Horse Meat Found in 1 in 3 Belgian Friterie Snacks

Nearly one in three snacks sold at Belgian chip shops, or friteries, contains horse meat — and nobody can say with certainty where that meat comes from. An investigation by the animal-rights organisation GAIA, published around World Animal Day, has reignited a long-running debate about the traceability of horse meat in a country that eats far more of it than it produces.

The findings, first reported by VRT NWS, are striking: horse DNA turned up in 27 percent of all snacks tested and in at least one product at 76 percent — roughly three in four — of the 25 friteries sampled.

What the Investigation Found

In August 2026, GAIA bought 123 popular snacks — including meatballs, hamburgers, croquettes and frikandellen — from 25 friteries across Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia, and had them analysed by a recognised laboratory.

According to GAIA’s campaign page, the results were consistent across the country: 80 percent of the friteries tested in Flanders, 80 percent in Brussels and 70 percent in Wallonia sold at least one product containing horse DNA.

The organisation stresses a caveat: the study covered only the 25 friteries examined, so the results cannot be extrapolated to every chip shop in Belgium. Even so, GAIA argues the findings expose a broader consumer-information gap. Friteries are not required to declare which animal species the meat in their snacks comes from, and ingredient lists are not displayed at the counter. Under EU and Belgian rules, non-prepackaged foods generally do not have to reveal the species of origin.

“Consumers can therefore eat horse meat without knowing it,” GAIA warns.

Dietician and nutrition scientist Michaël Sels of UZ Antwerp was not surprised. “Especially in snacks from wholesalers you more often encounter horse meat,” he told VRT NWS. “Manufacturers particularly like to use it in bitterballen.”

He offered two reasons. “On the one hand it helps them achieve the desired texture,” Sels said. “On the other hand it is a residual stream — a cheaper type of meat that is rarely on the menu and so still gets a place in the food chain.” The meat involved is usually “separator meat,” he added, pressed from the bones under high pressure. A bitterbal contains as little as 10 percent meat, while a frikandel is about 50 percent.

A Country That Eats More Than It Produces

The origin question is thorny because Belgium is not a horse-meat producer. According to VRT NWS, citing GAIA’s figures, Belgians eat an average of about 700 grams of horse meat per person each year, yet there are virtually no farms in the country breeding horses specifically for meat.

Some equines are still slaughtered at home. According to figures cited in the study, 1,662 equines were processed in Belgian slaughterhouses in 2025 — about 0.4 percent of the roughly 400,000 horses, ponies and donkeys kept in Belgium, mostly for recreation, sport and companionship. That is nowhere near enough to meet domestic demand.

Instead, Belgium imports heavily. In 2025 the country brought in 12,268 tonnes of horse meat — equivalent to an estimated 38,500 animals — while re-exporting 8,560 tonnes, making it a key hub in the international horse-meat trade. Much of the imported meat comes from Argentina, where horses are often kept as working animals on large farms and sent to slaughter as they age. GAIA questions the oversight in that supply chain, noting that animals are frequently transported long distances to collection centres where they are only registered and microchipped later, making their full history hard to establish.

A Fraud Problem Years in the Making

The traceability concerns are compounded by a series of fraud investigations. In September 2026, Belgian federal police arrested three suspects in an international probe into horse passports being falsified to register sport and riding horses as animals fit for slaughter. According to VRT NWS, two of the suspects were remanded in custody while a third was released under conditions.

As Transport Online reported, the operation involved more than 200 investigators and 24 house searches across Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Ireland, with support from Europol. Officials checked more than 1,000 horses and seized over €100,000 in cash. Investigators suspect the gang used forged passports, double microchips and constant cross-border movement to disguise the animals’ origins. A horse with no economic value could fetch as much as €1,500 once registered for slaughter.

The risk is not theoretical. Horses have a dual status under Belgian and EU law: owners must declare at identification whether an animal may ever enter the human food chain. Horses given certain medications are automatically excluded. Passport manipulation undermines that safeguard, because it can hide which drugs an animal received.

This is a documented problem, not a new one. As the Belgian food-safety agency FAVV reported during the European Operation OPSON X, 35 of 230 horse passports screened between December 2020 and June 2021 were falsified — more than one in seven. In that same operation, samples from equines sent to slaughter showed that information on medicinal treatments was missing in more than 50 percent of cases.

What GAIA Wants — and Why Friturists Push Back

GAIA is using the snack study to press a wider political demand. “We have long made the horse a companion animal in our lives,” chairman Michel Vandenbosch said. “It is time that our legislation follows that reality. No more horse meat in our shops or on our plates.”

Specifically, the organisation wants equines recognised as companion animals, excluded by default from the food chain; a ban in Belgium’s three regions on the slaughter, export and import of equines for human consumption; and a ban on the sale of horse meat in Belgium regardless of origin, including in processed products. Such a step would not be unprecedented — since 2021, Greece has banned the breeding, export and use of equines for meat production. GAIA’s accompanying petition, hosted on its campaign page, had by early October attracted several thousand signatures.

The pushback has been swift. Friturists, represented by the National Union of Friturists (Navefri), say they are being unfairly singled out. “A lot is being lumped together here,” chairman Bernard Lefèvre told Gazet van Antwerpen, arguing that consumers are not misled because they generally know what they are buying. He suggested GAIA might better focus on the pigs and chickens on Belgian menus, which he said are often treated worse than horses.

The dispute also extends to animal welfare. GAIA and other groups have published images of horses allegedly transported under difficult conditions — long journeys, extreme weather and poor shelter at collection centres. Countering that narrative, the Belgian meat federation FEBEV runs a “Respectful Life” programme pointing to improved infrastructure and monitoring at slaughterhouses in Argentina and Uruguay, backed by European audits. GAIA counters that announced inspections can present too rosy a picture. FEBEV declined to answer questions from VRT’s Radio 1 about the fraud case and its programme.

What’s Next

The core difficulty is structural: Belgium is a distribution hub for horse meat it largely does not produce, feeding a market that does not always know what it is eating. With fraud cases still under investigation and traceability gaps documented for years, the question of where the horse meat on Belgian plates comes from remains, for now, without a definitive answer.

For consumers, there is one immediate takeaway regardless of how the policy debate unfolds. As dietician Sels put it, if you want to avoid residual or horse meat, order a pure cut of meat — a chicken, beef or pork skewer is far less processed than the typical fried snack.