How About a Walk-In Chiller for Your Snails?

Picture of a Walk-in Chiller
17-May-2018

We are always interested to learn how clients use our walk-chillers and fridge trailers. Let's face it, there are plenty of great uses that even we don't know about. A case in point: storing snails to prevent them from breeding. It is a common practice among snail farmers who send escargot and snail caviar all over the world.

The escargot business is a lucrative one. Here in the UK, it is growing at a fairly rapid rate. We Britons apparently cannot get enough of snail. The only problem is finding fresh instead of tinned. Fresh is always better. But in order to sell it fresh, you have to be able to control when and how snails reproduce. Enter the walk-in chiller.

Coaxing Snails to Mate

In the wild, snails normally mate in late spring and early summer. If the temperatures are just right (especially in warmer climates) they will mate multiple times per year. Snail farmers coax their precious snails to mate by controlling temperature and lighting. When they do not want them to mate, they put them in cold storage.

Cooling snails down reduces their normal activity. They essentially go into hibernation. This natural reaction to cold allows farmers to maximise the lifetimes of their snails – which are usually ready to breed at about six weeks and can live for as long as five years.

Another thing to note is that snail eggs only take 4 to 6 weeks to mature. So under the right conditions, coaxing snails to reproduce multiple times per year can yield quite a harvest. And once again, the walk-in chiller plays an important role here. How big a role? Well, just consider what might happen if a farmer's chiller broke down.

You Need Emergency Refrigeration

Let's say the farmer has all his adult snails in the chiller while he tends to the recently laid eggs. He hopes to bring those eggs to maturity and then coax the offspring to grow and thrive. The last thing he wants during this time is for the adults to start mating again.

If his walk-in chiller breaks down, there could be a real problem. Adult snails mating off schedule can disrupt everything. They could negatively affect the crop in the long run. What that farmer needs is emergency refrigeration from Icecool Trailers.

We take extraordinary pride in our emergency service across the Greater London area. We can have a unit dispatched to the customer's location usually within an hour or two within our main service area. Same-day or next-day delivery is available throughout most of the rest of southern England and South Wales.

We never quite know what we are getting ourselves into when a customer contacts us for the first time. We might provide a walk-in-chiller for a turkey farmer or a refrigerated trailer for a biomedical company. One of these days we might even get a call from a snail farmer who needs to keep his snails on ice.

Got questions? Call 01635 250 950 or send us a message