For years some of the country's best minds have tried to figure out how to help Foodbank Australia feed as many people as possible.
That's because the number of people who need asistance feeding their families continues to outpace the amount of donated food.
Finally, there may just be an answer from an unlikely source - a university student with big ideas.
Among the hundreds of highly skilled people inside Microsofts' Australian headquarters is Brad Lorge.
Sitting in front of his laptop he looks and sounds like he belongs.
"What we're looking at is everybody submitting their extra pieces of code," he says.
But the 21-year-old spends most of his time as a student at the University of New South Wales.
"When we arrived on campus for the first day, academics asked us what we wanted to do with our lives," said Brad. "We were bold enough to say we wanted to build technology that changed the world."
Last year Brad and a team of students entered Microsoft's Imagine Cup. It's a technology tournament that challenges young people to solve some of the world's toughest problems.
"They are medical students, they are engineers, they come from different walks of life and experiences, and they and they see it as a competition where they can bring those ideas to life and get access to big companies to take them seriously," said Microsoft Development Director Sarah Vaughan.
Brad and his team won the 2013 Australian competition with an app that focuses on better utilising perishable food.
Currently, about 60 per cent of donated perishable food goes off or is thrown away before it reaches Foodbank Australia, and the people who really need it.
Brad's app helps connect businesses donating that food, such as bakeries and grocers, with drivers in the same area who can get it to the nearest charity as quickly as possible.
"This application is really a straight line from where the food is going to go to waste and where it is most usefully used," said Foodbank Australia CEO Jason Hincks.
The technology is being used in a national pilot with Woolworths and is being considered by Foodbanks from other countries.
"We never realised it would be us who was going to deliver," said Brad.
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