Product Update

Is Chika's Foods Still in Business? (2026 Update)

Is Chika's Foods from Dragons’ Den still around in 2026? The deal it made, the dragons who invested, and where to buy Chika's Foods today.

Dragons' Den IndexUpdated 6 May 20266 min read

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Chika's Foods pitched African-inspired snacks in series 13 and received offers from all five Dragons, a genuinely rare outcome on this show. The founder turned the on-air offer down, and the business has since grown into one of the biggest success stories connected to any UK pitch in this index.

It is a pitch worth studying closely, both for how rare a full five-Dragon offer actually is on this show, and for what happened to the founder's decision to walk away from it anyway.

The Short Answer

Chika's Foods is still in business and thriving. The company has grown into a snack food business reportedly worth more than ten million pounds, stocked across roughly three thousand UK distribution points including Waitrose, Co-op, Holland & Barrett and Ocado, plus thousands more retail points in Nigeria. This is one of the strongest post-Den growth stories anywhere on this site.

The Pitch

Founder Chika Russell pitched her Nigerian-inspired snack range in series 13, episode 2, asking for thirty thousand pounds for 25 percent of the company. All five Dragons on the panel that day made an offer, an unusually strong response that reflects how well the product and the pitch itself landed.

Russell accepted one of the offers on camera during filming.

Turning Down the Deal

After filming, Russell ultimately decided not to go ahead with the investment. Walking away from a deal that all five Dragons wanted to be part of is a bold call, but it is one that, in hindsight, clearly did not hold the business back.

Russell kept building the brand independently, and the results speak for themselves: retail listings with some of the UK's most recognisable supermarket and health food chains, and a valuation that has grown many times over from the thirty thousand pound ask that started the pitch.

Expansion Into Nigeria

Beyond the UK growth, Chika's Foods has expanded into Nigeria through a dedicated African subsidiary, Chika's Wholefoods Africa. In December 2021, the investment firm Alitheia announced backing for that African arm, a sign of the business moving from a UK snack brand with immigrant roots into a genuinely international operation selling into the market its founder originally drew inspiration from.

That kind of two-market growth, strong in the UK and expanding into West Africa, is unusual among the businesses that have pitched on this show, most of which stay UK-focused even when they succeed.

Building a supply chain and distribution network across two very different retail environments, premium UK health food chains on one side, the Nigerian retail market on the other, is a genuinely difficult operational undertaking, and it points to a level of ambition well beyond what a single Den appearance would typically suggest.

What This Says About Turning Down a Deal

Chika's Foods is one of the clearest examples on this site of a founder correctly judging that she did not need the Den's money to succeed. A snack range with cultural roots and genuine flavour differentiation, sold into premium grocers like Waitrose and Ocado, was always going to appeal to a specific, values-driven customer base that health food retailers actively want on their shelves. Russell backed her own read of that market over the terms on offer in the room, and the growth since has vindicated the call.

It is a useful counterpoint to some of the other companies in this index that took a Den deal and still folded, or that turned a deal down and quietly disappeared. Turning down investment is not automatically the right or wrong move, it depends entirely on whether the founder's own read of the business turns out to be accurate, and here it clearly was.

Getting offers from all five Dragons in the room also says something about how universally appealing the pitch was, cutting across every investor's usual focus area rather than landing with just one specialist. That kind of broad appeal on the day is a reasonable early signal, even if it is the founder's own execution afterwards that ultimately turned the promise into a genuinely large business.

Where Things Stand Now

The company now employs 230 people and sells around 18 products across roughly 3,000 UK distribution points, alongside its growing Nigerian operation. Russell has become a recognisable figure in UK Black business circles well beyond her single Den appearance.

If you came here to check whether Chika's Foods survived, the answer is not just yes but emphatically so. Turning down five Dragons on camera turned out to be the right call for a business that has since scaled far past the numbers discussed in the Den that day.

Where to buy Chika's Foods

Still selling as of 6 May 2026. Check today's price and availability.

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See the full Chika's Foods deal breakdown and term sheet →