The owners of Black Dinah Chocolatiers have chosen a new name: Ragged Coast Chocolates.

Kate Shaffer, who co-owns the Westbrook-based company with her husband, Steve Shaffer, announced in June that in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, they would be changing the company’s name. Black Dinah is the name of a mountain on the island of Isle au Haut, where the company was founded. But the name also was used as a generic term for Black female slaves.

“I have always imagined that if Black Dinah Mountain was named for an actual person or persons, she was strong and powerful and wise,” Shaffer wrote on social media in June. “But I’m beginning to understand that it is not my place, nor the place of my brand – perceived or actual – to use her name …for profit or to push my own unrelated agenda.”

The name change is also about trying to launch a local business into the national market. The Shaffers say they had been considering renaming their brand since 2015 because they were constantly having to explain the company’s name.

The Shaffers teamed with Toderico Creative, a Portland-based design company, to come up with a new logo, which features the puffin, a seabird that nests off the coast of Maine. As part of the rebranding, Ragged Coast Chocolates has partnered with Friends of Maine Coastal Island National Wildlife Refuge in a fundraising campaign that will benefit the group’s work to conserve nesting sites in Maine. The chocolatier will produce a limited edition gift set containing chocolates, a T-shirt and a map of Maine’s seabird nesting islands.

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