Over the last couple of decades, refugee flows have been telling us a story of increasing numbers that are unlikely to go down anytime soon. The region of Eastern Africa only is home to 2.7 million people finding refuge in refugee settlements that are not often associated with permanency. UNHCR handbooks and many competent authorities state that refugee camps are of temporary character and as a result we observe a significant similarity in post-disaster food assistance and food assistance in a quasi-permanent settlement. The subsequent disparity between the way of organising food distribution and the needs of the population is the main motivation for the development of Food ATMs. This novel method of food distribution is based on allowing beneficiaries to determine how food is withdrawn to suit their own lives. A key point on how beneficiaries will use the Food ATM is a population's perception of the Food ATM. For instance, alleged food shortages might move people to hoard food and consequently undermine whole-system performance. Assumed similarities in literature on panic-buying events suggest that a combination of behavioural factors is a key vulnerability. Since a system of Food ATMs has not been implemented before, a conceptual design was made by 1) acquiring information through expert consultation on the design of an individual Food ATM and 2) the creation of an optimisation model forming an optimal network of Food ATMs. In order to analyse the interaction between a system of Food ATMs and beneficiaries, the current set of Operation Research (OR) models with stochastic or game theory-based formulation of food demand had to be expanded. For this purpose, concepts from research on panic-buying and emotion-related social interaction were used. This research contributes with the union of these concepts in a geo-spatially explicit Agent-Based Model, replacing current OR models' top-down formulation of demand with an agent-based bottom-up formulation. This enabled 1) increasing the understanding of interaction between a supplier of recipient of food assistance and 2) analysis of proposed operational policy in the context developing the Food ATM. Following 2), this thesis provides policy recommendations that have been made based on subsequent quantitative and qualitative investigation of model results. This thesis represents a first step to investigate the effects of individual behavioural factors in the realistic context of improving food distribution in the Bidi Bidi refugee camp in Uganda. New insights taught the relevance for further research, most notably on the relation with the bigger humanitarian supply chain, information diffusion between beneficiaries and the strategy for a population's adoption of the Food ATM.