Levi Roots

Keith Graham was born in 1958 in Clarendon, Jamaica. His parents left for England when he was small, and he was raised by his grandmother, who cooked over a wood fire and taught him to season food with her hands. At eleven he was sent to join his family in Brixton, arriving in a cold, grey London where he could not read or write and was put in the bottom class of a school where he knew no one.

He learned to read as a teenager and found reggae, taking the name Levi Roots and performing for years around south London. He also got into trouble: he served prison sentences as a young man, an episode he speaks about plainly as part of the story.

The sauce was his grandmother's, sharpened for the Notting Hill Carnival, where he sold bottles from a stall from the early 1990s and built a following. In 2007, at 48, he went on the BBC's Dragons' Den with a guitar, sang a song about the sauce, and admitted he did not know his own sales figures. Peter Jones and Richard Farleigh backed him with 50,000 pounds for forty per cent of the business, and Sainsbury's stocked it within weeks.

Reggae Reggae Sauce became one of the fastest-selling products in the supermarket's history and led to a range of foods and cookbooks. He has been open about the disputes that followed, including a court case brought by an old friend claiming a share of the recipe, which he lost in 2011.