A hundred new farms in the last 12 months, between companies and individuals in Italy and abroad; agreements in view for the construction of large farms in Georgia and Morocco; a plant in Georgia in collaboration with a large Norwegian company specializing in the production and processing of salmon, where snail meat will be processed for the preparation of canned and frozen products to be distributed all over the world. The consolidation and development plan of Lumaca Madonita can be summarized in these three points, the company founded in 2006 in Campofelice di Roccella, in the Palermo area, by Davide Merlino, Michele and Giuseppe Sansone: it was a happy meeting between a family of farmers like the Samsons and a marketing and market expert like Merlin.
Today Snail Madonita, with its 40,000 square meters of land and about 2,000 plots born in collaboration with other Italian and foreign breeders, is the largest open field farm in Italy and manages to market about 200,000 kilograms of gastronomy snails. ‘year.
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“From 2011, the year in which we started the training, design and consultancy activities to date – says Davide Merlino, commercial manager of the company – there are more than two thousand farms that we have started and about 90% of these companies were born in Italy. However, heliciculture represents an attractive possibility also abroad: Serbia, Albania, Croatia, Greece, Ghana, North Africa, Poland, Bulgaria and Georgia. In Georgia, in particular, we are working with the Ministry of Agriculture to launch a consultancy and training project for new breeders, confirming the ever growing interest in this world ». A truly niche sector that of snail breeding but which manages to give an average annual turnover of half a million euros. Potentially among the customers of this type of company there could also be cosmetics companies but, explain the two founders of Snail Madonita, “For the drool there are no major customers in the cosmetic world because the giants do not use products derived from animals” . On the other hand, the project they started is interesting: «We are collaborating with the University of Bologna to create an adhesive film to be used as a healing agent, as a treatment for burns and cellulite» they explain.
In fact, the so-called “Madonita method” has been successful over time, a breeding system judged versatile and adaptable to all climatic and territorial realities developed by Merlino and the Sansone brothers. “Our breeding system – explain the two founders – unlike the old method that was used in Italy, manages to bring income from the first year of production because our production cycle needs only 9 months, compared to 2-3. years of the old system. We evaluate the degree of humidity of the soil, the slope, the exposure to the sun, the chemical composition of the soil itself, the size of the plot and our model is adaptable to very small farms that do not exceed a thousand square meters to others very extended up to 50 thousand square meters. We explain how to work the land, how to manage the breeding. These elements have made the difference on the market, allowing us to become one of the leading Italian companies in the sector ».