TovalaReviews of tovala.com

I have had my Tovala oven for almost a year now and would give it 5 stars. As for the quality of the food and the packaging, boo hiss! Sadly in the time I've been ordering, this part has been going steadily downhill and seriously I am so tired of being asked to provide pictures of the problem every time I provide an honest not-so-great review or report a problem. I mean REALLY? You need a picture of a package that has opened during transit in order to know you have to do a better job?? And btw mostly the problems being reported are repeats. How many times do I have to deal with a mess if I dare order anything with shrimp after the package opens inside the box of food? How many times, after the meal supposedly scans correctly do I end up with blackened, burnt green beans or rice floating in water?? Ugh. Looking for a better alternative, for sure.

Tovala not so smart. Tovala oven uses twice as much electricity as my old toaster convection oven, oven will continue to run for 5 or more minutes after you turn it off, I unplug it after using to save electricity the reasoning Tovala says the oven stays on is ridiculous. Other oven do not do this regardless of the technology. If you use low quality parts you have to compromise somewhere in this case the consumers pocket. Tovala food is over priced for what you get. Overall a bad value for any consumer. Most consumers who buy this have more money than sense. If you value your money buy something else and make your own meals. It's 450% cheaper.

Hideous nightmarish amounts of packaging. Who cares if it's recyclable or compostable?? The difference between buying a bunch of broccoli a pound of ground beef a few sweet potatoes a package of hamburger buns and so on and then putting that in a reusable fabric grocery bag and then unloading it into your refrigerator, the difference between that and receiving a single scallion in a plastic bag? Tiny plastic boxes that by the way are not recyclable and have to go into landfill don't delude yourself- tiny plastic boxes with a single spoonful of an ingredient in it? And then we're going to if there's multiple people in your household so you are cooking for two people let's say you're cooking for four even worse, you're going to throw away that much packaging for each and every meal for each and every person? Are you out of your mind? It's not only the discarding of the packaging it's the production of it to begin with. Have these people not ever considered the the production of a product creates a carbon footprint? So the creation for a need for a whole bunch of plastic boxes and bags and aluminum trays and on and on and on.... What are you seriously doing???? It's easier on the environment to hire a personal chef, it's easier on the environment to buy all of your food at restaurants. Considering all options for food procurement, this is literally the biggest eff you to the environment of any process by which you could obtain food. And then on top of it they add the fact that you have to create the need to manufacture an entire oven and a computer combined!! Your house already has an oven and a computer!!! We already dug resources out of the Earth plus created a carbon footprint turning them into a computer & oven ... You also have a cooktop and most likely a microwave as well!!! Why the ____ you need an additional oven with a computer in it for?? Even if every single one who decides to do this also decided that they would not reproduce, thus massively lowering their huge carbon footprint that they exponentially increased by using this type of food procurement system..... I don't think it would really matter unless we hit a critical point in childlessness where the population of the Earth was actually shrinking for once. I mean as long as the vast vast majority of people don't go childless & meal kit service users are the only ones to go childless the amount of carbon footprint it creates- I don't think that would even offset it. I mean if the only people on Earth were the tavala users and they were all childless then yes of course because the human race would then die out in one generation we wouldn't have to worry about all this the fact that we have on the planet and whether we can sustain it. But if massive amounts of people just continue to reproduce and only a handful of meal kit users are the ones that go childless out of guilt for producing such a Titanic carbon footprint, it's not enough people that are going to go childless the carbon footprint and waste that's produced by this type of thing is going to affect the next generation even if it's not from the bloodline of a meal kit user. There's too many people on the planet for this: the amount of carbon emissions not to mention the amount of packaging that meal kit services create is not sustainable. I just don't get it....

With the planet overrun with waste, the last thing we needed was a meal plan that requires carbon producing shipping, unacceptable amount of packaging - all at a cost multiple times that of meals prepared by the consumer - here comes Tovala. Not what the doctor ordered !

While the food was fine but carb heavy, the orders were routinely delayed multiple days. Considering it was raw meat, this is unacceptable. The convenience factor gets loss when you have to last minute meal plan to account for delays or get fast food anyways. Two of the last four weeks the orders were delivered at 10 pm and 12:30am with no heads up. During the summer's heat wave food would be delayed days and arrive with melted ice packs and I'd have to toss it. The boxes would arrived like they were slammed (I sent them photos) and the newspaper packaging gets everywhere. While the customer service is quick to issue credits, I just don't trust them to consistently deliver. Very disappointed. I understand supply chain issue, I understand world events, I understand holidays, I understand staffing issues, but again with raw food the delays are unacceptable. I read several reviews and it sounds like they have a habit of trying to remove the negative ones as well, but it looks like my experience is not uncommon either and my friends who use other meals plans never have these delays.

I’ve been enjoying Tovala meals for several years…until today. I upgraded my internet service to 5G and found out the oven won’t connect on 5G!!! For a company who makes a very smart oven not to keep up with changes in internet service is absolutely ridiculous. I’m mad and beyond disappointed.

The oven is decent but the meal delivery service is a joke! The food is actually pretty good, somewhat smaller portions, but enough to fill you up. But the packaging insulation they use is ridiculous. It gets everywhere in the box, all over your food. Yes Tovala is trying to insulate FOOD with shredded newspaper. If you’ve ever used a shredder you know the dust & newspaper is so much worse! It’s brown paper filled with shredded newspaper, basically like sawdust inside the packing. Any rip in the paper packaging, which of course happens in every shipment, causes sawdust like materiel to cover every square inch of the food. Every individual protein is covered, each individual meal box has sawdust material on the tins, sauce packets, veggies anything in your box will be covered with it. Wish I could attach pics. It’s horrible! You would not want to put the meal boxes in your fridge since it will get on everything in your fridge. It’s a huge mess not to mention disgusting! Everything has to get thrown out since there’s no way to clean the food it’s embedded in everything. They kept giving me meal credits but it keeps happening so it’s no use. Customer service kept saying they’d share my pics with their team but of course nothing changed. I don’t like the taste of shredded newspaper so I cancelled but if you do like the taste of sawdust then I’d consider joining.

I purchased a Gen1 at Goodwill and Tovala support says too bad, I can use it as a toaster oven. The greedy bums took the Gen1 off the app so it's basically an oven now with no controls without the app. Oven came out 4 years ago and now is obselete, just simple greed on Tovala part. Soon the Gen 2 will be obsolete when the Gen 3 model comes out. All they have to do is de-register your unit from connecting with their server and you are sheit out of luck. Capitalism at its best with Tovala. I would stay away from any appliance that they can disable with a stroke of a keyboard.