I’m an RD Who Tried Suvie’s Kitchen Robot and Meal Delivery Service — Find Out if It Was Worth the Investment

As a food and nutrition professional with over a decade of experience (including as a private chef), I know all the tricks to making it easier to get dinner on the table. But here’s the thing: Even I get tired of all the planning and cooking. I’d gladly invest in a new piece of kitchen equipment or a meal delivery service if I felt it could offer high-quality meals that didn’t take me hours to make and clean up, so when the opportunity to try out Suvie arose, I jumped at the chance. I gave this “kitchen robot” a shot at running my home kitchen for a week, and here’s my honest opinion about whether or not it’s worth the investment (and the counter space).

Suvie’s sign-up process is a bit different from others I’ve come across because of the need to purchase the “kitchen robot,” a countertop-size oven-refrigerator combo with three models to choose from.

All of these (the 2.0, 3.0, and 3.0+ models) offered some of the same basic functions, but with higher capacity and additional cook modes in the leveled-up versions. I chose the middle option, the 3.0, which comes with a credit to use on meals over the course of your first few boxes.

I had to pay for the oven first, choose a delivery date range for it, and then check out before moving on to meals.

Meal Selection

Once I purchased my oven, I was able to move on to choosing meals and put my first meal credit to good use. The menu was easy to navigate with some basic filters for “New,” “Bestsellers,” “Kids’ Meals,” and “Fit and Healthy.” There were also filters for cook time, number of servings, and ingredients like proteins and common allergens such as peanuts, pork, sesame, shellfish, shrimp, milk, nuts, soy, wheat, eggs, and beef. I was able to set some of these as preferences in my profile after becoming a member, which I could see would make future meal selection more streamlined.

As far as savory entrées go, I saw about 50 menu items to choose from, which felt robust to me. While there was some variation each week, there was also repetition between meals, and a lot of repetition of flavor profiles and ingredients. For example, it was hard to avoid green beans and broccoli as a side dish, and the grains on offer mostly consisted of rice. Meats were more varied, with some fun options like soy chorizo and pork ribs, but I found the seafood was mostly salmon (with an occasional crab cake).

Most meals were a plated entrée that consisted of a meat-based protein, with either rice or potatoes, and the option for a green veggie (or none at all). I saw some sandwiches, a few flatbreads, tacos, and pastas in the mix, too. The menus tend to lean into American comfort foods like barbecue, hearty Italian American options, and a few vaguely global-inspired dishes like teriyaki salmon or a chicken taco bowl. For the most part, the meals did look pretty appetizing, and if I were an ongoing customer, I’d look forward to seeing how the offerings change with the seasons or get refreshed over time.

Before I purchased my oven, I could see only the first week of meals, but once I bought in, I could see up to five weeks at a time. It’s incredibly simple to skip weeks with just two clicks of your mouse. As far as I can tell, there are no specific sustainable sourcing practices in place, and all the ingredients are frozen. I did have some issues with selecting add-ons and getting them to stay in the cart — the website kept redirecting me when I tried to — but otherwise, the meal selection process was fairly painless.

Here’s what I ordered:

• Chicken Tikka Masala With Jasmine Rice
• Honey Sesame Ginger Chicken With Rice and Green Beans
• Whole Grain Mac & Cheese
• Teriyaki Salmon With White Rice & Broccoli
• Lemon Herb Pork Tenderloin With Roasted Potatoes & Green Beans
• Carolina Gold BBQ Ribs With Cornbread and Green Beans
• Pesto and Roasted Tomato Flatbread With Mozzarella Cheese
• Italian Meatball Subs With Roasted Broccoli 
• Thai Yellow Sweet Curry With Tofu & White Rice
• Creamy Sriracha Chicken With Cauliflower Rice
• Chicken Taco Bowl With Black Beans, Corn and Tomatillo
• Mediterranean Salmon Grain Bowl
• Sausage Egg Sandwiches

Both the meals and the oven were well-packaged and arrived safely. But both also arrived outside the anticipated delivery window. The oven was almost a week early, and it came when I was actually on vacation, which was unexpected. Then the meals arrived about a day early. The oven’s arrival caused a bit of a scramble, as I had to find someone to get it off my porch, but the meals being a touch early was fine. The food was well packaged, and I think the contents would have been okay had I needed to leave them for a bit.

My Suvie oven arrived in a cardboard box fitted with a polystyrene-based packaging structure, which seemed to have protected it quite well in transit. It did have some condensation on the top, but that wasn’t super concerning, and the oven was easy to unpack and was undamaged. The meals were packed in an insulated cardboard box fitted with ice packs, and everything was still very well frozen when I opened it up. Each meal consists of several ingredient components, with all ingredients sealed individually in plastic and then all the components for each meal are bagged together with the recipe in a zip-top plastic bag. While the organization was really helpful, especially with a big order, this did generate a lot of plastic packaging that ended up in my trash.

Preparing the Meals

Most of the time, the process for cooking was really simple and only involved defrosting a sauce, pouring it over a protein on one level of the double-decker oven, and then putting the side components in the bottom section of the oven. The next step was for me to scan the code from the recipe card to bring up the cooking program, or enter it manually and press start. I could also schedule the meal for later, which activates the refrigeration. Meals typically took around 30 to 45 minutes, which is negligible if you schedule them ahead, but it sometimes ended up feeling like a long wait when I was hungry.

I did find that I consistently needed to add a bit more cooking time to each meal to get them hot enough for my liking, and with some of the more involved recipes, like the meatball subs, the process left something to be desired. That particular recipe called for cooking the meatballs in sauce at the same time as the broccoli, on different levels of the machine. When that finished cooking, I had to remove the meatballs, clean the pan, and then build the sandwiches before returning them to the oven to broil. The subs didn’t fit well in the pan, so broiling them to melt the cheese resulted in charred bread, while the meatballs were not as hot as I preferred. Overall, I’d avoid ordering that type of meal again since the rest were a lot simpler and had better outcomes.

