Why did the date change?

A drive-thru chain asked for it. Checkers and Rally's ran a public petition for a Friday, and on 13 July 2022 it said the founder of the National Day Calendar had agreed.

Is National French Fry Day an official holiday?

No. No legal standing was found for it in the indexes checked: a search of the US Federal Register returns nothing for the name.

Who invented french fries?

Pierre Leclercq of the University of Liege argues the fry began as a Paris street trade, and says its inventor will probably always remain anonymous. Belgium's own heritage inventory says the precise origin of the fry is and remains unclear.

National French Fry Day

Next celebratedFriday, July 9, 2027

National French Fry Day hands the side of the plate the whole meal. Cut a batch and fry them twice, or buy a paper cone from a counter that cuts its own and finish it walking.

See how to celebrate

Countdown to the day

--DAYS

--HRS

--MIN

--SEC

Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATESecond Friday in July

OBSERVED INUnited States

CATEGORYFood

SUBCATEGORYSide Dishes

ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY

Not documented

FIRST OBSERVED

Not documented

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

The date moved by petition, not by decree.

No founder or establishing act for National French Fry Day was located, and much of what still circulates gives the date as July 13. What is documented is a change of date. On 13 July 2022 the drive-thru chain Checkers and Rally's said that National Day Calendar founder Marlo Anderson had agreed to move the day to the second Friday in July, effective the following year, after the chain ran a public petition.

Read the 2022 date-change announcementvia Checkers & Rally's Restaurants, Inc.

INTRO

Fried potatoes first appear in print in a poisoning file

In December 1984 a Belgian historian named Jo Gerard published a passage he said came from a family manuscript of 1781. It described people at Namur, Andenne and Dinant cutting potatoes into the shape of small fish and frying them, and said the practice already went back more than a hundred years. That put the invention around 1680, in Wallonia, and it became the standard Belgian claim.

The historian who took it apart is also Belgian. Pierre Leclercq works on the history of food at the University of Liege, and his footnote on that passage is blunt: he has never been able to find the original, so he cannot certify the text everyone quotes. He puts the fried potato in Paris instead.

The record holds one more awkward detail. The man who opened Belgium's first fry booth was a Bavarian, Frederic Krieger, and he had learned the trade in a rotisserie in Montmartre. When he set up as a fairground trader in Belgium in 1844 he sold the product as fried potatoes in the Paris manner.

National French Fry Day arrives on the second Friday in July and settles none of it. There is no founder on record for the day either.

DEALS & OFFERS

2026’s deals have wrapped

See who celebrated this year, and browse offers from past years.

Offers wrapped for 2026

National French Fry Day ran on July 12. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.

28 brands offered a deal this year

BurgerFi

Beef 'O' Brady's

Bobby's Burgers by Bobby Flay

ORIGINS

French Fry Day history

CHAPTER 01

Why 1680 cannot work

On Leclercq's reading the Namurois had no potatoes to fry in 1680. Fernand Pirotte's study of the crop in eighteenth-century Wallonia puts its arrival at around 1735. Leclercq's own earliest plausible date is 1739, tied to the winter that froze the Meuse for months, and he labels it a pure hypothesis.

Fat is the second problem. In a poor eighteenth-century kitchen it was a luxury, eaten straight on bread rather than poured into a pan. What the 1781 passage describes, on his reading, is potatoes browned in a little grease.

CHAPTER 02

A Paris street trade

The phrase turns up first in a criminal file. At the Perrecy monastery in Burgundy in December 1760, Brother Hillarion accused the abbe des Brosses of trying to poison him, and fed the suspect food to a dog that died two days later. The surgeons' inventory of the sealed evidence lists fricasseed beans and some fried potatoes, and Leclercq's point is that by 1760 nobody needed the term explained.

Those were rounds browned in a little fat, not what anyone eats now. Leclercq puts the commercial birth of the fry on the Pont-Neuf, where fritter sellers set up in the 1780s and seem to have been the first to drop potato slices into a frying bath, probably around 1800. He flags his evidence for that date as a late witness to be handled with care.

The long, angular cut is certain in Paris by 1840. Daumier drew it two years later, in the hands of an actor from the Funambules.

CHAPTER 03

How this one ended up on a Friday

The reference books do carry a fry day, and it is not this one. Chase's Annual Events lists a French Fry Friday in its 1991 and 1992 editions and in no other volume of the series that HathiTrust has indexed.

National French Fry Day is not in that index at all. A search of the whole digitised corpus returns nothing for the name.

The day we do have answers to a drive-thru chain. Checkers and Rally's ran a petition in 2022 to get it off July 13 and onto a Friday, and it has run on the second Friday since 2023.

TIMELINE

Timeline

The phrase enters the record

Two surgeons inventory the sealed evidence in a poisoning case at the Perrecy monastery and list some fried potatoes among the dishes, using the term without explaining it.

Fritter sellers take the Pont-Neuf

Women selling fried potato fritters set up on the Paris bridge. Leclercq judges them the first to drop potato slices into a frying bath, probably around 1800.

The fry crosses into Belgium

Frederic Krieger opens the country's first frites booth. Two documents fix the year: the letterhead of his own letters to town councils booking fair pitches gives 1844 as the founding date of the firm, and a police record still has him working as a fairground musician in 1842.

English print catches up

On Leclercq's citation, a London cookery book by Eliza and J. R. Warren prints the words French fried potatoes. That is long before American soldiers reached Belgium.

A French Fry Friday in Chase's

The reference work Chase's Annual Events carries a French Fry Friday in its 1991 edition and again in 1992, then in no later volume the HathiTrust index holds.

The day moves to a Friday

Checkers and Rally's announces on 13 July that National Day Calendar founder Marlo Anderson has agreed to shift the observance to the second Friday in July from the following year.

