“…Most previous research has focused on the effects of the aforementioned factors on VFAs production from food waste and then selected the operational parameters that produced the maximum VFAs, all of which were based on the adjusted pH values in the above-mentioned research. However, so far the fermentation products, as external carbon source have failed to gain practical application in WWTPs due to the specific drawbacks of time consuming (5e10 days), consumption of large amount of chemicals (especially for pH adjustment), and particularly larger degree degradation of organic substrates (more than 50%) in the form of gas release (Chu et al, 2008;Liu et al, 2013b;Jiang et al, 2013). In fact, by free hydrolysis and acidogenesis, which usually takes short time and retains most of organics, the carbohydrate and protein of food waste can be transformed to intermediates readily or slowly utilizable by bacteria in the biological reactors (Elefsiniotis et al, 2004), though they are not really in the form of VFAs or lactic acid that are commonly recognized as high quality carbon sources for denitrification (Elefsiniotis and Li.…”