I tried Tovala’s smart oven for two weeks — here’s whether it beats takeout

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. 

“The idea originated from my own struggles in business school. 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.

“One afternoon, I was making a meal using several different appliances and realized that I was mostly just pressing buttons,” he said. “That’s what led to the idea for an end-to-end system: fresh, mostly prepped meals paired with a connected oven that could cook them automatically. 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. 

Taste and quality were the parts I was most skeptical about going in. I’m not a professional chef by any means, but I’ve recently gotten much more interested in cooking. Once you start learning how to properly sear meat, roast vegetables, and build flavor yourself, it’s hard not to be suspicious of a machine that promises to do all of that for you.

The biggest downside for me was the texture of the meats and how they cooked in the oven. I like a steak with a nice crust, so I finished mine in a steel pan for some extra browning. The steak was much better afterward, but that obviously defeats the point of a process that’s supposed to be mostly hands-off.

Not every dish had that problem, though. One of my favorites was the pineapple shrimp stir-fry. The rice was well cooked, and the sauce had plenty of flavor. It wasn’t necessarily something I’d rave about compared with a great restaurant meal, but it was easy, satisfying, and required very little effort.

What I appreciated most, however, was the grocery-food feature that gives the oven some use beyond cooking Tovala-branded meals. The oven can recognize certain grocery-store products, so instead of guessing how long your frozen waffles need to toast, you can scan the barcode and let the oven automatically select the appropriate settings.

That’s what makes Tovala feel more like a genuinely smart oven, not just a machine built to cook its own meal kits. Even if you stop ordering Tovala meals, you can still use the oven with compatible grocery products.

Overall, if your alternative to cooking is ordering takeout because you’re too tired to cook, Tovala makes a pretty compelling case for itself.

Tovala is available on the company’s website and Amazon. It ships to most U.S. states, but it doesn’t currently ship to Alaska or Hawaii.