Food waste generation is a worldwide phenomenon and disposing off it in an environmentally benign way has been a challenge. Thermochemical processes have the potential for not only processing mixed food waste effectively from an environmental point of view but also producing bioenergy in all three forms: solid (biochar), liquid (bio-oil) and gas (syngas). In this study, two thermochemical processes – fast pyrolysis and steam gasification – aimed for producing syngas as main product were carried out at three different temperatures: 600°C, 700°C and 800°C, and resulting syngas was characterised and compared for syngas yield, syngas composition, hydrogen yield and high heating value (HHV). The steam flow rate (SFR) was maintained at 0.625 mL min−1 for all gasification experiments. The syngas yield obtained from steam gasification was higher (1.2 m3 kg−1) than the syngas yield from fast pyrolysis (0.81 m3 kg−1). In addition, the hydrogen fraction was much higher in syngas from steam gasification (63.58%) than that from fast pyrolysis (45.03%). Furthermore, carbon conversion efficiency (CCE) and apparent thermal efficiency (ATE) were determined to compare the performance of these two processes. CCE was higher (63.6%) for steam gasification than that for pyrolysis (52.3%) which suggested that steam gasification was much more effective than fast pyrolysis to produce syngas of higher quality. © The Author(s) 2022.