Times are so tough that professional thieves are now diversifying into… popping shells for holiday snail meat.

Le vol d’escargots à grande échelle reste rarissime en France. Le dernier remonte à décembre 2024, quand des malfrats avaient opéré en Haute-Savoie pour voler près de 2 500 escargots cuisinés. « C’est un phénomène assez rare, car nous ne sommes que 300 producteurs en France. Mais en période de crise ça risque d’être de plus en plus fréquent », craint déjà Jean-Mathieu Dauvergne.

Gastropod extraction is for “butter times”, as in flush times, prosperity, the good life that premium French escargots represent. These aren’t hard times for everyone; someone’s sitting on 90,000 snails for Christmas dinners.

The security angle practically writes itself: agricultural supply chain vulnerabilities, the inadequacy of perimeter security for high-value seasonal inventory, the information asymmetry between a 25-year producer with “une petite notoriété” and criminals who can identify, target, and extract before anyone notices.

Dauvergne’s post-incident camera installation is the classic barn-door-after-the-snails-left response, where snails move at 0.03 mph and still got away.

There’s also something deeply poetic about Champagne country full of bottles worth hundreds of euros sitting in caves idly while the unassuming snail farmer gets hit instead. These thieves read the security landscape and found the soft, juicy target with comparable per-kilo holiday theft value.

The Pink Panthers hitting Cartier on Place Vendôme and this crew raiding a cold storage unit in Bouzy share the same threat modeling: reconnaissance, timing, speed, and a pre-arranged market. You don’t steal 450 kg of processed snail meat on spec any more than you grab Napoleon’s smelly blood diamonds hoping to figure out a buyer later.