HOWZAT

All of which begs the question: if Britvic is doing so well, why are the big backers baling out? The answer, says Moody, is focus. “If you look at InterContinental, which used to be Bass, they are focused on building themselves into the biggest and best hotel business in the world. Soft drinks is just not core.”

Likewise Whitbread, with its restaurant and leisure interests, and Pernod Ricard (which inherited its share when it acquired Allied Domecq) with its focus on wine and spirits. “This is a group of well established shareholders selling a well-invested business,” says Moody. “It’s a considered decision and they are very clear about what their ambitions are.”

Britvic’s ambition is to catch up with Coca-Cola Enterprises, Britain’s biggest soft-drinks firm, which outsells it two-to-one. Can it be caught? Moody shrugs.

“It’s an interesting question. When I arrived at Britvic 10 years ago, we had a strapline ‘To Be Number One’, but everyone said, actually, we’re not going to be number one because Coke is so much bigger. So what we talk about now is to be ‘leading’. We may not overtake on volume, but we can innovate better than them, work with customers better than them, engage with consumers better than them and build a better place to work.”

And just in case I am sceptical about that last aim, he lists the regular employee surveys and forums at Britvic, the board visits and outings. “The board goes out and sees every site and shift. We get a good hold on what is felt in the business.”

Others who have worked with Moody say his commitment to the workforce is genuine — a product of his broad experience, starting at 18 as an assistant legal secretary, moving through personnel, then sales, then operations. He has never been overtly ambitious, or political, just efficient.

“Paul is the good-news story about executive promotion,” says Paul Wilkinson, his boss at Eden Vale and a former chairman of baker RHM. “He is process driven, he takes lots of advice and he sells himself on his merits.”

That has been Moody’s trademark since he went into business. Born in Tottenham, but brought up in Bethnal Green, he says the only careers advice given by his father was “don't drive a cab”. So he joined the licensed credit trader John Blundell from school, “doing the grunt work” in the company secretary department, because he didn’t have the A-levels to go to university.

But in business he has proved a quick learner, moving from Blundell to Grand Metropolitan’s Host Group, switching to personnel, and later jumping to Eden Vale, where the sales director persuaded him to switch disciplines again and become a national account controller. His confident handling of the Kwiksave, Co-op and Safeway accounts convinced Mars’s Pedigree Petfoods to poach him.

That experience was inspirational. “The openness, the single status, the good communication, the focus on realising your own potential — it was all pretty formative.”

After a brief stint at Golden Wonder, he joined Britvic in 1996 as director of sales for supermarkets, and has helped transform the company from “beer company adjunct” to effective big brand marketer. Now he has to lead its next change of scale. ()

Vital to Britvic’s future will be its relationship with PepsiCo. Moody has one ace up his sleeve. PepsiCo UK president Martin Glenn is an old Pedigree chum and a Moody admirer.