BY ABBY FOX

When you lose your job as a production manager at a printing company and your brother doesn’t want to work in the mortgage business anymore, what do you do? The answer for Lucia and Tom Asprinio was to start a chocolate business.

Last year, this brother-and-sister-team was inspired to put the chocolate-peanut-pretzel-raisin chunks their mother made for them growing up in East Greenwich, into a product for sale. A year ago, Lucia said, she would say: “Sell it? We don’t have time to sell it!” Then, she said, they had the time.

“It’s mom’s candy, but we tweaked it a little bit,” Tom explained. They named it “Rhode Island Rocks,” started shipping in April and now it’s available in more than 30 stores, such as Whole Foods, and most locally, Chef-a-Roni on Rt. 2.

Lucia Asprinio was let go in December, when her company in Milford, Mass., where she had worked for 21 years, closed. “It was kind of a drag,” she said. But the day after her last day of work, her mother broke her neck and needed home care, and she decided: “this is a blessing in disguise,” and started taking this chocolate business plan more seriously. “Sometimes, things happen for a reason,” she said.

As for her brother, he said he “was so sick” of working at Wells Fargo, that “it was time” to do something else. “So many people wait for something to happen; you have to take the bull by the horns and do it,” he said. Tom, now an Exeter resident, is the vocal seller for Rhode Island Rocks, while his quieter sister works on the book-work, back-end of things.

“You just got to get people to try your product; you’ve got to hand out the samples,” he said. “You can’t be shy. I tell everyone, everywhere, what I do,” to the point, they agreed, where family and friends tease him about it. But talking works, he said, with people saying things like: “Hope you’re happy; I’m addicted now!” – as one woman put it to him in Whole Foods the other day. He said he likes to tell people that “you can eat a whole bag without batting an eyelash.”

The Asprinios, who grew up in Tanglewood, were two of five children; all boys except Lucia. She graduated from East Greenwich High School in 1980 and he in 1970. Their mother, also named Lucia, “would make chocolate on special occasions,” daughter Lucia remembered. “Cooking was her joy: to cook for people and bring it to them.” It’s kind of fitting, then, that they’d take up her recipe. “Candy takes people back to a time when they were younger and things were simpler,” he said. “It’s a nostalgic thing; it brings you back to when you were a kid.”

Though they fondly remember their mother making this treat and agreed “it’s fun” to be doing it as adults, Lucia was quick to add that “this is not a hobby” and “hopefully, this is going to sustain us.” With more chocolate planned by year’s end, they said, they’re working hard to meet that goal.

And as for 84-year-old mother, who reports she’s recovering well from her accident, “she’s getting a kick out of it,” her son said. “I’m very proud of them,” she said over the phone, after the interview with her children.