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Rob Whitehead is not your typical managing director.

He doesn’t have an office or even his own desk. Nor does he have a secretary and his mobile phone number is on his company’s website so anyone can contact him directly.

In short, the head of Zubrance Group, a trio of Yorkshire companies which produce fresh sauces and confectionery for major manufacturers and retailers, is more accessible than your average MD.

He is also keen to emphasise his down-to-earth approach.

“Do I like fast cars and blingy things? No,” he says.

“But you do have a boat”, I point out. Whitehead, 53, has already told me how he sailed across the Mediterranean earlier this year.

“Well, you say that, but when you get down to it there’s lots of different people who do all sorts of things,” he says defensively. “It’s a good slap round the cheek occasionally to remember that most people are pretty normal and they do all sorts of interesting things and it’s quite fun.”

I’m not sure whether that’s a slap round the cheek for me or for him but before I can question it further he changes the subject.

“What makes me tick is working with young people,” he says. “There’s a lot to learn for old croats like me and it’s fun.”

Zubrance Group has three companies with a combined turnover of about £28m.

New Ivory, the biggest business which he bought in 2001, is a protein sauces manufacturer based in Elland, making chilled sauces for major retailers including M&S and Asda. It also makes all the sauces for the Saucy Fish Co. It has a £22m turnover and employs 150 people.

Confection By Design, acquired in 2005, produces sugar-based ingredients including toffee, fudge and honeycomb pieces for food manufacturers including Green & Blacks. It has a £4m turnover and 50 staff.

Meanwhile, The Serious Sweet Company, launched in 2012, makes sugar-boiled confectionery, including fudge, for retailers’ own brands including Asda, Tesco and Harrods as well as its own new confectionery brand, Ultimate English.

The company, which employs five staff, recorded sales of £2m in 2013 and Whitehead has big ambitions to grow this to £10m by 2020.

The home of the two confectionery businesses, based on Hornbeam Park in Harrogate, is where we meet today.

“I bought the confectionery business because I walked in here one day and I saw people making fudge and I loved the theatre and the care with which they were making it and I loved the product,” says Whitehead.

He adds: “It was a business that was relatively undeveloped and I thought ‘surely I can do something with it’.”

Whitehead, who has made a career out of buying, developing and selling businesses, says he looks for companies in which he can innovate and create new products in areas where the ‘big boys don’t play’.

“In many ways I am a niche player in the food industry,” he says. “We need to wow our customers.”

Whitehead started his career as an IT consultant in London after studying history and politics at Keele University.

In 1992, his father-in-law asked him to join the family businesses, including a fats business called Matthews Foods, based in Wakefield. A year later, his father-in-law was diagnosed with dementia and Whitehead found himself on his own running two companies.

He sold one of the businesses and focused on Matthews Foods, growing it from £6m to a £38m turnover before selling it to Kerry Foods in 2005. “It hurt like hell to sell that business,” he says. “I had a lot of relationships with people in it and it had defined me for 10 years.”

Instead, Whitehead concentrated on buying and developing companies which needed innovation and product development.

The Serious Sweet Company is currently in the early stages of growing its new Ultimate English brand, which produces fudge, toffee and honeycomb, coconut ice and nut brittles.

Sugar has come under intense scrutiny in recent months following warnings by academics and campaigners that it has become as dangerous as alcohol and tobacco.

But Whitehead is not concerned about the impact on his business. “We are very upfront with people,” he says. “They are not daft. They know that we are in the naughty-but-nice category and what we say to people is ‘just have a little bit’.”

He adds: “We all have a responsibility to make sure that we are transparent about what our products are so people have the opportunity to make an informed choice about it. Where it’s possible, you can explore how to make things more ‘healthy’ but if you try to make a reduced fat fudge, it’s going to taste horrible.”

Whitehead believes his leadership approach stems from his early years. He was born and brought up in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, where his father worked at the Medical Research Council. The family moved back to England to live in Cambridgeshire when Whitehead was 12.

“The whole thing was a huge culture shock because I went from a private boarding school in Kenya to a secondary modern school and on my first day there I got thrown over a wall because that’s what happened to kids who arrived,” he says. “I was the only person from my year to go to university.”

He adds: “In many ways, what I like about that experience is that I’d like to think I can talk to anybody and I don’t mind going into the factory and getting my hands dirty. I think an important part of leadership is the ability to empathise with other people.”