Mama Yu: the UK-based chilli oil empire Xiengni Zhou and her mum built from scratch

Despite being raised by parents in the restaurant industry, Xiengni Zhou never imagined she’d one day pursue a career in food. “When I was born, the first building I saw after the hospital was probably the restaurant,” she jokes. The UK-based content creator and co-founder of the Malaysian Chinese chilli oil company Mama Yu took quite a roundabout journey to get to where she is. “I always thought I’d be an investment banking queen,” she says frankly. “I read maths and economics [at Newcastle University], then when I graduated I really struggled to find a corporate job in banking, tech or literally anything.”

Zhou ended up finding a job at Mob, a meal planning, recipe and grocery shopping app. At the same time, her mother Jolene was beginning to experiment with running a food business of her own. “We did our first drop just for fun,” Zhou says of Mama Yu’s beginnings in 2022. “Mum’s always wanted to sell food, not in the form of a takeaway setting. She’s very good with anything when it comes to food. She could make [food] with her eyes closed – she knows it by feeling and touching and smelling … but I never [thought] Mama Yu was going to be my business. It was just a way for me and Mum to spend more time together.”

For Zhou, who’s always enjoyed cooking for family and friends, applying her passion for food to content creation seemed like a natural next step. But quitting the corporate ladder – after just over a year at Mob, Zhou landed a job at KPMG – required a leap of faith. “The way we were brought up, we aren’t taught to embrace the creative side of our brains,” Zhou says. “We aren’t encouraged to see where we could find a job in film, art, food or hospitality.” And even after years of “summer holidays spent in the takeaway”, Zhou was instilled with the belief that she should aspire to more than being stuck in a kitchen.

“My sister [and I] would be at the [restaurant] counter being cute and saying hi to customers, trying to fold napkins – then it would level up the older we got, to folding dumplings and helping arrange stuff in the kitchen,” she remembers. “It was a big part of my childhood, and it’s funny because my mum always said, ‘I’m working hard so you don’t have to do this when you’re older.’”

Fast-forward to the current decade, and after two years at KPMG, Zhou took the plunge and has been fully self-employed for nearly two years now, running Mama Yu with her mum while pursuing content creation. She has developed and shared recipes for the BBC and worked with commercial clients including Ford, which gifted the vehicle mother and daughter now use for Mama Yu. Being British-born Malaysian Chinese, Zhou proudly wears her heritage on her sleeve and describes how it informs Mama Yu’s product offerings, which include variations such as curry chilli oil, crispy shallot chilli oil and black bean chilli oil, all available to order across the EU on top of being stocked at select retailers in the UK.

“You don’t see a lot of Malaysian chilli oils [in the UK],” she explains. “You see a lot of Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Sichuan chilli oils, but Malaysian oils are way thicker. We use fresh chillies [from] the UK, pretty similar to the ones we were sourcing in Malaysia.” Contrast that with Hong Kong chilli oil, which Zhou says is much more “crispy and dry”, often using shrimp and dry chilli flakes.