The recent development of true cost accounting (TCA) methodologies by various organizations has helped increase transparency in the food sector, but has also made it difficult to compare the results obtained through different methodologies. Here we review major TCA methodologies across five functional units that their assessment framework(s) apply to—namely product, organization, system, geography and investment. Our results show that the bulk of existing frameworks apply to products and/or organizations. According to publicly available documents and case studies published by the framework proponents, we found measurements of externality/dependency, the inclusion of economic, environmental and social effects, as well as the use of comparable metrics to be areas of general consensus; suggested indicators, monetization and aggregation emerged as areas of general divergence. The differences between TCA methodologies identified in this study indicate that collaboration between frameworks is key to their harmonization, ultimately making results more comparable and facilitating engagement in TCA.

各种组织最近开发的真实成本核算 (TCA) 方法有助于提高食品行业的透明度，但也难以比较通过不同方法获得的结果。在这里，我们回顾了其评估框架适用的五个职能部门的主要 TCA 方法——即产品、组织、系统、地理和投资。我们的结果表明，大部分现有框架适用于产品和/或组织。根据框架支持者发布的公开文件和案例研究，我们发现外部性/依赖性的衡量、经济、环境和社会影响的纳入以及可比指标的使用是普遍共识的领域；建议的指标，货币化和聚合成为普遍分歧的领域。本研究中确定的 TCA 方法之间的差异表明，框架之间的协作是它们协调的关键，最终使结果更具可比性并促进参与 TCA。