Graham in 1958 in the village of Content in Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, the youngest child in his family. When he was four, his parents left to build a new life in the UK and he was raised by his grandparents; in the kitchen his grandmother taught him the secrets of mixing Caribbean flavours, herbs, and spices, and at the church where she sang he discovered his love of music.⁠[1][2][3][2][2]

From 1968 he lived in London with his family, in Brixton. He could not read or write when he started school in England but caught up quickly; he became a Rastafarian as a teenager, and after school he became an apprentice engineer before leaving to pursue a career in music.⁠[4][3][3][3]

As a teenager he joined the Coxsone sound system, writing songs in Brixton and travelling to dance halls with his records, and he has said he played in front of 50,000 people with James Brown. In 1998 he was nominated for the Best Reggae Act award at the MOBO Awards.⁠[1][1][3]

He was imprisoned twice as a young man. He has recalled that it was while thinking in prison that he left Keith Graham behind, became Levi Roots, and decided to do good; on the BBC he described the experience as a turning point in his life.⁠[1][1][1][3]

In 1991 Roots met his later business partner Tony Bailey, and from 1993 the two ran a jerk chicken stall at the Notting Hill Carnival every year. That year he combined the food he was cooking with the music he was playing to open the “Rasta’raunt” at the carnival, which became an annual fixture. For years he made the sauce in his kitchen in Brixton with his children and sold it from a bag on his back, but banks and businesses, who thought the product looked and sounded “too black”, long refused to invest.⁠[4][2][2][2]

In June 2006, Roots began preparing to launch a jerk sauce called Reggae Reggae Sauce at that August’s Notting Hill Carnival, and the same month applied to Sainsbury’s for financial and other support. That year he was spotted at the World Food Market by a BBC researcher and invited to appear on the investment programme Dragons’ Den, and he later applied successfully to go on the show.⁠[4][2][4]

On February 7, 2007, the episode of Dragons’ Den featuring Roots was broadcast on BBC Two. With guitar in hand, he sang to the investors about Reggae Reggae Sauce and secured £50,000 from Peter Jones and Richard Farleigh in exchange for a 40% stake in his business. As the investors required, he had incorporated a company for the sauce in January 2007.⁠[4][3][2][4]

After the broadcast, Peter Jones helped get the sauce listed by Sainsbury’s, and within six weeks it was bottled and on supermarket shelves. On February 17, 2007, Roots disclosed the recipe to G Costa & Co Ltd, and on August 1 that year his company granted it an exclusive licence to make and distribute Reggae Reggae Sauce to that recipe. The sauce became Sainsbury’s fastest-selling product, outselling Heinz tomato ketchup in its first year.⁠[2][3][4][4][1]

The same year he opened his first restaurant, the Papine Jerk Centre in Battersea, London, which served Jamaican food, supplied lunches to the nearby Thames Christian College, and served as a community hub.⁠[5][5]

In 2008 Roots hosted his first television series, Caribbean Food Made Easy, which aimed to make the vibrant tastes and healthy ingredients of Caribbean food more accessible, accompanied by a book of the same name. In 2009 he released the studio album Red Hot, with the summer single “So Out Of My Mind”. He sums up his success with the mantra “Put some music in your food!”⁠[2][2][2]

The Reggae Reggae brand expanded into Caribbean-inspired cooking sauces, ready meals, soft drinks, desserts, and more, and several restaurant chains, including Wetherspoons, signed deals to use the sauce on their menus. He says the message he wants to spread is: “If a black Brixtonian Rastafarian can make it with just a sauce, then you can make it too.”⁠[2][2][2]

In February 2010, Roots’s former close friend Anthony (Tony) Bailey and financial adviser Sylvester Williams sent a letter before claim and then sued Roots and his companies in the High Court. The claimants said the sauce derived from a secret recipe Bailey had created in Jamaica in 1984, alleged breach of contract and breach of confidence, and sought more than £600,000. At the hearing on November 16, 2011, Roots admitted that his story on Dragons’ Den that the recipe had been handed down by his grandmother was untrue and a marketing ploy, but denied stealing Bailey’s recipe and said he had come up with the sauce himself.⁠[4][6][6][6][6]

On November 25, 2011, His Honour Judge Pelling QC ruled that both the breach of contract claim and the alternative claim for breach of a duty of confidence failed, and dismissed the claim.⁠[7][7][7]

