Guide · Updated August 2026
Tovala: the steam oven with a meal plan
Every other oven in our database is sold as an oven. Tovala is sold as a dinner service that happens to come with one. The hardware — a Wi-Fi countertop oven that steams, bakes and broils — is almost the giveaway; the business is the meals you scan and cook in it. Here's how that actually works, what owners think, and what to buy instead if you want the cooking without the subscription.
It's an appliance wrapped around a subscription
Tovala launched out of Chicago in 2017 with a simple pitch: order chef-made meals, scan the barcode on the package, and the oven runs the exact cook program for you — no settings, no watching. The Tovala Smart Oven Pro itself is a competent little combi — steam, convection and broil in a toaster-oven footprint that plugs into a standard outlet — and reviewers genuinely like it as a toaster oven. But the reason it's priced the way it is becomes obvious once you see the deal structure: the oven is the on-ramp to the meals.
How the meal plan works
The service and the appliance are two purchases that lean on each other:
- The oven
- Around $299 on its own, but frequently discounted to roughly $199 or less if you commit to ordering meals six times in your first six months.
- The meals
- Single-serving, chef-prepared, delivered weekly. Most run about $12–$14 per serving (some as low as ~$10, premium options higher). Prices change — check Tovala for today's.
- The minimum
- 4 meals per week to keep an active plan (roughly $52–$56), plus about $10.99 shipping. You can order up to 16 a week; there's no bulk discount.
- The cooking
- Scan the meal's code and press start; the oven pulls the right steam/convection program and it's ready in under 25 minutes. You can also cook your own food manually from the app.
- Flexibility
- Skip a week, resize an order, or cancel — all in the app. The oven keeps working as a normal oven if you pause the meals.
The honest math: the sticker price of the oven is not the cost of Tovala. If you run the minimum plan, the meals are on the order of $200+ a month — that's the real subscription, and it's the number to judge Tovala on.
So is it a good steam oven?
As a countertop oven, it's fine-to-good: it steams, it browns, and the scan-to-cook trick is genuinely effortless. What it is not is a precision tool — you don't get the fine humidity control or sous-vide range of an Anova Precision Oven, and its whole design assumes you're mostly cooking Tovala's meals. Buy it if the meal service is the point. If you want a steam oven to cook your food, you're paying for an ecosystem you won't use.
What owners actually say
The threads below come from a Reddit search for whether Tovala is worth it, spanning r/Tovala, r/ReadyMeals and more. Owner sentiment across them is consistent enough to sum up in one line: people love the oven and argue about the meals.
The hardware wins people over. "Tovala is the best toaster oven I have ever had," one owner writes in "Is the Tovala oven a good addition to a kitchen?" (r/Tovala) — cooking frozen foods better than a normal toaster oven with no long preheat. In a recent "Favorites" thread, another calls it "the most used appliance I own."
The meals are where it splits — and "price" is the recurring word. Cancellations almost always cite value: "protein + spices/sauce + cheap sides isn't worth anywhere close to $15" ("Recent reviews, should we rejoin?", r/Tovala), and "the portion size wasn't worth the price" over in r/ReadyMeals. Nutrition comes up too — owners flag high sodium and an "extreme lack of vegetables."
The balanced verdict is in the longer threads. "After two years…" (r/Tovala) lands on "some winners, some not so much, but overall an easy way to eat well." And the most-upvoted critical review — "Honest review after a full year with Tovala (I just cancelled)" (r/Tovala, ~195 upvotes) — surfaces a real gap: no way to log allergies, which led to an auto-order that shipped shrimp. Customer service, notably, gets consistent praise even from critics.
Read it yourself: the r/tovala community, a "Tovala worth it" search, and — since it's our closest listed alternative — the "Suvie vs Tovala" discussion. For longer write-ups, NBC Select's Smart Oven review and The Kitchn's meal-service review; for current meal pricing, Tovala's own how-it-works page.
Buy the hardware outright — no meal commitment — and decide on the subscription separately.
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Ovens like Tovala — and what makes them similar
Whether you want the same scan-and-cook ecosystem or the opposite (the cooking without the subscription), these are the closest options in our database.
The closest concept to Tovala: Suvie also pairs its countertop appliance with its own scan-and-cook meal-delivery service — but with multi-zone cooking that can prepare fresh proteins, starches and vegetables at once, not just reheat.
The other Wi-Fi, app-controlled steam oven — but open. You bring your own food and get full manual control of temperature, steam percentage and sous vide, with no meal subscription attached.
A similar-size countertop steam-and-convection oven at a lower price, for people who want Tovala's cooking modes without the app or the meal plan.
The same $299 countertop-combi footprint, but fully manual — steam, air fry and real sous vide you program yourself, with no ecosystem to buy into.
Some links on this page are affiliate links; we may earn a commission at no cost to you, and it never affects what we recommend. Meal pricing and oven deals are Tovala's and change frequently — confirm current numbers on Tovala's site before subscribing.