What makes food policy acceptable? Package design, true-cost information, and public support in Switzerland

Food systems have far-reaching impacts that result in public health costs and environmental damage which are not reflected in retail prices, but are borne implicitly by society. True Cost Accounting has emerged as a framework for making these costs visible, and is increasingly invoked to justify food policies that mitigate and internalize the public health and environmental health costs in food prices. Yet operationalization of true cost food policies to date has focused almost entirely on consumers- on true-cost labels and true pricing at the point of purchase - while a central element of its proposed theory of change remains untested: whether communicating these costs to the public affects support for the policy instruments that would mitigate and internalize the true cost of food in practice. On 27 September 2026, Swiss citizens vote on the «Initiative für eine sichere Ernährung (Ernährungsinitiative)», which calls for greater domestic food self-sufficiency and a shift toward plant-based production and consumption. This pre-registered study leverages that vote to examine what makes true cost food policy acceptable to voters along two dimensions: how a policy is designed, and what people know about the problem it addresses. In the second wave of a two-wave online survey with approximately 2,200 eligible Swiss voters, participants are randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a neutral control, a qualitative description of the food system's health and environmental impacts, or the same description with those impacts quantified as costs in Swiss francs per person per year. Following treatment, participants rate seven food policy measures individually and then evaluate policy packages in a conjoint experiment in which each measure varies in stringency and revenues from these measures vary in their use. This design allows us to estimate which policy package design features drive acceptability, whether true-cost information raises support for policy instruments, and, exploratorily, whether any such effect operates by correcting mistaken beliefs. The study speaks to literatures on policy packaging, information provision, and the political feasibility of food systems transformation.