It’s not quite a dating app, but it’s not just a menu service either – UCLA, meet Bruin Bite.

The concept behind Bruin Bite is simple: students on the Hill can pick a day, dining hall and time to eat a meal, and the app will match them with another student with the same selections.

Bruin Bite started as a student project under DevX, a design and technology club at UCLA, in January 2018. It was released with just its menu feature this past spring, and its three main features – the UCLA dining hall menu, the messenger feature, and the matching feature – were finalized at the beginning of this quarter.

The app was created by Ayush Patel, a fourth-year computer science and engineering student. As a freshman, Patel would use the dining halls to get to know fellow students.

“I made a lot of friends through dining halls … I thought it was a great place to meet people,” Patel said. “I would see people sitting alone that I would just approach and sit with them.”

Patel had the idea for the app at the beginning of his sophomore year, and he made a Facebook group to gauge interest.

“I made the Facebook group, added 50 of my friends, and asked them to add 5 more of their friends,” Patel said. “Pretty soon there were hundreds of people in the group, (and) I was asking them for opinions.”

Patel handed the project off to Hirday Gupta, a third-year computer science student, in the fall of 2018, the beginning of Patel’s junior year. The DevX team did a soft launch of the app the following spring, and an official launch this fall.

“We wanted to promote community on the Hill,” Gupta said. “It’s all about connections and networking, and bringing people together over what UCLA loves the most – their food.”

The app now has 300 to 400 weekly users, and the team plans to revamp its marketing strategy to pull in more students, Gupta said.

Samuel Lee, a third-year computer science student, was a software engineer on the app’s production team in 2018. The goal of the app is to capitalize on the potential of a shared meal, he said.

“We realized that every meal you have by yourself is a lost opportunity to get to know another person,” Lee said. “There are so many people who eat by themselves. … We wanted to provide an option where they could have the choice to potentially meet someone new.”

Lee tried the matching feature when the app had its “strong release” this quarter, which came with a stronger push to market the app. He matched with five users, and has met up with one, a first-year psychology and biology student.

“This person, after we matched, she was immediately saying ‘Oh, we could meet at this time, and we could go to this dining hall,’” Lee said. “I got dinner with her … she asked me questions about UCLA in general.”

While the app was originally intended as a simple networking tool, Lee said he found that the app could also be used as a way to make new students feel like part of the UCLA community.

“What I saw when I met this freshman was that they didn’t really have someone older to ask questions about UCLA,” Lee said. “I think this is a good opportunity for freshmen to find older friends and a bigger community, especially if they’re not a part of organizations.”