Fiona Uyema is on a mission to introduce Irish households to Japanese flavours. Starting with her own family.

“My mother has my glorious ginger (soy sauce) with spuds,” smiles the farmers’ daughter behind the Fused range, which recently launched in supermarkets nationwide and is the latest chapter in the former tax consultant’s journey since she changed careers after overcoming cancer.

One of five girls raised on a sheep farm in Lorrha in north Tipperary, run by her parents Ann and Eugene Mahon, Fiona jokes that she initially planned to follow a very different path.

“When I was very young I wanted to be a vet, just from growing up on a farm, but that quickly changed (during transition year) after two weeks up the mountains tagging calves,” she laughs.

An interest that never wavered, however, was in Asian culture, which she attributes to books that she read as a young girl, as well as the fact that her sister worked as a child minder for a Chinese family at one stage.

“I just found it fascinating that it was so different,” she explains; so much so that when it came to filling out her CAO form, she opted for international marketing and Japanese in DCU, despite the fact that she did not speak a word of the language.

"I just decided: ‘This could be an absolute disaster or I could love it, so I’m going to take the chance,’” she recalls.

One of the main reasons that Fiona chose the course was for the opportunity to spend her third year in Japan, while living with a local family in a “homestay” arrangement.

As well as improving her language skills, however, the experience proved to be the start of her love affair with Japanese food – though she admits that it took time to adjust to new flavours in dishes like miso soup, ramen, teriyaki or katsu curry, especially when leftovers from dinner often re-appeared for breakfast.

“Once I actually made Irish stew just to help out for dinner and when I woke up at 6am … I was like: ‘Oh God!’” she laughs.

“Even though I didn’t realise it at the time, that was the start of my journey.”

A journey that took a twist after Fiona met her future husband, Gilmar Uyema, during her placement, and returned again to Japan after graduating to teach English as a foreign language for two years as part of the JET programme.

This time around, she was living in a very rural village in a rice-producing region, but once again found her way through food after some farmers in the area took her under their wing.

“They’d drop local vegetables at my door,” she explains.

“So I ended up thinking: ‘Okay, I have this local veg, I don’t know what to do with it,’ so I started asking them: ‘How do I cook with this?’ So it was their recipes – these older ladies – and they taught me probably everything I knew when leaving.

"At the time I hadn’t realised it was what I wanted to do with my life. I was still on that journey that I was going to go back and work in business and use my Japanese.”

Overcoming cancer

Indeed, on her return to Ireland, Fiona qualified as a tax consultant and worked in business, going back and forth to Japan.

The course of her life was changed, however, in 2008 when she found herself floored by a range of symptoms including lower back pain, bloating and a complete lack of energy.

“I was tired after work and I was cancelling going out with my friends. I was in my mid-20s, so it didn’t really make sense,” she explains.

“But I’d had a lot of back pain and I was going back and forth to the doctor and he was like: ‘Oh you have sciatica, here’s some anti-inflammatories.’ But it got so bad I was like: ‘I can’t accept this.’ It was really impacting my everyday life.”

It was actually Fiona’s mother who initially suggested that she might have a cyst and urged her to ask her doctor to refer her for a scan.

“He was actually quite reluctant. He didn’t think there was any need,” she recalls, but the scan soon revealed something a lot more sinister at play: ovarian cancer.

“He actually nearly fell off his chair because the tumour was so large,” Fiona says simply.

While surgery was soon scheduled to remove the tumour, it was still a “very scary time” for the young woman.

“At one point, they found a mark on my lung and they thought it had spread,” says Fiona, though fortunately this turned out to be a false alarm.

However, she still had to endure three months in and out of hospital receiving three different types of chemotherapy.

"Thankfully, because I was young and healthy apart from that, I could take it, but it was very aggressive,” she explains of the treatment, which also had an impact on her appetite and what foods she could tolerate.

“I used to cry when I’d hear the hospital trolley coming, because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to eat what was on offer,” she recalls, but what she soon discovered was that she could manage Japanese-style food.

