Retiring on the success of his sauce, Levi Roots is touring an inspirational show

His current UK tour may be flagged as promoting his new album Red Hot, but those who recognise Roots as a reggae veteran (of some 30 years vintage, during which he's worked with the likes of Sly & Robbie, King Tubby, Lee Scratch Perry and Lucky Dube) will be vastly outnumbered by those who saw him slaying the assembled financiers on Dragons' Den in 2007. Vaster still are the legions who have since bought his Reggae Reggae Sauce, the product he sold to the Dragons with a little ditty beginning "Put some music in your food", and which went on to outsell Heinz tomato ketchup the first year Sainsbury's stocked it.

On the strength of a recipe adapted from his grandmother's jerk chicken sauce, a staple of his childhood diet in the village of Content in Jamaica, where he was born in 1958, Roots has also presented his own TV series, last year's Caribbean Cooking Made Easy, written two cookbooks, opened a restaurant, launched seven more sauces and licensed the Reggae Reggae brand to Bird's Eye, Subway and Wetherspoons. The United States is next in his sights – or rather in those of his business partners and managers, still including original Dragons' Den backer Peter Jones. As if Roots's whirlwind success story weren't fairytale enough (complete with a couple of long-ago spell in prison, for that extra rags-to-riches element), after just three years he doesn't even really have to work any more.

"I am kind of retired, in some ways that's how come I'm doing this tour," he says. "I really don't need to do much with the sauce business now, so I'm taking some time to relax with my music, which has always been my original inspiration."

AS THE pre-sauce CV outlined above makes clear (it also includes a Mobo nomination for his 1998 album Free Your Mind), the credentials behind this last statement are far sturdier than the TV-celeb norm. It's to music, in fact, that Roots attributes the genesis of his now bestselling persona, or rather the identity that underpins it.

"My real name – Keith Graham – is Scottish, but when I looked in the mirror as a kid I didn't see anyone Scottish; I didn't know who I was," he says. "There was no thought at school about black history, any of that, not like now. But then I started listening to Bob Marley, especially Natty Dread, the songs of empowerment more than the love songs, and through him I found out I was African, via Jamaica, which led directly to my metamorphosis from Keith Graham to Levi Roots when I was 17."

Having followed his emigrant parents to London aged 11, he went on to establish his new name via the Brixton roots-reggae scene, and ultimately this transplanted sense of identity became be a key catalyst in his culinary breakthrough.

"I've had a stall at the Notting Hill Carnival since 1991, where I started selling the sauce," he explains. "Now, every Jamaican family has their own jerk sauce recipe, there's nothing unusual about that, but at Notting Hill you've got three million people in one place, and the majority aren't Jamaican, they're white or European. I'd also been in London more than 20 years, and touring as a musician through most of that time; I had that wider experience of the world, so I changed my grandma's original recipe with a few non- Jamaican ingredients – coriander, for instance, in place of mint or thyme to give it a different twist, like adding a bit of my Britishness to my Jamaican-ness."

That same stall – the Rastaraunt – was the birthplace of Roots's central Unique Selling Point, namely his Dragon-felling synergy between music and food. Swapping between griddle and guitar, he'd dispense his songs along with the jerk chicken, effectively creating the basic template for his current run of shows, which see him performing with a five-piece band in between cooking up a few favourite dishes onstage.

"I don't think it's a format anyone's tried before," he says of this singular live concoction, "but it seems to be working. It's just another way of connecting to people, which is what I've always loved to do; another way of getting across the message that if I can make it, like I have these last few years, anyone can."

GIVEN his background, the motivational element is an inevitable factor in the Levi Roots brand, but no less genuine or inspiring for that. Aside from music, his retirement mainly consists of visits to schools, colleges and youth groups to share his story.

"I spend more time doing that than I do at home," he says, "but I love it. They'll listen to me because they see me as a normal person like them, who's made good, which is what I am."

Levi Roots plays the Pleasance Theatre, Edinburgh, tonight. For more about Levi Roots, visit www.reggae-reggae.co.uk.