Investors will be keen to see what progress is being made at Premier Foods on Tuesday after the group was forced to cut its dividend and announce a refinancing deal back in March.

Premier, (whose brands include Hovis, Mr Kipling cakes & Branston Pickle) has been hit hard by the ‘double whammy’ of a rise in commodity prices and being deeply indebted at a time when lenders are particularly nervous.

Rising UK wheat prices alone added an extra £40m to the group’s input costs for 2007, whilst competitor Warburton’s exerted additional pressure on the group by keeping prices steady at a time when Premier sought to raise the price of a Hovis loaf to recover some of its higher input costs.

Analysts are hoping that Premier may have been able to recover some of its market share as Warburton’s now has to contend with strong price rises in Canadian wheat since the beginning of the year.

An additional loan and working capital arrangement with its banks on the £1.6bn of debt (the JP Getty quote “if you owe the bank a $100 thats your problem, but if you owe the bank $100m that’s the bank’s problem” seems appropriate here!) it has amassed in a number of acquisition deals gives the group some additional breathing space.

However, the group has recently put its French bakery business Sofrapain up for sale in a move designed to reduce the debt burden and other parts of the group are also rumoured to be on the block.

On Wednesday supermarket group J Sainsbury’s is expected to post a decent set of results as the transformation under CEO Justin King continues. Analysts are looking for profits of around £480m on sales of a little over £17bn and for reassurance that Sainsbury continues to show good like-for-like sales growth whilst also pinching market share.

Of more interest may be what key shareholder intentions might be. Qatari based Delta 2, which holds 25%, walked away from a bid 6 months ago and is now free to bid again, should it wish to. Activist shareholder and property tycoon Robert Tchenguiz is reported to hold just under 5% and is nursing a significant loss. He has called for the board to restructure its balance sheet, leveraging its substantial property portfolio, perhaps by splitting the group into a property firm and a supermarket business.

Sainsbury has gone part way to addressing the balance sheet issue, announcing a £1.2bn deal with British Land in March, seeking to ‘add value’ by extensions and developments to 38 of its stores.

Whether Mr. Tchenguiz and Delta 2 believes that is sufficient remains to be seen-despite Mr. King having delivered 13 successive quarters of like-for-like growth, an extra £2.7bn of sales and a doubling in profits over the 3 year turnaround strategy he has successfully implemented.

From here, however Sainsbury will have to run hard to stand still; the launch last month of its new homeware and furniture range under the Tu brand is one attempt to increase non-food sales by £1bn by March 2010.