Greencore management has taken plenty of stick in recent months (not least from this column) for its snail-like corporate activity. There was a perception in the market that the management might be very good at wringing the maximum profits out of a near-monopoly sugar business but did not have the strategic vision to propel Greencore into the front-rank of international food companies.

For that reason, David Dilger and his colleagues can be forgiven for feeling just a little bit smug at the ecstatic market reaction to the £73 million acquisition of Pauls Malt, reaction that immediately drove the shares ahead 10 per cent to a new high around 445p.

Greencore and Pauls' owner Elementis have been involved in a "who blinks first" exercise for months over Pauls Malt, with Greencore privately indicating that, whatever the attractions of Pauls, it was not going to pay over the odds. Elementis, for its part, put out the message that it was happy to wait to get the price it wanted for a company that did not fit into Elementis's new focus on chemicals.

On this occasion, it seems pretty clear that Elementis was the first to blink, once it became clear that Garry Weston's ABF (a notoriously tight-fisted group when it comes to paying for acquisitions) was not going to pay more for Pauls than Greencore.

By any standards, the Pauls deal is an excellent one for Greencore, on the basis of cost per tonne of malting capacity and on the basis that a large chunk of the purchase price covers a new state-of-the-art maltster that Pauls was due to bring on stream shortly.

This reporter does not wish to appear curmudgeonly and deny Greencore's management the credit it is due for what is an excellent addition to the group's business. But the acquisition of Pauls - while of enormous significance for the malting division - is relatively modest given Greencore's capacity to do a really big deal.