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Tovala's Jetsons-Like Smart Oven Promises To Make Fresher Meals In A Crowded Startup Field

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Steam is rising from what looks like a souped up microwave as David Rabie talks about the future of food.

He's cooking a chicken pozole stew, if you can count pressing a button as properly "cooking" food. But that's the point of Rabie's startup Tovala, which promises to deliver a home-cooked meal that's actually produced in your home.

Tovala does that through a smart oven that scans the barcode of an uncooked meal that's been prepared and delivered by the startup, then cycles through different cooking processes from broiling to baking and convection. A few minutes later (the meals max out at about 30), a fresh, hot meal pops out. In practice, it looks part Jetsons, part Easy-Bake Oven for millennials. "You're probably the 200th person to make that comparison," says Rabie, Tovala's cofounder and CEO.

The technology behind Tovala isn't science fiction, Rabie says, nor is it a toy. The hardware, manufactured in China, uses cooking methods that already existed in commercial kitchens, which pay tens of thousands of dollars for large, low-tech versions of Tovala's hardware already. What's new is that the startup designed software to scan and process each meal automatically, with a network of chefs behind its meals.

Tovala is far from the only startup looking to deliver fresh meals into homes. Closest to Tovala is Munchery, a fast-growing San Francisco startup that offers up its own meals that are ready to be heated up in a microwave or traditional oven. Munchery's raised more than $86 million in funding at a valuation of $300 million, according to data from Pitchbook. A growing chorus of other startups are competing to bring tastier meals to a user's door fast enough that they're still hot in the first place, including SpoonRocket, Sprig to New York-based Maple. Then there are those focused entirely on the logistics of delivering the food, including DoorDash, and Uber's UberEATS. Plus GrubHub Seamless, Yelp's Eat24 and others provide sites and apps to connect existing restaurants to a hungry user. And still another category has emerged providing meal kits for people to cook themselves, led by Blue Apron and including Plated, HelloFresh and a host of smaller challengers.

Chicago-based Tovala is well aware of the noise and competition in the food category, Rabie says. "I think everyone fills a different piece of the pie. Blue Apron and Plated, they're an experience teach you to cook and opening you up to new recipes. We are solving a problem that people want delicious food, they want it fresh and at the touch of a button."

In some ways, Tovala's easier to describe by what it's not. It can't get cold or soggy sitting in someone's car, and it won't taste like it's been microwaved from hours before like glorified airplane food. And while it's easy to make, it's not going to feel like truly making a dish in the way that a meal kit experience will.

If the goal is fresh-tasting food, that should be enough, says its cofounder. Rabie and cofounder Bryan Wilcox got together on the idea after Rabie had grown tired of relying on delivery food or quick runs to Chipotle as a business school student at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The veteran of Veggie Grill and chief of a chain of frozen yogurt stores teamed up with Wilcox, a mechanical engineering PhD who'd worked at GE and Whirlpool and new a think or two about appliances. They got to work in September 2014 and the business heated up when they won Booth's New Venture Challenge and $10,000 to get to work on a prototype.

Tovala has since raised about half a million dollars in seed funding to build the technology, which is almost finished. The company currently has demo units that look how the final product will, and then earlier working models that it can cook meals on already without more tests.

The company launched a Kickstarter campaign on Tuesday purely to drive some pre-sales and generate marketing buzz, Rabie says, and would've proceeded if it had failed. Not an issue: the campaign has already raised nearly $170,000 of its $100,000 target, with 27 days to go.

That buzz is necessary for Tovala to withstand challenges from the bigger, sharp-elbowed startups in the food space. Rabie expects it to compete most directly with those that offer centralized kitchens delivering their food ready to eat, a logistics and efficiency play against Tovala's hardware. "I think there are limited barriers to entry with delivery," says Rabie. "The idea of taking a restaurant and turning it into an app is cool, but I think there will be dozens."

While Tovala will offer a range of recipes for different diets, its creators say the hardware will have plenty of value simply by replacing a customer's existing microwave and toaster oven.

Then there's the food. The smell of the pozole quickly spread through Forbes' headquarters during the demo, with passersby commenting that they could sense "actual cooking" going on. It came out bubbling, hearty and satisfying, while Rabie popped in heatable cookies for dessert.

The biggest challenge Tovala faces is just that: it needs as many people as possible to actually taste its food, or its technology can too easily feel like a science experiment. "People are skeptical--until they try it," Rabie says.

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