Despite all of the cutting edge kitchen equipment at last week’s NRA show, the industry has yet to fully catch up to the world of e-commerce. Instead, the ~$6bn domestic commercial kitchen equipment industry still mostly functions off of paper invoices and opaque pricing. Enter Backhouse, a year-old startup that is marketing itself as a digital procurement agent for everyone from single to multi-unit hospitality operators. Thanks to its group buying power, independent restaurants can tap into the same 15-25% savings as larger chains while also using the site as an educational discovery tool to find the right equipment across Backhouse’s database of tens of thousands of SKUs. This week, HNGRY sat down with Founder & CEO Max Mandell to dissect this two-pronged problem of pricing and discovery within the commercial cooking equipment space.