Restaurant Comps Policy: Staff Drinks, Freebies and Food Cost

8 September 2026 · MidaOne

Nobody opens a café intending to give away four kilos of coffee a month. It happens one cup at a time, and every single cup is reasonable: the barista's own flat white before service, a cortado for the delivery rider who waited, something for the neighbour who's been coming in since you opened, and your friend who never once lets you charge him and you never once insist. None of that is theft. All of it is cost, and almost none of it gets written down.

The cost that never reaches the till

Here's why this one is worth an hour of your attention. A drink you throw away is visible — somebody notices the bin. A drink you sell is visible — it's in the till. A drink you give away sits in the gap between the two: the milk and the beans left the shelf, no sale was recorded, and nothing anywhere says why the numbers no longer add up.

So it turns up months later in the wrong place, as food cost that has crept two or three points with no obvious cause. You start suspecting the supplier, or portion sizes, or the new starter. Meanwhile the actual answer is a handful of unrecorded cups a day that everybody in the building thinks are fine, and they're broadly right — they just aren't free. If you're already chasing a gap like that, where café stock actually disappears is the wider version of this hunt.

Three kinds of free, and only one is a problem

Lumping these together is what makes owners either too generous or too suspicious. They are different things, they cost different amounts, and they need different rules.

Type	What it buys you	The rule it needs
Staff drinks	A team that's awake and knows the menu	A stated allowance, not an open bar
Service recovery	A complaint that ends at the counter	Anyone can do it, up to a limit, always logged
Owner's guests and goodwill	Relationships, sometimes nothing at all	Only you decide, and you record it too

Service recovery is the one to be relaxed about — a remade drink is far cheaper than an argument, and that's covered properly in handling refunds and complaints at the counter. Staff drinks are a benefit worth having. The third row is where cafés quietly lose real money, because it has no limit and no witness, and the person doing it is the only one who can stop it.

Set the staff drink rule on day one

Set it in the first week of a new hire, not in month six when you've noticed something. Retrofitting a limit onto a team that's had none reads as an accusation, even when it isn't one — you're taking away something they were given. Written into the induction it's simply how the café works, and nobody argues with it.

A workable rule is usually shaped like this: a stated number of drinks per shift, from an agreed list, made during a specific window rather than mid-rush, and taken at a specific place rather than behind the machine. What matters isn't the exact number — it's that a number exists, everyone knows it, and it's the same for the person who's been here two years and the person who started Tuesday.

Say what's included. Espresso drinks and filter, usually yes. The single-origin you buy in small quantities, the pastries you'd otherwise sell, and anything with three shots of syrup in it are worth naming explicitly.
Say when. Before service and after the rush, not during it. A barista making their own drink at 8:15am is a queue getting longer.
Say who else. Friends and family of staff is the vaguest category in any café, and it is the one that expands. Decide whether it exists at all.
Say what happens off shift. Staff coming in on a day off are customers, or they're not, and either answer is fine as long as it's the stated one.

Comps work better when someone owns them

A comp is a legitimate tool. Buying a coffee for a regular who's just had a bad week, or for a journalist, or for the landlord's building manager, is ordinary business. The problem is never that comps happen — it's that nobody is accountable for the total, so there is no total.

Give the authority to a named person or two, put a ceiling on it in dirhams a week, and require a reason next to every one. The reason field does more work than the ceiling. "Regular, machine was down" is a business decision you can review; a blank line is a hole. And when you read the log back you'll find comps cluster around specific people and specific hours, which usually tells you something about the shift rather than the customer.

Record it, or it's just food cost drift

Everything above collapses without this step. A rule you don't measure is a suggestion, and free drinks are the single easiest cost in a café to lose track of, because there's no receipt, no bin bag and no complaint — just a slightly smaller bag of beans than the maths predicted.

Give it a home. Whatever you use for the waste log works, with a column for which of the three types it was. Then read the total once a month next to your food cost percentage — not to feel bad about it, but to know the number. Most owners find it's smaller than they feared and more concentrated than they expected: one or two categories, one or two people, one or two hours of the day.

One thing worth saying plainly: the goal is not zero. A café with no staff drinks has baristas who don't know what the coffee tastes like today, and a café that never comps anything has a counter full of small arguments. The goal is a number you chose, rather than a number that happened to you.

Where MidaOne fits

MidaOne doesn't have a comps button, and it's more useful to say so than to pretend otherwise. What it does have is somewhere sensible to put the cost: waste can be recorded against the item, it appears in the sales summary next to revenue, cost of goods and gross profit, and there's a waste-by-item report — so staff drinks and comps logged that way come off the stock count and land somewhere you'll actually see them, instead of vanishing into an unexplained variance.

Because stock updates live as you sell, and sales, stock and VAT sit in one record, the month-end picture is what was bought, what was sold and what left the shelf for another reason — the three numbers this whole article is about. That's on the flat AED 200 a month, every feature and unlimited devices included.

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Frequently asked questions

How many free drinks should café staff get per shift?

There's no standard figure, and anyone quoting one is guessing. Pick a number you can afford, state it clearly, and apply it identically to everyone. A stated allowance of one or two drinks a shift from an agreed list is far easier to manage than an open arrangement that nobody has ever put a boundary on.

Should staff drinks be rung through the till at zero?

Some owners do, and it keeps the count honest. The important part is that the drink leaves your stock record somehow — whether that's a zero-value entry, a waste log or a notebook by the machine. What you must avoid is product leaving the shelf with nothing anywhere recording that it happened.

Is it worth tracking something this small?

It's small per cup and rarely small per month. More to the point, untracked giveaways are the reason food-cost investigations go in circles — you end up suspecting suppliers or portion sizes when the answer was a few cups a day. Tracking it takes a column in a log you already keep.

How do I introduce a limit to staff who've never had one?

Frame it as writing down what already exists rather than taking something away, and apply it to yourself first. Announce it with a start date, put the number in writing, and don't make it retrospective. Most teams accept a clear allowance far more easily than an unspoken rule they can accidentally break.

What about the owner's own friends and guests?

Same log, same discipline. This is the category with no ceiling and no witness, and in a small café it is often larger than the staff allowance. You don't need to stop it — you need to be able to see the monthly total, because it's a marketing cost you chose rather than a leak.

Write the rule down while the café is still small enough that it fits on one page. It costs nothing today, it's an awkward conversation in a year, and it's the difference between a cost you decided on and a number you go looking for one quiet Tuesday when the margin doesn't make sense.