BBC Dragons' Den: Ballymena’s Del Currie secures £50k investment for his Spudos crisps brand

Unlike regular crisps, Spudos come unseasoned, which allows consumers to choose their own flavours with one of eight seasonings.

With Del also being very environmentally minded, the crisps come with home-compostable packaging and refillable tubs.

On Thursday evening, dragons Peter Jones and Deborah Meaden coughed up £25,000 each for a combined 25% stake in the company.

But while some may have taken note of his laidback demeanour and style – appearing in leather and denim – his confidence in front of the bright lights and fearsome dragons has been honed in decades of developing his own businesses “for fun”.

Speaking to the News Letter from his London warehouse, where he was helping pack orders of crisps, Del said Tayto cheese and onion was his “most favourite crisp ever” but that he believed there had been no development in the market in over 50 years.

His successful Dragons’ Den project was inspired by childhood memories of buying the popular plain bag of crisps with a blue bag of salt inside, which you open and shake onto the crisps.

“When I thought back to it I felt like a chef making my own crisps,” he said. “So it suddenly hit me, what if we did that but had loads of different flavours?”

His ‘Dragons’ Den Bundle’ available from www.spudos.com contains 1kg of crisps (equivalent of 30+ regular bags) with a refillable tub, eight different flavour sachets, and eight shake bags, for £22.99.

It has been a long journey to Dragons’ Den for Del, leaving Ballymena for London at 18 years of age.

It was there the 56-year-old met his wife, the couple later moving to California for 13 years. They have lived back in London for the past ten years with their two children.

Initially Del learned to “hustle” in London by promoting and developing his band Fono, for which he was guitarist and singer.

But as that chapter was closing he leaned back on his trade – in the 1990s he worked on computer servers and networking.

He never went to university – his expertise at that time was so new that there was no university teaching it.

Later he founded his own digital agency which provided seed funding for all his other ventures by providing online digital solutions for clients.

His CV includes producing an app to let shoppers weigh their own produce as they buy it – thus facilitating reusable containers and cutting down on packaging waste.

And he has launched a remote video platform for his own team – 25 staff in digital alone – which they now sell to other clients.

To top it off, he also owns a pub in London, the Old Ivy House on Goswell Road.

Modestly, he says he has “a couple of other little bits and bobs that are still on the boil as well”.

Del currently works 60-70 hours per week “but it doesn't feel like work – because I love all the stuff I'm doing, even though sometimes it's a right pain".

The common thread is that all his businesses have been “kind of personal passion projects”.