At a quick count Ashburton has around a dozen opportunities to stop, nibble and drink, with more about to join the throng and the question on the old hands’ minds is – ‘how many is too many…”

 Ask retiring café owner Rebecca Driscoll, and she’ll say we’re there, more than there.

 “People think this is an easy way to make money – it’s not. The number of coffee drinkers is not really growing. If we have more cafes then there’s less business there for each one.”

 She’s been Lunch Café owner for seven years. They’ve been good years, but each year she’s watched new players enter the field and with some cafes she’s seen ownership change more than once.

 In those seven years, at a quick count, Rebecca says two cafes and a couple of pubs have been added to the mix; with at least another two cafes undergoing a complete metamorphosis.

 And she knows about changing ownership; last week she handed over the reins of Lunch to new owner Vicki Waaka.

 Lunch is now Nosh.

 Like many in the industry, Vicki has been around the traps, moving from cafe to cafe.

 Better offers, better hours, they’re both enough to tempt the handful of top performers whose skill in the kitchen or behind the coffee machine set them apart.

 Before she decided to buy in to the cafe culture, she’d packed away plenty of years of experience in bars, cafes, and with food formal and casual.

 Another long-timer on the cafe scene, Kim Baynes, knows first hand how tough the business can be.

 She’s been the brains behind Taste Cafe for just over three years. She’s had great staff join her team, she’s trained them into her way of doing things and like every cafe owner, she’s watched another cafe owner lure them away. But your staff are your cafe, Kim says, and finding the right mix of attitude, skill and personality is tough.

 “In the hospitality trade people move around, that’s the nature of the industry and the nature of the people working in it.”

 To her, the key factor in the success of any cafe is the old real estate maxim – location, location, location.

 If you’re in the right spot and you’re good at what you do, then while it won’t be easy making a dollar, you’ve got every advantage, Kim said.

 And then there’s Christine Harper, she’s the brains behind the latest cafe, Salads and More, to open its doors. It opened this week and she’s coming at the business from a different angle.

 While her shop front might be new, she’s no newcomer to food having established a big network around Canterbury for her gluten-free products.

 The market might be rich with cafes, but it’s all about finding a point of difference, she said.

 As Ashburton’s cafe culture continues to expand and to all appearances, to thrive, the experts around New Zealand are claiming restaurants and cafes are the unsung victims of the recession.

 They’re saying the public is closing its wallet on spending on discretionary things such as coffee and cafe food and that means the cafes are being foced to become leaner and to run tighter ships if they want to stay in business.

 Clearly in Ashburton, cafe owners and potential cafe owners are thumbing their noses at the doomsayers.

 Business, while it might not be easy, is clearly still good – good enough to keep those in the business in business and good enough to attract new players.

 Cafes now also face competition, not just from one another, but also from a raft of players who view coffee as a sideline, rather than their main business.

 Where once coffee was the domain of a café, there are now opportunities to grab a brew on the run from service stations, the odd dairy and most pubs as well.

 And some of what they’re turning out is more than halfway decent.

 The opportunities to sip, sup and spend a little time do not end in Ashburton either.

 Rakaia has a couple of cafes and a service station offering a caffeine fix and Methven outdoes itself with opportunities to catch a coffee addict.

 And then there’s the price. Regardless of how you like it – strong, weak, milky or mysteriously black, the quality may vary, but the one constant is the price – it just keeps climbing.

 Increasing the price of a long black from $3 to $3.50 and then $4.

 And that’s the one factor the cafe owners have little control over, the rising price of raw ingredients.