Dragons’ Den turns 20: how has it shaped fmcg entrepreneurship?

In 2007, Levi Roots had never even heard of Dragons’ Den. The musician and businessman from Brixton, south London, spent his weekends travelling to country fairs and Saturday markets in rural towns – “the Shires,” as he dubbed them – armed with jars of his spicy Caribbean sauce, his guitar and the confidence to belt out the ‘Reggae Reggae Sauce’ song to gathering crowds.

“One weekend I was singing the song and having a great time with the public at a trade show when I was approached by a BBC producer,” he remembers. “She said: ‘Levi, I love the song; I love the sauce; and I love that you put music and food together.”

From her top pocket she produced a business card that read ‘Dragons Den.’ Roots tried to refuse it. “I didn’t know anything about the show. I’d never watched it, and I’d never heard of it. It didn’t sound like something for me.”

The producer insisted, though, and after Roots’ children spotted the card and urged him to reconsider, the entrepreneur finally agreed to appear on the then relatively new BBC show. With one caveat: he was taking the guitar. “I decided to go as me, against the advice of everybody,” he says. “I thought, if I’m going to take the opportunity, then I don’t want to be anyone else. The only thing I’m good at is being Levi Roots, so if I’m going, I’m going as the authentic me.”

And thank goodness he did.

The 13-minute clip of Roots serenading the five Dragons has been watched millions of times and propelled Roots and his Reggae Reggae brand into becoming a household name (when we speak, Roots is only a few months out of the Celebrity Big Brother house).

But if Roots was one of the first, his was far from the last food and drink brand to benefit from the overnight success (or notoriety) that can accompany a slot on Dragons’ Den.

So, with the show marking 20 years on air on 4 January – during which time there’s been 21 series, 17 different Dragons, 1600+ entrepreneurs and (roughly) 311 investments made – how do participating founders look back on their time in the Den? And how do they think it’s shaped both their own journey and entrepreneurship in the food sector as a whole?

Kirsty Henshaw was a single mum in her early twenties when she hit ‘send’ on an application for the Den in 2010. Her free-from frozen dessert business, which then went under the name Worthenshaws, had recently struck a deal with Tesco to list products in 700 stores, but she was at a loss on how to fund those sorts of volumes. “I was a single mum, with no mortgage or house that I could leverage against. I had no way of raising that amount of capital, so I thought: ‘Let’s give this a try.’”

It was an incredibly daunting experience, she remembers. The pitch itself lasted two hours and prior to that she’d been sat in a room since 6am waiting nervously for her turn. “I’ve never been as on edge in my life. It’s one hell of a day that I’ll never forget,” she says.

Peter Jones and Duncan Bannatyne went onto invest, helping Henshaw deliver Tesco’s order. And the clip of her breaking down in tears at Jones’ praise went viral – “it had eight million views on YouTube that night; I think I was the first crier they’d had” – giving Henshaw an unexpected 15 minutes of fame that unfortunately ended up with false stories in the tabloids. “I wasn’t expecting to be noticed and suddenly it took off,” she says.

If Roots and Henshaw were part of an earlier cohort that entered the process with a little naivety, that’s changed over the years.

Polish, preparation, publicity, profit

More than a decade later, when matcha and energy drink brand PerfectTed was asked to appear, they were “meticulous” in their preparations, says co-founder Marisa Poster. “Five days before filming, we got a call from the producer saying they had a spot open in Manchester if we could make it,” she says. “We dropped everything and pivoted. And, you know, the rest is history.”

They swotted up on previous episodes and pored over successful pitches, compiling a list of 100+ questions that might come up. Their aim was not a single offer, she admits, but five. And they managed it, too, eventually accepting a combined £50k offer from Steven Bartlett and Peter Jones after a practically flawless pitch. Bartlett has gone on to inject a further £1m into the business, providing advice on an almost daily basis via WhatsApp, says Poster, on everything from overarching business strategy to the angle on a video the team posts to social media. “It’s pretty amazing, because the guy’s super busy.”

For other founders, though, the potential cash and mentorship has practically become an irrelevance. When Oppo co-founder Harry Thuillier and his brother Charlie entered the Den in 2016, they’d already agreed they wouldn’t accept an offer. “Dragons’ Den is as close to business as Big Brother is to real life and The Apprentice is to a job interview,” says Thuillier “It’s all for entertainment, it isn’t real.”

The duo, who had just won a UK listing for their healthier take on ice cream and completed a “record-breaking equity crowdfunding campaign”, had rejected BBC researchers’ overtures several times. Not only would it be a massive distraction to the core business, they figured, but it was “an extremely expensive way of raising money because of the huge amount of equity Dragons typically took”.

And so, when they did finally agree to take part, on the third phone call from the broadcaster, they had no intention of taking investment (as it happened, no such offer was made) and saw it purely as a chance to leverage the visibility. “The researcher reminded us it would be aired to four million people,” says Thuillier. “So, we went for it – the chance to tell a huge audience about our mission to deliver healthier indulgence was too good to pass up. We got 12 minutes of airtime and sold out in supermarkets after the show aired. For 24 hours, apparently, we were the third most searched for food and drink term on Google UK. Our sales tripled overnight – in the middle of winter. We got what we came for.”

