EASTPORT – Each year they go for the gold, and again this year Raye’s Mustard walked away with the coveted gold medal at the 2008 World-Wide Mustard Competition in Napa Valley, Calif.

Raye’s famous Down East Schooner Mustard is the proud recipient.

Karen, 42, and Kevin Raye, 47, own the fourth-generation Eastport business.

The medal will be presented at a March 14 ceremony in Napa Valley.

This is not the first time the famous little mustard company’s classic yellow has won. It also won gold medals in 2006, 2002, 1999 and 1998.

The World-Wide Mustard Competition is held annually with the world’s leading mustards competing for honors. Last year, Raye’s won the gold medal for outstanding labeling and packaging for its distinctive birch bark rolls of mustard. In all, Raye’s has won more than 40 prestigious national and international awards at Napa Valley and elsewhere in the past few years. The company produces more than 20 varieties of mustard.

The award comes just as the couple is planning to debut its Down East Schooner squeeze bottles at the Maine Restaurant and Lodging Expo in Portland in April, Raye’s distribution manager Gerald Greenlaw said in a press release. “With Maine producing the world’s best classic yellow mustard, we hope every Maine restaurant will consider it a must to feature it.”

It has been a banner few years for the company, which is the nation’s only remaining traditional stone-ground mustard mill.

Last year it received national attention in the November issue of O, the magazine that carries the name of Chicago talk maven Oprah Winfrey.

That same year, Raye’s Mustard Mill was featured in a three-page spread in the May issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine. And later it appeared on Stewart’s television show as part of “Martha Must-Haves: Favorites from Maine.”

The mill also was selected as Editors’ Choice in the 2007 special travel issue of Yankee magazine.

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