Jhenifer de Souza Couto Oliveira¹, Jackline Freitas Brilhante de São José^1,

The great relevance of evaluating the sanitary-hygienic conditions in the street food vending sites, as a means to identify risks and prevent food-originated diseases. In this paper, street food trades are analyzed in Vitória, Espírito Santo, Brazil. To accomplish this, a study of a cross-sectional, observational and descriptive kind was carried out from July 2016 to March 2017. Good practice checklists based on legislation and research were applied in that group of street vendors and 20 samples of the food commercialized were analyzed. The places visited presented average adequacy equal to 44%, as from the analysis of the checklists, various items pointing to the need for improvement, mainly in relation to sanitary license and environmental conditions. Coliforms at 35 °C, molds and yeasts, as well as Staphylococcus spp. were detected in all food samples analyzed, hot dogs standing out as the food with the highest microbial load. This indicates that the organizations must supervise sanitary conditions and offer to street food vendors education programs to contribute to adequate hygiene practices. This is essential to improve the quality of the foods sold in the streets and prevent foodborne diseases.

food hygiene; food handling; public health, contamination, quality control