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Moroccan meals need local nutrition context.
Tajine, harira, couscous, pastilla, breads, and home recipes do not fit neatly into a generic food search. This page explains the public references behind Forma’s localized approach and the limits of every food value.
Published and last reviewed August 25, 2026 · 7-minute read
Why a localized layer matters
The Food and Agriculture Organization describes reliable food-composition data as foundational to nutrition work and promotes international standards through FAO/INFOODS. Country and regional tables matter because importing a superficially similar food from another market can hide meaningful differences.
The 2020 Moroccan food-composition update documented 587 foods and dishes with 38 nutrient components, including a large number of new entries. It also exposes the limitations of the available evidence. About 7% of values came from Moroccan data, 93% came from international sources, and roughly 20% of the targeted nutrient values remained unavailable. Local coverage is essential, but it is not the same as perfect measurement.
The public methodology
What Forma publishes
- Support for Moroccan dishes, ingredients, and saved meals
- Search designed for Darija, French, and English terms
- Editable portions and user-created recipes
- Use of public and product-label nutrition references
How to read a food value
- Database values are estimates for a defined food or recipe
- Packaged-food labels are specific to that product and serving
- Home dishes vary with ingredients, cooking, and portion size
- A custom recipe is often best for a repeated household meal
The cited Moroccan table is an external scientific reference. This page does not claim that Forma copied or redistributes the table’s full dataset.
What remains proprietary
Forma publishes its source categories, language coverage, user controls, evidence, and limitations. Forma does not publish its food-search ranking, name normalization, translation mappings, deduplication rules, product matching, recipe resolution, source-priority logic, confidence scoring, recommendation rules, or source code.
Protecting those mechanics does not change the user-facing rule: nutrition values are estimates, and people can edit a serving or save a more representative recipe.
Public reference layers
Provides the official FAO entry for the 2020 Moroccan table and links the country-specific resource to the broader international food-composition system.
Documents the table’s coverage, source methods, and missing-data limitations. It supports the need for a localized Moroccan reference while making clear where the underlying evidence is incomplete.
Explains distinct data types, including foundation foods, survey foods, experimental foods, and branded products. These categories show why provenance matters when comparing values.
A public product-label database that can help with packaged-food coverage. Label data can change and may be incomplete, so the product package remains the most specific reference.
Limits and responsible interpretation
Two households can make the same named dish with different meat, oil, vegetables, grains, and serving sizes. Nutrients also vary with brands, season, origin, and cooking. Transliteration adds another source of ambiguity. No search result can infer an unseen recipe with certainty.
For repeated home meals, build a custom recipe from the ingredients actually used. For packaged foods, compare the entry with the current label. Nutrition tracking is an estimate and is not medical advice. People managing allergies, disease, pregnancy, or therapeutic diets should use qualified clinical guidance.
References
FAO/INFOODS food composition tables and databases.
Journal of Food Composition and Analysis, 2020. DOI: 10.1016/j.jfca.2019.103397.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
United States Department of Agriculture.