Tovala Smart Oven Review: Can It Really Beat Takeout?

Cooking dinner after a long day can feel like a chore. That’s the problem Tovala is trying to solve with a connected countertop oven and a meal-delivery service designed to handle most of the cooking for you.

I spent two weeks using Tovala to find out whether the system actually delivers on its promise of making dinner nearly effortless. The short answer is that it doesn’t completely replace a good home-cooked meal, and some dishes worked better than others. But when the alternative is ordering takeout because you simply don’t have the energy to cook, the convenience is difficult to ignore.

The concept came from Tovala co-founder and CEO David Rabie, who said the idea developed during business school. He was frequently busy and wanted something that could offer the convenience of takeout or frozen food without giving up the experience of eating a freshly prepared meal.

Rabie said the idea became clearer while he was preparing food using several different kitchen appliances. He realized that much of the process involved little more than pressing buttons. That eventually led to Tovala’s approach: combine mostly prepared fresh meals with a connected oven capable of automatically handling the cooking.

How Tovala Works

The process is designed to remove as many steps as possible.

Tovala delivers meals with ingredients already portioned. Instead of chopping vegetables, measuring ingredients or constantly checking cooking temperatures, users generally unwrap the ingredients, add things such as seasoning packets when instructed, place everything in the supplied trays and scan a QR code through the companion app.

From there, the oven takes over.

The countertop appliance automatically follows the meal’s cooking instructions, adjusting temperatures and switching between cooking modes during the process. It can bake, broil, air fry, toast and reheat.

The standard Tovala oven costs $299, while the Smart Oven Pro costs $349 and adds a steam function.

Plenty of Meals, But Convenience Comes at a Price

Tovala offers more than 45 meals each week, with choices ranging from steak and garlic mashed potatoes to salmon with vegetables, butternut squash soup and various pasta dishes.

Customers can also select different delivery sizes, with plans offering 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 or 16 meals per week. Deliveries can be skipped or paused, and customers can cancel when they don’t need meals.

The pricing, however, is higher than simply buying groceries.

Single-serving meals start at $13.99, while two-serving meals start at approximately $8.99 per serving, or $17.98 total, before the $10.99 shipping fee. Tovala has also introduced family-sized meals starting at $35.96.

That pricing reflects the company’s main selling point. While services such as HelloFresh focus more heavily on meal kits that require cooking, Tovala is charging for the extra convenience of letting the oven handle much of the work.

The Food Isn’t Perfect

Taste and texture were the biggest questions going into the test.

I’m not a professional chef, but I’ve recently become more interested in cooking. Once you get used to searing meat properly, roasting vegetables and developing flavors yourself, it’s easy to wonder whether an automated oven can deliver the same results.

For me, meat texture was one of Tovala’s biggest weaknesses.

I prefer steak with a well-browned crust, and the oven didn’t quite deliver the result I wanted. I ended up finishing the steak in a steel pan to add more browning. That improved the steak considerably, but it also meant taking an extra cooking step — something that works against Tovala’s promise of a mostly hands-off dinner.

Other meals performed much better.

The pineapple shrimp stir-fry was one of the highlights. The rice was cooked well, while the sauce provided plenty of flavor. It wasn’t comparable to an exceptional restaurant meal, but it was satisfying, convenient and required very little effort.

The Smartest Feature May Not Be the Meal Kits

One feature that stood out was Tovala’s ability to work with certain grocery-store products.

The oven can recognize compatible products, allowing users to scan a barcode instead of guessing how long something needs to cook. For example, if you’re making frozen waffles, the oven can automatically select the appropriate settings after scanning the product.

This makes the appliance more useful beyond Tovala’s own meal-delivery service.

That’s an important distinction because it means the oven doesn’t become useless if you eventually stop ordering Tovala meals. Compatible grocery products can still give the connected oven a practical role in the kitchen.

Is Tovala Worth It?

Tovala isn’t necessarily a replacement for cooking from scratch, especially for people who enjoy preparing food and want complete control over how their meals turn out.

But that’s not really where the product makes its strongest argument.

If you’re regularly choosing takeout simply because you’re too tired to cook, Tovala offers a compelling alternative. The meals still require some preparation, but the amount of work is significantly reduced, while the oven handles much of the cooking process automatically.

Tovala is available through the company’s website and Amazon. It currently ships to most U.S. states, although Alaska and Hawaii are not included.

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