Jada Chasse’s favorite part of her budding business in Hodgdon is licking all of the batter from the bowls when she’s finished making her batches of cookies.
That’s according to Jada’s mom, Sarah Chasse, who along with her 8-year-old daughter just started Shiretown Sweets & Treats at the end of May.
It’s the family’s third business, joining her dad’s small batch coffee roaster, Shiretown Coffee Roasters, and alongside her brothers’ egg-selling venture, James and Jo Co. This Hodgdon family of eight is busy juggling the ins and outs of three budding home-based businesses while dad Jeremiah Chasse is also the pastor of Shiretown Baptist Church in Houlton.
The Chasses join a growing number of homemade food and artisan businesses in rural Hodgdon, a food sovereign Aroostook County town. And with the 2024 expansion of Maine’s Food Sovereignty Act and the passage of a local ordinance, unlicensed food creators can sell their goods face-to-face at roadside stands, community markets and events.
Hodgdon officials unanimously passed the ordinance in 2023.
The Chasses’ stand is open every Saturday with fresh baked cookies and newly roasted coffee. The eggs — a business overseen by James, 11, and Josias, 10 — are not at the stand and instead sold to regular customers.
The family’s foray into home businesses started about two years ago, when Jeremiah started experimenting with roasting coffee beans after he tried coffee from a friend who was roasting his own.
“It was really good,” he said. “I made it for myself and Sarah and then some friends wanted to try some and it grew organically from there.”
Unlike Portland, there are barely a handful of coffee roasters in northern Maine. And once word spread about the local roaster, who does not advertise, business really picked up, he said.
“Coffee like this is so much different from what you get in a store,” Jeremiah said. “Mass market coffee has been on the shelf anywhere from six months to a year and ours was roasted a few days ago. The freshness is our biggest selling point.”
He gets green coffee beans from an online supplier, selecting varieties by their flavor notes, he said.
Often where the beans are grown affect their flavor. Kenyan coffee beans, for example, have orange flavor notes, he said.
His most popular blends are The County Blend, a medium roast with a dark chocolate and raw sugar flavor, and Border Blend, a dark roast made from Guatemalan beans. It’s been difficult to get Guatemalan beans recently, he said.
“Different beans and different blends have different flavor notes,” he said. “We don’t do any infusing, the bean is the flavor. And also how long you roast it, draws out different flavors.”
The coffee roaster is a special popcorn popper with a metal coffee sleeve inserted. As the coffee beans roast they shed a chaff, and then when the beans are done roasting he puts them into a special container with a fan to cool them.
“If you don’t cool it down properly, that affects the taste as well,” he said. “You have to go from hot to cool pretty quickly and then chaff it some more by moving it with a spoon.”
Jada and Sarah’s Sweets & Treats business got started when Sarah thought that Jada might like to have a business like her brothers.
“I thought it would be fun to have something that she can make money on the side,” Sarah said, adding it would also be a good learning experience for Jada.
The pair will be offering fresh homemade cookies for weekend pickup and local delivery.
“This week we have classic chocolate chip, cookies and cream funfetti with white chocolate chips, and a chocolate base with peanut butter chips,” Sarah said. “We’ve also done snickerdoodles and peanut butter blossoms.”
The children’s businesses are a way to teach responsibility, how to make money, profit and loss.
“I’m not just buying the stuff for their business and they are profiting 100%. It is a good learning experience.”
With the 15 chickens, the boys have to give half of what they made back to the chickens for food and hay. The other half of the money goes to them and they split it.
And last spring they had a hard lesson and business setback after weasels found their way into the coop and they had to start over with 15 new chickens.
They hope to expand, but need a bigger building to do that,” Sarah said.
“We want our kids to be the best that they can be for the glory of God,” Jeremiah said. “And we want them to be good stewards of their money and learn how to save.”
To purchase coffee or cookies from the Chasses, their Calais Road stand is open from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays or reach out on Facebook.
