The Cepac Files : Metcalfe’s – Maria Walker, Two WhatsApp Lines And The Ricecake Audit

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Cepac’s 2026 portfolio displays a Metcalfe’s Ricecakes counter unit. Metcalfe’s belongs to Valeo Foods UK, whose supplier code requires fair and equal treatment of job applicants, prohibits disability discrimination, protects privacy and gives Valeo the right to audit documents and premises. Its current supply-chain machinery adds SEDEX, supplier questionnaires, whistleblowing, corrective action and termination. Into that system go Page Outsourcing’s interview offer, the same-day WhatsApp receipt, Maria Walker’s later denial, Cepac’s contradictory ET3 and Michael Page’s blacked-out DSAR trail. Valeo wrote the recipe. Cepac supplied the questionable fucking ingredients.

Metcalfe’s Is In The Current Box

The Metcalfe’s Cepac supplier audit does not depend upon a trade-union customer list from 2023, an archived web page or some logo-glimpsed-behind-a-forklift bollocks. In its own 2026 POS Portfolio, Cepac displays a Metcalfe’s Ricecakes counter display unit carrying yoghurt-dipped and chocolate-dipped products. Cepac chose the photograph, placed it beneath its own name and offered it to the market as evidence of what the company can produce.

Valeo Foods UK currently identifies Metcalfe’s as one of its brands. Its website lists the same ricecake products, while Valeo’s modern-slavery statement identifies Kettle Foods Limited as the group company manufacturing rice cakes and popcorn. Valeo Foods Group says Bain Capital owns the business. The branded display therefore sits inside a named commercial family with published procurement controls and a private-equity parent, not in some anonymous snack aisle where everyone can suddenly forget who commissioned the cardboard.

The precise contracting route remains a document question. Valeo, Kettle, Metcalfe’s, any intermediary and Cepac can identify who ordered the unit, when it was produced and whether the relationship continues. What cannot be rubbed away is the supplier-side receipt: in 2026, Cepac was still using Metcalfe’s branded work to sell Cepac. That is enough to open the packet.

Valeo Already Built The Audit

Valeo’s supplier code does not settle for misty corporate bullshit about being nice. It defines suppliers across goods, services and supply chains, then requires them to respect human rights, dignity and privacy. Disability and union membership appear expressly among the prohibited grounds for discrimination and harassment. Better still, the code says employees and job applicants must receive fair and equal treatment.

The compliance mechanism is equally direct. Suppliers must implement the code and monitor their own adherence. Valeo reserves the right to inspect documents and premises. Where a supplier fails, corrective action must follow immediately. Continued non-compliance gives Valeo the right to terminate the commercial relationship.

Valeo’s Human Rights Policy adds the corporate machinery above that contract. The group says it will pursue equal opportunity in recruitment, remove unconscious bias, investigate allegations promptly, mitigate and remedy adverse impacts, and reject retaliation or threats against people reporting possible violations. It also promises dialogue with major supply-chain partners to identify, prevent and reduce human-rights harm.

This is not seasoning dust scattered across a sustainability page. It is an inspection specification written for exactly this kind of shit. Candidate treatment, disability, privacy, records, reporting, remediation and commercial consequences are already printed on the packet. Now Valeo gets to taste what it bought.

The Supplier Questionnaire Should Already Exist

Valeo Foods UK’s 2024/25 Modern Slavery Statement makes the system harder to avoid. It says all Valeo Foods UK suppliers were either registered on SEDEX or assessed through an ethical audit. Procurement, Technical and Operations own implementation, while suppliers complete questionnaires and risk assessments every two years. The statement also says every new contract contains an obligation to follow Valeo’s supplier code.

Packaging is not hidden in the small print. Valeo said suppliers of ingredients and packaging with more than 30 employees at their manufacturing sites should complete SEDEX and its self-assessment questionnaire annually, with the company aiming for full compliance. Cepac is a packaging manufacturer, not a bloke folding ricecake trays in his garage. If it entered Valeo’s approved supply base, the due-diligence trail should be sitting there already.

The same statement makes a whistleblowing route available to employees, suppliers and third parties. Valeo can order more frequent audits, report concerns and end the supplier relationship. Technical and Procurement conduct the audits, so there is no need for a ceremonial committee to spend six months deciding which department owns the bloody file.

The questionnaire now needs a supplementary page. Did Cepac disclose the discrimination proceedings, the recruitment contradiction, the litigation conduct or the current Darlington closure dispute? If not, what exactly did Valeo assess?

Page Offered The Interview

On 21 August 2024, Page Outsourcing called me about a production role at Cepac’s Darlington factory. During that conversation, Page offered an interview for the week after the bank holiday and discussed a £27,000 training wage moving towards £29,000. I also explained that treatment for my mental health accounted for the substantial gap in my employment history.

Page said my details would go forward and another call would confirm the precise, mutually agreeable interview time. That confirmation never arrived. What arrived was fuck-all. However, the original conversation left a record made before any complaint, ACAS notification, Tribunal claim or TCAP article existed.

