Former city dwellers Matt Dunnicliff and Tracey Gunn, with their daughter Mackenzie (2), have relocated to Twizel where they are preparing to open a small artisan cheese factory, Ben Ohau Road Cheese.
Visitors will be able to watch cheese being made by hand and have cheese tastings and there will also be a cafe, The Rusty Halo, on the site.
For Ms Gunn, who was a finalist in last year's television series of MasterChef New Zealand, it is a return to her roots, because she grew up in the hydro town.
The couple are both passionate about food, yet their career paths, until now, have taken different routes. Mr Dunnicliff worked in radio broadcasting and his wife in medical laboratories.
They bought some land five minutes west of Twizel about seven or eight years ago, deciding to purchase while property was still a reasonable price. They thought they would figure out what to do with it later.
They knew they would not be in Auckland forever and they would eventually head back south. It was a matter of what they should do and when they should do it.
They tossed around various ideas, including running a bed and breakfast, but cheese eventually took over, and they moved south before Christmas last year.
Mr Dunnicliff has been making cheese for about six years.
A magazine article about cheese-making originally whetted their interest. "The next thing you know we were at home trying to make cheese," Mr Dunnicliff said.
While those first attempts were an "absolute shambles", they could not stop trying. Mr Dunnicliff did a short course in Auckland and that was the start of "feverishly making cheese".
At the New Zealand Champions of Cheese Awards in 2008, they won a silver medal for a soft cheese and a bronze medal for a firm cheese.
They did not just want to copy cheese but also create their own cheese and that was what they were aiming for in Twizel - creating regional cheeses.
The couple were waiting for a shipping container to be converted for the cheese factory and placed on the site. They hoped to open the factory before Christmas.
The couple planned to use sustainable energy - mostly solar power, with some wind - and as much recycled material as possible.
In the meantime, Ms Gunn has been working in the kitchen at the Mackenzie Country Inn, a job she said she would never have got if it had not been for the MasterChef experience.
She had a longtime interest in food, and her friends and family told her she was a good cook, so she entered the competition to see if it was true.
She looked back on the experience with "some pretty good memories", but at the time she was "absolutely terrified".
One of the judges, Ray McVinnie, was a referee on her curriculum vitae.
"I thought that was pretty cool," she said.
To secure a cooking job and be working in a kitchen while the cheese factory was getting established was "perfect".
The couple wanted to keep the cheese business small, making a maximum of about 50kg a day, but they also wanted to do the job well.
"I'm as serious about it as any other cheese-maker in the country," Mr Dunnicliff said.
The site was "just gorgeous", with its mountain views, and was close to the planned Alps 2 Ocean cycleway from Aoraki Mount Cook to the coast.
The couple have already held several cheese-making courses which were fully booked. People were thinking about the price of food and a lot of people were wanting to grow their own produce, something the couple attributed to the advent of farmers markets.
They were also enjoying the new lifestyle in Twizel. While the town had progressed in recent years, it had not become restrictive for people to move there, Mr Dunnicliff said.
"We're loving it, we really are. We just want to get going," he said.
They had been buoyed by the support and interest shown in their venture.
"You'd have to do a pretty bad job to not make it work here, I reckon," he said.
