Cadbury Schweppes has won the title of Britain’s Most Admired Company ahead of Unilever, who took second place, followed by BP in third.

The winners were announced at Management Today’s Britain’s most Admired Company awards at the MT Summitt, which took place earlier this week.

Tesco, the winner of the 2003 awards, finished in fourth place, but its chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy, won the individual prize of Britain’s Most Admired Business Leader for the second year running.

Cadbury Schweppes employs 55,000 staff and has recently overseen a $4.2bn acquisition of Adams, making the company the largest confectionery group in the world.

Tesco scored highly in eight of the nine categories in the BMAC poll but it ranked low for corporate and environmental responsibility coming 94th out of 220 companies.

Speaking at the MT Summit, Cadbury Schweppes chief executive Todd Stitzer said: “Cadbury Schweppes is a company built on a foundation of strong values nurtured by generations of principled leaders passionate about performance and stewardship in the broadest sense, and driven doe over 200 years by hundreds of thousands of loyal employees dedicated to compelling product quality, customer satisfaction and community well-being.”