The Perfetti Van Melle Cepac connection is sitting inside Cepac’s own 2026 portfolio: a complete Chupa Chups floor unit. Meanwhile, Perfetti says suppliers can be required to certify equal treatment and non-discrimination, accept site inspections and face penalties for violating its code. The same document covers third-party recruitment, physical ability, privacy and reporting without retaliation. Now the certificate meets Maria Walker’s denial, the same-day WhatsApp receipt, Cepac’s ET3 contradiction and a legal campaign costing more than £50,000. Perfetti has one obvious job: make sure its suppliers don’t suck.
Cepac Put Chupa Chups On The Floor
Cepac published its POS Portfolio 2026 to advertise the retail displays it can design and manufacture. On the page devoted to floor-standing display units, one finished unit carries Chupa Chups branding from top to bottom. The familiar yellow-and-red daisy sits above rows of lollipops inside a busy retail aisle.
Meanwhile, Perfetti Van Melle identifies Chupa Chups as one of its global brands. Indeed, the group calls it the original lollipop, sold around the world in more than one hundred flavours. Therefore, the Perfetti Van Melle Cepac trail does not depend upon a distant newspaper reference, an unidentified box or somebody squinting at a loading bay. Cepac selected the Chupa Chups work and placed it in its own 2026 portfolio.
Moreover, TCAP has never published a Chupa Chups or Perfetti Van Melle article. Consequently, this is not a sequel bringing one missing document to a company already familiar with the file. Perfetti receives the full fucking stick at once: Page Outsourcing’s interview offer, the mental-health disclosure, the contemporaneous WhatsApp record, Maria Walker’s denial, Cepac’s pleaded defence, the medical-centre intrusion and the conduct campaign used to prevent a merits hearing.
Accordingly, Chupa Chups becomes a clean first entry into The Cepac Files. Better still, Perfetti wrote a supplier code unusually well suited to testing every part of the record.
Perfetti Wrote The Supplier Certificate
Perfetti Van Melle’s Code of Conduct applies across its group and to other stakeholders. The company shares it with third parties entering business relationships and treats compliance as an essential contractual obligation for any person or entity conducting business with the group.
Moreover, the code reaches suppliers directly. Perfetti selects them using objective criteria that include compliance with its code or equivalent business-conduct policies. Violations can therefore trigger penalties or other measures intended to protect the group’s reputation.
Most importantly, the contractual mechanism is even clearer. Perfetti says third-party contracts, including supplier agreements, shall contain provisions requiring suppliers to self-certify specified social obligations. For example, its list expressly includes equal treatment and non-discrimination. Contracts must also preserve the possibility of visiting manufacturing units or operating sites to verify compliance.
Consequently, this is not decorative ESG sugar dust. It creates a document, a promise and an inspection route. If Cepac certified compliance, Perfetti can identify the certificate, its date, its signatory and the evidence used to support it. By contrast, if nobody requested one, procurement can explain why the mechanism remained in the wrapper. Finally, if the certificate exists, paragraphs 12 and 14 provide a wonderfully simple fucking quality-control test.
Physical Ability And The Agency Corridor
Perfetti’s employment language also lands directly on the recruitment facts. The code says it does not tolerate discrimination, unfairness or unequal treatment and recruits according to capability and performance regardless of characteristics including physical ability. Its human-rights statement extends respect beyond its own workforce to individuals employed by businesses with which it deals.
Moreover, agency labour receives specific attention. Perfetti describes employees hired through third parties and says it expects reputable agencies to meet high ethical standards. Its public responsibility material also promises a fair environment for direct employees and people retained through third-party agencies.
Consequently, that wording matters because Page Outsourcing occupied the recruitment corridor between me and Cepac. Page made the telephone call, discussed the wage, heard the mental-health disclosure and promised the interview confirmation. Cepac then supplied the different explanation through Maria Walker.
Meanwhile, privacy sits beside those duties. Perfetti’s code protects employee personal data and forbids unauthorised disclosure. In addition, it prohibits investigations into private life except where law permits them. The broader human-rights position requires business partners to treat workers with dignity and respect and to act ethically in their own treatment of staff.
Therefore, another corporate layer does not dissolve the issue. Perfetti chose rules covering suppliers, third-party agencies, recruitment, physical ability and privacy. The Page-Cepac handover fits inside that wrapper without anybody stretching it.
Two Lines Before Anybody Needed A Story
First, Page Outsourcing called me on 21 August 2024 about a production role at Cepac. During that conversation, Page offered an interview for the week after the bank holiday and discussed a £27,000 training wage rising towards £29,000. I also explained that treatment for a mental-health condition accounted for the lengthy gap in my employment.
Next, Page said my details would go forward and another call would confirm 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”
Moreover, 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. In other words, nobody was preparing litigation, anticipating a denial or building an evidential exhibit. I had simply received good news and told somebody about it.
