Cepac’s own 2026 portfolio displays a Tic Tac unit beneath a page heading that calls this kind of display a “Parasite”. Meanwhile, Ferrero’s supplier code requires open disclosure, grievance reporting, remediation, five-year records and due diligence capable of reaching agents, subcontractors and sub-suppliers. Moreover, its business code condemns discrimination, abuse, harassment and careless handling of personal data. Now the ET3 contradiction, Maria Walker’s denial, the same-day WhatsApp receipt and Cepac’s £50,000 escape route are hanging from Ferrero’s aisle.
Cepac Put Tic Tac On The Parasite
Cepac published its POS Portfolio 2026 to sell the retail displays it can design and manufacture. In particular, one page promotes a narrow cardboard unit that clips onto an aisle fixture. The industry term printed across the page is “Parasite”. Beside Cepac’s line drawing sits a finished green display carrying Tic Tac branding from top to bottom.
Ferrero’s own website identifies Tic Tac as one of the Ferrero Group’s global brands. Therefore, nobody needs to infer the brand connection from a discarded box, an old trade report or two companies occupying the same exhibition hall. Cepac selected the work, photographed it and placed it inside its own 2026 sales portfolio.
The page even describes the format as a low-cost merchandising solution designed for impulse purchases. That is useful commercial language. However, it also creates a wonderfully exact picture of the relationship Ferrero now needs to inspect: Cepac’s product attached itself to the Tic Tac aisle while the unresolved recruitment record travelled in the opposite direction.
TCAP has never published a Ferrero or Tic Tac article before. Consequently, this is not an update and Ferrero has not merely missed a later development. The company now receives the complete file at once: Page’s interview offer, the health disclosure, the WhatsApp receipt, Maria Walker’s denial, Cepac’s ET3 and the legal campaign that prevented a merits decision.
Ferrero Wrote The Five-Year Rule
Ferrero’s Supplier Code applies to businesses providing goods or services within its supply chain. Direct suppliers must also cascade the code and conduct due diligence across employees, agents, subcontractors, suppliers and sub-suppliers involved in providing those goods or services. Accordingly, adding another commercial layer does not make the cardboard invisible.
The code offers a sizeable compliance toolbox. For example, Ferrero may require self-declarations, online assessments, risk and impact assessments, data collection, certifications and internal or third-party audits. Suppliers must operate management systems for due diligence, grievance reporting and remediation. They must also make programmes visible, provide Ferrero-specific information and keep records of assessments, results and actions for at least five years.
Most importantly, Ferrero requires suppliers to deal with it openly and cooperatively. They must disclose anything connected with the code that Ferrero would reasonably expect to hear about, while considering the severity and potential effect on Ferrero’s supply chain. Ferrero promises prompt investigation and reserves the right to impose corrective actions, deadlines and firm implementation commitments.
That creates the first Tic Tac question. Did Cepac tell Ferrero about a disability-discrimination claim involving recruitment, a pleaded conflict over health information, a complaint answered by Maria Walker and costs schedules exceeding £50,000? If not, five years is plenty of time to find the missing fucking record.
Any Form Of Discrimination Means Any Form
Ferrero’s Supplier Code condemns all forms of discrimination and harassment, together with inappropriate or disrespectful behaviour, physical abuse and verbal abuse. Moreover, it requires proactive measures supporting equal opportunity, including for temporary workers. Suppliers must identify, prevent and mitigate discrimination they cause, contribute to or encounter through business relationships.
Meanwhile, Ferrero’s Code of Business Conduct places similar expectations across its third-party relationships. It says employees of commercial partners must not suffer discrimination, abuse or harassment based on characteristics including age, origin and physical ability. The document also requires careful handling of personal data and lets Ferrero verify supplier compliance.
Ferrero’s Human Rights Policy adds another layer. It commits the group to identify, prevent, address and remedy adverse human-rights effects that Ferrero causes, contributes to or becomes directly linked with through a business relationship. In addition, its privacy principle covers the personal information of employees, vendors and providers.
