Garry Weston, who died on February 15th aged 74, was the third generation of a family of entrepreneurs who popularised some of the most famous grocery brands in Britain and ran Fortnum and Mason in London.
He took over Associated British Foods (ABF) in 1967 and ran it for more than 30 years with quiet success. In Ireland, ABF owned the Quinnsworth stores before their sale to Tesco five years ago. It still owns Penneys. Garry Weston's brother Galen owns Brown Thomas.
An untypical businessman, he avoided fashions and fanfares, and succeeded in handing over to the next generation something more valuable than he inherited - including mass-market brands such as Sunblest bread and Silver Spoon sugar.
Born in Canada on April 28th, 1927, Garry Weston was brought up in Britain and lived there all his life except for a 14-year stint in Australia, where he went to escape his tyrannical father.
"I don't want to blame my father for anything," he once said of his escape from England, "but it was the first time I woke up in the morning and wanted to get out of bed."
Garfield Weston senior was more in the usual mould of the businessman. A disciplinarian, he was known to fire Fortnum and Mason staff for smoking on the back stairs. Garry Weston got his break running Ryvita in the UK because he happened to be passing his father's office as the previous boss of the crispbread business was being sacked.
Weston senior had transformed the business from a small Toronto bakery established by his father, who was a Cockney emigrant. Beginning in 1924, it became a huge multinational conglomerate, which moved into the UK in 1934 and extended into South Africa and the US. Garfield Weston started with bakeries but quickly added biscuits and retail outlets, including the Fine Fare supermarket chain as well as Fortnum and Mason.
Educated at Sir William Borlase School, Marlow, New College, Oxford, and Harvard, Garry Weston then joined the family business, but did not enjoy working under his father. He left for Australia in 1951. There he built up the Australian branch of the family empire and his own family.
When Garry Weston was tempted back to the UK in 1967 to take over the British end of the empire, he sensed a mood of frustration: "Too many intelligent young people are not being given their heads." At the time he seemed a breath of fresh air after his austere father. But for three decades he maintained an iron grip on the group, watching every penny and largely avoiding the takeover fever that raged through most of the period.
There were a few exceptions as he sought to make sense of the sprawling empire he had inherited. Fine Fare was sold in 1986. British Sugar (the company that allowed him to joke that he had been born with a Silver Spoon in his mouth) was finally acquired in 1991, after an attempt in 1987 was abandoned because of the stock-market crash.
Garry Weston was happy to acknowledge his lack of extravagance. He dispensed with a chauffeur after a few weeks because the man spent most of his time ferrying Mrs Weston around London. The billionaire would also take a bus to Fortnum and Mason. He once explained: "I have to sell 10 loaves to make a penny. You cannot afford to be extravagant."
He was proud of his lack of flamboyance and love of his work. While a family man and the owner of an Oxfordshire farm as well as his Knightsbridge base, Garry Weston admitted that work was his main preoccupation.
"I envy people who can leave their work and forget about it."
Gardening was his main relaxation and he could not understand why people thought it odd that someone with his financial resources would spend his Sundays stripping down his lawnmower.
His lack of ostentation extended to his charitable programme, which was considerable. His £20 million sterling for the British Museum in the late 1990s was the largest private donation it had ever received. The Weston trusts handed out £30 million a year, mainly to medical charities, arts and education.
The same applied to his politics. Like many business leaders of his era, he was a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher. ABF was one of the band of big businesses that made large donations to the Conservative Party during her period in office.
As he approached 70, Garry Weston finally bowed to pressure to separate his dual role of chairman and chief executive, appointing Peter Jackson as chief executive in December 1998. And after suffering a mild stroke in 1999, he finally retired from the ABF board, after 51 years, in 2000. He left a business worth about £4 billion sterling, compared to £140 million when he took over.
He is survived by his wife Mary, three sons and three daughters.
Garfield Howard Weston: born 1927; died, February 2002