23,000 product pages. One person. A completely different experience.
Cresco-Resco has sold restaurant equipment since 1977 and owned RestaurantEquipment.com since the mid-90s. What it never had was the army of content people its digital-first competitors hired. Here’s how a three-generation family business rebuilt its online catalog with one person and Anglera.
A family business that was early to everything — except content
In 1977, Paul Oelsner — a retired pharmacist — bought a small restaurant supply store on South Virginia Street in Reno. His bet was simple and, at the time, unusual: keep real inventory on hand and let customers walk a showroom. The slogan said the rest: “We have everything, including the kitchen sink.”
Nearly fifty years later, Cresco-Resco runs five showrooms across the western US — Fresno, Sacramento, Reno, Las Vegas, and Denver — and is operated by the family’s third generation. They were early to the web, too: the company registered RestaurantEquipment.com in December 1995, arguably the best domain in the category, and has been online since 1996.
But owning the perfect domain and filling it are different problems. The e-commerce site listed more than 23,000 products — a page for every one — but the pages themselves were thin: a title, a price, a photo. Not the depth a buyer wants before committing to a four-figure piece of equipment.
A problem everyone could see, and no one could staff
Restaurant equipment is a brutal category for product content: tens of thousands of SKUs across vastly different classes — slicers, fryers, walk-in refrigeration, smallwares — each with its own spec sheet, certifications, and buying logic. Cresco-Resco had solved the plumbing (a page for every product), but the pages themselves stayed thin.
Meanwhile the category’s digital-first giants — WebstaurantStore, KaTom — had spent two decades and enormous sums building exactly that richness. Put one of the old Cresco-Resco pages next to theirs and the gap was undeniable. “We weren’t going to win that battle,” Michael says.
It was a problem that was easily recognized, but we didn’t have a solution for it. There was never going to be a budget for however many people it was going to take. We were swallowing that pill continuously — this is just what our website looks like.
One cold email, one slicer
It started with a cold email from Anglera’s founder. “I get a lot of cold emails,” Michael says. “Generally they don’t hit it on the nose. What he was describing was my problem.”
The demo was a single product — a Globe G12 12″ manual meat and cheese slicer, taken from bare data to a complete, spec-rich page. That one before-and-after was the entire pitch. Michael escalated it internally, brought his sister into a second meeting, and the decision was, in his words, “a pretty easy argument.”
It’s a pattern we now use everywhere: prove the whole pipeline on one product a customer knows cold, then scale the exact same process to the catalog.
The G12 today
The same Globe G12 that sold the demo, as it appears on RestaurantEquipment.com now. A page that used to be nearly bare is a full buying experience — and the rest of the catalog got the same treatment.
Home / Restaurant Equipment & Supplies / Commercial Cooking Equipment / Meat Slicers
Globe
Globe G12 12 Inch Medium-Duty Manual Meat and Cheese Slicer
$1,852.00
Key Features:
- Medium-duty manual meat and cheese slicer with 12 inch special alloy, hollow-ground knife with hard-chromed coating; slices 0 to 9/16 inch thick.
- 1/2 HP knife motor designed for up to 4 hours per day of slicing performance.
- One-piece carriage with extended slide rod plus extended chute and end weight to accommodate product up to 10.5 inches long.
- Pyramid-shaped end weight teeth and gripping teeth improve product hold for higher yield and less waste.
- Stainless steel ball bearing chute slide system for smooth carriage travel.
- Operator safety features include knife cover interlock and permanently attached knife ring guard to limit blade edge exposure during cleaning.
Detailed Description
The Globe G12 is a medium-duty manual slicer built for consistent, high-quality slicing of meats and cheeses in mid-volume operations. A 1/2 HP knife motor and 12 inch hollow-ground blade deliver smooth performance for up to 4 hours per day. Its extended chute and end weight help accommodate larger product, while the knife cover interlock and permanently attached knife ring guard enhance operator safety during cleaning.
Built for Smooth, Consistent Slicing
12 inch hollow-ground knife, ball-bearing chute slide, anodized aluminum construction.
Handles Larger Product with Better Hold
Extended slide rod, chute, and end weight accommodate product up to 10.5 inches long.
Easy Maintenance, Everyday Reliability
Top-mounted all-metal sharpener, knife cover interlock, motor overload protection.
Specifications
| Brand | Globe |
| Model | G12 |
| Knife diameter | 12 in |
| Slice thickness range | 0 to 9/16 in |
| Motor | 1/2 HP knife motor |
| Electrical | 115V, 60 Hz, 1 phase, 3.0 A |
| Plug type | NEMA 5-15P |
| Construction | Heavy-gauge anodized aluminum |
| Overall dimensions | 25 × 25.25 × 17.25 in |
| Weight | 68 lb |
| Certifications | cETLus; ETL-Sanitation |
| Warranty | 2 years parts and labor |
Recreated in HTML from the live page — descriptions, feature stories, specs, and document classification all Anglera-generated. See it live on RestaurantEquipment.com ↗
I myself did this, for the entirety of the project, over the course of two or three months — and it’s not my only job. [The result is] what amounts to a completely different experience from a customer perspective.
One marketer, part-time, no engineering team
Michael’s job is marketing, not engineering — and the rollout never required it to be. Once the connection between Cresco-Resco’s product database and the storefront was in place, he ran the entire enrichment of the catalog himself, while doing the rest of his job.
There were blocks — a rollout this size always has them. “I was never down for significant periods of time. We never encountered a problem that we weren’t able to solve.” Some fixes were his; some were changes Anglera shipped.
By the end, he needed less of it: “I appreciated the patient teaching I got from this process. As it went along, you heard from me less and less. I felt a lot more confident changing things and solving problems myself.”
Presenting as an equivalent — without spending like one
Since completing the product-page rebuild in April, Cresco-Resco has seen very significant growth in online revenue over the following three months. Michael is careful about attribution — the pages landed alongside SEO and digital-marketing work — but the customer-facing difference isn’t subtle.
In a category where a purchase is often a capital investment — a range, a fryer, a walk-in — product pages this thorough do more than inform. They signal that the seller is professional, that every spec is accounted for, that the equipment will fit the space it’s being designed into.
The way it is now instills a sense of confidence. Lots of times we’re talking about capital investments people are making — and it makes a difference how we present this. It’s a huge difference from where it was before.
We’re able to present as an equivalent to those larger companies — and I’m sure we did not spend what they spent to build out what they’ve built out.
From product pages to the whole catalog experience
With the pages rebuilt, Michael has moved on to the site’s bones: navigation logic, breadcrumb relationships, category pages. Faceted filtering is the next project — taking the structured attributes now living on every product page and organizing them into backend metafields, so collection pages can filter on what actually matters to a buyer instead of just the brand name.
It’s only possible because the attributes now exist in structured form. That’s the compounding part of enrichment: filters, navigation, and search all draw on the same data.
As we talk about the things we want to add to the site, Anglera comes as a tool in the forefront of my mind. I find myself thinking: I feel like I can probably solve that with the Anglera platform.
Have a catalog that deserves better pages?
We’ll do what we did for Cresco-Resco: take one product you know cold, show you the before and after, and let the page make the argument.
Book a Demo