The WhatsApp message sent that day contains two unremarkable lines: “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. I had received good news, so I told somebody. No litigation strategy existed because there was no litigation.

That is what makes the message so bloody inconvenient. Page discussed the interview and the money. Mental health entered the call. The promised confirmation then vanished, but the original label remained stuck to the date.

WhatsApp conversation recording the outcome of the Page Outsourcing recruitment call on 21 August 2024.
Sent on the day Page rang, before the Employment Tribunal claim, the pleadings or TCAP coverage existed.

Walker Put A Different Label On It

At 04:35 on 8 October 2024, I complained directly to Cepac. The email set out the offered interview, the proposed timing after the bank holiday, the promised confirmation call, the questions about my employment gap and the mental-health disclosure made during Page’s call.

Five hours and seventeen minutes later, Cepac HR Business Partner Maria Walker replied. She said Page had conducted an initial telephone screening and sent my CV to the recruiting manager with other candidates. Walker then supplied Cepac’s replacement history: I “was not shortlisted on that occasion”. Her apology concerned Page supposedly failing to explain that no interview had been secured, while the discrepancy became “confusion”.

Walker had not seen the WhatsApp record when she wrote that answer. Page offered an interview and discussed salary. I recorded both that day. After the health disclosure, the confirmation disappeared. Seven weeks later, Cepac converted an offered interview into a failure to pass the shortlist without first accounting for the contemporaneous receipt.

Calling the discrepancy “confusion” is not an explanation. It is linguistic arse-covering pasted over a dated record. Valeo’s code says job applicants must receive fair and equal treatment, so ask Walker what she reviewed, ask Page what its system recorded and compare both answers with the message she did not know existed. The ricecake does not need another flavour. It needs the correct label.

Cepac adopted the no-interview explanation before Maria Walker knew the contemporaneous WhatsApp record existed.

The ET3 Kept The Health Information

Cepac’s pleaded defence made the chronology even less appetising. Paragraph 12 distances the company from knowledge of my disability. Paragraph 14 nevertheless records recruitment information that I had spent around twelve months out of work because of health problems and felt ready to return.

The health information therefore existed inside the recruitment account used to defend the claim. Somebody recorded it, retained it or transmitted material from which Cepac later pleaded it. The information did not fucking teleport into paragraph 14. The audit questions are hardly exotic: what did Page record during the call, who accessed it, what reached Cepac, when did it arrive and where did paragraph 14 obtain its wording?

Valeo’s code expressly combines applicant equality with privacy and record inspection. That combination matters. This was not merely some telephone-vibe bullshit about whether somebody sounded cheerful enough. Sensitive health information entered a recruitment chain, an interview vanished and the two companies later produced accounts that do not sit cleanly together.

No amount of corporate rice-paper can make paragraphs 12 and 14 become the same story. Valeo can inspect the underlying records or accept the contradiction as part of its approved supply base.

Cepac ET3 Grounds of Resistance Sections 12 and 14 concerning knowledge of Lee Thompson’s disability
Cepac’s ET3 Grounds of Resistance. Sections 12 and 14 create a material tension over knowledge of disability

Michael Page Blacked Out The Middle

Page Outsourcing sits inside the listed recruitment group now called Michael Page plc. Its role did not end when the call ended. Page held the screening notes, candidate history, communications and internal reaction to the discrimination complaint. When I used a subject access request to seek that trail, the response returned great slabs of internal correspondence under black redactions around the material that mattered.

Meanwhile, the same pack managed to disclose information belonging to a different Lee Thompson. Page had enough black ink to obscure names, senders, recipients and chunks of the discrimination chain, yet unrelated candidate material escaped into my file. Black ink over its evidence and somebody else’s data in my disclosure makes a tidy little privacy clusterfuck. One internal message also instructed a colleague: “Don’t call him – we need to get our internal team to advise”. The recruiter that had called freely before the complaint suddenly treated the telephone like an unexploded device.

Valeo does not have to accept the claimant-facing DSAR as the final audit product. Under appropriate confidentiality, it can demand Page’s unredacted call notes, email chains, system history, access logs and candidate-status changes through Cepac. No customer should accept that black-marker shit as an audit trail. It merely shows Valeo where the inspection lamp should point.

The Complaint Became The Product

A straightforward investigation could have compared Page’s records, Walker’s review, the WhatsApp receipt and Cepac’s ET3. Instead, the recruitment dispute became an industrial arse-covering process for examining me. Cepac and its lawyers collected communications, complaints, TCAP material and posts on X, then packaged disability-related reactions as free-standing “conduct”.

Horsfield Menzies entered my medical terrain too. Acting for Cepac, the firm contacted my medical centre, investigated appointment availability and used that information while opposing postponement. Medical evidence supplied to establish disability became a route into the mechanics of accessing treatment. The privacy promise in Valeo’s supplier code looks rather less decorative when placed beside that grubby little expedition.

Cepac’s combined costs schedules exceeded £50,000. On 24 April 2026, Newcastle Employment Tribunal proceeded without me, struck out the claims and later ordered £20,000 in costs. Yet nobody decided whether Page offered the interview, why its confirmation disappeared, what Walker checked or how the health information travelled.

