Tovala Family Meals Review: Good Food, Lots of Salt

Tovala is a meal-delivery service. It is also an oven. And in some ways, it also feels like a very specific vision of the future. Tovala is not quite a robot chef, exactly. But it's not not a robot chef, either. It's a robot chef as imagined in old science fiction, or an episode of Wallace and Gromit.

The idea behind Tovala is simple. You get a box in the mail with a full complement of ingredients, boxed up individually alongside vacuum-packed proteins. Here is your Parmesan-Crusted Chicken Breast with Cheesy Stuffed Shells and Garlic Bread. Or here is your Togarashi Chicken Breast and Sweet Soy Noodles.

The only cooking implement you will need to prep your food is a pair of scissors to open the little bags. Then, deposit each ingredient in the proper place into a series of aluminum trays, and pop them in the Tovala oven. Hold up a little QR code to a laser on the oven, and the little combi-smart oven will do the rest—moving itself through a series of preprogrammed steps. The oven steams, it convects, it broils, it bakes, all of its own accord.

It's ingenious in its way, one of very few meal kits to offer such simple preparation while still offering a genuine fresh-cooked meal. (And I should know. I've tested 20 meal-delivery services in the past year.) But when I first tested the Tovala meal kit and oven last year, I noted that the little oven had one very serious limitation: It only made one meal at a time. This capped its potential audience to solo diners or couples who don't mind eating consecutively.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage