Miami's Most Instagram-Worthy Takeout Boxes
These days, it's almost guaranteed: before anyone takes a bite, they're taking a photo. Across every social platform, food has become content, and nowhere has that been truer than during the pandemic, when takeout became one of the only ways left to make a meal feel like an occasion worth sharing.
Restaurants have caught on. A clever, well-designed to-go box isn't just packaging anymore — it's a brand touchpoint, a piece of content, and sometimes the closest thing a customer gets to the in-person dining experience. Bright colors, playful details, and a satisfying "unboxing" moment can turn even a Tuesday-night delivery order into something worth posting.
Around Miami, restaurants have leaned hard into this idea, but few examples capture it as well as Dos Croquetas, whose packaging redesign — developed with the Wynwood-based branding studio Jastor — has turned a humble fried snack into one of the city's most talked-about takeout experiences.
Dos Croquetas: Turning a Simple Snack Into an Event
On their own, croquetas are not a particularly photogenic food. They're small, brown, and fried — delicious, but not exactly built for the camera. That was precisely the challenge Dos Croquetas co-founder Alec Fernandez brought to Jastor: how do you make something so humble feel elevated?
The answer was packaging that does double duty as presentation. Jastor designed a slide-out tray system for Dos Croquetas that transforms the box itself into a serving platter — part container, part reveal. Instead of opening a bag and pulling out a paper-wrapped snack, customers slide out a tray that presents the croquetas the way a jeweler might present a piece of jewelry: deliberately, and with a bit of theater.
"We wanted something that would speak to the quality of our product," Fernandez has said of the collaboration. "At the end of the day, croquetas aren't much to look at. But we still wanted to display them in an elevated way. When you get your food, it's like unboxing a piece of jewelry."
That single design choice reframes the entire experience. It's no longer just a box of food — it's a small ritual, and one that happens to look great on camera. In a delivery-first world, where a brand rarely gets to interact with a customer face to face, that slide-out tray becomes the brand's handshake.
For Jastor founder and creative director Jason Torres, that's exactly the point. The agency's philosophy centers on building "Instagrammable" experiences, whether the project is a restaurant or a real estate development. Packaging, in particular, has become one of the most valuable tools for keeping a brand present in a customer's life when there's no storefront or server involved.
"We transform their packaging into an engaging brand asset, which is important during times like these where consumers don't come in contact with the people or the brick-and-mortar side of your store," Torres has explained. "Packaging is the one experience where you can engage a consumer and provide them with your brand message."
The Dos Croquetas project has become something of a showcase for that approach — proof that thoughtful design can make even the simplest food feel like a statement, and that a to-go box can carry as much brand identity as a dining room ever could. Jastor has applied that same thinking to other Miami-area brands, including Night Owl Cookies, luxury ice cream label Quore Gelato, and the Versailles restaurant chain, but the Dos Croquetas redesign remains one of the clearest examples of packaging doing the heavy lifting for a brand's identity.
The Rest of Miami Is Catching Up
Dos Croquetas is far from alone in treating the to-go box as prime real estate for brand storytelling. Order from LPM Restaurant & Bar in Brickell and your meal arrives in a hand-painted canvas tote, baguette included. At La Mar, the Mandarin Oriental's Peruvian restaurant, diners get a card linking to a curated Spotify playlist meant to recreate the feeling of the restaurant's waterfront dining room. Fiola sends its seafood out in a sturdy metal bucket that looks more like a design object than a food container.
Sisters Jennifer and Michele Kaminski of the delivery-only brand 2 Korean Girls have built their entire business around the idea that a takeout box should feel like a gift. Their bright pink packaging is meant to evoke the nostalgia of childhood treats — the excitement of a surprise, translated into an adult format. The pair has also made sustainability part of that story, packaging every meal in compostable and plant-based materials to counter the mounting single-use waste that comes with a delivery-heavy world.
Other brands have taken a more functional approach. Yardbird Southern Table & Bar sells themed, grab-and-go meal kits — including a Super Bowl-inspired wings box and a brunch-themed package — designed as much for portability as for presentation. Miami's at-home sushi scene has followed suit: Omakai's boxes reveal each course as they're opened, while Makoto in Bal Harbour sends lunch out in a reusable bamboo bento box.
Newer entrants are pushing even further. Guy Fieri's delivery-only Flavortown Kitchen wraps its most popular dishes in boldly branded boxes built to keep food hot while making an impression the moment it arrives. Bubusan, another delivery-first concept, worked with Wynwood's DeepSleep Studio to create vividly illustrated boxes blending Japanese street art with Hindu and Indian design motifs — and even embedded a hidden, VR-unlockable message inside its omakase boxes, adding a layer of interactivity rarely seen in takeout packaging.
Packaging as the New Front of House
What ties all of these examples together is a simple shift in mindset: when a restaurant can't rely on ambiance, service, or a dining room to tell its story, the box has to do that work instead. Dos Croquetas' collaboration with Jastor is a case study in just how far that idea can go — proving that with the right design thinking, even the most unassuming food can become the centerpiece of a brand experience, one slide-out tray at a time.