Tina Lee started her career in grocery retail at 13, bagging groceries at a store her parents had just opened in Vancouver. Today, she runs one of the fastest-growing specialty grocery brands in North America — and she's just taken it into California. On this episode, recorded live at the grand opening of T&T Supermarket's San Jose store, CEO Tina Lee breaks news on four new Bay Area locations, reveals what "six senses retailing" really means, and explains how a family grocer became Canada's number-one Asian food brand.
The FEED powered by Loblaw goes live from the grand opening of T&T Supermarket's first California store, where host Michael LeBlanc sits down with Tina Lee, CEO of T&T Supermarket, in front of a packed crowd at Westgate Centre in San Jose.
Tina Lee's story is as much personal as it is professional. Born in Vancouver, B.C., she was just 13 when her parents, Jack and Cindy Lee, opened the first T&T Supermarket in 1993 — a business named after Tina and her sister, Tiffany. Lee traces the company's origins to her mother's frustration with grocery shopping across scattered Chinatown shops, with no carts and no bathrooms, and to the family's determination to build "an Asian Safeway": a single, modern destination for Asian grocery shopping in Canada.
After earning a degree at UCLA and spending six years in California working for Deloitte Consulting, Lee returned home to join the family business, eventually taking the helm as CEO. Under her leadership, T&T expanded from British Columbia into Alberta, Ontario and a hard-won Quebec market, becoming part of the Loblaw family in 2009. That partnership, she explains, has fueled the retailer's private-label engine — now more than 600 SKUs strong in Canada and Canada's number-one Asian food brand, distributed in over 1,000 Loblaw stores nationwide.
The conversation turns to T&T's long-awaited U.S. push, which started with a single email in 2016, stalled through COVID, and finally landed with the company's first American store in Bellevue, Washington. San Jose marks store number three in the U.S. and number 40 overall — and Lee uses the live setting to break genuine news, announcing three more Bay Area locations, including a 70,000-square-foot flagship at NewPark Mall in Newark targeted for 2028.
Lee also unpacks what she calls "six senses retailing": the deliberate design choices behind T&T's produce-forward layout, curated in-store playlists tailored to shopper demographics, loose fruit displays, bakery aromas, and constant in-store sampling. She digs into the surprising rise of T&T's K-beauty and beauty business, now one of the largest movers of Asian beauty products in Canada, and shares a crowd-pleasing pro tip for beating the line at the kitchen counter. She also details the regulatory hurdles — from Prop 65 warnings to English-only packaging rules — that come with operating a Canadian retail brand on U.S. soil.
Recorded live in front of hundreds of shoppers on opening day, this episode captures a founder-led retailer at a genuine inflection point: scaling a beloved regional grocery brand into a national and now cross-border force, without losing the family story that built it.