By Sam Levy, Senior Vice President Sales, Oracle NetSuite
Founded in 2017, Tovala is the product of a graduate student looking to make eating healthy work with his busy schedule. To bring the idea to life, Co-Founders David Rabie and Bryan Wilcox ran a successful Kickstarter campaign, and today Tovala is a multimillion-dollar business.
Tovala is a first-of-its-kind fresh meal subscription service paired with a smart oven. When you scan a meal’s QR code, the Tovala Smart Oven identifies each meal, then uses an automated multi-mode cooking sequence (including steam, bake, and broil) to cook your food perfectly in 20 minutes or less. In the last two years, the service has grown rapidly as consumers increasingly turn their attention to how and what they eat. It has now surpassed 10 million meals cooked and to meet growing demand it opened a second, 230,000 square foot production facility to serve more geographies in the United States.
Serving Up a Simplified View of the Business
As Tovala expanded its business, managing its staffing and operations became increasingly difficult. Manual business processes took the Tovala team away from high priority customer-facing development work and it was clear Tovala had outgrown its legacy business systems.
After careful review, Tovala decided to make the move to Oracle NetSuite to streamline and automate its financial processes and establish a scalable foundation for the future. Tovala chose Bryant Park as its implementation partner.
Subscribing to a Proven Approach
“Our Tovala ecosystem presents unique challenges. From the application and packaging, to the oven and fresh food, each component is a key part of the Tovala customer journey. Specifically, we needed help with visibility and lag time between financial metric changes and decision making. Inventory management is also a critical challenge because our product is perishable and we differentiate through our ability to deliver fresh food,” said David Barrent, director, Operations Engineering, Tovala.
With NetSuite, Tovala will be able to make more informed decisions, scale its operations, and adjust to supply chain changes as it explores in-house and external production and fulfillment at scale. This will help increase the speed and accuracy of business processes and help Tovala manage costs and improve visibility into cash flow. To further increase efficiencies, NetSuite will also help Tovala automate previously manual processes.
Accelerating the Path to Profitability
“We are mapping out a phased approach where NetSuite first becomes our repository of our accounting and finance data, then later becomes the engine that will run our end-to-end supply chain operations,” said Barrent. “NetSuite will help free up valuable internal resources so we can pivot our focus to tactics that will further business differentiation.”
NetSuite will also help support the introduction of new offerings and efficiently manage all Tovala operations, enabling the organization room to focus on new markets, new types of food, and partnerships as it adapts and scales its business.
“NetSuite will help us expand our food supply, fulfillment strategy, and reach, by providing both the core capabilities and workflow customizations that we will need to quickly deliver a scalable solution for wherever the market takes us. We plan to use the efficiencies and insights to innovate our platform and expand our facilities and offerings,” said Barrent.
