I tried Tovala’s smart oven for two weeks to see if it could make dinner as easy as the company promises.
The idea is 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 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. 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.
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.
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 betting that you’re willing to pay for the added convenience of having most of the cooking handled for you.
Even if you stop ordering Tovala meals, you can still use the oven with compatible grocery products.