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. About Your Host, Michael LeBlanc Michael LeBlanc is the president and founder of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc, a senior retail advisor, keynote speaker and now, media entrepreneur. He has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. Michael has delivered keynotes, hosted fire-side discussions and participated worldwide in thought leadership panels. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience with Levi's, Black & Decker, Hudson's Bay, CanWest Media, Pandora Jewellery, The Shopping Channel and Retail Council of Canada to his advisory, speaking and media practice. Michael produces and hosts a network of leading retail trade podcasts, including the award-winning No.1 independent retail industry podcast in America, Remarkable Retail with his partner, Dallas-based best-selling author Steve Dennis; Canada's top retail industry podcast The Voice of Retail and Canada's top food industry and one of the top Canadian-produced management independent podcasts in the country, The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois from Dalhousie University in Halifax. Rethink Retail has recognized Michael as one of the top global retail experts for the fifth year in a row, the National Retail Federation has designated Michael as on their Top Retail Voices for 2025 and 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him on of the Top 50 global thought leaders in retail. If you are a BBQ fan, you can tune into Michael’s cooking show, Last Request BBQ, on YouTube, Instagram, X and yes, TikTok. Michael is available for keynote presentations helping retailers, brands and retail industry insiders explaining the current state and future of the retail industry in North America and around the world.
