The Mars Cepac supplier code prohibits disability discrimination in hiring, psychological abuse, intimidation, bullying, retaliation and misuse of personal data. Mars even calls privacy a human right. Cepac’s live 2026 portfolio still displays Galaxy and Maltesers work. Now Maria Walker’s denial, the same-day WhatsApp record, the medical-centre intrusion and the £50,000 conduct machine are going into the same fucking box.
Part One Put Mars On Notice
Part One, The Cepac Files : Galaxy, Maltesers And The £50,000 Human Rights Box, established the commercial and ethical problem. Food Manufacture publicly named Mars as a Cepac customer during the 2023 Darlington dispute. More recently, Cepac placed Galaxy and Maltesers displays inside its live POS Portfolio 2026. Its own website currently hosts that portfolio, complete with the contact details of a Cepac sales manager.
Indeed, that is a current supplier-side receipt, not an archaeological fragment TCAP dug out of an abandoned warehouse. Cepac is using Mars brands in 2026 to advertise what its cardboard operation can do. Consequently, the chocolate sits in the display, the display sits in the portfolio and the portfolio sits in Cepac’s shop window with the fucking lights on.
Part One also put Mars’s human-rights promises beside Cepac’s ET3, its conduct campaign and combined costs schedules exceeding £50,000. However, it did not contain the complete recruitment trail that emerged in the later KFC and Asda articles: the precise timing of the Page Outsourcing call, the same-day WhatsApp message, Maria Walker’s answer before she knew the message existed and the privacy invasion Cepac used to oppose my safe participation.
Therefore, Part Two supplies that missing file. Mars wrote a supplier code covering almost every page of it.
[IMAGE: Cepac POS Portfolio 2026 page showing the Galaxy and Maltesers displays. Alt text: Mars Cepac supplier code article showing Galaxy and Maltesers displays in Cepac’s 2026 portfolio.]
The Mars Cepac Supplier Code Wrote The Whole Fucking Test
Mars’s September 2024 Supplier Code applies to suppliers with active commercial relationships, upstream and downstream suppliers, relevant subcontractors and labour providers. It prohibits disability discrimination in hiring. Moreover, the code bans physical, verbal and psychological abuse alongside intimidation, bullying and harassment. Suppliers must also handle grievances effectively, confidentially and without retaliation.
Then the code reaches information. In addition, suppliers must collect, process, store, transfer and dispose of personal data lawfully while respecting privacy as a human right. Mars can demand information, require self-assessments, inspect procedures, conduct announced or unannounced audits and terminate a supplier that refuses to comply or take corrective steps.
This is not generic ESG custard poured over a cocoa bean. In effect, Mars wrote a procedural map of the Cepac file. Disability in recruitment. Psychological pressure. Bullying. Retaliation against the complainant. Confidential grievance handling. Personal data. Privacy. Records. Investigation. Corrective action.
However, the only missing clause is one requiring suppliers not to spend more than £50,000 turning a disabled claimant into the offence because answering two WhatsApp lines looked commercially inconvenient.
Two Lines Before The Lawyers Arrived
Page Outsourcing called me on 21 August 2024 about the Cepac role. It offered an interview for the week after the bank holiday and discussed a £27,000 training wage rising towards £29,000. During the same conversation, I explained that mental-health treatment accounted for the lengthy gap in my employment. Page said my details would go forward and another call would confirm an exact, mutually agreeable interview time.
However, that confirmation never came.
Meanwhile, a WhatsApp message recorded the outcome on the same day. It said “Interview next week” and “27k training wage up towards 29”. The recipient retained the exchange and later supplied a witness statement confirming its origin and context. Nobody had yet complained about anything. Moreover, nobody had notified ACAS, no Tribunal claim existed and TCAP had not published a word about Cepac.
The message therefore arrived before anyone needed a litigation position. Specifically, it is the ordinary little record a person creates after finishing a call, telling somebody what happened and carrying on with the day. Two casual lines survived what followed because facts do not become dysregulated when a corporation applies pressure to them.
