Food Wastage, Comps & Portion Control in Restaurants

The two largest costs in any hospitality business are stock, and labour.

We’re going to tackle the former first - food wastage, comps & portion controls in restaurants - as a greater amount of people within the business can have a direct impact on stock costs.

Maybe you’ve heard the owner or General Manager saying that the business isn’t hitting the GP target, or maybe you are a GM or business owner and you’re tired of saying it. Sounds like a broken record, doesn’t it?

But, I bet you’ve never heard them dive into why GP is below target, so I’m going to do this for you. There are a number of key factors that influence Gross Profit, and each one of them needs to be examined when GP doesn’t meet target (that doesn’t mean to say that if you’re constantly hitting your GP target that you can ignore these areas- you still need to control them). The main areas of impact are:

1.       Wastage

2.       Discounts and Comps

3.       Portion Control

4.       Over-ordering, or ordering incorrect products

Wastage

The following section is quite food heavy- the principles still apply to the bar, but I’m speaking from my own experience here.

Now, at some point over the last week or so, you’ll have either heard someone telling you to record wastage, or you’ll have been the one saying it.

But why is it important?

A lot of owners and GMs have a terrible habit of belittling their team members for wasting too much food or drink, and whilst I am fully aware from my days as a chef that wasting anything is bad, I find that a lot of people (myself included) go about it in the wrong way.

This leads to wastage not being properly recorded, fabricated, or not recorded at all. With wastage being a big contributing factor to GP margins, it’s drastically important that we fully understand not just what is being wasted, but also why it is being wasted.

We ask all of our clients not to be too harsh when evaluating wastage, and to operate an “open & honest” policy when it comes to recording wastage. That’s not to say that if you burn £400 worth of the Sunday Roast meats that you’ll keep your job, but it should mean that you’re not going to get reamed out for over-cooking a few sausages.

What managers and owners should be doing is training their teams on how to record wastage properly:

·       What was wasted?

·       Why was it wasted?

·       What was the cost of the waste? (We’re talking about the product cost here, not the menu price).

·       When did it happen?

Food and drink get wasted all the time- it’s part of running a hospitality business. What we should be doing though, is looking at ways to reduce wastage, and to ensure that we’re recording everything that does get wasted. I’m not saying that you need to break out the scales for every gram of carrot that goes into the bin, but you should be able to sensibly estimate what you’ve had to throw away.

Once all of the wastage has been recorded, it’s best practice to enter it into the till system so that there’s a digital record (most EPOS systems have a means to do this, but if yours doesn’t, then a spreadsheet is fine). When we know what we’re wasting and why we’re wasting it, then we can look to solve the problem:

·       Is it a training issue?

·       Are we over-ordering?

·       Did the fridge break?

·       Are the lines calibrated?

·       Are we missing fridge plans?

Over-ordering and incorrect ordering

A lot of chefs and some servers will have come across this issue before - something that they don’t think that sells particularly well always seems to need buying in. I found this several years ago with a “Softshell Crab & Waffles” dish that I had on the menu (there’s a reason that I’m not a chef anymore). After my 2 days off, I’d come back in to sort my prep and there’d be no crab left- no note, and no wastage sheet- so I assumed that we’d sold out. So, I’d order more, and the same thing would happen the following week and so on. A few weeks later, I finally had my Sous Chef on shift with me and I made a remark about how he always seems to sell out of the crab, and I barely make any of them- he told me that it wasn’t selling and that he had to keep binning it off. If I’d have checked the sales data, or had he recorded it as waste, then I may not have spent several hundred £ on stock for him to throw in the bin.

Yes, I’m aware that this could also fall under the wastage category, but if I didn’t put it separately, then how would I have managed to work in the detail about my amazing crab dish? It’s also worth noting that over ordering can be a cause of wastage, but not always. Sometimes over ordering leads to excessive portioning.

Incorrect Ordering. When I say incorrect ordering, I don’t mean that you’ve ordered a product that is no longer on the menu (although this does happen), I’m more concerned about when we end up ordering the right product, but from the wrong supplier. It happens all the time- maybe the person on shift wasn’t aware that you’d switched suppliers, or that you only order Heineken from LWC, and not from Heineken Direct.

Discounts & Comps

Finally, something for the Front of House team!

Accidents happen- whether it’s the kitchen preparing something incorrectly, or the wrong order going through the till. The important thing here is that everything is recorded. With this example, you’re most likely going to record it as wastage on the correct sheet (or on the till). But there are quite a few other circumstances in which discounts and comps will happen, and it’s important to be able to both recognise them, and categorise them accordingly.

Our advice is to split these costs into separate categories:

• Goodwill gesture (positive) i.e. when it’s someone’s birthday and you want to do a little extra.

• Goodwill gesture (negative) i.e. a table has been completely overlooked, or there’s a huge wait on food.

• Staff discounts (on shift).

• Staff discounts (off shift).

• Owner discounts (these should absolutely be recorded separately).

• Manager discounts (where a Manager or Owner has given a discount, or comped a bill- whether that’s for staff, the owner, or friends & family).

