What is a snail’s life cycle?

Snails are hermaphrodites, and they lay eggs. Once they go into their breeding season, they’ll bury their eggs into the dirt, two inches or so, and deposit the eggs out of this hole in the back of their neck. The clutch is 50 to 100 eggs. They’ll come back out of the hole and cover it up with the dirt and some mucus and they’re done. There’s no mothering instinct, they don’t hang out and wait for the eggs to hatch. In about two weeks, the baby snails will crawl up out of the soil.

What do you feed snails? Does the diet affect their flavor?

The terroir greatly affects the flavor. We’ve got Long Island soil in the bins and they eat the dirt to build their shells. We actually grind up the old shells from snails that we have processed and mix it with the soil because it’s a great calcium supplement.

In the spring through the fall we do a lot of foraging. We’ll go out and pick dandelion and mugwort and burdock and clover and all of these wild greens in the nearby woods and that’s what we’re feeding them.

And when they are ready for processing, we move them off the dirt and go into empty bins and they just eat herbs and some spent grain from Greenport Harbor Brewery. It’s malted barley that we grind to a fine flour and we finish them on that. It purges their digestive system and lends a kind of nutty toastiness to the herbaceous flavor. We are selling the entire animal, like an oyster or a clam.

Did you think about selling them already cooked?

When we started this business, we planned to sell them cooked, by the pound. And then we saw the finished product. I was holding this sad-looking cooked snail and I thought, “This is not good.” If I was a chef, and this is what someone was bringing to me, I wouldn’t be happy with this. So we had to re-evaluate the whole thing and figure out how to process them raw.

I assume they are not alive when they are delivered.

Our devitalization process is proprietary so I can’t really discuss it, but it is very humane.