The biggest potential payoff of the show isn’t investment, but eyeballs on your product, agrees Pasta Evangelists founder Alessandro Savelli. His pasta subscription service pitch may have been infamously labelled “pasta le disaster” by Dragon Jenny Campbell, but the appearance was “jet fuel” for the business nonetheless, he says. “Although we did get grilled, ultimately the brand did not get tarnished,” says Savelli. In fact, the night of the show he opened his laptop to see a “tsunami” of orders appearing within a few seconds of the broadcast. “The Dragons missed out on a 1,000% return investment,” he adds.

Overnight success

That immediate aftermath can be brilliant but brutal at the same time, explains Full Power Cacao founder Liam Browne, who appeared in 2024. “We did £500,000 worth of sales within about a week of Dragons’ Den,” says Browne, who admits he hadn’t seen the show “for donkeys’ years” when he was given the opportunity to pitch.

“It’s impossible because you have this massive uplift that’s not going to be sustained. If you set up your business to manage that many sales and for it to always look like that, you’d be tripling the size of your warehouse and employing loads of people but [in reality] it all tails off.”

Everybody pitched in, he says, packaging up packs of cacao and shipping out orders. Now, the company is creating processes that will allow it to keep up with higher volumes longer term with sales on track to hit between £1.8m and £2.2m on the anniversary of its Dragon’s Den appearance. For context, in the year prior to the broadcast, it was a little under £300k.

“The evening the episode aired, our website crashed from the traffic surge,” remembers Timo Boldt, Gousto CEO and founder, which may have failed to secure investment on the show a decade ago but has gone onto become a £300m+ turnover business. “We had one developer at the time who worked really hard to make sure the website could not go down. Ten seconds into airing, the website crashes.”

Nonetheless, Boldt adds: “It was a super fun experience and did a lot for us in terms of getting the Gousto name out far and wide at a critical time when we were looking to scale.”

But it’s arguably been just as impactful for the industry as a whole. “The show is awesome for the industry,” Boldt says. “So many high-profile food and drink businesses have been launched. I love the way it inspires first-time entrepreneurs to think and dream bigger, as you see how small start-up ideas can be grown into multimillion-pound enterprises.”

“We don’t see many visible entrepreneurs outside of the Elon Musks of this world, and for young people growing up it shows there’s a viable way of becoming an entrepreneur,” says Amelia Christie-Miller, founder and CEO of Bold Bean Co, who walked away with a £50k investment in return for a 7.5% equity stake last year. As a result, it’s now “become a tried and tested route for a lot of food and drink brands” – most of which wouldn’t be able to afford that type of boost to brand awareness otherwise.

“What’s really powerful about Dragons’ Den is that people feel part of your journey and understand there’s a human behind the brand,” she adds. “Nowadays, particularly in the grocery sector where so few brands are founder-led or are acquired by big conglomerates, that’s been really impactful in people feeling a connection to me and to what we’re doing.”

That was certainly the case for Roots, who is now as well known – if not more so – than his product. “Peter [Jones] has told me time and time again that, for him, it was an investment into Levi Roots rather than the sauce,” says the businessman. “It was the originality of somebody having the audacity to come on the show and to do something a bit different.”

Keen to throw down the ladder, Roots frequently visits schools and prisons to talk about entrepreneurship. Even his stint on Celebrity Big Brother was motivated by a desire to reach audiences that may now be too young to know him from Dragons Den, he says. “It was important for me to connect with these younger people now and still give that story that if I can do it in the way I did, other young people can do it as well without having to change on the inside.”

For all their different experiences in the Den, none of the entrepreneurs that The Grocer spoke to regrets their appearance on the show. But a few do have advice for others looking to follow in their footsteps as the show enters its 21st year.

“There are definitely a few things that I wish I’d known before I did it, or that I’d been more prepared for,” says Edward Hancock, founder of Cheesegeek. Most of all, given the hefty discount on equity that most Dragons secure as part of their deal, understand the value you’re getting as a brand in return, he says. That might be publicity, or it might be the contacts of a Dragon, but don’t let being under the bright lights of a TV show prevent you securing a good deal. “It’s very easy for a founder to become a deal taker,” he says “Be really clear on what you want from the Dragon and formalise that. I probably didn’t do that as well as I could have done.”

Don’t go in looking for an instant cash injection either, advises Christie-Miller. “If you’re going on for investment there and then, your cash flow is going to seriously suffer. It takes months to do due diligence.” In fact, some half of deals reportedly fall through after the recording. “I very much wanted to secure a Dragon, but not for their capital, because I think you can get great angels in the industry. It’s more what they can bring in terms of publicity and prestige.”

And finally, be prepared to put in hours upon hours of work to capitalise on the experience. “It’s fucking hard work,” says Full Power Cacao’s Browne, of the aftermath of the show. “If you go on Dragons’ Den, the amount of business you’re doing now as a startup or small business is going to multiply by 20, 30 times, and you’ve got to cope. It’s been the hardest year of my life. [But] the opportunities that arise from it, if you can get your shit together, are phenomenal.”