KaTom Restaurant Supply Scraper

Scrape KaTom Restaurant Supply — a national wholesale retailer of commercial kitchen equipment and foodservice supplies serving over 1.5 million operators since 1987. Search by keyword, browse a top-level category, or pull specific products by URL. Get price, brand, SKU, stock status, technical specs, images, and rating/review counts. No login, no cookies, no paid proxy required.

What this actor does

• Three modes: search (keyword), byCategory (browse a top-level category, optionally narrowed by sub-category), byUrl (fetch specific product pages)
• Filters: brand, price range, in-stock only, free-shipping only, quick-ship only, sort order (relevance / price ascending / price descending)
• Optional deep enrichment: turn on fetchFullDetails to also pull each product's full description, all product images, and rating/review count from its detail page
• Empty fields are omitted — every record only contains fields KaTom actually returned

Output per product

• sku — KaTom item number (e.g. 491-36019)
• title, fullTitle — product name (fullTitle includes brand + model)
• brand, modelNumber
• price, currency, originalPrice (list/retail price when discounted)
• unitOfMeasure (e.g. Each, Set, Case)
• category, categoryPath, topCategory
• inStock, availability (e.g. "IN STOCK: Ships in 1 Business Day"), qtyOnHand
• freeShipping, quickShip
• weightLbs
• imageUrl, imageUrls[] (multiple, when fetchFullDetails is on)
• specs — structured technical attributes when present (capacity, horsepower, voltage, phase, hertz, color, controls, certifications, special features, dimensions, etc.)
• description (when fetchFullDetails is on, or always for byUrl mode)
• rating, reviewCount (when fetchFullDetails is on, or always for byUrl mode)
• productUrl, sourceUrl
• recordType: "product", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	search	search / byCategory / byUrl
searchQuery	string	blender	Free-text query (mode=search)
topCategory	string	–	One of KaTom's 10 top-level categories (mode=byCategory)
subCategory	string	–	Optional exact leaf category name to narrow topCategory, e.g. Commercial Blenders
productUrls	array	–	KaTom product URLs or bare item numbers (mode=byUrl)
brand	string	–	Only include products whose brand contains this text
priceMin / priceMax	int	–	Price range (USD)
inStockOnly	bool	false	Only in-stock products
freeShippingOnly	bool	false	Only products tagged free shipping
quickShipOnly	bool	false	Only products tagged Quick Ship
sortBy	string	relevance	relevance / priceAsc / priceDesc
fetchFullDetails	bool	false	Fetch each product's detail page for a full description, all images, and rating
maxItems	int	20	Hard cap on emitted records (1–1000)

Example: search with a price cap

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQuery": "ice machine",
  "priceMax": 5000,
  "inStockOnly": true,
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example: browse a category with full details

{
  "mode": "byCategory",
  "topCategory": "Restaurant Equipment",
  "subCategory": "Commercial Blenders",
  "sortBy": "priceAsc",
  "fetchFullDetails": true,
  "maxItems": 30
}

Example: fetch specific products

{
  "mode": "byUrl",
  "productUrls": ["https://www.katom.com/491-36019.html", "141-BB145"]
}

Use cases

• Price monitoring — track commercial kitchen equipment pricing across brands and categories
• Competitive intelligence — compare foodservice equipment assortment and stock levels
• Procurement research — pull specs (capacity, voltage, dimensions) for equipment sourcing
• Catalog enrichment — feed structured product data into internal PIM/ERP systems
• Market research — analyze commercial kitchen equipment brand distribution and pricing tiers

Data source

KaTom Restaurant Supply's product catalog. This actor was originally scoped against WebstaurantStore.com, but that site enforces a Cloudflare Turnstile interactive JS challenge on every request (confirmed via both curl_cffi browser impersonation and a real Playwright browser — both consistently received HTTP 403 challenge pages), which makes it inaccessible without a paid CAPTCHA-solving or residential-proxy service — a violation of this project's zero-cost policy. KaTom Restaurant Supply was selected as a directly comparable, freely accessible alternative: a large, well-established US commercial kitchen and restaurant-supply wholesaler with the same target audience (foodservice operators) and a comparably broad product catalog, but with no bot-blocking on its public catalog data.

Limitations

• Individual product-detail-page fetches (mode=byUrl, or fetchFullDetails=true) can occasionally miss a small fraction of products. Unlike KaTom's search/category API (which the actor calls directly and has been 100% reliable across every verification run), KaTom's individual product pages sit behind Cloudflare bot protection that intermittently blocks even legitimate cloud-datacenter traffic — including after this actor's built-in direct-connection + proxy-rotation retry sequence (8 attempts per page). When this happens the actor logs a clear status message with how many products it could and couldn't resolve, rather than failing the whole run; simply re-run with the same URLs to pick up the rest. This does not affect search or byCategory mode listings, which never need to load an individual product page.

• inStockOnly only excludes items explicitly marked out-of-stock. KaTom's own search index does not always populate a stock flag for backorder/vendor-fulfilled/dropship items (it's simply absent, not false) — those items pass through the inStockOnly filter since there is no data to positively exclude them on. Items with a confirmed inStock: false are always excluded.

• Brand is free-text, not a dropdown. KaTom carries 500+ distinct brands — too many for a fixed enum. The filter does a case-insensitive substring match; common brands (Vitamix, Cambro, Vollrath, Hatco, Winco, Carlisle, True Refrigeration, Turbo Air, etc.) are listed in the field description as examples.

• subCategory requires an exact (case-insensitive) match to one of KaTom's ~1,000 leaf category names (e.g. Commercial Blenders, Reach-in Refrigerators). There are too many leaf categories to expose as a dropdown; an incorrect value returns 0 results rather than a fuzzy match.

• Reviews are not paginated separately. reviewCount reflects the total on the product page; only a handful of the most relevant review snippets are exposed by KaTom's own product page, so full historical review text is not extracted.

• Pricing reflects standard web pricing. Some commercial/wholesale accounts see negotiated or volume pricing after login; this actor scrapes the publicly visible price shown to anonymous visitors, which is what KaTom itself displays without requiring sign-in.

• Non-US/international storefronts are not applicable — KaTom Restaurant Supply ships within the United States only, so no multi-market/locale variant exists to expose.

FAQ

Do I need a KaTom account? No. All data (including pricing) is scraped from KaTom's publicly visible catalog pages, which require no login.

Does this use a paid proxy? No. The actor calls KaTom's own public product-search API directly over plain HTTPS; no residential proxy or CAPTCHA-solving service is used or required.

Why is fetchFullDetails off by default? It adds one extra HTTP request per product (to fetch the full description, image gallery, and rating). For fast bulk price/stock checks, leave it off; turn it on when you need product descriptions or ratings.

What's the difference between category, categoryPath, and topCategory? category is the specific leaf category (e.g. Commercial Blenders); categoryPath is the full breadcrumb (e.g. Restaurant Equipment > Food Prep Equipment > Commercial Blenders); topCategory is just the top-level department (e.g. Restaurant Equipment).

What does specs contain? A dynamic set of technical attributes KaTom publishes for that specific product type — e.g. blenders expose horsepower/capacityOz/voltage, refrigerators expose capacityLbs/temperatureRange, etc. Only attributes KaTom actually lists for that product appear; nothing is fabricated.

How current is the data? Pricing, stock status, and lead times are read live from KaTom's own search index at run time — the same data KaTom's own website displays to shoppers.