I tried Tovala’s smart oven for two weeks to see if it could actually make dinner as easy as the company promises. It won’t replace the quality of a good home-cooked meal, and some dishes turned out better than others, but it’s hard to beat the convenience on days when you absolutely don’t want to cook. This was exactly the challenge that Tovala co-founder and CEO David Rabie aimed to address.
I was often busy and sought a solution as convenient as takeout or frozen meals, yet still wanted the experience of a genuine home-cooked dish,” Rabie told TechCrunch via email. The challenge became figuring out how to remove all that friction without sacrificing the experience of eating food that was actually cooked fresh at home.” The idea is pretty simple: Tovala sends you meals with the ingredients already portioned out, and its smart oven handles the cooking. Instead of chopping vegetables, measuring ingredients, figuring out cooking temperatures, and standing over a stove, you mostly just unwrap everything, follow simple instructions like adding packets of seasoning, put everything in the provided trays, scan a QR code using the companion app, and let the oven do the rest.
The countertop-sized oven follows the cooking instructions automatically, switching temperatures and cooking modes throughout the process. It can bake, broil, air fry, toast, and reheat. The regular oven costs $299, while the Smart Oven Pro costs $349 and adds a steam function.
As for the meal-delivery side, there are more than 45 meals to choose from each week. For instance, steak and garlic mashed potatoes, salmon with vegetables, butternut squash soup, pasta dishes, and more. There are also plenty of options when it comes to how much food you want delivered.
Meal plans include 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, or 16 meals per week. You can skip deliveries, pause your plan, or cancel if you don’t need meals that week. The meals aren’t exactly cheap, though.
Single-serving meals start at $13.99, and two-serving meals start at around $8.99 per serving — $17.98 total — plus a $10.99 shipping fee. The company also recently launched family-sized meals, starting at $35.96. Unlike meal-delivery rivals like HelloFresh, Tovala is essentially betting that you’re willing to pay for the added convenience of having most of the cooking handled for you.
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