When David Dilger took his place at the top table at yesterday's annual general meeting of Greencore, the chief executive was fully aware that, as far as many shareholders were concerned, he has still to prove himself as chief executive of one of the State's biggest food companies.

After four years as chief executive, the 41-year-old Dilger is acutely aware that while the market has no doubts about his abilities to churn profits out of the existing sugar, malt and fertiliser businesses, investors are not as convinced that Dilger and his management team have the strategic vision to drive Greencore into the next phase of its development.

"There's no doubt about his ability to generate the best possible return especially from the sugar business, but I'm still not convinced that they know where they're going when it comes to acquisitions," says one fund manager. "There seems to be an innate caution among the management team and that possibly comes down to the fact that most of them are accountants," he adds.

For that reason, Greencore shareholders are hoping that Dilger will be able to produce the one remaining acquisition that will make Greencore a world player in one of its chosen sectors - malting. Greencore is currently thought to be the top bidder in the race to acquire the Harrison & Crosfeld (H & C) subsidiary Paul's Malt. But its bid of £70-80 million sterling is thought to be a long way off what H & C is willing to accept.

If H & C decides to take Paul's off the market - as some in the London market believe - it will represent a grievous blow to Dilger's plans for Greencore, especially given the strength of Greencore's balance sheet which would comfortably allow a deal of up to £150 million.

In the years since Greencore was privatised, those attending financial presentations by Mr Dilger and his predecessor Gerry Murphy have been told repeatedly that Greencore will not make an acquisition for the sake of making an acquisition. That caution is, no doubt, laudable but many of Greencore's shareholders feel that the group should still be taking a more aggressive approach to sourcing deals.

The investment in the American sugar company Imperial Holly has mystified many observers who could see little sense in taking a substantial stake in the US sugar industry before a period of forecast plant over-capacity and raw material overproduction.

The fact that Greencore had to accept a massive dilution in its stake in Imperial Holly when the American company issued a load of shares to fund an acquisition has only added to the mystification about Greencore's strategy in its foray into the American sugar industry.

If any acquisition would have catapulted Greencore into a position of primacy, it would have been a successful bid for the Dalgety food ingredients business. Or, at least, the Spillers flour business. An operation that would have fit like a glove with Greencore's own Odlum business. The fact that Greencore, apparently, never made it to the final reckoning was, to say the very least, unfortunate.

Comparisons with other food companies are probably unwelcome in the Greencore boardroom, but shareholders have had to stand by while the rest of the Irish food industry has become involved in a frenzy of corporate activity, especially Kerry, IAWS and Avonmore Waterford. Seeing Denis Brosnan, Philip Lynch and Pat O'Neill luxuriating in the limelight that big corporate deals bring probably doesn't bother David Dilger too much. But when some institutional investors suggest that Brosnan and Lynch in particular are successful because they are aggressive in deal making, that must surely rankle with the Greencore chief executive. Failure to nail down the Paul's acquisition will undoubtedly lead to more sniping from the institutional sidelines that what Greencore needs is not just a manager, it is a visionary.

The apparent inability to make acquisitions has been reflected in the performance of the Greencore share, which has under-performed the Irish market to the tune of almost 32 per cent. That performance would have been even worse had it not been for a strong January for Greencore when the shares jumped from 330p at the end of 1997 to 380p as the market anticipated corporate movements and a share buy-back.

Despite the January recovery, Greencore is still trading on a rating that makes it one of the cheapest sugar companies in Europe. That discount to its European peer group probably explains why Greencore got an under-whelming response to its offer to buy back 10 million shares at 380p.

Most institutional shareholders, feeling that the buy-back price was more than a little bit parsimonious posed the question: Why sell shares back at a discount?

Investment group Dolmen Securities reflected the view of the market quite candidly this week when it commented: ". . . however unhappy Greeencore might be with the valuation placed on Paul's Malt, shareholders will grow increasingly restive should the stock continue to underperform the market as it has since early 1997. Looked at from a relative sectoral perspective the stock is one of the cheapest sugar stocks in Europe, and does have considerable upside potential. Yet it remains one of the ISEQ's poorest performers.

"However, implicit in realising this upside is the assumption that the company can grow earnings, preferably through an acquisition," says Dolmen.

So who is David Dilger and how is it that a 41-year-old Dublin accountant has spent the past 10 years in the agri-food industry, periodically locking horns with farmers and trade unions alike.

After graduating in law from Trinity College, David Dilger joined Stokes Kennedy Crowley (now KPMG) and qualified as a chartered accountant in 1980. Four years later he joined Craig McKinney at Woodchester Investments and became McKinney's right hand man at the rapidly-expanding leasing group.

His move into the food industry came courtesy of Larry Goodman, who poached Dilger to become chief executive of Goodman's Food Industries company. That soon led the former Clongowes boy into the unaccustomed situation of trying to persuade Monaghan, Cavan and Westmeath farmers to become part of the Goodman fold.

Those who thought that the city boy Dilger might find it difficult to relate to the farming community were soon proven wrong, and by all accounts Dilger found little difficulty in transferring from the world of leasing at Woodchester to the machiavellian politics of the Irish dairy industry.

After Greencore acquired Food Industries in 1992, Dilger stayed on as chief operating officer, a position he continued to fill after Greencore went outside the State in 1992 and headhunted Gerry Murphy as chief executive. Any disappointment he might have had disappeared in 1995 when Murphy returned to England and Dilger became chief executive.

Since then, he has built up Irish Sugar in particular into a cashcow, operating on high margins in a domestic market where it has a virtual stranglehold. To many - including its sugar beet suppliers and its sugar factory workers, those hefty margins have come at their expense, claims dismissed out of hand by the chief executive.

Disputes with the beet growers led to a boycott of Greencore's fertiliser business by the growers and an accusation against Dilger of "arrogance" by former IFA president John Donnelly. But now there is peace on the farms and the factories - achieved by Dilger at minimal cost to Greencore's margins.

"He's not afraid to take any interest group on, and he's totally focused on cost," says one industry source on Dilger. He adds, however: "The jury is still out on whether he can take the company forward."