Steam Oven + Meal Subscriptions = Tovala

Excerpts from an article by Maura Judkis in The Washington Post

This is what we want in 2017: We want our food to be delivered to us. We want it to be gourmet. We want to know all the ingredients and where they come from, so we can be sure they are healthful. We want to be able to order it with our phones and use them to cook it, too. We want to make restaurant-quality meals without needing restaurant-quality skills. We want dinner to take less than 15 minutes to make, and we want it to be easy, almost brainless. But not too easy — we still want to put the final touches on it, so it feels homemade.

One start-up thinks it has cracked the code on all our conflicting culinary desires. Tovala — the name is a mash-up of the Italian word for table, “tavola,” and the Hebrew word for good, “tov” — is a smart steam oven and meal subscription service that launched Tuesday; thanks to a Kickstarter and other pre-release efforts, it already has 700 of its $399 ovens in homes and connected to the Internet. And by mid-July, chief executive David Rabie estimates they will have shipped more than 10,000 meals.

You can use the Tovala, which is controlled through an app, for your own recipes, but Rabie says it’s best when paired with the meal delivery service. It costs $36 for three meals a week for one person, or $72 for three meals a week for two, including shipping. That’s a few dollars more than Blue Apron, which charges $59.94 for two — but the difference is that with Tovala, there’s no cooking required. The meals are delivered to customers pre-assembled in small trays, just like a dreaded airplane meal. But they’re a practical necessity, because all you have to do is pop them directly in the oven, and scan a bar code that communicates the cook time and temperature to the device (for some dishes, you might also be instructed to add a sauce, first). It’s Blue Apron for people who find Blue Apron to be too cumbersome.

Read the full article in The Washington Post

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