Well, a few weeks is a long time in the food industry and Current Account has to confess that his new-found enthusiasm for Glanbia after its mozzarella joint venture with Leprino has been shown subsequently to have been more than a little misplaced.

A few weeks ago, we wrote with some enthusiasm about the link-up with the kings of the mozzarella industry, Leprino, and suggested that there was finally some light at the end of the tunnel for Glanbia's longsuffering shareholders. How wrong we were.

Last week, Glanbia produced a truly shocking set of figures and it seems that as soon as the group gets its head above water in one part of its operations, another part of the business drags it back down again.

It was generally known that Glanbia was suffering from margin squeeze in its food service and pork businesses in the UK, but nobody seriously expected things to be as bad as they were revealed to be in last week's first-half accounts.

Glanbia's food service business is part of the old Cheese Company business that Waterford Foods bought for £125 million (€159 million) a couple of years before the merger with Avonmore.

Back then, Glanbia's food service business seemed a tidy operation but now it has fallen victim to the demands of major customers for a single supplier of chilled, frozen and ambient food products.

Glanbia can only provide one of those food categories and is now faced with a pretty stark choice - does it try and expand the business or does it admit defeat and try and find a company that wants to add chilled foods distribution to its existing frozen and/or ambient operations?

Given the state of Glanbia's balance sheet, it is certainty not going to be a buyer in any rationalisation of the British food service industry.

It is also going to be seen in the industry as something of a distressed seller. That said, Glanbia was also in effect a forced seller of its liquid milk business, but still managed to get a decent £120 million from Express Dairies.

So what has Glanbia got that might restore the group's fortunes? On the plus side it has a strong dairy ingredients operation in Ireland and cheese business in Idaho. The 3p milk price premium guaranteed as part of the merger agreement runs out at the end of this year, saving an estimated £9 million.

On the minus side, Glanbia will end the year with debt of about £265 million, with accompanying high gearing and low interest cover - unless it manages to sell off the food service business. Its pork business in the UK is recovering but it is still part of a fundamentally unsound industry, where over-capacity and margin squeeze are endemic problems. The minuses still heavily outweigh the pluses.

It's hard not to feel sympathy for Ned Sullivan, who probably had no idea of the scale of mess he was taking over when he took on the managing director's job. Now, he is in effect faced with a job of not growing Glanbia's business but of preserving the good bits that are left.

The job he faces in an unenviable one - faced with institutional investors that have lost confidence in the company and that have just suffered a 40 per cent drop in dividends.

He is also faced with farmer-shareholders who control 54 per cent of Glanbia through the coop, and who are facing an automatic 3p a gallon cut in their milk price irrespective of what happens in dairy markets.

It would be nice to be able to advance a solution to Glanbia's problems. Unfortunately this reporter sees none, and the possibility may have to be faced that a company of Glanbia's size should turn inwards and simply focus on providing a market for its farmers' milk and forget about its overseas business.

In effect, revert to being a coop!