Restaurants, hotels, markets, fisheries and other small to medium-size agro-food industries must manage 239 million tonnes of organic waste in Europe per year. The specific management of such waste, with respect to the legislative regulations of EU, involves costly treatment for SMEs and potential hygiene issues on site. ORION aimed to allow for a vast majority of SMEs to manage their organic waste themselves in order to decrease their treatment costs (storage, transport landfill or incineration) and increase on-site hygiene conditions. Wastes werealso valorized as biomass to produce energy and increase SME autonomy and profitability. The digestor designed by the ORION cosortium was shown to be very cost effective for users. ORION partnership was composed of European research institutions and SMEs representing the targeted sectors: fishery/aquaculture, hotel-restaurants, small agro-food industries, as well as a Core Group of representative SME partners involved in the pilot design and testing with various waste qualities and quantities. The project relied on an interdisciplinary group of research centres in order to achieve the technical goals of the project.