KitchenCompare exists because buying commercial kitchen equipment in Australia is needlessly opaque. The same machine sits on twenty sites under twenty different names at twenty different prices. We fixed the matching problem, then refused to sell the ranking.
A chef looking for a Roband GSA810S will find it listed as a “Grill Station 8 Slice”, a “Sandwich Press Large”, and a “Contact Griller – 8 Round”. Search engines treat those as three products. Buyers give up and ring whoever they used last time.
We match every listing to a canonical model number first. Only then do we compare price. That ordering matters: comparing before matching is how you end up recommending a $600 machine as an alternative to a $6,000 one because the words overlapped.
Once the matching is right, the honest thing to do with the result is rank it by price and leave it alone. That’s the whole product, and it’s the part we won’t sell.
These aren’t marketing lines. Each one is a constraint we’ve turned down revenue to keep.
Every comparison keys on the supplier model number. If the code doesn’t match exactly, the listing isn’t compared — no fuzzy matching, no “similar product” swaps.
Deals on a product page are sorted by verified list price, ascending. Subscription tier, claimed status and sponsorship do not enter the ranking calculation.
Missing stock, freight, specs or price history says “not recorded” or “unavailable” — we don’t invent values to fill a column or make a page look complete.
Prices reflect retailer listings at our last collection run. We show when a price was checked and flag verified drops only when history supports the claim.
You should be suspicious of a free comparison site. Here is the entire business model, including the parts that create tension.
Enhanced profiles, analytics, buyer enquiries and KitchenIQ intelligence for businesses that want more than a free listing.
Any paid placement outside the comparison itself — homepage features, banners, category highlights — carries a visible “Sponsored” label.
When venues ask about equipment finance, we may introduce a broker — always disclosed, never bundled into a product ranking.
The honest tension: subscriptions and finance referrals both come from businesses that would prefer to rank higher. Our answer is structural rather than promissory — ranking is computed from price data alone, and no field in a subscription record is readable by the ranking code. If that ever stops being true, the claim on every page of this site becomes a lie, so it won’t.
We’re based in Australia. Most of us have either worked a service or sold equipment to someone who did.
We don’t publish a staff directory of fabricated bios. If you need a human, get in touch — a real person reads every message.