Accordingly, Perfetti can test the rest through Page’s call notes, candidate-status history, internal communications and audit trail. The first record is already waiting in two ordinary lines.
Maria Walker Rewrapped The Answer At 09:52
At 04:35 on 8 October 2024, I complained directly to Cepac. The email described the interview offer, its planned timing after the bank holiday, the promised confirmation call, the questions about my work gap and the mental-health disclosure.
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. Walker then 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. Moreover, she apologised because Page had supposedly failed to explain that I had not secured an interview. Finally, her response reduced the clash between an offered interview and a failure to shortlist to “confusion”.
Yet Walker had not seen the WhatsApp record when she answered. The sequence stays fixed. Page offered the interview and discussed the wage. I disclosed my mental health. The confirmation vanished. Cepac replaced the offer with a failed shortlist before it knew that the original account had survived in writing.
Perfetti requires truthful, transparent business conduct. It can begin by asking what Walker reviewed before 09:52.
Paragraph 12 Cannot Swallow Paragraph 14
Cepac’s later ET3 did not repair the knowledge problem. Instead, it made the contradiction suitable for display. 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.
Therefore, health information did not float into the pleading by itself. Page recorded it, passed it along or placed it inside material that later reached Cepac and its lawyers. Otherwise, paragraph 14 could not deploy that information while explaining the recruitment process.
Accordingly, Perfetti’s self-certification becomes more than a paper promise. Procurement can ask what Page recorded during the call, who accessed it, when the candidate status changed and what reached Cepac before Walker replied. It can identify the source of paragraph 14 and establish why the promised confirmation disappeared after Page learned that my work gap related to mental health.
Ultimately, a merits hearing should have tested those facts through disclosure, witnesses and cross-examination. Cepac spent its resources constructing another route.
The Complaint Went In And The Complainant Came Out
Perfetti says its whistleblowing process encourages employees, customers and other stakeholders to report concerns connected with direct or indirect activities. It promises a route without fear of retaliation. Cepac’s response to a recruitment grievance travelled in precisely the opposite direction.
For example, 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. Consequently, the firm directed that pressure at a disabled litigant in person who had already described financial hardship, worsening mental health and serious participation difficulties.
Next, Cepac collected correspondence, complaints, TCAP articles and posts on X into a 191-page conduct dossier. Its lawyers separated my reactions from the disability, pressure and procedural failures surrounding them. Afterwards, they repackaged those reactions as free-standing 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 its tactics helped produce. Thus, a complaint about an interview entered the system. Out came a character case against the disabled person who raised it.
Perfetti calls fair and equitable treatment a top priority. This was the fucking reverse production line: take the grievance, remove the facts, attach a conduct label and send the complainant towards the exit.
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 supplied medical material to establish disability and explain why safe participation required an adjustment. That evidence did not invite Cepac’s solicitors into my healthcare relationship looking for adversarial stock.
However, the firm maintained that the medical centre disclosed no private medical information. Nevertheless, that response avoids the conduct at issue. Cepac’s representatives contacted a healthcare provider because they wanted information capable of defeating a disability-related request.
Perfetti’s code says employee privacy deserves protection through lawful processing and proper maintenance of personal data. Except where law permits otherwise, information should not be disclosed without authorisation. Moreover, the code prohibits investigations into employees’ private lives. In addition, its human-rights position requires business partners to treat workers with dignity and respect.
Consequently, Perfetti can demand every instruction, email, attendance note and submission connected with the medical-centre contact. It can ask who authorised the step, what privacy assessment took place and why Cepac considered the tactic compatible with a supplier code concerned with dignity.
Ultimately, the wider pattern is plain. Cepac used medical evidence when acknowledging disability served its procedural needs, investigated access to treatment when pressure offered an advantage and then removed health context from the reactions shown to the Tribunal. That is not careful handling. It is unwrapping somebody else’s private life for litigation.
More Than £50,000 Bought The Detour
Cepac’s combined costs schedules eventually exceeded £50,000. Yet nobody cross-examined Page about the interview offer. Nobody required Walker to reconcile her denial with the same-day message. Nor did the proceedings produce a 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 addressed the recruitment facts. Consequently, pressure generated reactions. Cepac preserved those reactions, removed their context and sold the edited version back to the Tribunal as the reason a fair hearing could not occur.
Accordingly, Perfetti’s supplier rules create an obvious commercial investigation. Who 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 conflict inside Cepac’s own pleading?
Resources were never the problem. Cepac chose where to put them. It funded a detour around the merits while a supplier code demanded equal treatment, non-discrimination, truthful conduct and respect for personal information.
Two WhatsApp lines remained in the file throughout. Apparently, the expensive part was avoiding them.
