Biohydrogen produced via dark fermentation (DF, a variant of anaerobic digestion) offers simultaneous food waste (FW) management and renewable energy production. The heterogeneous nature of FW, however, makes hydrolysis the rate-limiting step in DF. While conventional pre-treatments can overcome this heterogeneity, they require high energy demands, prolonged processing times, form inhibitors and are not scalable. Contrastingly, hydrodynamic cavitation (HC) can solublise and improve feedstock bioavailability due to intense localised physicochemical effects while being scalable and energy efficient. Therefore, the aim of this work is to investigate HC as an effective pretreatment to enhance biohydrogen production from FW through DF. HC pre-treatment in a recirculating batch system(nominal capacity – 1.2 m3/h) across various pressure drops and number of passes (dimensionless parameter analogous to time) were performed with fixed FW loading. HC pre-treated FW at 3.5 bars and 50 passes when subjected to batch DF tests for biohydrogen production significantly reduced lag time (5h vs 9h) and increased hydrogen production rate (HPR) compared to controls. This improvement was associated with higher net total organic carbon consumption(55%), suggesting that HC enhanced FW solubilisation and reduced feedstock complexity. The substantial enhancement in HPR observed upon HC treatment suggests a higher feedstock throughput when scaled up.