I hate eating alone. Yet often times, I find myself in a new area where I don’t know anyone or in a meal that I just didn’t plan ahead for, and I’m forced to eat alone. I’ve sometimes been bold enough to just randomly ask strangers if I can join them in their meal and they’ve generally been quite welcoming. But it takes a lot of confidence. There’s definitely a lot of stigma around approaching strangers like this and these kinds of interactions can be very awkward at times.

I wish there was a website that could help with this. The concept would be simple: if you're at a dining hall/cafe/food court/other large eatery, and are alone, just scan a QR code (on your table or receipt), answer 3 quick questions and based on that, if the app knows of someone else in the eatery who is also eating alone and would be a good match, it pairs you two up! This way, neither of you have to feel like you’re interrupting someone else’s meal, nor wonder if the conversation will be good. Win-win!

It seems like a pretty simple concept to implement and I think eateries would be happy to partner up since it improves customer satisfaction and makes it more likely that customers would return. You could start at a university dining hall, particularly one that caters to new college students who are eager to make friends. As traction builds, you can expand to food courts and commercial eateries too.

I built a prototype for this during a hackathon (and won prizes too!). You can take a look at it here as a starting point. Loneliness in big cities is a huge problem and something like this could really help address it!