We discuss in this short note the local-in-time strong well-posedness of the compressible Navier–Stokes system for non-Newtonian fluids on the three dimensional torus. We show that the result established recently by Kalousek, Mácha, and Nečasova in https://doi.org/10.1007/s00208-021-02301-8 can be extended to the case where vanishing density is allowed initially. Our proof builds on the framework developed by Cho, Choe, and Kim in https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpur.2003.11.004 for compressible Navier–Stokes equations in the case of Newtonian fluids. To adapt their method, special attention is given to the elliptic regularity of a challenging nonlinear elliptic system. We show particular results in this direction, however, the main result of this paper is proven in the general case when elliptic $$W^{2,p}$$
W
2
,
p
-regularity is imposed as an assumption. Also, we give a finite time blow-up criterion.