Comps
Also called: comped · complimentary
A comp is food or drink provided without charge — service recovery, a manager's goodwill gesture, staff meals, marketing tastings. The cost is entirely real and appears in COGS with no matching sale, which is why it shows up as variance if it isn't tracked separately.
Categorise by reason, always
- Service recovery — something went wrong. A rising trend here is an operations signal, not a cost signal.
- Staff meals — predictable and budgetable. Should be a planned line, not a surprise.
- Marketing / relationship — press, industry, regulars. Fine, if intentional and capped.
- Manager discretion — the one to watch. Not because of dishonesty, but because uncapped discretion drifts.
Worked example · What 2% of sales looks like
- Annual sales
- $1,850,000
- Comps at 2% of sales
- $37,000 in retail value
- Cost of those comps at 30% food cost
- $11,100
- Annual cost
- $11,100
Comps are usually reported at menu value, which overstates the cash impact roughly threefold. Both numbers matter — menu value for the revenue conversation, food cost for the P&L one.
The guide that works it through
Why Is My Food Cost So High? A Diagnostic
Seven causes of a high restaurant food cost, in the order they're usually the answer — with the check that confirms or eliminates each one in under an hour.
Related terms
Voids
Items removed from a check — some before the food was made, some after, and only the difference matters for cost.
Variance
The dollar gap between theoretical and actual food cost — the money that left without a sale.
Theoretical vs. actual food cost
Theoretical is what the recipes say you should have spent; actual is what inventory says you did. The gap is the whole story.