tl/dr; Getting up and running with the Suvie was a C- experience overall with no show stoppers. Mostly I experienced annoyances that could be overcome after using the machine a few times preparing their smart meals and my own recipes.
If you haven’t heard of the Suvie Kitchen Robot, you’ll find it’s a pretty cool idea to help with streamlining your cooking experience. Playing on the term sous vide, it offers a selection of cooking options including sous vide, rapid cook, and slow cook and can also refrigerate your uncooked meal ahead of time so that you can time-shift meal prep as well as deferring the actual cooking time.
Weighing in at 55 lbs, it’s not a small thing and not easy to store if you don’t intend it for regular use. Suvie started as a Kickstarter campaign. Since then, the company has made improvements and released a new version. Using separate cooking zones, the updated product can independently cook two different meal components concurrently. With the second generation unit, they made the starch cooker an add-on purchase which I opted not to order. It just didn’t make sense since I eat low-carb / borderline keto.
Because of demand from their aggressive price promotions, delivery is about four months out. I ordered mine at the end of November and was given a 6-8 week estimate. It took 14 weeks. They are currently estimating 9-10 weeks as of the date of this review so plan accordingly.
If you take advantage of their current promotion, you are committing to two auto-ship orders or paying an extra $80 for each missed order six months after you receive the machine. To be honest, I forgot about that detail by the time I received the product and it isn’t stated anywhere on the order confirmation or on the delivery updates so it caught me by surprise when I tried to register my account on their website to peruse their selection of smart meals.
The website requires you to subscribe to an auto-delivery plan just to register your account and I started getting reminders two weeks before the machine even showed up. There is no way I want to commit to purchasing meals for a machine that I’ve waited months for delivery and still don’t have. It’s not clear when you are signing up that you’ll have the option to pause or edit the first order and this definitely gave me pause before I was willing to actually activate the account. A simple statement such as, “You’ll have the option to schedule deliveries and modify your meal selections before placing your first order,” would have gone a long way at that point.
Once the machine actually arrived, unboxing was simple. I’m glad I happened to have some distilled water around so I didn’t have to make a trip to the store before completing setup. The quick start guide was filled with ads for the smart meals. A glaring omission are the steps for “plug it in” and “here is where you find the on/off switch.” Yeah, plugging it in is obvious. But not seeing that in the quick start made me wonder if I somehow missed other steps while navigating 36 pages of “quick start” intermingled with ads for the smart meals.
Meal ordering was not a great first experience either. When I paused auto-delivery (I still didn’t have a machine at this point and the estimated delivery date had passed), it offered me a $10 credit to not do that. That never materialized. The website is loaded with dark patterns to make it challenging to pause and edit orders. It felt like the entire point of buying the machine was to get sucked into a $600+/month meal plan. The average price per serving ranges roughly between $12 and $18. I’ll withhold judgment at this point about whether the quality of the food justifies the prices. If you hate to cook and convenience is your primary goal, perhaps the price is easily justified. For me, convenience has value but I expected to find that value in time-shifting meal prep and scheduling cooking time so that eating at home can better fit my schedule.
When I actually placed my first order, I built it to the level to get to the free shipping tier. When the order was billed, they applied a random $5.88 discount which brought me just below that order level and then charge me shipping that more than wiped out the discount. This did not increase my satisfaction. I actually looked before I ordered to see if I had any discounts or credits on my account and found none prior to ordering. The order confirmation showed that I qualified for free shipping. I only saw the discount and charge when they billed my credit card.
For my first Suvie smart meal, I decided to make the Taco Bowl meal. I was excited to get it all setup and then have a ready-to-eat meal this evening on a schedule. Scanning the card was easy. Setting refrigeration was easy. But I couldn’t figure out how to schedule the completion time. Oh wait, this is a meal that doesn’t support that. It is not obvious from looking at the meal card which ‘type’ of meal I’m using. This one is a rapid cook meal and packaged in what appears to be sous vide bags. I’m sure the meal was identified as rapid cook when I ordered but that isn’t visible when I pull it out to cook.
Since I work from home, I opted to just put it all back in the freezer and restart the process when it’s almost time to eat. The scheduled time for the meal was 42 minutes. I added two five minute broil segments to the chicken because it was very pale and not to temp in the center. The meal was ok. Tomatilla sauce was very tasty. The rest was pretty bland. Reminded me of an old school frozen dinner.
The meals are expensive, not terribly healthy, and loaded with sodium. I will place the orders I committed to when I ordered this unit at a discount, I will also try this with some recipes that fit my eating style and then decide if it is worth keeping.