Ferrero’s Human Rights Progress Report then puts procurement directly on the wrapper. Chief Procurement Officer Isabel Hochgesand says human rights belong at the forefront of procurement practices. The report calls supply-chain human rights a “Top Priority” and says Ferrero uses supplier audits, regular reporting and continuous challenge to identify and remedy violations.
No document needs to contain the name Maria Walker or the words “Page Outsourcing telephone call” before it applies. Indeed, Ferrero wrote broad duties around discrimination, temporary workers, privacy, business relationships, grievances and remedy. Cepac’s recruitment record lands inside every one of them.
The company sells Tic Tac as a simple little product made with care. Likewise, this file is simple. The difficulty begins only when somebody tries to make two incompatible recruitment accounts occupy the same tiny box.
Two WhatsApp Lines Before The Lawyers
First, Page Outsourcing called me on 21 August 2024 about a production role at Cepac. Page 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 arrange an exact, mutually agreeable interview time. However, that confirmation never arrived.
Later that day, I sent a WhatsApp message recording the news:
“Interview next week”
“27k training wage up towards 29”
The recipient retained the conversation and supplied a witness statement dated 20 February 2025 confirming its origin and context. Crucially, the message predates the complaint, ACAS notification, Tribunal claim and TCAP itself. Nobody was preparing litigation or building an allegation. I had received good news and told somebody about it.
Ferrero’s audit tools can test the rest. Consequently, Page’s call notes, candidate-status history, internal communications and system logs should reveal when the interview entered the process, what followed the health disclosure and why the promised arrangement call disappeared.
Maria Walker Repacked The Answer At 09:52
At 04:35 on 8 October 2024, I complained directly to Cepac. My email described the interview offer, its planned timing after the bank holiday, the promised confirmation call, the questions about my work gap and the disclosure that I had received treatment for a mental-health condition.
Cepac HR Business Partner Maria Walker replied at 09:52, five hours and seventeen minutes later. She said Page had screened potential candidates and sent their CVs to Cepac. Then Walker supplied a different result:
“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.”
Walker maintained that the recruiting manager would not have known about the mental-health information. She also apologised because Page had supposedly failed to explain that I had not secured an interview. Finally, her response compressed the clash between Page’s offer and Cepac’s shortlist account into “confusion”.
However, Walker had not seen the WhatsApp record when she answered. The sequence therefore stays fixed. Page offered the interview and discussed the wage. I disclosed my mental health. The confirmation vanished. Cepac then replaced the offer with a failure to shortlist before it knew that the original account had survived in writing.
Ferrero demands openness, records and investigation. Therefore, it can start by asking what Walker reviewed before 09:52.
Paragraph 12 Meets Paragraph 14
Cepac’s later ET3 did not resolve the knowledge problem. Instead, it sharpened it. Paragraph 12 distanced Cepac from knowledge relevant to disability. Paragraph 14 then recorded recruitment information that I had spent around twelve months out of work because of health problems and felt ready to return.
The extract reproduced below comes from Cepac Ltd’s Grounds of Resistance.
Health information did not walk into a legal pleading by itself. Page recorded it, transmitted it or included it in material that eventually reached Cepac and its lawyers. Otherwise, paragraph 14 could not use the information while explaining the recruitment process.
Consequently, the five-year rule matters. Ferrero can ask what Page recorded during the call, who accessed it and when the candidate status changed. It can identify what reached Cepac before Walker replied and who supplied the words used in paragraph 14. Above all, it can examine why an interview confirmation disappeared after Page learned that my work gap related to mental health.
A merits hearing should have tested those questions through disclosure, witnesses and cross-examination. Instead, Cepac spent its money building another exit.
The Grievance Mechanism Ate The Grievance
Ferrero requires an effective remedy mechanism capable of addressing human-rights concerns across the supply chain. Instead, Cepac received a recruitment complaint and converted the disabled complainant into the principal compliance problem.
