Who got that job?

Job title: Managing director, Newmans Quality Foods

You probably have tasted some of the foods that come out of the company Peter Tinholt, 35, has just taken over - you just don't know it.

Newmans is a Tauranga food ingredients company producing edibles such as the fruit in many yoghurts for blue-chip food manufacturers in the Asia-Pacific region. But he's not about to name names: the food business is competitive, he says.

Newmans, which has a staff level in the "mid-40s", also has sales offices in Auckland, Melbourne and the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.

Says Tinholt: "We're very Asia-focused." And those Asian clients have high standards. There will be at least five independent audits of the factory a year by various clients.

Tinholt, who has Dutch parents, was born in Tanzania. The family - he has one brother - migrated to New Zealand in 1981. He followed his education in Hawkes Bay with a Waikato University degree in social sciences.

He started his working life as a pharmaceutical sales rep, clambering swiftly up the sales ladder to the position of general manager of natural foods company Mother Earth in Melbourne. He spent nearly three years in Australia, and was taken on by Cadbury Schweppes there when it gobbled up Mother Earth.

But Tinholt was wanting to take his wife and two small children, aged 1 and 3, home to New Zealand when the Newmans job was advertised.

It was exactly what he was seeking - "a position with the right amount of challenge and the opportunity to still have an international role".