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Product Hunt — what else your suppliers carry

Every supplier you’ve added has a catalogue behind them — not just the products you actually buy, but the full sheet they could ship you tomorrow if you asked. Pasta Vera might carry two hundred lines; you’re probably ordering twenty. Mauro Foods lists every wine in the warehouse; you stock thirty. Product Hunt is the page that surfaces the other 170 of Pasta Vera’s list and the 200 wines of Mauro Foods’ you’ve never tried — sorted, searchable, one-click approvable into your own pantry the moment something catches your eye.

This page is for the head chef thinking about the next menu change, the bar manager scouting for a new house red, the owner wondering which products on the supplier sheet could improve a margin. It sits next to the supplier detail page but flips the viewpoint: instead of “what does this one supplier carry?” you ask “what does everyone I work with carry, that I’m not yet using?”

What it does

Most kitchens shop the same fifteen ingredients for years because the head chef knows their prices, knows they’re reliable, knows they fit the recipes. The other 150 lines on the supplier’s sheet stay invisible — partly because nobody scrolls a PDF price list for fun, partly because no one connects the line on the PDF to whether the product would actually fit the kitchen.

Product Hunt makes the whole catalogue browsable in one place. When you upload a supplier price list (see suppliers overview), every line the system reads — whether you approved it into your pantry or skipped it — lands here. Add a second supplier’s list, the same. The result is one unified search bar across every product your vendors carry, with their prices, their packaging, and a clear marker for which ones are already part of your pantry versus which are still candidates.

The page is split first by macro — Food, Beverage, Other — because most kitchens think in those buckets and the search is faster when narrowed. Inside a macro, you search by name, brand, or supplier SKU, filter by sub-category (Dry Goods, Dairy, Wine, Cleaning…), filter by supplier, and toggle between approved-only, pending-only, or all. Every row carries a clear ✓ Approved badge if it’s already a pantry item, or a one-click ✅ Approve button if it isn’t. Approving from here is the same flow as approving from the supplier price-list tab — the system asks you to confirm the inventory category and the recipe unit, then creates the pantry row with the supplier wired in as the cost driver.

The rule

Product Hunt is a discovery surface, not the pantry. Browsing here changes nothing; approving a row creates a pantry item with the supplier as its cost driver, and from that point on every recipe and dish that uses it picks up the price. Skipping a row leaves it on the supplier’s sheet but never touches your inventory or your costs.

How to use it

Open Admin → Product Hunt. The landing page shows three big tiles — Food, Beverage, Other — each with the total products in that macro and how many are already approved versus still pending. Tap a tile. The macro workspace opens with the search bar live and a toolbar across the top: a search box (matches name, brand, or supplier SKU as you type), an All / Pending / Approved segmented toggle, a supplier filter, a sub-category filter, and a List / Grid view switch. The far right of the toolbar shows the result count and a scroll for more hint when there’s a next page.

The product list itself is paginated and infinite-scrolls — you keep scrolling, the next thirty rows load. Each row carries the product name, the brand if there is one, the supplier, the sub-category with its icon, the packaging size (“12 × 500ml”, “1kg pack”), the per-unit price, and the approval status. Already-approved rows show the green ✓ Approved badge and a View → link that jumps straight to the matching pantry item; pending rows show three actions — Edit to clean up the product details on the supplier’s record, ✅ Approve to drop it into your pantry, Delete to remove the row from the supplier’s catalogue entirely (the row leaves Product Hunt; existing pantry items stay).

There are two typical motions on this page. The first is the appetite-driven scan: switch to Food, filter by Pending, scroll the list looking for something interesting to put on the next menu. The second is the targeted hunt: switch to Beverage, search “Sangiovese”, look at every Sangiovese any of your wine suppliers carries that you haven’t yet stocked, pick one, approve it, write it onto the wine list this afternoon.

The Edit button is the small detail that matters more than it looks. The AI that read the supplier’s price list usually gets the product name and price right, but sometimes packaging is awkwardly formatted, the brand and product are conflated, or the sub-category is wrong. A 20-second edit before approving makes the pantry row land clean and saves you cleaning it up later.

Worked example

Anna runs a small Italian kitchen. She’s been buying San Marzano tomatoes from Pasta Vera for a year — same 2.5kg can, €4.20, comfortable. The autumn menu refresh is coming up and she wants something new for an antipasto. She opens Admin → Product Hunt, taps the Food tile, types “tomato” in the search box.

Fourteen rows come back. Six are already approved (her San Marzanos, her tinned cherries, her sun-dried, her passata) — she ignores those. The other eight are pending: yellow datterini from Pasta Vera (a smaller, sweeter tomato she’s never bought), bottled tomato water from Hortus, an organic Pachino DOP from Mauro Foods, a green tomato preserve from a small Sicilian supplier, three different sizes of plum tomato she doesn’t need, and a tomato powder for seasoning.

The datterini catches her eye — €6.80 per 2.5kg jar, a 35% premium over the San Marzano but with a flavour she wants to taste. She clicks Edit first because the row’s sub-category reads as “Vegetables” and she’d rather it sit under “Dry Goods → Tinned Tomato” alongside her existing tomato rows. Fixed in 10 seconds. Then she clicks ✅ Approve. A dialog opens: “Create new inventory item: Datterini gialli, 2.5kg jar, recipe unit: kg, cost €2.72/kg. Supplier: Pasta Vera. Category: Dry Goods → Tinned Tomato.” She confirms.

A new pantry row appears in inventory the next time she opens it, linked to Pasta Vera, with €2.72/kg as the last purchase price. She writes it into a new antipasto recipe — burrata with yellow datterini and basil. The recipe’s cost rolls up, the menu item inherits, the till button is ready by the time she opens for service Friday. From “what else does this supplier carry?” to a new dish on the menu: about eight minutes.

The other tomato she liked — the Pachino DOP — she leaves pending for now. The next time she opens Product Hunt and the appetite for a tasting menu lands, it’ll still be there.

  • Suppliers — overview — where supplier price-list uploads happen. Every line the system extracts from a price list lands in Product Hunt so it can be found later without scrolling the original PDF.
  • Inventory — overview — where an approved Product Hunt row lands as a real pantry item, ready to be used in a recipe.
  • Purchase orders — once a product is approved into the pantry, it’s available to order against on the next request.
  • From idea to till — the five rooms a dish moves through. Product Hunt is upstream of room one (the pantry).