Tineco Toasty One smart toaster review

I’m predicting that most kitchen appliances will have some kind of smarts within the next 5 years. And while there’s a case for smart cooking robots, smart faucets and smart ovens or fridges with barcode scanners, we might have a hard time wrapping our heads around a smart toaster. But start wrapping, friends, because the future is now. I recently got to review the Tineco Toasty One smart toaster. I had a chance to use it for a few weeks ahead of its public launch. So in this review I’ll show you what it can do, look at the toast quality, and take a look at whether or not a smart toaster is really worth it.

The trouble with most toasters today is that there’s no standards for how much they grill your bread. Some use numbers, others use dials and wither way, it’s a crapshoot for what you get… to borrow a sentiment from Goldilocks, sometimes it ’s too light, sometimes it’s too dark, and other times it might be just right.

The premise of the Tineco Toasty One, is that it not only gives you a better idea of your future toast outcome, but it shows you how long it’s going to take and it can adapt to various breads, from fresh to frozen, and it can give you different levels of toastiness on each side.

Even so I’m more than aware a smart toaster can seem like a bit of a joke to some people. But in the interests of seeing if the product lives up to the promise, let’s get to it…

Design & looks

Toasty One is bigger than an average toaster, but it is really nicely designed. The toast slots are wide, and long but not overly tall. The biggest thing to see on the Tineco Toasty One is the 4-inch LED touch screen. This is your information and control panel and it kinda makes making toast look like launching a moon rocket.

There’s no set up or anything required; hit the power button under the screen and you’re ready to go.

Smart Mode: for sliced bread only

The toaster uses what’s called Smart Mode to automatically and easily cook your toast. This mode is for sliced bread only.

You can choose which side to program, then use the touchscreen slider to adjust your level of crispiness; and the colour chart is actually quite accurate. Tineco calls this IntelliHeat, and promises you get “perfect toast – every slice”. You can cook each slice differently or both to the same level of toasty.

Your toast will lower itself into the toaster and start cooking. You can watch the progress on the screen, and it will show its progress, since no one likes to hover above the toaster, only to be surprised when it finally bounces up into your face.

Toast quality

Two different levels of toasty in one session.

I think the toaster did a good and accurate job and it seemed a lot easier to get the level of toasty I was going for without guessing or losing a few slices to the grill gods trying to find the optimal setting. It was successfully able to toast different slices two different levels at the same time, and I never once ended up with burnt toast. In short, I feel like I got exactly the toast I was after each time I used it.

Holds toast warm

Interestingly, both slices will stay down until each are complete; I found this was actually helpful since it seemed to keep the finished slice warm so that butter would still melt after both were ejected.

Related; there’s also a reheat feature for toast that’s done but needs a bit of a warmup for that butter.

Bagels, waffles: use Manual Mode

If you like to toast other things aside from bread, Tineco recommends Manual Mode. You can choose from one of the 4 toasting levels, and use the Fresh, Frozen or Reheat options.

Store favourites

Tineco Toasty One will let you save up to 8 toast settings; you can assign them to a shortcut button.

Auto shutoff

Because we are often rushing out of the house after breakfast, it’s good to know this toaster has a 10 minute auto shut off feature that will power it down if you forget.

Crumb tray

There’s an easy to remove and replace crumb tray with a thin lip to keep crumbs from falling, and unlike some other toasters it slides right out so you can dump it fully.

Overall review: Tineco Toasty One

Overall, this toaster is fun, and it’s effective. The Smart toasting mode for bread works really well, it’s accurate and delivers the exact results I wanted. I love that it will cook different slices at different levels of doneness at the same time and keep them warm until both are ready. The design is nice too and it’s a sleek looking appliance you won’t feel bad about leaving in view.

Downsides? You don’t get quite as much help if you’re toasting things other than bread, and the toaster is probably a bit bigger than it needs to be. It’s also substantially more expensive than any other toaster.

While you can get a basic toaster for about $20, the Tineco TOASTY ONE has an MSRP of $339USD. Compare that to a design darling like SMEG which is about $199USD, but it does cost a smidge less than the original smart toaster, Revolution InstaGlo which is $349USD. You can shop it on Amazon or Tineco’s website.

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