I Used a $400 Smart Toaster to Make Pop-Tarts and All I Got Was a Tummy Ache

It’s hard to say what separates all of these options from one another, but it’s clear that Revolution did actually focus on the heating element of the R180 and not just the flashy screen stuff. That’s evidenced by the fact that this toaster has a copyrighted heating tech called InstaGLO, which Revolution claims “heats in seconds” and sears bread rather than roasting the life out of it. The subtlety of the R180’s heating coils is meant to toast the outside of the bread without drying it out, according to Revolution, and I will say, at first glance, the coils do look different than your run-of-the-mill toaster. Namely, they’re more slight and spindly, which may be how they get so hot so fast. And as to the claim that it toasts bread without drying it out, I think it does a decent job, though not all the time.

For your bread-and-butter white toast (I’ll see myself out for that double entendre), it does a good job. The brioche I cooked with the “white bread” setting was nice and browned on the outside using the default doneness setting, but was actually a little steamy on the inside. When I switched that setting to “gluten-free,” however, it kind of burned the crap out of the bread, though maybe that’s more to do with the bread than the toaster. It did an okay job with Pop-Tarts, but let’s be honest, that’s pretty hard to mess up. Unrelated to the toasting process, I did wind up with a tummy ache, but I think that’s what’s supposed to happen when you put that many preservatives in your body. This level of variability between toast outcomes, while not ideal if you don’t choose the right setting, is kind of a sign that the toaster is working. There are differences in the preset toast settings, and they have a demonstrable difference on the final product. I’ll give you an example.

For shits and giggles, I decided to try and toast a piece of the brioche bread under the artisan bread setting. I mean, what is “artisan,” anyway? How do I know who made this bread? Maybe it came from a family of bakers in Brooklyn. Maybe there’s an independent bread seller going door-to-door trying to grow their gluten empire. Whatever. Maybe I was bending the rules. The important part is I tried it, and the results were… smokey. Trying to toast the brioche under the artisan bread setting was not a good idea, since it started to burn the toast to the point that I cancelled the function early for fear that I would smoke my office kitchen out. On one hand, yikes, but on the other, there’s clearly a major difference in heat and timing between settings that makes presets more tailored to certain things. And that’s the whole damn point.

Altogether, I tested three different things: Pop-Tarts (since there’s a specific pastry setting for that), gluten-free bread (there’s also a setting for that), and brioche white bread. It did a pretty decent job toasting all three of those and was responsive when I selected the browness level. I’m not sure who needs to optimize their Pop-Tart toasting, but if that’s your jam, then your time has finally arrived. An unexpected perk of toasting with this thing is that there are no jump scares. When you press “start” on the screen, the bread descends into the depths of the toaster like Han Solo post-carbonite. Similarly, when the toast is done (there’s a circle countdown on the screen, and it flashes the last 10 seconds like the ball in Times Square is about to drop), it rises, born again as slightly burned bread.

Again, as with any proper smart appliance in 2025, there are lots of things you absolutely do not need, but since the internet is inside this thing… why not, I guess. One of those things that you don’t really need is the weather. By entering your city into the toaster, you can get local weather. Revolution claims that this toaster does not collect data on you, though I can’t verify if that’s true or not. If you’re buying this smart toaster, you’re going to have to just take their word for it. Another frivolous but fun (I guess?) smart feature is a digital photo album that you can set to cycle through pics when you’re not busy toasting stuff. I uploaded some of myself to the toaster using the provided QR code, and, honestly, this screen is kind of nice? No one needs this, but this toaster panel is not total garbage. Good job, Revolution!

One thing I don’t love about the smart features is that there’s no way to do certain stuff via an app or some kind of web-based interface. Using the touchscreen works surprisingly fine, but sometimes there are things you’d rather do on your phone, like enter your Wi-Fi network. When I went to enter my office Wi-Fi into the toaster, it said that it was connected, but I couldn’t actually go online because of added security. With a phone, I may have been prompted to enter the necessary credentials and would have been able to get online without using my colleague’s hotspot. That’s a minor complaint, to be clear. Most people won’t encounter that problem since they’ll be setting these things up at home, but the option to use a phone or another device would have been nice.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what anyone wants out of a smart toaster or if anyone wants anything at all. There are mostly two camps of people when they witness the R180. One of them is intrigued (i.e., wow! what is that?) and then mildly entertained by the existence of a smart toaster. The other is near-viscerally offended that smart appliances have gone this far (i.e., did we really need to reinvent toast?). One friend of mine told me he “had to go to the doctor” after seeing me post about it on my Instagram. No matter which camp you belong to, both share one thing: they’re equally as disgusted by the price.

This, at the end of the day, is a $400 toaster, and there’s just no getting around that. For everything that it does right, or does uniquely, no one needs a smart toaster, and no one needs to spend hundreds of dollars toasting bread. Okay, maybe if you buy one of those fancy Japanese ones that steams at the same time (those are notably $100 less than this, by the way). But if you want one, who am I to stop you? You can tap and swipe your way into a bready bliss. I’ll be on the sidelines turning bread into that nice crumbly stuff the old-fashioned way, one toasty jump scare at a time.