French friends launch New Zealand’s only snail farm in Queenstown

Otago Escargots plans to start supplying local, high-end restaurants with fresh, locally raised snails in about a year's time.

The idea began when Queenstown hospitality worker Louis Parent, a lifelong fan of escargots, went to a restaurant in Dunedin on a rainy night.

He said he ordered a serving of imported snails that didn't quite hit the mark.

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“I wasn't really happy about the quality, the texture and the taste of them,” he said. “And when I got out it was raining. I saw a few snails in the park and I was like, ‘Why don't people farm them here in New Zealand?’”

The idea struck a chord with Charles Durand, a fellow French friend and hospitality worker.

The duo set to work on a plot of land in Gibbston, which now houses 50,000 snails.

Otago Escargots’ goal was to start supplying top-end Queenstown restaurants with fresh, locally raised escargots by May next year, should their MPI licensing and paperwork go to plan.

Starting out was easy, Durand said - the pair simply collected "a couple of hundred" snails from the wild - what’s known as petit gris in France, or the common garden snail in New Zealand, and began breeding them.

He said convincing their friends they had decided to become snail farmers was another story.

“Everyone was like laughing at us when we [said] we are snail farmers. A lot of people were saying we’re so French,” he said.

Durand and Parent built a garden full of wooden structures for the snails to hide under during the day, and established a breeding room and a hibernation room where the snails are currently hunkered down until November.

Despite their slow pace, Durand and Parent said the snails kept them busy in the warmer months, munching through a special limestone-cereal blend and requiring regular cleaning and watering.

“Right now we’re working on the side as well, so we’ve got two full-time jobs,” Durand said.

Parent conceded snail farming had been a big learning curve, with a few literal missteps.

"We try to do our best to avoid all the snails on the ground, but there's always a little accident every now and then. Luckily they can rebuild their shell," he said.

Some of the snails were faster than others; some were bigger and more energetic, Parent said.

“We started to name them at the beginning, and then after fifty we were like... ah, alright,” he said.

Otago Escargots planned to scale up to 200,000 snails by next May, ready to debut on local menus.

Eventually, Durand and Parent planned to offer an on-farm tasting experience with wine pairings, and even had ideas to expand into snail mucin cosmetics.

University of Waikato senior history lecturer Garritt Van Dyk, who has carried out extensive research into the history of snails as food, believed there was definitely a place for escargots in modern Kiwi cuisine, for both sustainability-focused and adventurous eaters.

"I think that people are starting to get over their aversion to eating certain types of things. As people become more adventurous and venture outside their regular food traditions, people are starting to experiment. There was a time when people wouldn't have thought about eating sushi because they would have been like, 'wait a minute I'm not eating raw fish'. There are some people who will never eat an oyster...because it's still alive," he said.

"But there are other people that are looking at sustainable meat alternatives, and they look at things like snails and say, 'well, there's something that's actually routinely thought of as a garden pest, but in fact, you can farm it sustainably, ethically and economically, and you can produce meat that is high in iron, high in amino acids... and you can use every different part of it."

While Durand and Parent are the only snail farmers in New Zealand, they're not alone in pushing the protein envelope.

In Dunedin, Otago Locusts founder Malcolm Diack believed more people should definitely give eating creepy crawlies a go.

However, he conceded it was tough work as a non-conventional farmer to get information - or complete compliance paperwork.

"As far as getting certified, it took quite a few months to go to MPI and say 'this is this is what I want to do, which category do we fall in so we can get these certifications and and make sure we fit in?' Our square peg was sort of rammed into a round hole and we were put in [a category] with a few other different foods," he said.

"But it's a fun if you, if you've got the right attitude and and you like animals and insects and creepy crawlies and things. It's a good one at parties or social events telling people that this is what you do, which is always different from what anyone else there is doing," he said.