The claimants appealed. On November 16, 2012, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales dismissed the appeal; the Chancellor of the High Court, giving the lead judgment, said the appeal was an attempt to reargue the case on the facts and that there was no ground to interfere with the trial judge’s conclusions on breach of contract or misuse of confidential information, and Lord Justice Longmore and Lord Justice Davis agreed.⁠[4][4][4][4]

In March 2013, Roots decided to close the Papine Jerk Centre after six years, hoping to expand the business into a high street restaurant franchise. “My heart is bleeding, I have got to uproot,” he said.⁠[5][5][5]

The same year he launched the School of Life Tour, a philanthropic project in which he visits schools, colleges, universities, and prisons every year, combining music and cooking to tell the story of his setbacks and success, encourage young people to follow their dreams, and show them how to make tasty, healthy food. He has also long been an ambassador for the Prince’s Trust and the Duke of Edinburgh Award.⁠[8][2][8]

In December 2015, Roots opened the restaurant Levi Roots’ Caribbean Smokehouse in the Westfield Stratford City shopping centre in London. In June 2019 he announced its closure and apologised on social media, saying the worst thing was letting down his brilliant team.⁠[9][9][9]

On July 22, 2016, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Kirsty Young’s Desert Island Discs with Roots as the castaway, in which he talked about his childhood, his move to Britain, and his business journey; his book choice was Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk To Freedom and his luxury item was a guitar.⁠[3][3][3]

In 2018 Roots made a cameo appearance as Billy Springer in the BBC series Death in Paradise. In 2019 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Agricultural University for his contribution to entrepreneurship and food; the same year he narrated the BBC documentary Studio 17: The Lost Reggae Tapes, and writer-producers Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft approached him about making a film of his life story.⁠[2][2][2][2]

On June 29, 2021, Bristol’s St Pauls Carnival announced Roots’s appointment as its chair, for a three-year term starting on September 1. The carnival celebrates Afro-Caribbean music, food, and culture; Roots had sold his sauce in Bristol in its early days and had regularly performed there with his band since the 1970s. He said he wanted to give the carnival back to the local people of St Pauls.⁠[10][10][10][10][10]

In 2024 Roots took part in the ITV reality show Celebrity Big Brother, and on March 15 he and Ekin-Su Culculoglu were evicted in a double eviction after a public vote. He said afterwards that some housemates knew how to play the game while others, including himself, had no clue.⁠[11][11][11]

On July 23, 2024, UWE Bristol awarded Roots an Honorary Doctor of Letters in recognition of his commitment to future generations and to Bristol, one of the first cities where he sold Reggae Reggae Sauce; he was then chair of the board of St Pauls Carnival. On July 24, the University of Westminster also awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Letters, and at the ceremony he told graduates that his journey showed that entrepreneurship, in most cases, is not inborn but learned.⁠[8][8][8][8][12][12]

On May 5, 2026, The Venture Room published an interview filmed on Bond Street, London, in which Roots appears at 22:37 in the video. He said the most he had made in a year was a million pounds and that he made his first million at 48; he described himself as a Windrush child from a poor background and called himself the “Dragon Slayer” who appeared on Dragons’ Den two decades earlier and the man behind Reggae Reggae Sauce. He recalled meeting Sainsbury’s chief executive Justin King after the show, who asked him to deliver 250,000 bottles while he was still making 67 bottles at a time at home with his children, so he licensed production to a sauce manufacturer; he also talked about the risk of singing his pitch on the show and how Shakespeare’s lines about taking the tide inspired him.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13][13]

“Outsourcing is a magical word that not a lot of young people going into business think about.” He says what the rich know that the poor do not is distribution: entrepreneurs often think they have to do everything themselves, but they do not; the key is to build the brand first, because once you have a brand you can outsource production and fulfil a large order overnight (at 23:22 and 24:22 in the video).⁠[13][13][13]

“It’s the audacity to be yourself.” He says singing on a business show could have made his pitch one of the worst ever, but entrepreneurship is about being yourself and taking chances (at 24:50 in the video).⁠[13][13]

“We must take the current when it serves or lose our ventures.” Quoting Shakespeare, he says that when an opportunity comes you must believe in yourself and dare to sail on the high tide (at 25:21 in the video).⁠[13][13]

Levi Roots: Official website: https://leviroots.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/OfficialLeviRoots (opens in a new window)⁠[2]