FOODCoST: towards the true price of food

How much do the avocados in your shopping basket really cost? What about your coffee, bunch of bananas or jar of peanut butter? In any case, more than you think. Because the hidden costs of environmental, human and animal damage are not included in the regular supermarket price. In the FOODCoST project, we are working on an effective and accessible methodology to determine the true price by including all externalities in the food price. The goal? Making the price of your avocado, coffee, apples and peanut butter as fair as possible.

The FOODCoST project is a large-scale European project in which CSR Netherlands is working with academics, non-profit organisations and companies to find out and determine the true price of food products. The true price is the cost price for the producer including the costs of the negative impact on people and nature. This includes a living income for farmers, but also the impact on soil and biodiversity. Only by paying a true price does all parties in the food value chain get paid fairly and does the farmer have room to invest in sustainability. But how do we calculate that true price?

True Cost Accounting

One suitable method is True Cost Accounting (TCA). This is an accounting method that attempts to measure the hidden costs of economic activities on natural and social capital in monetary terms. This means it quantifies the impact of these activities on climate, biodiversity, environment, society and health, with the result that these costs appear in financial statements.

Deliverables

The FOODCoST project eventually collects tools such as True Cost Accounting to calculate the hidden costs of things like pollution or the use of natural resources and provides tips to policymakers on how best to legislate on this. By adding these extra costs - see it as a kind of compensation - to the price of products, we redefine the value of food. The development of harmonised methods for calculating true prices supports the transition to sustainable food systems.