MEET Andy Bond, boss of Asda. Lean, angular, knobbly – he looks every inch a fitness freak. Yeah, says Bond, normally it’s a run every day, but last weekend it was just a 115-mile cycling race round the Yorkshire countryside.

“Four thousand metres of ascent, 33C temperature, some seriously fit guys. I did it with my No 2, Dave Cheesewright, and the strategy director . . .”

Here come the hard men from Leeds. Asda, for so long outstripped by Tesco and Sainsbury, is back on course in the war for supermarket supremacy, and its executives seem to be taking “lean and mean” to heart.

Do you have to be super-fit to get on? Nah, says Bond, in a blunt East Midlands accent. Yes, says his body language. He’s perched tautly on the edge of a sofa in his Leeds office, looking as if he might leap to the floor at any minute for 20 press-ups.

Asda has always nurtured a sportier top team. Previous bosses Archie Norman and Allan Leighton liked a kickaround – Bond, chief executive since 2005 but a long-time Asda man, just takes it further.

With his cropped ginger hair and Toby Jug grin, 42-year-old Bond even looks like a throwback. Born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, he exudes the happy-to-help, common man touch. Asda bosses walk the floor a lot.

Right now, it seems to be paying off. Nine years since it was bought by Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest supermarket chain, Asda is sharpening its act after a period in the doldrums. It is now the fastest growing of the biggest four supermarkets in Britain. With demand for organic food leading to accusations of overpricing, and tougher times forecast, Bond sniffs opportunity.

“Value retailing is as relevant today as it’s ever been,” he says. “Everyone talks about ‘premium-isation’, and that the days of value are over: well, baloney. Some people are much richer but a lot aren’t. We are a value retailer born and bred and always will be.”

He proved it in May, slashing prices on 2,500 items just to welcome in quarterly sales updates from Tesco and Sainsbury. Tesco’s sales growth stuttered. Sainsbury is enveloped in bid speculation. Some even think Asda might be a bidder. No wonder Bond looks alert.

“We know our growth rate slowed before 2004, but in the past couple of years we have turned a corner. We weren’t listening to our customers as much as we should have. People expected more organic and premium ranges, and we were slow to get into dotcom. But we have identified that, and by improving some of these things, the business has improved.”

Bond, previously head of the supermarket’s George clothes brand, has reorganised Asda with some severity. About 1,400 management jobs have gone. He makes a face when I mention the redundancies.

“It was clear the head office had grown too big and too bureaucratic,” he says, “and we needed more on the shopfloor helping customers. In hindsight, though, we didn’t do a great job communicating that.”

Old colleagues suggest that Bond has simply taken the business back to basics: getting footfall by selling food cheaply and efficiently in big box outlets, strengthening its No 2 position behind the vastly bigger Tesco.

It is still weak in southeast England, and it is still unable to make full use of the benefits of being owned by Wal-Mart – it could, for example, build umpteen more outlets if land could be bought and permissions obtained, or push more quickly into general merchandise. But Bond is bullish.

“I am very keen for Asda to become multi-format but the most important thing we have had to do is to get existing stores growing well – that’s how you satisfy customers. I don’t think our customers or our owners want us to put time into clever ideas when not satisfying consumers.”

That mention of “multi-format” is Bond preempting inevitable criticism. Wal-Mart’s size has given Asda access to far cheaper goods, especially in nonfood, but it has also distracted it. In Asda’s stores – bigger but less numerous than its rivals’ – the excitement of offering the first sub£50 DVD players meant food was pushed sideways.

There were also stand-alone George stores, and smaller own-brand-only stores (Asda Essentials), and stores selling general merchandise (Asda Living). Meanwhile, its rivals have pushed into convenience stores.

“I feel positive about Asda Living, it’s a great channel for growth,” says Bond. But he has stopped the roll-out of George stores – 12 so far – “because they are not performing as well as we thought”.

And Asda Essentials – too big to be a convenience store and too small to work as a superstore – “just didn’t work”, not least because people like branded goods. He has no plans to start opening convenience stores.

But isn’t it obvious that the in-between size wouldn’t work? He laughs uneasily. “Well, maybe if you were in our team you could have told us that.”

Former workmates say Bond can be prickly, a symptom of his dogged determination to get things right. He may also be unused to criticism – he doesn’t face journalists and analysts as regularly as bosses of quoted companies.

Bond says he is often “disappointed” by the media’s attitude to Wal-Mart’s ownership. “Culturally, Asda has actually not changed that much at all.” And Wal-Mart, he adds, for all its unpopularity with campaigners, does more for sustainability than any other retail group on the planet. Asda launched its own “sustainability summit” this year to which all its rivals sent representatives.