The original complaint went into the machine. Out came a character dossier, a costs claim and fuck-all on the recruitment merits.

Valeo calls for remediation. Cepac manufactured displacement.

Newcastle Never Inspected The Batch

The Tribunal result does not spare Valeo from examining its own supply chain. Strike-out ended the case before a merits hearing; it did not authenticate Walker’s email, erase the WhatsApp message or reconcile Cepac’s ET3. Page never had to explain the offered interview under cross-examination, while Walker never had to account for the record she had not seen.

Administrative and case-management failures made that escape possible. Correspondence went to the wrong Tribunal office, the contents of a file approaching two thousand pages remained unclear and claimant applications disappeared into procedural shit. Three days before the decisive hearing, Employment Judge Brain refused the postponement required for safe participation. Employment Judge James then heard the respondents without me.

Valeo’s policies do not say a supplier may replace investigation with any procedural outcome carrying a court crest. They promise prompt examination, appropriate action and remedy when allegations raise human-rights concerns. A hearing that never determined the recruitment facts cannot perform Procurement’s audit by magic.

If Valeo wants to know whether its supplier treated a disabled applicant fairly, it must inspect the batch that Newcastle left sealed. There is no best-before date on the receipt.

Darlington Adds A Second Supplier Test

Valeo’s code also prohibits discrimination connected with union membership and protects freedom of association and collective bargaining. That clause now sits beside the other public Cepac chronology. In 2023, more than 90 Darlington workers fought the company over pay and conditions. Unite accused Cepac of threatening redundancies, fire and rehire, and vindictive job cuts.

Cepac itself said the strikes damaged orders, put investment on hold and changed the strategic direction of Darlington. Management subsequently backed Flutepac, praised the factory as a “hidden jewel” and recruited a permanent Production Manager to help shape its future. Meanwhile, Cepac launched a £53 million programme intended to double its Rotherham headquarters operation.

Darlington now faces proposed closure with up to 63 jobs at risk. Cepac blames heavy losses and slower-than-expected Flutepac growth. The workers did not select that product strategy, allocate the capital or write the forecasts. Management did. It had already told the world that industrial action changed Darlington’s strategic direction, then backed the bloody product line now falling short.

The recruitment complaint and the union dispute are different matters. However, both ask Valeo the same supplier question: what happens inside Cepac when somebody below the top table says no? Its code already recognises the risk. Audit accordingly.

Valeo Can Run The Test It Advertises

The first step is commercial traceability. Forget the branding bullshit and trace the order. Valeo should identify who commissioned the Metcalfe’s unit, which agency or intermediary participated, when Cepac produced it and whether Cepac remains anywhere in the approved supply base. If the relationship ended, give the date. If it continues, name the responsible procurement owner and the applicable contract.

Next comes the compliance trail. Produce Cepac’s supplier questionnaire, SEDEX status, ethical-audit record, risk rating, code acceptance and any corrective-action plan. State whether Cepac disclosed the disability case, Michael Page’s role, the Walker chronology, the medical-centre contact, the strike dispute or the proposed closure. Then explain whether Technical or Procurement inspected the records or merely ticked the bastard box.

The recruitment audit has equally obvious inputs. Obtain Page’s call material and unredacted correspondence. Establish the candidate-status history, the source of paragraph 14 and what Walker reviewed before answering at 09:52. Compare that evidence with the WhatsApp and supporting witness statement. Finally, publish the finding and identify the remedy.

Valeo says suppliers and third parties can raise concerns. It says Procurement and Technical conduct audits. It says non-compliance can trigger immediate correction or termination. There is the procedure, stripped of the sustainability garnish and placed on the counter. Run it.

The Metcalfe’s Cepac Supplier Audit Is Due

Metcalfe’s entered this story because Cepac placed the brand inside its 2026 portfolio. Valeo then supplied everything else: a supplier code covering job applicants, disability, privacy, union membership, monitoring, document inspection, corrective action and termination. Its UK operation added SEDEX, ethical audits, supplier questionnaires and a reporting route open to third parties.

The facts waiting for that machinery are already dated. Page offered an interview and discussed wages on 21 August 2024. I disclosed the mental-health reason for my employment gap. A same-day WhatsApp preserved the offer. Cepac later supplied a no-shortlist account before Walker knew that receipt existed. Its ET3 distanced the company from disability knowledge while carrying health information into the defence. Michael Page’s DSAR then put black boxes across the middle while leaking another candidate’s material out the side, a data-protection piss-take with the blackout blinds down.

Rather than determine those facts, Cepac spent more than £50,000 building a conduct route around the complainant. Newcastle closed the case without deciding the recruitment merits. Separately, Darlington workers now face closure after a corporate chronology already stained by strike threats, shifted investment and management’s failed growth bet.

Valeo does not need another policy, a new committee or a bowl of ethically sourced fucking popcorn. It needs to use the controls it already boasts about.

The display is current. Every document exists. Valeo’s supplier code has teeth.

Open the packet and bite.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

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