International Journal of Innovation and Applied Studies ISSN 2028-9324 Vol. 30 No. 2 Aug. 2020, pp. 535-542 © 2020 Innovative Space of Scientific Research Journals http://www.ijias.issr-journals.org/ Corresponding Author: Said Barrijal 535 The Microbiological Quality of Commercialized Food Products in Northwest of Morocco Insaf Ghailani 1 , Adnane Louajri 1 , Asmae Zawjal 2 , El Ouardy Khay 3 , and Said Barrijal 4 1 Laboratoire de Biologie Appliquée et Pathologie (LBAP), Faculté des Sciences, Tétouan (FS), Université Abdelmalek Essaadi, Morocco 2 Laboratoire régional de diagnostic épidémiologique et d’hygiène du milieu (LRDEHM), Tétouan, Morocco 3 Laboratoire de Biologie et Santé (LBS), Faculté des Sciences, Tétouan (FS), Université Abdelmalek Essaadi, Morocco 4 Laboratoire Valorisation Biotechnologique des Microorganismes, Génomique et Bioinformatique, Faculté des Sciences et Techniques, Tanger (FST), Université Abdelmalek Essaadi, Morocco Copyright © 2020 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT: The microbiological quality analysis of 914 samples of food products, taken at restaurants and food outlets the most vulnerable to human health in the Tetouan region (Northwest of Morocco) between 2012 and 2017, were conducted at the Regional Laboratory for Epidemiological Diagnosis and Environmental Health. This analysis showed that the rate of non- compliance of different food categories reached 77.8% during 2012, and then it dropped to a percentage of 60.5% in 2014, and a rate of 62.5% during the year 2017. This non-compliance affected all the food categories studied, but it varies according to the type of food. Meat products and raw vegetables are the most contaminated, with a rate of non-compliance of 80.75% and 81.81% respectively, followed by dairy products with a rate of 63.47%, and ready meals with 60 %. KEYWORDS: Food restaurants, food outlets, microbiological quality, Northwest of Morocco. 1 INTRODUCTION The way of life in developed countries and developing countries such as Morocco has evolved for several decades. This evolution has significantly modified dietary habits [1]. Despite the success of our modern societies in the control of major infectious problems, they find themselves in difficulty, faced with some aspects of food hygiene [1], especially in Africa; food hygiene represents a public health problem. In developing countries, fast food, canteens and institutional catering are becoming inevitable in the current urban development scheme [2]. In Morocco, because of rapid urbanization and the changing people’s eating behavior, this type of food is becoming more and more widespread in society, so meals served in sales outlets and restaurants can be the source of collective food poisoning if hygienic precautions are not taken into consideration [3]. Foodborne illness is a public health problem for both industrialized and developing countries. In the latter case, the management of these diseases is obviously heavy, hence the need to improve surveillance programs and to set up a standard practice for this type of poisoning [4], especially the number of declared cases is below reality. This problem is common to all developing countries. The comparison of national data with data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers shows per 100 000 inhabitants in the USA there are 46 times more reports than in Morocco, with a very big difference between reporting methods [5]. The highest number of food poisoning cases in 2011 was registered in the Marrakech-Tansift-Al Hour (western region), which has more than 1400 active declarations, and more than 250 passive declarations cases, followed by the region of Sousse- Massa-Draa, the eastern region and the Doukkala-Abda (center region) [17]. The region of Tangier-Tetouan is ranked fifth in