local faces
April 2022
Faster than a speeding bullet ― By Laura Burgoine
Ultramarathon man pitches his chewable caffeine invention on Dragons’ Den - and it’s not just for athletes
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eckham local David Hellard can’t recall exactly how many marathons and ultramarathons he’s run but puts it somewhere “between 60 and 80.” He’s won marathons on three continents - including being the marathon champion in Somaliland, birthplace of Mo Farah- he’s raised over £100,000 for the Street Child charity, led the London Marathon for 400 metres, and set the Underground marathon record, running to the platforms of 42 tube stations. It was while racing in a six-day ultramarathon across the Sahara Desert that David first came up with the idea for Caffeine Bullet energy chews, a creation that’s now led to him being featured on the latest series of BBC One’s Dragons’ Den, where budding entrepreneurs get three minutes to pitch their business idea to a panel of multimillionaires for investment. While running the Marathon Des Sables, dubbed “the toughest footrace on earth” David dropped a caffeine pill and watched it disappear into the sands of the Sahara. “I’d had a shocking Day 2 and I just started to cry,” he recalls. “This was during a series of challenges I was doing to raise money for Street Child and I knew if I didn’t do well it would potentially cost the charity thousands of pounds.” At that moment, it occurred to him that there must be a better way to take caffeine during exercise, and so the Bullet was born. David launched the energy chew out of his Brixton home in 2018. “It was partly made in my kitchen but I quickly realised there are some things you can’t and shouldn’t try to make from home, so I started working with a factory!” he says. “We never had any investment; it’s just grown by word of mouth, and it was me running the company on my own up until this year.” The Bullets are mainly sold online and in select sports shops. “We’re really well known in the running industry but now we want to become more of a mainstream brand,” David says. “Although we were created for athletic performance, people want to be performing better in everyday life, and they can use
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