In March 2025, Horsfield Menzies estimated Cepac’s costs at £25,000 to £30,000 and offered not to pursue them if the discrimination claim disappeared. The firm directed that pressure towards a disabled litigant in person who had already reported financial hardship, serious participation difficulties and deteriorating mental health.
Next, Cepac collected correspondence, complaints, TCAP articles and posts on X into a 191-page conduct dossier. Its legal team separated my reactions from the disability, pressure and procedural failures surrounding them. It then presented those reactions as independent misconduct and argued that the original recruitment claim should never reach a merits hearing.
Ultimately, Cepac chose to bully me, invade my privacy and weaponise the responses that its tactics helped produce. A grievance about an interview went into the machinery. Out came a character prosecution designed to ensure nobody had to answer whether Page offered that interview.
Ferrero’s code demands systems for grievance reporting and remediation. This was the fucking opposite. Cepac did not remedy the alleged discrimination or clear itself through evidence. It clipped the complainant to the side of the dispute, labelled him the problem and kept moving the original product through the aisle.
Privacy Was Not A Free Sample
Horsfield Menzies contacted my medical centre for Cepac, investigated appointment availability and used the result to oppose a postponement. I had supplied medical material to establish disability and explain why safe participation required an adjustment. That evidence did not grant Cepac’s solicitors permission to enter my healthcare relationship looking for adversarial stock.
The firm maintained that the medical centre disclosed no private medical information. Nevertheless, that answer avoids the conduct under examination. Cepac’s representatives contacted a healthcare provider because they wanted information capable of defeating a disability-related request.
Ferrero’s rules require suppliers and commercial partners to comply with data-protection, confidentiality and privacy law. Its Human Rights Policy also promises respect for the personal information of employees, vendors and providers. Therefore, Ferrero can request each instruction, email, attendance note and submission connected with the contact. It can ask who authorised the step, what privacy assessment took place and what purpose Cepac recorded.
The tactic also belonged to the wider conversion process. Cepac relied upon medical evidence when acknowledging disability served its procedural needs. Its solicitors investigated treatment access when extra pressure might prevent a postponement. Afterwards, they stripped the health context from reactions placed before the Tribunal.
Ferrero sells “gentle freshness” one Tic Tac at a time. Cepac’s lawyers brought the subtlety of a supermarket tannoy into my medical affairs.
More Than £50,000 Bought The Exit
Cepac’s combined costs schedules eventually exceeded £50,000. Yet nobody cross-examined Page about the interview offer. Nobody required Walker to reconcile her answer with the same-day message. The proceedings also produced no tested account of how health information reached paragraph 14.
Instead, the money followed the conduct strategy. Lawyers gathered material, opposed adjustments, entered my medical terrain and built an argument for ending the claim before witnesses could address the recruitment facts. Pressure produced reactions. Cepac preserved those reactions, cut away their context and sold the edited version back to the Tribunal as the reason a fair hearing could not happen.
Ferrero’s due-diligence framework raises a second commercial question. Who at Cepac authorised expenditure exceeding £50,000? What did those decision-makers know about disability, financial hardship and medical deterioration? Why did nobody direct a fraction of that sum towards Page’s records, Walker’s chronology and the contradiction inside Cepac’s own pleading?
Resources were never the problem. Cepac decided where to place them. It funded a route around the merits while Ferrero’s code required open cooperation, grievance handling, remediation and evidence capable of surviving an audit.
Nevertheless, two WhatsApp lines remained in the file throughout. Apparently, opening them cost too much.
Newcastle Closed The Little Lid
The institutional machinery is documented in Newcastle Employment Tribunal : Deep Dive : Deliberate Maladministration, Disability Shaming, Judicial White Knights, Speed-reader Smith And The Horsfield Menzies Feeding Frenzy. Newcastle’s administration and case management created the conditions in which Cepac’s conduct case displaced the disability-discrimination evidence.
