Today’s consumers want to spend their cash on responsible companies’ products, Paul Polman, Unilever’s chief executive, told me in a recent interview. “They are now increasingly willing to vote with their wallet,” he said.

You hear the same from many corporate leaders. Consumers are insisting that the products they buy do not destroy the planet or come from sweatshop factories.

Yet I detected some frustration alongside Mr Polman’s assertion. He said some of those same consumers were not getting the ethical message. Unilever has pledged that all its palm oil will come from certifiably sustainable sources by 2020. The Anglo-Dutch consumer goods group is talking to the Indonesian government about investing more than €100m in a processing plant in Sumatra so that it can trace its palm oil purchases more accurately. Much of this is a response to a Greenpeace campaign against Unilever and others over the purchase of palm oil from an Indonesian company that was causing deforestation in regions inhabited by orang-utans.