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National French Fry Day

Belgians once thought the fry was Russian

The fairground trader who sold Belgium its first fries called his large packets Omnibus and his small ones Vigilantes, after two kinds of Paris carriage. During the Crimean War he renamed them Russes and Cosaques. Russe stuck as the Belgian word for a portion of chips for so long that many Belgians came to believe the fry was Russian.

The paper cone is older than the shape it holds

The cornet, the twist of paper a Belgian counter still serves fries in, is recorded in Paris from 1837. That is before the long angular cut it is now associated with was standard anywhere.

Seventeen fry stalls at one fair

The Liege fair had three stalls selling fried potatoes in 1856. By 1861 it had seventeen. The number then fell sharply, because cheap vegetable fats had brought frying into the home.

Sticks won because rounds stick together

A source of 1815 complains that thin rounds cling to one another and advises cutting thicker, irregular pieces instead. The standard cut went from about 3.5 mm in 1806 to 7 mm in 1822, and Leclercq thinks street sellers moved to sticks for the same practical reason.

The date will not be the 13th until 2029

The second Friday of July always falls between the 8th and the 14th, so the observance can only land on the 13th in a year when the 13th is itself a Friday. The next one is 2029, then 2035.

I, in good conscience, cannot ignore the voice of the people, who simply want to 'fry-ght' a wrong that's been in place for far too long. National Fry Day, you are and will forevermore be on a Friday.

Marlo AndersonFounder, National Day Calendar

This action today is a small, but symbolic effort to show the strong displeasure of many on Capitol Hill with the actions of our so-called ally, France.

Bob NeyChairman, Committee on House Administration, 2003

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National French Fry Day

Scale

The fry is a food-service product that happens to be sold to households as well.

Frozen potato products, most of them fries, account for about half of American potato availability per person, at 58 pounds a head. Availability is the food supply rather than what anyone swallows, and the shift behind it is real: fresh potatoes fell from 46 pounds a head in the early 2000s to 28. Fries are also barely a grocery product. On an earlier USDA measure, about a tenth of frozen fries were sold in shops and quick-service restaurants alone accounted for roughly two-thirds of use.

Technique

Two fries, and the second one is short

The double cooking has a documented commercial advantage that has nothing to do with taste: the second pass takes two or three minutes against about ten for a single cooking, which is the difference between a queue moving and a queue standing. Industrial practice complicates it. A 2024 review of frozen fries reports that the two fries are not simply additive. Par-frying and the sugar and salt step after blanching lower the crust's freezing point, so the crust is still unfrozen while the core freezes and expands into it.

Heritage

A state decided a fry shop was cultural property

Belgian frietkot culture has sat on the Flemish inventory of intangible heritage since 2014, and Leclercq describes the recognition being completed in 2017 across the country's Flemish, French-speaking and German-speaking communities. That is a government classifying a fried potato counter as something worth protecting. The American observance rests on a calendar listing and a chain promotion instead.

GOOD TO KNOW

National French Fry Day Around the World

Belgium

The heritage inventory puts the number of frituren in the country at about 5,000 and says a quarter of Belgians visit one every week. The first fixed frietkoten date from the 1880s.

Bruges

Belgium organised its fry trade late and fast. Unafri, the national union of frituristes, dates from 1984, a fry museum opened in Bruges in 2008, and since 2008 the country has kept 1 August as the international day of the Belgian fry.

Paris

The city that Leclercq credits with the fry lost it. The press was already noting street fry sellers thinning out in 1912. They were still there between the wars, sold pain-frites during the second, and were photographed in May 1968 before disappearing completely.

Washington

On Tuesday 11 March 2003 the cafeteria menus in the three House office buildings replaced french fries with freedom fries and french toast with freedom toast, in protest at France's position on Iraq.

MYTH VS FACT

Common Misconceptions

The myth

American soldiers in Belgium during the First World War coined the name, having mistaken a French-speaking army for the French.

The truth

The words were in print long before they got there. Leclercq cites the contraction French fry in an American memoir published in 1903, and the fuller phrase French fried potatoes in a London cookery book decades before that.

The myth

Thomas Jefferson introduced fried potatoes to America at a White House dinner in 1802.

The truth

The journal usually cited for that dinner is the Rev. Manasseh Cutler's, and it lists no potatoes. It gives the menu in full, down to a pie called macaroni. Across both volumes of the 1888 edition the word potato appears twice, in farm letters about feeding livestock and about families living on potatoes for want of bread.

The myth

The double fry is a Belgian invention.

The truth

Leclercq's earliest written trace of it is a Belgian teaching manual of 1889, and he refuses to conclude anything from a single text. Paris was already double-cooking pommes soufflees in a recipe of 1877.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National French Fry Day

Fry them twice

Cut, dry the sticks properly, then give them a first pass at a gentle heat and a second, hotter pass to finish. The second one is quick, which is the whole point of the method.

SERVE

Serve them the Belgian way

Leclercq lists three things that made Belgian fry culture its own rather than Paris's: moules-frites, the double cooking, and mayonnaise on the side. Put out a bowl of it instead of ketchup and see who complains.

CHECK

Check the date before you plan anything

The observance moves. It sits on the second Friday in July, which means it can land anywhere from the 8th to the 14th, so pick the year's actual Friday rather than a remembered number.

TAKE

Take them out in paper

The cone a Belgian counter still serves fries in was Paris street kit before the long cut was standard. Get an order to take away and eat it walking, which is how the dish spent its first century.

READ

Read the argument yourself

The three-part history behind most of this page is free and footnoted to nineteenth-century newspapers. Start with the chapter on Monsieur Fritz and decide who you believe.

Test your knowledge