"My husband used to come in every night with a Japanese bento for me – a packed lunch with rice, fish and vegetables – and that’s what I would be looking forward to all day,” she continues.

“So I suppose with that connection, I kind of felt Japanese food was going to heal me too and it got me through the chemo, so I continued then to eat primarily a Japanese diet and we still do today.”

Thankfully, Fiona has gone on to enjoy a successful recovery, and is especially thankful that she was able to have her two boys, Scott (seven) and Matthew (four).

“We thought that might never happen because the chemo was so aggressive,” she explains.

However, her cancer experience also had another outcome and that was in giving her the courage to pursue a career in food.

“There’s no doubt that had a massive impact on my decision to follow what I was really passionate about and to work on a job that I wake up in the morning and love,” she says. “But I did it with small steps.”

Fused by Fiona

While Fiona went back to the business world in 2009, she began teaching Japanese cooking classes in her spare time, as well as starting her own blog.

“I suppose the cookbook then was a turning point,” she says of Japanese Food Made Easy, which was published in 2015 and which gave her the final push to pursue her passion full-time, even if it seemed like a big risk.

"People were like: ‘You’ve got such a great job.’ And I did,” she acknowledges. “(But) I’d kind of come to the realisation that you don’t have to have one career in your life: that you can actually have lots of careers and it’s not a bad thing.”

In fact, Fiona feels that it was her experience as a teacher and a tax consultant that laid the foundations for Fused – her own range of store cupboard essentials for cooking Japanese or Asian food at home.

Starting with a trio of naturally brewed soy sauces – “clever classic”, “glorious ginger” and “cheeky chilli” – with no added sugar, artificial preservatives or additives, Fiona developed the original recipes at home, before starting small-batch production by renting a commercial kitchen from the Mountmellick Development Association in Co Laois, with early support from her Local Enterprise Office.

Customers, including SuperValu, Avoca, Ardkeen and James Whelan butcher, soon came on board to support the product, which Fiona explains is extremely versatile, whether used as a condiment like salt and pepper, or in a marinade or stir-fry.

Just before Christmas, however, she took the range to the next level by adding two new products – a sweet chilli and a teriyaki stir-fry sauce – with the support of Dunnes Stores.

“Fused launched in Dunnes alongside the fishmonger counters to bring a new and exciting offering to customers looking for cooking inspiration with fish and seafood,” explains Fiona.

“It was really enjoyable to be able to use my learnings from living in Japan and bring this into one of Ireland’s largest retailers. The feedback from Dunnes customers has been overwhelmingly positive.”

Sometimes people say the biggest challenge when you’re running your own business is managing yourself

With the range also launching into Tesco stores nationwide, it’s a busy time for Fused. To meet this new demand, Fiona has had to temporarily outsource production to a factory in the UK, but is currently in negotiations with a factory in Ireland to bring Fused back home in 2019.

“We moved to the UK because we weren’t large enough for a partnership in Ireland, but now that the business has scaled, we hope to return to Ireland to work with a production partner here, hopefully by the end of 2019,” she explains. “I’m passionate about returning production to Ireland: that’s a priority for me.”

In addition to running Fused, Fiona also regularly collaborates with bodies, including Bord Bia, does consultancy work with restaurants and continues to host private classes and demo at food festivals.

While she plans to take on a staff member this year to help her run her growing business, one of the biggest challenges remains striving for a healthy work-life balance.

“Sometimes people say the biggest challenge when you’re running your own business is managing yourself, because I could work 24 hours in a day and I’ve two small kids, so it’s really just managing myself and saying: ‘Okay you just have to walk away from that now,’” she says.

As for advice to others who wish to make a change in 2019 – no matter what that might be – Fiona believes in the power of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.

“Not everyone is going to go from being a tax consultant to running their own food business, but it’s about getting out of your comfort zone,” she says, adding that we should not be afraid to embrace change.

“It does take courage,” she concludes, “but if you do, the sky is the limit.”