When life gives you lemons, you should try to use them in your kitchen within a week. Lemons are great with my favorite, simple salad dressing—lemon, olive oil, & salt; they are also generally a good acid to cook with, in everything from chicken dishes to cakes to garnishes. Obviously, you can also make beverages with lemons. If you leave lemons out at room temperature, expect them to last a little over a week before starting to brown and spoil. Refrigerated, however, lemons will last as long as a month. The ideal storage temp for lemons is about 10 degrees celsius. If life has given you an abundance of lemons, you may want to preserve some. I like to slice them thinly and pack them in wide-mouth mason jars with a mixture of 1/2 sugar and 1/2 salt then let cure for at least 1 week before serving. If you still have lemons left over you can give them to friends and family, neighbors, hand them out at church or even set up a “free lemons” stand in front of your home. If after all this you still have lemons, you might want to contact a local farmers’ market or grocer to explore selling them retail. If life happens to have given you organic lemons or even “pesticide-free” lemons, you should be able to fetch a significantly higher price for them (although you will need some sort of certification for the “organic” designation in most locales). If life has given you more lemons than you can unload in the above describe manner, you are now running into a logistics problem. I would try selling them wholesale, but get ready to roll up your sleeves because you will need to establish the necessary relationships, permits, distribution, etc., in a timely manner before your lemons start to rot. As I mentioned above, at this point, it’s going to be critical that your lemons are stored in proper conditions. Refrigerated, windowless trucks are a good option, some cold-storage facilities will have reduced ambient oxygen, which will slow the degradation of the fruit so if you can find such a facility in your area, I would strongly recommend securing space in it. Ultimately, I recommend pricing your lemons very competitively. After all, life has given you these lemons, so your startup costs are null. Don’t get greedy. Remember you are competing with an established cartel of lemon farmers, trucking companies, and major supermarket chains and they won’t have the patience for a new player in the business, so you have to make them an offer they can’t refuse. Sell below prevailing market price. Once you master the wholesale process, you may find yourself in a position where you have saturated the domestic lemon market. If you think you might be able to find customers abroad, it’s time to explore the international market. Initially I would recommend avoiding heavily-regulated markets such as the European Union, Japan, and Korea and avoid trying to import your fruit into nations that are large lemon exporters (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, China and India) because those countries will have trade barriers designed to protect their growers. Target those emerging markets that are going to make you jump through fewer regulatory hoops—Russia, Africa and much of central Asia would be a great starting place. Now pay attention, because if you are still in the game at this point, you’ve got a shot at making some real money. If, after all of this, you find that you still have substantial stores of lemons, there is a good chance that you could actually manipulate world prices. Flood international markets with your lemons! The law of supply and demand comes into play here. You keep unloading those lemons at a bargain-basement price and eventually you are going to put everyone else in the lemon business… out of business. You’re going to start seeing farm foreclosures, liquidation of shipping fleets, piles of lemons being left to rot at custom houses. In short, your competitors are going to be driven into the poor house. At this point you’ll need partnerships. Work with big banks to secure big loans and start snapping up properties, equipment, labelers, warehouses, anything related to the lemon industry that you can get your hands on. And make sure you grease the right palms. Bribe customs officials, lobby for favorable legislation, make big, strategic donations to politicians and political parties, have ambassadors and regulators out on your yacht with their kids. Leave no stone unturned. If you want to maintain your stranglehold on the lemon industry, you are going to need to develop a bulletproof business. Life may have given you lemons, but you need to leverage that gift into a sustainable legacy if you really want to become the lemon tycoon I know you can be. -Misha Collins