Tasting the Meals

Unfortunately, none of the meals from Suvie really blew me away in terms of flavor or texture, and some patterns did emerge. I found that the meat tends to run a bit dry, likely because they were cooked or partially cooked before being frozen. Similarly, the texture of some of the veggies, which were advertised as “roasted,” was like they had come out of the microwave — watery and on the soft side. I did really enjoy a lot of the grain-based sides, and I was especially impressed with how light and fluffy the rice turned out, without sticking to the pans.

I thought the flavors of a lot of the meals were decent, and I particularly enjoyed the Chicken Tikka Masala, the Sriracha Chicken, the Teriyaki Salmon, the Honey Sesame Chicken, and the Mediterranean Salmon Bowl. I liked the breakfast sandwiches a lot, and I think the Pesto Flatbread would have been a favorite if I had used less of the pesto than they recommended. I wanted to love the Meatball Sub, but, as I mentioned, I had some issues with overcrisping the bun, while the meatballs stayed lukewarm. The dish was also very salty, and overall, it ended up being one of the bigger disappointments.

Everything else was middle-of-the-road, not earth-shattering, but not bad from a flavor perspective. I think the food might taste better as you get to know the machine and cooking times better, but it seems you do trade some of the flavor and textures for the convenience factor here. Meals overall were satisfying, but some portions were a bit small, and I would have liked a bit more complexity in flavors and variety in ingredients, especially when it came to side dishes.

Nutritional Quality of the Meals

If I were looking to limit my intake of sodium and saturated fat and wanted to order from Suvie, I would start by looking at the “certified balanced” choices to identify some meals. While the exact nutrition criteria for this certification was not listed on the website anywhere I could find, the FAQs do state that the “Certified Balanced meals meet per-serving requirements for total calories, sodium, and percentage of calories from fat as set by Dr. Angela Fitch of the Mass General Weight Center and Harvard Medical School.” I did find the certified balanced meals to be more moderate overall, but they might not be appropriate for folks on a more advanced tier of sodium restriction, as is often the case with chronic high blood pressure and other illnesses.

In the typical weekly menu, I thought there was a good assortment of add-ons to bulk out an order of entrées. Offerings focus on soups, breakfast items like croissants and egg dishes, desserts like individual cheesecakes, chocolate soufflés, and cookies, as well as an impressive array of sauces. There were also a few preseasoned but raw proteins like chicken breasts and salmon on offer, along with a precooked protein and a side dish here and there.

I ordered one of the breakfast sandwiches, and it not only arrived in great shape but tasted good as well. I could see utilizing these for mornings if you set them up the night before, but I don’t see myself making them on a typical weekday morning, as they still take the usual 30–45 minutes. I also would hesitate to pay for additional sauces, as items like teriyaki sauce or pesto can probably be found at your local grocery store for a more reasonable price. The same goes for raw proteins.

Outside of food, there was also a fair amount of add-on equipment to help make the most of the Suvie experience. Due to the specialized size of the oven, there’s not a lot of regular-size kitchen equipment that would work in it, but Suvie has everything you could need for all types of cooking available for purchase. From baking sheets and air fryer baskets to egg trays, cast-iron sets, serving utensils, and much more, I appreciated the variety and how I could use Suvie to support my cooking in general. This could be a great fit if I wanted to maximize a small kitchen space (like my old New York City studio apartment) or simply didn’t want to fire up my full-size oven just to feed myself or a few people.

Suvie stacks up well against its closest competitor, Tovala, which also has a specialty oven with meal kits and scannable recipes. Tovala’s food is fresh to Suvie’s frozen, which means Tovala has the advantage on textures and variety of meal types, but Suvie’s frozen options have a greater shelf life and allow you to pre-set and refrigerate your meals until it’s time to cook. The services are similar in terms of comfort food offerings, and the amount of cooking required is also similar — that can’t be said of most meal kits. Hungryroot and Sunbasket’s streamlined meal kits are probably the next closest in terms of low-effort kits, but they still take more real-time cooking than Suvie, while others, like Green Chef, HelloFresh, and Home Chef all require full-blown cooking.

For those who rarely need to feed a crowd and who aren’t afraid of going all-in on a countertop appliance, Suvie might be a good choice. To get the most out of this service, I recommend going for the extra equipment so you can get more range when cooking your own food, and lean into the healthier options available if you plan on eating Suvie meals on a consistent basis. This could be a great fit for singles or couples, those who travel for work, or those who have city-size kitchens and want a single appliance that brings a lot of functionality to a small space.

As someone who enjoys cooking and has the time to dedicate to it, I don’t necessarily see the service working for me long-term, but I do love a good, multifunctional countertop appliance. I could see myself investing in something like this just to make cooking day-to-day easier, even if I don’t require the convenience of the Suvie meals themselves.

In order to recommend the best meal delivery services from an unbiased perspective, we selected more than 50 different services and had industry experts test them. With health journalists and dietitians as our first-person testers, we scrutinized each service from start to finish and evaluated how well they performed in ease of ordering, packaging and shipping, nutrition content, preparation, recipe quality, technology, and, of course, taste.

As someone who has been a dietitian for more than 10 years and has been writing specifically about meal delivery services since 2021, I’ve personally tested nearly every service and have seen how many of these companies have changed over the years. My focus is on finding services that offer streamlined processes, functional recipes and solid flavors while not ignoring the nutritional needs of customers. Finding all these factors without breaking the bank can be a challenge, but we only want to recommend the best.