Estimating the Cost of the Spanish Sustainable Food Basket through the Reference Budgets Approach

Elena Carrillo-Álvarez, Júlia Muñoz-Martínez, Blanca Salinas-Roca and Irene Cussó-Parcerisas
Additional contact information
Elena Carrillo-Álvarez: Global Research on Wellbeing (GRoW) Research Group, Blanquerna School of Health Science, Ramon Llull University, Padilla, 326-332, 08025 Barcelona, Spain
Júlia Muñoz-Martínez: Global Research on Wellbeing (GRoW) Research Group, Blanquerna School of Health Science, Ramon Llull University, Padilla, 326-332, 08025 Barcelona, Spain
Blanca Salinas-Roca: Global Research on Wellbeing (GRoW) Research Group, Blanquerna School of Health Science, Ramon Llull University, Padilla, 326-332, 08025 Barcelona, Spain
Irene Cussó-Parcerisas: Pedagogy, Society, and Innovation with ICT support (PSITIC) Research Group, Blanquerna School of Psychology, Education and Sport Sciences, Ramon Llull University, Císter 34, 08022 Barcelona, Spain

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 16, 1-18

Abstract: Reference budgets (RB) are illustrative priced baskets containing the minimum goods and services necessary for well-described types of families to have adequate social participation. Cross-country comparable food RB with the minimum cost were previously developed in 26 EU countries. However, sustainability was not considered. The aim of this paper is to present the development of healthy and sustainable food baskets for Spanish adults. This work follows the steps proposed in previous European projects to build RB: (1) revision of guidelines on healthy and sustainable eating and expert consultations, (2) translation into a concrete list of foods, (3) pricing. The results indicate that a sustainable diet can be cheaper than current recommendations when only the dietary content is considered, representing monthly savings of about EUR 7.27. This is mainly explained by the shift towards more plant-based proteins. Adding constraints on origin, packaging and seasonality increases the overall cost of the food basket by EUR 12.22/month compared with current recommendations. The Spanish Sustainable Food Reference Budget illustrates the cost of applying different criteria to improve dietary sustainability in the Spanish context, and can be useful to support the ecological transition, since providing different levels of adherence to a sustainable dietary pattern can ease its access across socioeconomic groups.

Keywords: reference budgets; food basket; sustainable diet; diet cost; healthy eating; inequalities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/16/9401/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/16/9401/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:16:p:9401-:d:619098

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().