Maria Walker Answered At 09:52
At 04:35 on 8 October 2024, I complained directly to Cepac. The email recorded the interview offer, its planned timing after the bank holiday, the promised confirmation call, Page’s questions about my work gap and my disclosure that I had been receiving treatment for a mental-health condition.
Five hours and seventeen minutes later, Maria Walker, Cepac’s HR Business Partner, replied at 09:52. She said Page had completed an initial screening and sent a group of potential candidates’ CVs to Cepac. Walker then supplied the corporate replacement history: “I can see that your CV was sent to the recruiting manager with a group of potential candidates and unfortunately you were not shortlisted on that occasion”.
However, her answer maintained that the recruiting manager would not have known about the mental-health information. The apology concerned Page supposedly failing to explain that I had not secured an interview, while Walker filed the clash between an offered interview and a failure to shortlist under “confusion”.
The WhatsApp Receipt Walker Had Not Seen
Crucially, Walker had not seen the WhatsApp message when she wrote that answer. The evidence now fixes the sequence. Page offered the interview and discussed the money. I disclosed my mental health. A contemporaneous message recorded the outcome. Then the confirmation disappeared. Cepac replaced the offer with a failed shortlist before knowing the same-day receipt existed.
In short, Mars does not need a cocoa-tracing satellite to investigate this. It can ask Page for the call notes, recording, candidate-status history and system audit trail. Likewise, Cepac can identify what Walker reviewed before 09:52 and when the recruitment status changed. A supplier code serious about records should be able to survive contact with two messages and one email.
The ET3 Could Not Eat The Health Information
Cepac’s later ET3 made the problem worse. Paragraph 12 tried to distance the company from knowledge relevant to disability. However, paragraph 14 recorded recruitment information that I had spent around twelve months out of work because of health problems and felt ready to return.
In other words, one paragraph attempts to seal the box. The next has the health information pushing through the fucking fold.
Therefore, that wording entered Cepac’s pleaded defence from somewhere. Page held it, passed it on or placed it into material that travelled through the recruitment chain. Cepac had sufficient access to use it when explaining the employment gap, yet still wanted the Tribunal to treat disability knowledge as safely absent from the decision that followed.
A merits hearing could have established the route. For example, counsel could have questioned witnesses about the call, the shortlist, the vanished confirmation and the information behind paragraph 14. System records could have shown who knew what and when. Maria Walker could have explained the work she completed before converting an interview offer into “confusion”.
Instead, none of that happened. The contradiction remained in the file while Cepac built a different case around the disabled person raising it.
Privacy Was A Human Right Until Cepac Needed An Exit
Mars’s code says privacy is a human right. By contrast, Cepac treated mine as litigation stock.
Acting for Cepac, Horsfield Menzies contacted my medical centre, investigated appointment availability and deployed the result against a postponement. I had supplied medical evidence to establish disability and explain why safe participation required adjustment. However, that evidence did not invite Cepac’s solicitors to tour my healthcare arrangements, test the reception desk and convert access to treatment into an adversarial exhibit.
Moreover, the intrusion sat inside a wider operation. Cepac searched my litigation history and deployed medical information. It collected emails, complaints, blog articles and X posts into a 191-page conduct dossier. Pressure generated disability-related reactions. Cepac then stripped those reactions of the pressure and medical context that produced them before relabelling the remains as misconduct.
Consequently, Cepac chose to bully me, invade my privacy and weaponise my reactions by turning them into “conduct”. It then spent more than £50,000 doing it because the strategy offered an escape from the one place its recruitment account had to survive: a merits hearing.
That was not grievance resolution. Instead, it was grievance conversion. The complaint went into the machine. A character prosecution came out. Mars bans psychological abuse, bullying, retaliation and misuse of personal information throughout its supply chain. Cepac assembled the fucking demonstration model.