As for Asda’s diversions that haven’t worked: “I do get frustrated about everyone wanting comment on failure. We should be measured by the number of successes, not the number of failures.”

Others say Bond inherited a tough situation. Many talented executives had left, and Wal-Mart’s power was ill-used.

“Asda was always about the cheerful experience of buying bulk food at cheap prices,” says Richard Baker, formerly chief operating officer at the supermarket, now chief executive at Alliance Boots. “But the thing about Andy is he really understands the brand.”

That comes from Bond’s start at Asda, hired by Norman as his marketing assistant in 1994. Norman says he liked Bond’s determination, and his eye for detail. “Great retailers have an eye for detail while keeping the big picture in mind. It’s not so irrelevant that Andy trained as an engineer.”

Born the younger son of a plumber and a nurse, Bond comes from just the kind of “ordinary, working” family that Asda targets. He attributes his drive to his one childhood trauma: failing the 11-plus to get into grammar school. He made it later, transferred from secondary modern school because he excelled academically, but the fear of failure stuck. “I think failure in your teen years does make you more driven.”

Bond took a scholarship from British Gas to study gas engineering and joined a BG supplier, but eventually quit an industry that he could only see shrinking. He was snapped up by Asda after finishing top of an MBA course at Cranfield. He was determined to work for Norman, already a corporate star.

Later he caught Leighton’s eye. The former Asda boss, now Post Office chairman, praises Bond for getting back to “big box” basics, and reintroducing “some craziness”.

“Get the prices right, get the values right, drive George and away you go,” says Leighton. The difficulty for Wal-Mart now, he predicts, is how to hang on to its man.

Bond groans when I bring it up. “Here’s my pat answer: I’m happy doing what I am doing, but at some point in the future either I am going to move on in Wal-Mart or leave.I am not going to be here in five years’ time.”

And yes, he has seen the recent share-option package won by his former Asda colleague Justin King at Sainsbury. And no, he’s not revealing how much he earns – only that money is not a motivating factor. He drivesa Mini. King has a Maserati. Enough said.

Leighton laughs when I run that by him. “Money’s never a factor until people offer you a lot of it,” he says, before adding, “people like Bondy are hugely attractive to private equity.”

Perhaps Wal-Mart will give Bond the resources to do his own deals. Has he discussed bidding for Sainsbury? Bond looks aghast. “I’m not telling you that, I’d be locked up.” Would he? “Look, the more general question is would we want to grow by acquisition? We are fundamentally constrained by government regulation. The acquisition of Safeway by Morrisons largely defined the shape of the industry for the future.”

That sounds like a “maybe”. Bond grins. Others say it’s easy to underestimate his ambition and ceaseless application. Even in his hours off, he is often seen setting out from head office with colleagues for yet another run. He can’t sit still.

Little surprise that the new boss of Waitrose, Mark Price, who is more generously proportioned, joked recently that it was time for a return to “chubby” grocers.

“Did he?” asks Bond, looking pensive. “I don’t see any virtue in being chubby.”

Of course not. Lean and mean is still very much a compliment in Yorkshire.

ANDY BOND’S WORKING DAY

THE Asda chief executive wakes at 6am at his Harrogate home and either cycles into work, car-shares or drives himself. Andy Bond is at his desk in Leeds by 7.15am.

“I do a few e-mails and look at the sales. Numbers are a mood generator in a business this size, though I am not going to influence anything day to day.” Bond says his key tasks are “developing strategy, choosing and evaluating the top team, and monitoring and controlling delivery of the plan”.

He finishes at 6.30pm. He spends half his week in Leeds, and the other half split between store visits, meetings with suppliers and overseas travel.

VITAL STATISTICS

Born:March 16, 1965

Marital status:married, with two children

School:The King’s School, Grantham

Universities:Salford, Cranfield

First job:trainee engineer at British Gas

Salary package:undisclosed but estimated at more than £1m

Home:Harrogate

Car:grey Mini Cooper

Favourite book:It’s Not About The Bike, by Lance Armstrong

Favourite music:Robbie Williams, Keane

Favourite film:Carlito’s Way

Favourite gadget:Blackberry Pearl

Last holiday:Majorca

DOWNTIME

ANDY BOND relaxes with serious exercise. “I used to be a competitive sportsman, doing athletics and rugby. Now I run, I cycle, I go to the gym. My only real extravagances in life are posh trainers and a posh racing bike. No, I avoid the tight lycra.”

Otherwise he likes “having a social time” with friends, or taking his children out. “My son likes Liverpool so we go and see them. We also went to the cricket recently – six hours in the rain at Headingley waiting for the Test Match to start. And sometimes we watch the Leeds Tykes play rugby.”

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