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Since joining RHM he has been similarly driven, introducing central purchasing, and corralling the group’s diaspora of small firms into more tightly knit divisions handling bread, cakes and culinary products.

But it’s not just about costs and structure, he insists. At RHM, taken off the stock market by Tomkins in 1992 before being sold to Doughty Hanson five years ago, he spotted another problem in his first few months.

“I talked to the supermarkets about the cake side, and they said, ‘The firm’s not doing anything — where’s the innovation, the new product?’ I think RHM just forgot, it went for volume and forgot what the brands are about. It’s too easy to get caught in the vicious circle of cutting advertising spend, and cutting discretionary spend, and then not taking risks.”

Others have suggested that Britain’s powerful supermarkets will take one look at RHM’s improved performance and demand further discounts. McMahon brushes that off.

“In my experience they do not come to you and say, ‘We want a bit of that.’ But you have to give them full marks. If the food industry had moved on as fast as the supermarkets in terms of sophistication, understanding their business, investment in IT applications and people . . .”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. McMahon has made his own plans to catch up with the supermarket giants. He wants a concentration on higher- margin, branded goods — RHM also does a lot of own- label work for supermarkets — and he predicts consolidation in the highly fragmented UK food market. RHM, probably the biggest UK-focused food firm by sales (£1.5 billion), will be a buyer, not bought, he says.

So will he take a run at Premier Foods, the branded grocery group that floated a year ago? Or go back for some of the brands he ran at GrandMet’s Pillsbury operation? His answers are ambiguous.

“I’m not interested so much in acquiring companies I’ve run before, but maybe the brands. As a principle, quality brands succeed in the industry.”

Anyone looking for pointers might want to study McMahon’s past form. At GrandMet he advocated selling its unbranded UK food interests, in effect reorganising himself out of a job. At ICI Paints he negotiated the £350m takeover of Williams’s European home-improvement arm, adding big brands such as Hammerite and Cuprinol to the Dulux stable. “It transformed performance,” he smiles.

Improving performance is the McMahon lodestone. It has been a constant in a varied career that has taken in sales, marketing, manufacturing and management, and embraced textiles, threads, retail, betting, food, paint and more.

He says he has always wanted to be a winner, right from his Scottish primary-school days when his seat in class was determined bv how he did in the weekly exam each Friday.

Born the second of twins, he was the first in his family to attend university — his brother followed their father into car mechanics — and an ardent sports player who found it easy to transfer that competitive edge to business.

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