Tovala's smart oven trades restaurant quality for convenience

A two-week test of Tovala’s smart oven and meal-delivery system set out to answer whether it can 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 the convenience is hard to beat on days when cooking is the last thing anyone wants to do.

The system pairs a countertop smart oven — which bakes, broils, air fries, toasts, and reheats, automatically switching temperatures and modes as it follows a recipe — with meals shipped with ingredients already portioned out. Instead of chopping, measuring, and watching a stove, users mostly unwrap the ingredients, add any seasoning packets, place everything in the provided trays, scan a QR code in the companion app, and let the oven do the rest. Tovala co-founder and CEO David Rabie said the idea grew out of his own time in business school, when he wanted something as convenient as takeout that still delivered a genuine home-cooked dish; the idea crystallized, he said, while cooking a meal with several separate appliances and realizing he was “mostly just pressing buttons.”

The regular oven costs $299, and the Smart Oven Pro, which adds a steam function, costs $349. Tovala offers more than 45 meals to choose from each week — among them steak and garlic mashed potatoes, salmon with vegetables, and butternut squash soup — with plans covering 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, or 16 meals a week that can be skipped, paused, or canceled. The meals aren’t cheap: single-serving options start at $13.99, two-serving meals start at around $8.99 per serving ($17.98 total) plus a $10.99 shipping fee, and newly launched family-sized meals start at $35.96 — a bet, unlike rivals such as HelloFresh, that customers will pay extra to have most of the cooking handled for them.

Results on taste were mixed. The biggest shortfall was meat texture: a steak lacked the desired crust and had to be finished in a steel pan for extra browning, undercutting the system’s hands-off promise. Other dishes fared better — a pineapple shrimp stir-fry, with well-cooked rice and a flavorful sauce, wasn’t restaurant-caliber but was easy and satisfying for little effort. One feature extends the oven’s use beyond Tovala’s own meal kits: it can recognize certain grocery-store products by barcode and automatically select the right settings, so it stays useful even for someone who stops ordering Tovala meals. The oven is sold on Tovala’s website and Amazon and ships to most US states, though not Alaska or Hawaii.

Why it matters

As connected kitchen devices compete less on novelty and more on whether they save real time, Tovala’s bet is that shoppers will pay a premium for an appliance that removes decision-making from dinner — even if it can’t yet replicate a properly seared steak.