Million Dollar Idea: Export Snails to France

Giant African Snail. Courtesy H. Vannoy Davis © California Academy of Sciences.

Ever wondered what to do with those disgusting snails you find in your garden besides kill them in place? Have fantasies of getting money for the slimy creatures in your backyard? All your dreams might come true if you can connect the bureaucratic dots in shipping your backyard wildlife to foreign countries yearning for a taste of them!

Robert, a machinist in Hilo, Hawaii, recently created a little garden with his girlfriend Diane. Hawaii, like most tropical islands, has extreme bug issues. Robert’s most pressing garden concern is preventing Giant African Snails from getting near his plants. While hosting me for a couple days, this topic came up, and Diane had a brilliant solution: ship the critters to France, where people pay well to eat escargot.

As with most great ideas I’ve come across or had myself, a quick search revealed that this one is already being done in Africa. You can, however, probably do it better or differently, such as shipping “Snail of the Month” selections to customers.

Your biggest barrier to entry will be government bureaucracy. You will have to work with multiple agencies to ship living things intercontinentally. Justifying your business model, proving that the snails won’t impact the ecosystem, and just dealing with international commerce are obvious struggles that come to mind. Bringing a piece of fruit into the United States is tough. Shipping snails from Hawaii to France? This task seems difficult to impossible.

Surely, there are other untapped markets. If one man’s trash really is another man’s treasure, then that means we have a lot of undiscovered international commerce.

What other pests do you have that might be valuable to someone else around the world? What kinds of things do we trash that could be useful to others?