Correspondence travelled to the wrong Tribunal office, while the contents and visibility of a file approaching two thousand pages remained unclear. Respondent material received rapid attention. By contrast, claimant applications, medical context and complaints disappeared into procedural fog. Employment Judge T. R. Smith said he spent three hours reviewing a 1,941-page file and called me its “principle culprit”. Three days before the decisive hearing, Employment Judge Brain refused the postponement required for safe participation.
On 24 April 2026, Employment Judge James heard the respondents without me. He struck out the claims and later ordered £20,000 in costs. However, the Tribunal never decided whether Page offered the interview, why the confirmation vanished, how health information moved through the recruitment chain or whether disability affected the outcome.
Strike-out did not authenticate Walker’s version. Nor did it reconcile paragraphs 12 and 14 or erase the WhatsApp receipt. Newcastle simply closed the lid before anybody counted what Cepac had put inside.
The Integrity Helpline Has An Aisle Number
Ferrero tells suppliers to notify concerns through their regular Ferrero contact or its Integrity Helpline. The group describes that helpline as an externally managed service available around the clock, every day of the year and in dozens of languages. Ferrero says reports reach a steering committee for review.
The Supplier Code then makes the expected response explicit. Ferrero will promptly investigate concerns, discuss findings with the relevant supplier and demand corrective action, firm deadlines and implementation commitments where remediation becomes necessary. Moreover, Ferrero reserves the right to verify compliance and end commercial relationships with businesses that refuse its standards.
Ferrero’s July 2026 complaint rules for the helpline add further operational detail. Specifically, external people can report suspected legal or human-rights violations across the supply chain. Ferrero promises confidentiality, impartial handling, protection from adverse treatment and documented, controlled remedial measures.
Accordingly, the investigation route already exists. Ferrero can collect Page’s call records, candidate history and internal communications. It can identify what Walker reviewed before 09:52, trace paragraph 14’s health information and inspect the medical-centre correspondence. It can also examine the 191-page dossier, the costs schedules and any disclosure Cepac made to Ferrero while pursuing that strategy.
Cepac supplied the green display. Ferrero supplied the grievance machinery. TCAP has now supplied the aisle number.
Refresh The Record, Ferrero
The complete sequence fits inside a Tic Tac box. First, Page called on 21 August 2024, offered an interview and discussed the wage. During that conversation, I explained that mental-health treatment accounted for my employment gap. Meanwhile, a same-day WhatsApp message preserved the interview and salary discussion. Then the promised confirmation disappeared. Finally, Maria Walker denied that I had secured an interview before she knew the receipt existed.
Afterwards, Cepac’s ET3 distanced the company from disability knowledge while placing health information inside its recruitment account. Rather than test those facts at a merits hearing, Cepac invaded my privacy, built a conduct dossier and spent more than £50,000 converting the disabled complainant into the offence. Newcastle finished the exercise without deciding the recruitment claim.
Ferrero’s standards address every stage. They condemn all forms of discrimination and harassment. Furthermore, Ferrero requires careful handling of personal data, open disclosure, effective grievance systems, five-year records, due diligence and remediation. Its auditors can inspect the evidence, while its commercial teams can require correction or terminate the relationship.
Cepac’s own 2026 portfolio proves that Tic Tac-branded work passed through its cardboard operation. More importantly, Cepac classified the unit itself. Ferrero’s product hangs from the aisle inside a category headed “Parasite”.
TCAP did not choose that word. It merely arrived with the receipts.
Ferrero can keep selling little moments of refreshment. First, it should open the fucking file and refresh the record.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Cepac – POS Portfolio 2026
- Ferrero – Supplier Code
- Ferrero – Code Of Business Conduct
- Ferrero – Human Rights Policy Statement
- Ferrero – Human Rights Progress Report
- Ferrero – Rules Of Procedure For The Complaint Procedure
- Ferrero – Tic Tac
- Ferrero – Code Of Business Conduct And Integrity Helpline
- TCAP – The Cepac Files : KFC II – Maria Walker And The Interview Receipt
- TCAP – The Cepac Files : Pernod Ricard II – Maria Walker, Two WhatsApp Lines And The Legal-Attack Clause
- TCAP – 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.