Newcastle Let The Stick Slip
The institutional machinery appears 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 dossier displaced the disability-discrimination evidence.
For example, correspondence travelled to the wrong Tribunal office, while the contents and visibility of a file approaching two thousand pages remained unclear. Moreover, respondent material received prompt attention. Meanwhile, 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.
Ultimately, 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 travelled through the recruitment chain or whether disability affected the outcome.
Therefore, strike-out did not authenticate Walker’s version. Neither did it reconcile paragraphs 12 and 14 or erase the WhatsApp receipt. Instead, Newcastle ended the case before anybody tested the centre of it. The lollipop kept its wrapper. The recruitment facts never reached the tongue.
EthicsPoint Is A Doorway, Not An Investigation
Perfetti directs third parties to its Group Compliance Office and offers an anonymous online reporting route through EthicsPoint. Its code promises protection against retaliation, harassment and discrimination after a good-faith report. The Compliance Office itself includes an external non-executive board member, the Chief Human Resources Officer and the Group Internal Control and Compliance Director.
Those details matter, but a branded reporting doorway does not prove what happens beyond it. For example, Cummins used EthicsPoint too. In my own Darlington report, the response came from somebody at Darlington. Consequently, the apparently external entrance led straight back inside the business whose conduct required examination.
The wider Cummins loop is documented in Cummins Confidential Special : Kevin Graham – The Global Ethics Director Who Sent Me Back To HR. After CEO Jennifer Rumsey sent my escalation to Global Ethics, seven connected concerns were declared outside its remit and directed back towards UK HR. Ultimately, Global Ethics completed the circuit instead of breaking it.
Therefore, Perfetti should learn from that fucking carousel. Indeed, EthicsPoint can receive a complaint, but the portal cannot reconcile Cepac’s evidence, examine Page’s system or challenge Walker. People with genuine authority and sufficient distance must do those things. Otherwise, the whistleblowing page becomes a colourful handle attached to a door that opens into the same room.
Perfetti Has An Inspection To Conduct
The file does not require confectionery expertise. First, Perfetti can obtain Page’s notes, call data, candidate-status history and internal communications from 21 August 2024. It can identify when the interview entered the process, what happened after the mental-health disclosure and who changed the expected outcome.
Next, investigators can establish what Maria Walker reviewed before 09:52 on 8 October. They can compare her answer with the WhatsApp record and identify the source of the health information used in paragraph 14. Afterwards, Perfetti can inspect the medical-centre correspondence, the 191-page dossier and the costs schedules exceeding £50,000.
Finally, procurement can retrieve any Cepac self-certification covering equal treatment and non-discrimination. It can identify the person who signed it, the representations made and the monitoring performed. Perfetti can then use the site-visit and enforcement mechanisms it already wrote into the code.
This is what supplier verification looks like when stripped of the corporate confetti. Gather the records. Test the competing accounts. Examine the treatment of the complainant. Decide whether the certificate survives contact with the evidence. If it does not, apply the promised penalties or corrective measures.
Ultimately, Cepac manufactured a display for Chupa Chups. Perfetti manufactured the compliance test. TCAP merely brought them together.
Make Sure Your Suppliers Don’t Suck
The chronology fits comfortably on a lollipop wrapper. Page called on 21 August 2024, offered an interview and discussed the wage. I disclosed that mental-health treatment explained my employment gap. A same-day WhatsApp message preserved the news. The promised confirmation disappeared. Maria Walker then denied that I had secured an interview before she knew the receipt existed.
Later, 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 process without deciding the recruitment claim.
Consequently, Perfetti’s rules cover the entire sequence. They reach third-party business relationships and agency recruitment. Moreover, they prohibit discrimination based on physical ability and protect private information. Most importantly, supplier contracts can require self-certification of equal treatment and non-discrimination, preserve inspection rights and impose consequences for violations.
Cepac’s own 2026 portfolio placed Chupa Chups inside this file. Therefore, the Perfetti Van Melle Cepac link did not come from TCAP or a random sweet brand selected for an easy joke. Cepac published the fucking receipt.
Perfetti Van Melle has the certificate, the inspection route, the Compliance Office and the evidence. It now needs to use them for the one duty no responsible lollipop company should neglect.
Make sure your suppliers don’t suck.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Source List
- Cepac – POS Portfolio 2026
- Perfetti Van Melle – Code Of Conduct
- Perfetti Van Melle – Our Position On Human Rights
- Perfetti Van Melle – Fun, Fair And Equitable
- Perfetti Van Melle – Reporting Violations
- Perfetti Van Melle – Chupa Chups
- TCAP – The Cepac Files : KFC II – Maria Walker And The Interview Receipt
- TCAP – Cummins Confidential Special : Kevin Graham – The Global Ethics Director Who Sent Me Back To HR
- 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.