True Cost of Food: Work Packages

Lead: UNIL (Dominique Barjolle) and UNISANTE (Murielle Bochud)

Develop a common ontology for food systems serving all disciplines involved in the project Harmonise a TCAF methodology for the Swiss context, and compute adequate metrics.
Propose innovative health metrics for TCAF.
Create a knowledge hub that serves as an information platform to the public, including the TRUE COST webtool.
Disseminate the project’s results to the general public through different channels..

Lead: EPFL (Philippe Thalmann and Gino Baudry) and UNISANTE (Joachim Marti and Murielle Bochud)

Implement the TCAF methodology to enable the computation of the TCAF calculator accounting for different food production and consumption practices.
Develop the true cost of food calculator accessible through a user-friendly web interface (decision-making tool).
Develop an economic model to identify taxation/subsidy schemes that incorporate all costs into food prices, incl. environmental, health, and social costs, and account for consumers’ imperfect knowledge of these costs.
Calibrate the model for practical application to the Swiss case and integrate results from WP5 regarding alternative instruments influencing consumer decisions (e.g. non-market solutions, such as information campaigns and labeling.

Lead: University of Bern (Theresa Tribaldos) and UNIL (Dominique Barjolle)

Co-elaborate a system-based theory of change to transition to a more sustainable, fair and resilient Swiss food system
Co-create different transition pathways and scenarios for acceptable.
Compensation mechanisms.
Test through the web tool developed in WP2 different leverage points.
Analyze the policy framework underlying the Swiss food system and provide policy recommendations to reduce external costs.

Lead: HEG Fribourg – CCRS (Philipp Aerni)

Apply the TCAF methodology on particular value chains together with businesses and identify inconsistencies.
Survey different stakeholders in the private sector on their views and expectations on the transformation towards a sustainable, resilient, and fair food system, the tools they use to measure their impacts, and the role of TCAF.
Conduct interviews with private sector and investor stakeholders to identify the innovation potential of applying TCAF metric as sustainability performance.

Lead: UNISANTE (Joachim Marti)

Investigate the demand-side effects, through focus groups, nutrients-based taxation, differential impact by socioeconomic economic incentives in the Swiss context, in particular consumer response to price changes, and substitution status.
Analysis of trade-offs made by consumers between price at point of purchase, healthiness, environmental impact, and other impacts of their food purchase (hypothetical choice experiment, stated preferences data collection).
Conduct (controlled pricing and labeling experiments) experiments to test different ways of informing consumers about TCAF using a sample of food products/menus.
Test a set of possible pricing/price framing strategies, including compensation mechanisms and their interaction with food labeling in the virtual shopping environment.