This year is the tenth anniversary of Green & Black's Maya Gold, the world's first organic chocolate bar and the first product to be awarded the Fairtrade mark.

Linda McCartney swore the dark chocolate was the best way to make brownies and bars of Green & Black can be seen in the shopping baskets of ethical consumers and chocaholics. Lilly Peel met the couple behind the company.

When Craig Sams and Jo Fairley started Green & Blacks in 1991, most people had barely heard of organic food, let alone embraced it.

In fact it was not just their organic outlook which was different.

They paid more than the world price for their cocoa beans, gave the Mayan Indian farmers in Belize long-term contracts and built up a relationship with the tribe.

Their actions won them ethical awards, the first Fairtrade mark and established a blueprint for socially responsible business which many big companies strive towards today.

Jo said: "We didn't think we were doing anything weird. We just thought it was the way you should do business.

"We offered a premium for organic beans, gave the farmers the security of long-term contracts and paid them up front because we also needed that security. At a time when organic cocoa wasn't traded anywhere on the world markets, we needed to be sure of a supply."

It was a blessing for the independent Fairtrade Foundation, which until then had failed to find a product which met the stringent criteria for its launch ten years ago.

When Craig and Jo first met the Maya Indians, the children there left school at 11. Now because of the secure income from Green & Blacks they go to secondary school and even university.

There are now 140 Fairtrade products available.

The impetus for an organic dark chocolate with 70 per cent cocoa solids initially came from Craig.

As a macrobiotic chocolate lover he had been trying to develop a chocolate with no sugar.

He said: "I'd been looking for organic peanuts when I came across the Maya. I had never seen cocoa pods growing on trees and I didn't realise they grew under a rain forest canopy.

"I went back to the hotel and scribbled in my diary my imagined chocolate bar."

However, it was Jo who brought the vision to reality.

She said: "I nagged him to do it. He was preoccupied with doing his Whole Earth health food stuff.

"I found a couple of squares of chocolate on his desk. He said he couldn't do anything because there was sugar in it. But I said, 'This is fantastic. It's the best chocolate I've ever eaten.

"So he said, 'You do it then'.

"I had sold my house before we got married so it was the first time I'd had some proper money."

Maya Gold - a blend of dark chocolate with orange, cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla - was inspired a couple of years later by a return trip to Belize when Craig and Jo drank the Maya's local drink, flavoured with cocoa beans and spices.

The couple met at a party 22 years ago but it took eight years before they got together.

Jo, who was Paula Yates's best friend, said: "I'm not sure if I knew what I was letting myself in for.

"I was writing a green column in The Times. People were becoming aware of recycling, Sting was trying to save the rainforests and you could get the first 100 per cent recycled bin bag. It wasn't sexy but green stuff was really taking off.

"I like to say he turned me organic and I got him into recycling."

The couple's house in Hastings, an old rectory which they moved to from London's trendy Notting Hill two years ago, is a now a temple to organic, recycled living.

In their beautiful garden they grow organic vegetables, the walls are painted with organic paint, the carpet is made of natural fibres and Jo found most of the furniture and pretty patterned crockery in local junk shops or car boot sales.

She even knits her husband jumpers from organic wool.

Until recently Marmite was the only non-organic product in their kitchen - but now even that has been banished.

She said: "We were telephoned by Crazy Jack's, who make an organic yeast spread. I had never found an organic one that was as good as Marmite but this one is. So now absolutely everything is organic."

Their home is a recycler's dream.

Jo said: "Nothing gets out of here. Every last tea leaf and square of cardboard is recycled."

The couple love the good life they have found in Hastings.

Craig said: "We had a weekend house here for years. Gradually the weekends were becoming longer and longer until finally it made sense to move here completely.

"My son, who lives in Brighton with his family, says it would be too quiet for him here. But we love the slower pace. I like the fact it's harder to get to."

Jo, 47, does not seem an obvious organic pioneer, a term which carries connotations of sandal-wearing, muesli-eating hippies.

At 23 she became the youngest women's glossy magazine editor, at the helm of New Look.

But her green mission started in her teens.

She said: "In 1971, when I was 15, my boyfriend gave me a book about recycling. There was a limit to what a schoolgirl could do to change the world.

"I got into trouble for putting bricks in the loo cisterns at school to save water. They regarded it as vandalism."

Craig also has impeccable green credentials. The pioneering businessman, health food lover and now chairman of the Soil Association, has always been years ahead of the game.

Originally from Nebraska, the 59-year-old opened Seed, London's first macrobiotic restaurant in 1967, with his brother Gregory, who went on to invent the veggieburger.

It was a regular hangout for John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Rolling Stones and Terence Stamp.

Three years later the brothers set up Whole Earth Foods, a pioneering organic and macrobiotic food company, known for its excellent organic peanut butter.

He has just launched his Nomato range, a selection of food - baked beans, ketchup, pasta sauce - which taste like tomato but are made from beetroot and carrot.

He said: "I had a sauce like this made from pumpkin back in 1970 but even I knew it was a niche market of about one. Now people realise a tomato-free diet is good for rheumatoid arthritis and reduces inflammation."

It was a bad bout of Delhi belly that led Craig to his macrobiotic diet almost 40 years ago.

He said: "I was on an American equivalent of a gap year, travelling overland to India when I got dysentery and hepatitis. I thought it was all over in Delhi.

"Eventually I made it to Kabul where I lived on unleavened bread and unsweetened tea, which got rid of the dysentery. But it didn't take away the pain in my liver.

"I didn't get better until friends suggested I try a macrobiotic diet.

"Within two weeks I felt completely restored. I have been macrobiotic ever since."

Craig is proud of what Green & Blacks has achieved but modest about his own input.

He said: "Things happen, you know. I wasted a lot of time when I was young surfing.

"You have to watch the waves for a long time to know which one will give you a good ride. Then you have to swim like crazy to ride it in.

"Possibly because of my macrobiotic knowledge I could see those waves coming further away and I was there when they were breaking."