Household-week measurement and cost accounting for community food provisioning: framework specification and partial pilot demonstration

Community food projects commonly report production, expenditure, labour, water, or participation as separate totals. Such records do not show whether a defined service was offered and delivered to an eligible household in a particular service period. This Methods article specifies a household-week framework that joins six established streams—harvest, loss, distribution, labour participation, cost, and water—to a prospectively declared service obligation: recipient × service period × parameter set, with a weekly period as the default. It states the strongest objection to that design—that the join is only a fact-table grain, and that community-supported agriculture pick-up logs, food-bank visit records and humanitarian distribution monitoring already track recipients per cycle—and answers it: an event log cannot record a scheduled delivery that did not happen; demand-driven logs measure use rather than promise-keeping; and humanitarian distribution runs through relief supply chains and is monitored for donors, whereas a multi-year community project must join its own production, loss, labour, cost and water records to the same obligation. The join distinguishes production, offer, and delivery; identifies the first documented break; and calculates cost per eligible or successful obligation on one shared frame. Thresholds and cadence are declared parameters with threshold-response sensitivity, and provisioning reliability is separated from household food security. An 18-week pilot at one tropical site partially demonstrates the production pathway: recorded vegetable harvest totalled 1,421.63 kg, rising from 8.56 to 155.89 kg/week; the late five-week mean was 143.98 kg/week (SD 12.58); routine egg counts exist only for Weeks 43–44. Household delivery, complete loss, labour, full economic cost, and water records are absent, so continuity, cost per successful household-week, governance effects, waste reduction, and transferability are not pilot results. A complete schema, reference implementation and synthetic multi-period demonstration are supplied. This is the first, protocol-setting paper of a programme of five or more years, not a validated intervention.