Newcastle Supplied The Escape Route
Newcastle Employment Tribunal : Deep Dive – Deliberate Maladministration, Disability Shaming, Judicial White Knights, Speed-reader Smith And The Horsfield Menzies Feeding Frenzy documents the institutional behaviour Cepac exploited. Newcastle did not merely make a few untidy administrative mistakes around the edge. Instead, it created the conditions in which Cepac’s conduct case could consume the disability-discrimination claim.
Correspondence travelled to the wrong Tribunal office. Meanwhile, the contents and visibility of a file approaching two thousand pages remained opaque. Respondent material received attention while claimant applications, medical context and complaints disappeared into procedural fog. Employment Judge T. R. Smith said he had spent three hours reviewing a 1,941-page file and blamed me as its “principle culprit”. Then, three days before the decisive hearing, Employment Judge Brain refused the postponement required for safe participation.
Employment Judge James then proceeded without me on 24 April 2026. He struck out the claims and ordered me to pay £20,000 in costs. Yet no merits decision determined whether Page offered the interview, why the confirmation vanished, what information moved through the recruitment system, how paragraphs 12 and 14 could coexist or why Maria Walker’s account collided with the same-day WhatsApp record.
Ultimately, Cepac read Newcastle’s institutional appetite correctly. The Tribunal wanted reactions detached from cause, so Cepac and Horsfield Menzies supplied them by the pallet. Newcastle manufactured the escape lane. Cepac stocked it with material harvested from a disabled litigant under pressure and drove more than £50,000 through it before the recruitment evidence could reach open court.
Mars Can Open The Box Or Wear It
The Mars Cepac supplier code now creates a clean decision. First, Mars can establish the present commercial relationship behind the Galaxy and Maltesers displays in Cepac’s live 2026 portfolio. Then procurement can demand the Page records, candidate audit trail, Maria Walker review material, ET3 drafting trail, medical-centre correspondence and the schedules showing where the £50,000 went.
Next, its compliance function can apply the clauses Mars wrote. Did disability affect hiring? How effectively and respectfully did Cepac handle the grievance? Did the response involve bullying, psychological abuse or retaliation? What happened to the obligation to safeguard personal information and treat privacy as a human right? Finally, did Cepac notify Mars about the discrimination proceedings and related human-rights issues, and what corrective action follows when a supplier manufactures a conduct case to prevent a merits hearing from trying the original complaint?
Part One put the £50,000 human-rights box in front of Mars. Part Two opens it and finds timestamps. Page rang and offered an interview. It discussed the money. I disclosed my mental health. A same-day message preserved the result. Maria Walker denied the offer before knowing the message existed. Afterwards, Cepac invaded my privacy, provoked and catalogued the reactions and bought a procedural exit before a merits hearing could test those facts.
Mars says the world it wants tomorrow starts with how it does business today. Today, Cepac is still displaying Galaxy and Maltesers work in a 2026 portfolio while the supplier code sits beside a record of disability discrimination, bullying, retaliation and privacy abuse that reads like somebody filled it in as a fucking checklist.
Nevertheless, the chocolate wall did not stop the two WhatsApp lines. It only made the invoice larger.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Mars – Supplier Code of Conduct
- Mars – Global Human Rights Disclosure
- Cepac – POS Portfolio 2026
- Food Manufacture – Strike At Cepac Plant Threatens Food And Drink Packaging Supplies
- The Cepac Files : Galaxy, Maltesers And The £50,000 Human Rights Box
- The Cepac Files : KFC II – Maria Walker And The Interview Receipt
- Newcastle Employment Tribunal : Deep Dive – Deliberate Maladministration
- Employment Tribunal – Thompson v Cepac Limited And Page Outsourcing UK Limited
- TCAP case file: WhatsApp record dated 21 August 2024; email exchange between Lee Thompson and Cepac HR Business Partner Maria Walker dated 8 October 2024; supporting witness statement dated 20 February 2025; Cepac ET3 Grounds of Resistance; respondent costs schedules, submissions and medical-information correspondence.