Last year, Juliette Sartori decided she wanted to expand her social circle, so she went for coffee with three people she’d never met before.

“It went really well,” she said.

“We ended up talking for two hours and I still talk to them today. We all keep in touch.”

Her blind date was part of Dinner with a Stranger, the company Juliette and her housemates set up “on a whim” for other Glasgow University students who want to meet new people.

Juliette, 21, had moved to Scotland from the US to study business and management and said it was harder to instantly connect with others as she found people “had a wall” and were closed.

With students so connected and digitally connected that they spend less time interacting with each other face-to-face, she hasn’t had many opportunities to expand her circle of friends.

This is how Dinner with a Stranger was born.

“At first, we thought only 30 people would join,” explains Juliette. “We just didn’t know what to expect.

“It’s a novel idea and the name puts people off from the start.”

But 200 people – a mix of undergraduate and postgraduate students, men, women and non-binary – signed up in the first month and the company has been growing ever since.