Your meal vouchers expire. Brussels has not noticed.
Since January 2026, the little card everyone carries is worth up to 50 euros a week. The city has not yet understood what that changes about dinner.
Tanto Cuisine · 21 July 2026 · 2 min read
Tanto Cuisine
There is a gesture Brussels makes hundreds of thousands of times a day without looking at it. Noon, a counter, a terminal, and a card that is neither a bank card nor a loyalty card. Edenred, Pluxee, Monizze, the name depends on the employer, the gesture stays the same. The meal voucher has been a Belgian institution for decades, so settled that everyone stopped thinking about it.
Which is a pity, because in January 2026 the rule changed, and almost nobody looked up. The ceiling rose to 10 euros per working day. Five working days, 50 euros. Per week. That is no longer sandwich money, it is a table budget.
- The 2026 rule
- Up to 10 euros of meal vouchers per working day, loaded by the employer.
- The week
- Five working days, up to 50 euros on the card.
- The detail everyone forgets
- An unused voucher eventually expires. That money dies quietly.
Now look at what the city does with it. A sandwich here, a supermarket checkout there, a balance nobody ever checks. The issuers know it: part of that money is never spent. It sleeps on the card, then it expires. Earned money, meant for eating, vanishing without having fed anyone. For one person, an irritating detail. Across a city, a considerable waste.
The reason is simple: the meal voucher was filed, mentally, under lunchtime. It pays for the lunch between two meetings, the salad next door, the supermarket till. Nobody ever invited it to dinner.
At eight dishes, one meal is exactly one voucher.
Do the sum once and it will not let you go. A week of eight dishes comes to 10 euros a meal. One working day loads up to 10 euros onto the card. One meal, one voucher. The week of dinners costs exactly what the week of work already set aside for eating. And the shortest week, four dishes at 44 euros, still sits under the 50 euros the card can carry.
This is not a promotion. It is a correspondence. On one side, a food budget Belgium decided to give its workers, with a use-by date. On the other, a week of real dinners, cooked on Saturday in a traiteur kitchen in Auderghem, delivered on Sunday. Both already existed. They only needed to be introduced.
We will not claim dinner becomes free, that would be untrue and slightly vulgar. The money is yours, you earned it. We are only saying this: before they expire in silence, your vouchers can set the table.
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