When Robin Jenkins married her husband, Mark, a family friend handed down the recipe for her legendary chocolate sauce.

“She made a big thing out of giving it to me,” Robin recalled. “She gave it to me in a pewter serving dish as a wedding gift. And she very pointedly said, ‘You’re going to make something of this some day.'”

Robin’s response?

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

As it turns out, the idea wasn’t as far-fetched as it seemed. Today, Robin’s Chocolate Sauce – a velvety mixture of organic chocolate and vanilla, Aroostook County cream and Vermont butter – is gaining a reputation among cocoa connoisseurs and plain old sweet tooths throughout Maine.

It’s a quick, homemade dessert that busy people can just pop in the microwave. Thirty seconds later, they have fondue for pound cake and berries, or an ice cream topping, or something to dip bananas in before freezing them. One of her customers spreads the sauce on rounds of French bread and eats them while sipping a glass of Bordeaux.

It started humbly enough. While her sons, Graham and Chris, now 15 and 17, were growing up, Jenkins would make “the chocolate cure” whenever they were sick. During the holidays, she also made batches of the sauce for the boys’ teachers and coaches in Wayne, near Augusta.

“It’s definitely been a staple for our family,” she said.

When the family moved to Fort Fairfield in 2000, Mark went to work as the high school principal. And Robin, who also teaches special education at the elementary school, had visions of selling her chocolate sauce. When she found out the small-business incubator at Loring Applied Technology Center in Limestone had one of the state’s only food-processing facilities, she knew it was time. Production started last summer.

“At that time, I knew absolutely nothing about what we’re into now,” Robin said, sitting in the Spartan office area of her suite at Loring.

For starters, she thought she’d cook the sauce on a stove top.

“Yeah, right,” she says now, laughing.

It quickly became apparent that she needed a large steam kettle, giant paddles and a way to chip away at the slabs of chocolate she buys.

But more important issues arose when she found out there’s more to the cocoa industry than meets the eye. Jenkins has always tried to use natural and minimally processed ingredients in her cooking, and when her research turned up not-so-sweet details about the chocolate trade, she decided to do something about it.

“We had heard reports of child slavery in chocolate plantations in Africa, which is where most of [the United States’] cocoa comes from. … We didn’t want any part of this child slavery or anything like that, so we researched it. We found out about Transfair,” she said.

Transfair was formed in 1992 to support disadvantaged producers in Africa, Asia and Latin America through fair trade practices, including livable wages and good working conditions.

“Many people nowadays are calling it the ‘socially conscious’ frame of reference,” Jenkins said. “To us, it means that we do not want to do any harm in the process of doing business; and if possible, we want to help improve the health of the environment and the economic situation for the farmers who grow the cocoa through the promotion of fairly traded consumer goods.”

Though Robin’s sauce is not certified fair trade because of labeling complexities, the dark chocolate and chocolate liquor she uses come from fair-trade collectives. She is working with her supplier to find a fair-trade alternative, and once she does, she plans to either adapt her recipe or add another sauce to her line.

“It is very good cocoa,” Jenkins said, unwrapping a block of striated chocolate that looks like a sedimentary boulder. “If we can’t do it with this cocoa, we’ll simply buy another one and do both. I’d like to see the fair trade market grow here as it has in Canada and especially Europe.”

The vanilla and cane sugar she uses are certified organic. Her cream and butter come from cows that aren’t injected with the controversial recombinant bovine growth hormone. And the cocoa used to make the chocolate is both organic and shade grown.

Though farmers who grow cocoa under a canopy of trees have lower yields, “traditional organic shade-grown cocoa plantations benefit endangered birds. They also form buffer zones around remaining swathes of rainforest protecting those areas from further harm,” according to a report in the UK Newsquest Regional Press.

“When they cut down trees, it adds to global warming … and it affects our birds,” Robin said. “We’ve had a decrease in species. There’s a lack of areas for them to go; the rain forest is now patches. With commodities like coffee and chocolate, organic and fair trade are helping to promote reforestation.”

That reforestation has a wide-ranging impact. The birds that are faltering in the rainforest are the same birds that stop at our backyard feeders for a winter snack. They come north to breed, then they head south.

“I think it’s marvelous to know all this stuff now that I never used to know,” Jenkins said. “I see the connection.”

For Jenkins, it’s fine if business is going to the birds. Her packaging is emblazoned with a red-breasted robin (which, incidentally, is not one of the endangered migratory birds). She prepares the sauce in large batches and hordes it, but if her business takes flight, she plans to turn it out full time.

“We’re quite committed to it, and it’s been a lot of fun,” said Jenkins. “This is our opportunity to do it in the best way we know.”

Robin’s Chocolate Sauce costs $5.99 for an 11-ounce jar, and is available at Graves’ Shop ‘n Save supermarkets in Presque Isle, Camden, Hampden, Bar Harbor and Dover-Foxcroft; The Store-Ampersand in Orono; and Whole Grocer in Portland. Kristen Andresen can be reached at 990-8287 and kandresen@bangordailynews.net.