Last night in Australia, an elderly person had porridge for dinner again. A parent told their children they weren’t eating dinner because they weren’t hungry. A university student ate 2-minute noodles because they couldn’t afford fresh food.
They are just a few examples of groups experiencing food insecurity in Australia.
“Food insecurity is a spectrum. It’s everything from feeling anxious about having enough food for your family, to compromising food choice and food volumes through not eating,” said Sarah Pennell, General Manager of Research & Policy, Foodbank Australia.
In 2025, 33% of Australian households experienced either severe or moderate food insecurity, with almost half of low-income households facing food insecurity1. Food insecurity is one of the most pressing health and social welfare challenges facing the nation.
While the long-term goal is to eliminate food insecurity, the food rescue and relief sector provides a vital safety net for those who need support today. Foodbank Australia is the largest hunger relief charity in Australia, linking surplus food and groceries to people in need. Foodbank sourced the equivalent to 92 million meals for its charity partners in 2024 alone.
To ensure food reaches those who need it most, data is essential.
Originally developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Foodbank Australia’s Hunger Map was created to help understand food insecurity at a national level. However, it lacked geographic data to pinpoint where food insecurity was occurring in Australia, and where food relief services were being delivered by all food relief organisations, not only Foodbank. The Hunger Map was also only available internally, limiting research and collaboration opportunities.
Sarah pointed out that “we realised that it’s great to know hunger exists, and to what level, but we can’t do anything until we know where it is: where the food insecurity occurs, to what degree amongst who, and where is our food relief going so we can tackle the gaps between need and provision of services.”
“But as with all things for charities, we have limited resources, and we could only do so much. We knew we needed extra support to keep it moving forward. That’s where the ARDC came in.”
In 2023, ARDC and Foodbank partnered to enhance the Hunger Map. The project was part of the ARDC’s Food Security Data Challenges initiative, which aims to strengthen research into Australia’s food production, distribution and consumption.
While Foodbank had embarked on a journey to collect data to inform its operations through the Hunger Map, smaller food relief organisations lacked the capacity to do the same. This meant the national picture was incomplete.
“It became very obvious very early that unless the data we were working with was covering all of the food relief sector, it would be dismissed as being not representative,” said Sarah.
With ARDC’s support, Foodbank was able to invite the other 2 major food relief providers in Australia, OzHarvest and SecondBite, into the project to enhance the Hunger Map to include comprehensive, sector-wide data on food insecurity and food relief across Australia.
“The project brought us together and built trust,” said Sarah. “We now do advocacy together, and the foundation of that advocacy is the Hunger Map.”
The Foodbank Hunger Map is now a critical tool for strategic planning. For example, Foodbank, OzHarvest, and SecondBite are using it to support a strategic collaboration to reform food rescue and relief services across Tasmania.
The map is being used by the organisations to identify areas of unmet need, assess service capacity, and determine where new infrastructure—such as storage facilities, distribution hubs, or community access points—should be established. It’s also helping to optimise transport routes ensuring rescued food reaches communities in need efficiently.
Beyond Tasmania, the Hunger Map is supporting operational planning nationwide. Foodbank WA used it to identify gaps in coverage, while in South Australia, it guided decisions on where to establish new community hubs and mobile pantries. The data is helping providers prioritise investment and expand their reach to those most in need.
Foodbank had identified a major data gap: robust geographical information on food insecurity in regional and remote First Nations communities, which are among the groups most affected by food insecurity. Thanks to the ARDC partnership, Foodbank partnered with Ipsos, a global market research and consulting firm, to conduct a targeted literature review, to help establish distinct modelling for First Nations Peoples.
The review provided insights and references for the First Nations Peoples food insecurity model which is the basis for discussion for the next phase of development of Foodbank’s First Nations Peoples Hunger Map.
The Hunger Map is more than a planning tool; it’s a powerful tool for advocacy. It equips Foodbank with robust, data-driven insights to engage all levels of government on the scale and prevalence and pervasiveness of food insecurity across Australia.
“We’ve used it in our advocacy towards the various state and federal elections, trying to educate politicians and electorates around the level of food insecurity, its impact, and that we are the safety net and need to be supported in order to fulfil that role,” Sarah explained.
The map also informed Foodbank’s submission to the Treasury’s Economic Reform Roundtable in August 2025, highlighting that Australians cannot thrive or be productive without access to nutritious food.
The enhanced Hunger Map has confirmed what food relief organisations have long known: food insecurity exists everywhere, in varying degrees.
“Being able to look at the picture of food insecurity geographically has reinforced the demographic and psychographic data,” said Sarah.
A public version of the Foodbank Hunger Map is now freely available online, creating an opportunity for researchers to work with Foodbank to help understand food insecurity and relief at a level never before possible.
The Foodbank Public Hunger Map serves as an open invitation for engagement and collaboration. Government agencies, community organisations, and researchers are invited to connect with Foodbank to co-design solutions that are tailored to local conditions. Through the Hunger Map, Foodbank seeks to foster collective impact—building partnerships that turn insights into action and create meaningful change for those experiencing food insecurity across the country.
ARDC’s support was pivotal.
According to Sarah, “ARDC really helped us with being structured and disciplined about the development of the project. Our commitment with ARDC firmed it up and gave us targets.”
“It helped to build partnerships with OzHarvest and SecondBite, which would not have eventuated if we had been waiting on them to commit money to it.”
“Without the ARDC support, the Hunger Map might have withered on the vine. We might not have been able to go that next step of being able to add the other food relief organisations to get the full sector data/picture. I don’t know where we would have gone.”
Foodbank continues to update the Hunger Map to meet sector needs, foster collective impact and deliver smarter, more equitable food relief across Australia.
Visit Foodbank Australia’s Hunger Map.
This project was a co-investment partnership with the ARDC through the Food Security Data Challenges program (DOI: 10.47486/DC107). The ARDC is enabled by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to support national digital research infrastructure for Australian researchers.
Written by Jo Savill, ARDC. Reviewed by Alexandra Zhen (Foodbank Australia) and Dr Stefanie Kethers (ARDC).
