Yum, chocolate: is there any substance more synonymous with willful self-indulgence? Yet recent studies have shown it has health effects – and thanks to John and Kira Doyle, now it also has positive social ramifications.

John & Kira's is a Pennsylvania-based company that manufatures high-end chocolates. But instead of a fussily-decorated cardboard, these arrive in a simple pine box adorned with the loveliest of bows, stamped and sealed with wax. Inside lie not the usual drunken cherries or buttercremes, but fresh and fascinating concoctions of lavender, ginger, fresh mint, lemongrass, bergamot… the list is long and eyebrow-raising. The taste isn't traditional, but surprising and fresh.

Most importantly, the company imbues both its chocolates and its business plans with a generous dollop of social responsibility. They get their mint by starting and utilizing school-run urban city gardens. The fruits, honey and nuts used in the chocolates are locally-produced by small farmers as much as possible; when ingredients such as ginger and coffee must come from farther afield, they are still produced in small batches from cooperative farms.

Jon and Kira's mission is to make people happy – by feeding them or by supporting their farms, either way works. LIME sat down with John Doyle for a mixed assortment of tasty questions and answers.

LIME: How did you find your way to chocolate, and then to sustainable chocolate?

Jon Doyle: In college, I went to Paris, took the Food Lover's Guide to Paris to the chocolate and cheese shops and sampled everything. Later, I spend a year living in Siena, Italy while I got a masters in Italian Lit and Art History. When I came home, I got a job as an analyst at Donaldson Lufkin and Jenrette, and did not like it. So I spent three months working for free as a line cook in a restaurant in Chelsea, where a friend was head chef. I loved cooking and I saw that I was able to fine-tune plates and flavors in plates so that they tasted really, really good. I knew I had a good palate and a knack for cooking. But I hated the flashy, sexy aspect of the chi-chi Manhattan scene.

LIME: And you fled New York.

Doyle: I'd heard about a woman who runs a restaurant in Philadelphia, Judy Licks. The White Dog Café combines local food and community activism, all funneled through her restaurant. I thought the idea was cool, so I drove down to Philly on a day off, got a job as a business manager with her, and worked there for about a year. I met all the farmers who bring their produce through the back door of the White Dog. My mind was spinning with business ideas that had to do with food. I was determined to find a business that I could start from scratch and that would use local farmers.

LIME: And you finally settled on chocolate.

Doyle: Right. What Starbucks did for coffee, what Ben and Jerry's did for ice cream, I wanted to do with… something. I rented a car and toured college towns, looking for new food ideas, and came across Burdick Chocolates in Cambridge, Mass., and Lake Champlaign Chocolates in Burlington, VT. I thought, wouldn't it be cool to create the kinds of chocolates I tasted in Paris, but make them fresh, here in the States, incorporating the fruits and herbs and berries and cream that the farmers here, in the Delaware Valley, could produce.

LIME: So how did you acquire your sweet chocolate-making skills?

Doyle: I apprenticed with a few different chocolatiers. At the time, Kira was my girlfriend, and over a year and a half she and I launched the company. We thought we'd grow slowly.

LIME: But the provident palate of Ruth Reichl intervened.

Doyle: Yes – we did a slow-food tasting for a bunch of freelancers, plus Ruth Reichl [former restaurant critic for the New York Times, author of Tender at the Bone, and editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine]. She loved them and put them on the cover of Gourmet in February of 2003.

LIME: So much for slow food.

Doyle: It was mind-boggling. Suddenly Williams-Sonoma called, Whole Foods called, thousands of individuals called, and since then all kinds of fortuitous things have happened. In February of 2005, we were ranked #1 out of 25 in Consumer Reports.

LIME: Well, is that luck, or a measure of your quality?

Doyle: Good point. I think it validated the phenomenal amount of attention we put into our chocolates. We make about ten different flavors, and make sure they are the best that can be made.

LIME: Besides the local food aspect, there's the social programs. How does that happen?

Doyle: Kira has a Master's degree in education from Penn, and is working toward her Ph.D. But with an unbelievably cute 17-month-old baby to care for, there's only so much she can do. Still, she sets up the relationships with the kids and the social programs.

We're working with two mint gardens, one here in Philadelphia and one in Chicago, which we're helping to build now. Last year we had two graduates of our Philadelphia mint-garden program work with us as interns and hope to do that again this year. We bring the kids in to see what happens to the mint after they grow it, show them how the circle completes itself.

And we have a project called The Chocolate Bus. Kira noticed that a lot of the kids in the public-school system don't have the $8 a head or whatever it costs for their class to take a field trip, so we fund about two field trips per semester for schoolkids.