After the hearing, the messages kept coming. Hundreds of small suppliers. Cheesemakers, jam makers, bakers, farmers.

How did you do it? How did you prove it?

So I started something.

I called it the Blue Box.

Once a month, in the back of the bakery, I run a free afternoon for small food businesses. Natalie runs it with me. She's my commercial manager now. She's the best I've ever met at reading a supermarket contract.

We teach people the boring things. The things that saved me.

Write everything down. Date and time every note. Save every email. Never hand over a recipe without a signed letter. Know your rights. Know who the watchdog is, and how to contact them.

Every person who comes gets a free blue box file. And a pasty.

Simon came to work for us too. He develops new recipes in our little test kitchen. His own recipes, this time. His cheese and leek pasty is so good it nearly made Mr Treloar cry.

“I spent twelve years copying other people's ideas,” Simon said on his first day. “I'd like to spend the rest of my career making my own.”

The cheesemaker from Somerset came to the first Blue Box afternoon. Six months later, she reported her supermarket to the watchdog.

She won.