A novel cascade biorefinery approach to transform food waste into valuable chemicals and biogas through thermal pretreatment integration

[Display omitted] •A food waste (FW) biorefinery platform integrating thermal pretreatment is presented.•FW extract, rich in available sugars, was effectively fermented into marketable VFAs.•Stable anaerobic digestion of FW residue produced high methane conversion rate.•Preliminary cost assessment suggests attractive economic returns (+180%) A novel biorefinery platform integrating thermal pretreatment and solid-liquid separation unit is here proposed to fully exploit food waste (FW) potential for production of valuable chemicals and energy through semi-continuous anaerobic bioconversion. The liquid fraction deriving from raw or pretreated FW, was fermented into volatile fatty acids (VFAs, from acetic to caproic acid) while the residual fraction was converted into biomethane. Thermal pretreatment effectively extracted a portion of the macromolecular organics, especially starch, to the liquid phase, promoting acidogenic fermentation and chain elongation pathways (0.43 gVFA g−1VSfed and 0.58 gVFA g−1VSfed with raw and pretreated extract, respectively). In parallel, anaerobic digestion of solid residue in 10 L reactors showed process stability and higher conversion rate for the pretreated residue (0.31 against 0.26 Nm3CH4 kg−1VSfed). The mass-transfer balance coupled with the economic assessment, calculated in terms of direct gross added value, indicated promising revenues by integrating the thermal upstream treatment.