As demand for air fryers continues to grow in the U.S., and the countertop appliance becomes "far and away" the most coveted in the market, Tovala founder and CEO David Rabie figured it was time for his startup to enter the fray.
The meal-kit delivery service and smart oven maker expanded its product portfolio of cloud-connected smart ovens on Thursday with the launch of the new Tovala Smart Oven Air Fryer.
Tovala Smart Ovens cook prepared meals and other foods using automated cook cycles. The Chicago food-tech startup uses a barcode scanner to correctly cook meals, whether they need to be steamed, baked, broiled, toasted, reheated and now fried. Users simply scan the barcode on the items they receive and the oven will do the rest.
The idea for the business first came to Rabie one day when he was cooking for himself while in graduate school.
"I didn't have time to keep cooking for myself. I was using multiple appliances, and I just thought there's got to be a better way to do this," he told Chicago Inno.
He said his "aha moment" came when he realized that while certain parts of cooking are "just science."
"What we've done is we took away the science and embedded that in our technology so that customers don't have to work hard," he said.
It's not just about getting an air fryer, but also getting access to Tovala meals, which Rabie said is the "central differentiation" between Tovala and other products on the market.
"For a lot of our customers, they want the Tovala meal experience — that's the core," he said. "The other things the ovens do are secondary."
Rabie said the air fryer will open Tovala to new customers.
Tovala's air fryer costs $249 or $99 with six meal orders over the course of six months. It's company's first new oven to launch since late 2018.
No 'flash in the pan'
Rabie said that Tovala has been able to avoid some of the economic headwinds that have hurt other startups through the pandemic because its product solution isn't a "flash in the pan."
"This country has been on a march towards more convenient and higher-quality food for 100 years, whether it was the invention of fast food, the drive-thru or the microwave," he said.
The company also had minimal customer-facing supply issues through all of Covid, according to Rabie.
"Our longest back-order period was probably two-and-a-half to three weeks," he said. "That laid the foundation to go and build a new product — the fact that our existing supply chain was pretty robust."
After going through Y Combinator, a top Silicon Valley startup accelerator, Rabie admits that there was a possibility that Tovala would have stayed in Silicon Valley and never made its way back to Chicago, but in hindsight he's happy with the decision he made.
"A lot of our capital has come from Chicago. It's a great source of talent, and the bulk of our team is still based in Chicago. We've got great connections with the universities and a pretty good peer set of other food tech and food entrepreneurs," he said.
Indeed, Chicago's food and food-tech scene has taken off in recent years, and investment in food innovation has increased more than 500% between 2019 and 2021 in terms of capital raised compared to 73% nationwide, according to data from World Business Chicago.