• Marketing. You may be in an area that accepts localised discount cards e.g. your café is in an office building and all office workers get 10% off, or you might be running a “50% off food in January” promotion, or maybe you’ve launched a new menu and filled the restaurant with influencers.

• Errors & Mistakes. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the kitchen or the bar’s fault, it’s just important right now that we separate this out.

Why do we categorise discounts and comps?

Discounts and comps (particularly if there’s an offer on at the time) can heavily affect your GP. It’s important to be able to identify these costs to the business and split them out so that they can be removed from the Cost of Sales (the cost of the products you’ve bought in) and transferred on the P&L to the relevant account e.g. marketing expenses, incentives, staff wellbeing, and so on. The only discounts or comps that should affect the GP figure are Errors & Mistakes. This ensures that we’re viewing an accurate representation of our GP margins, and it makes it easier to identify any issues or faults. Without splitting these discounts out, it could look like the kitchen or bar has a poor GP when in fact, we’re comping 10% of sales for influencers.

Portion Control

The three other areas that we’ve looked at so far can be implemented relatively quickly, and can be controlled by an individual (I’m not saying that they should- everyone should play their part). Portion control requires a team effort. Far too often we see specs that say something like “a handful of chips”. Annie might have hands the size of an infant whereas Steve might have hands like dustbin lids.

Now, you might think that overall, the lower portion delivered by Annie would balance out Steve’s portion, but it’s more likely that Annie is now going to use two handfuls so that her portions are more similar to Steve’s.

I used to spend literally hours weighing out all of my ingredients, portioning them up, labelling them, and reorganising the fridge to make everything fit only to come in after my day off to find that no one else had followed suit, or that someone had called in sick and the prep team weren’t able to do this. I couldn’t think of a way around this until I worked at a place where they used utensils for measurements - one ice cream scoop of tuna mayo, etc. Obviously, everything had to be weighed out when creating the dish and the accompanying spec, but once that was done we went out and bought a load of different sized utensils. This got around both the “handful of” issue, and my over-zealous method of churning through plastic tubs that usually ended up in the bin after one go round in the microwave.

Quick(ish) Tips on How to Combat all of the above areas:

1.       A simple- yet effective- trick that McDonald’s uses is to put all of their waste into a food bin and count it at regular intervals throughout the day. Given that as of the 31st March 2025 it’s now a legal requirement to separate out waste for hospitality businesses with 10 or more employees (those with less than 10 employees will have until March 2027 to put this in place), you’re actually doing yourself a favour by splitting it out to count it.

2.       Another practice that I tried my best to implement wherever I worked was the use of fridge plans and shelf labels. If there’s a laminated plan on the front of every fridge, it reduces the risk of anyone doubling up on prep. It also makes your day easier as you’re able to identify what needs to go on your prep list at a quicker pace. If you’re also implementing shelf labels in all of your fridges and dry stores, then it makes the ordering process easier too- no more panicking on your day off that Steve forgot to order the salmon.

3.       This one takes a little while longer to implement- par levels. This is how much of a product or ingredient that you’re expecting to use that day/week/month. The easiest way to find this out is by evaluating your sales data- what’s selling, and what isn’t? Combine this with fridge plans and shelf labels and you’ve less of a chance of over ordering stuff you don’t need.

4.       Supplier & Product lists- one way of stopping products being ordered from the wrong supplier is to have a list of what you order, and where you order it from.

a.       It’s important to note that it’s always worth having back-up suppliers for “just In case”, but it should be noted in your ordering procedure documentation that we only order from X supplier when Y supplier is out of stock. Some suppliers will also allow you to have set lists to order from- if it isn’t on the list, then they won’t deliver it. This can be an incredibly useful- or painful- tool.

5.       A lot of restaurants will actively try to use as much as possible so that it doesn’t get wasted- usually in the form of soups, broths, and stocks, but I appreciate that this isn’t possible in every venue, and it definitely isn’t applicable behind the bar (well, back when I was 18 you could order a “pint of shite” which could contain quite literally anything).

6.       When it comes to portion control, follow this process:

a.       Weigh and measure everything whilst you’re building your menu.

b.       Find utensils that match those measurements.

c.       Buy a surplus of those utensils (and record where you’ve bought them from) for when they inevitably go in the bin.

d.       Be concise in your measurement description i.e. don’t say “1 scoop of”, instead say “1 level scoop of”. Also, try to avoid using the word “heaped” in your measurements- have you ever seen (or been) a kid at Pizza Hut and you get the unlimited SoftServe ice cream? Yeah, that’s what portions end up looking like when you use a measurement like “heaped”

Final Thoughts

Controlling your GP isn’t about cutting corners—it’s about tightening up the everyday practices that quietly erode your margins. Wastage, over-ordering, unrecorded comps, and sloppy portioning don’t just dent your profits—they make it impossible to see where the real issues lie.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about building systems that make the right thing the easy thing. Give your teams the tools, clarity, and structure to track waste, portion accurately, and follow consistent ordering practices. The result? Fewer surprises at stocktake, more predictable margins, and a smoother operation all round.

You don’t need perfection—you just need progress. One fridge label, one recorded comp, and one measured scoop at a time.