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Anaerobic digestion serves as a feasible and practical technology that converts food waste into biogas. Effective food waste-digesting inoculum must be capable of handling the heterogeneity of organic fractions. Therefore, the preparation of such an inoculum can be challenging. In this work, we explored a new approach to prepare the inoculum from palm oil mill effluent (POME), which is an alternative source of microbial consortium abundantly available in tropical countries, to be a food waste-digesting inoculum. By employing POME as an initial inoculum, our acclimatization was divided into three strategies, which were low, medium, and high-rate acclimatization. The result showed that low acclimatization was a successful strategy to adapt to the consuming behavior of microorganisms inside the anaerobic digestion system. The low acclimatization could provide a methane yield (513.90 mL-CH₄/g-volatile solid …