Eating egg tarts with Tina Lee, CEO of T&T Supermarkets | Canada Voices

Each month, generations reporter Ann Hui takes readers along to hang out with fascinating Canadians – regular people and celebrities, teens to seniors – joining them in their favourite pastime for up-close and candid conversations.

Tina Lee is sitting hunched over, head tilted, trying to convince me to listen to an egg tart.

“I can’t believe you haven’t tried this yet,” she said. It’s no regular dan taat, she insisted. This tart’s shell had 16 layers of puff pastry. The texture – the sound of tooth biting through all those crispy layers – she promised, is life-changing.

“It’s insanely good,” she said. “Insanely good.”

That Lee would hype these tarts isn’t surprising. The desserts were made at T&T Supermarkets, where she serves as chief executive.

But what is unusual for the 45 year old is that she’s here at all on a Tuesday, sitting down for a leisurely afternoon tea. Her workdays don’t typically end until at least 8 p.m. – too late to have dinner at home with her husband and three kids, and certainly no time for long breaks in between.

On this day, there will still be other meetings and even site visits. But at this moment, the CEO only wants to talk about this egg tart.

“Any opportunity for another meal,” she said. “It’s what brings me joy.”

If you’ve never before heard of Lee, you’re likely not alone. For the uninitiated: T&T is Canada’s largest Asian grocery chain, with 38 stores across North America. And until recently, Lee led the business quietly, remaining, for the most part, out of the public eye.

But over the past few years, she has increasingly stepped up and into the spotlight. Made it known that her name is the first “T” in T&T. Explained how the business is not only her mother’s, but her family’s story, and her story, too. How it’s a rare example in the world of business – certainly among Asian-owned businesses – of a matriarch story.

To outsiders, it might seem like Lee had been groomed from childhood for this role. Her Taiwanese immigrant mother Cindy, T&T’s founder and former CEO, named the business after Tina and her sister Tiffany.

That first store opened in 1993, when Lee was 13, at Metrotown centre in Burnaby, B.C. It was my local mall. Growing up in a Chinese-Canadian family, I saw firsthand the impact T&T had on the families around us. We no longer spent our weekends tethered to Chinatown. Within a few years, there were T&T stores across the Lower Mainland.

And though Lee spent many of her teenage years bagging groceries in the stores, she said that she and her siblings (Tiffany, who’s now a lawyer, and their youngest brother Jason, who works in tech) were never pushed into the family business.

Earlier: From niche grocer to supermarket giant: How T&T plans to repeat success in the U.S.

Instead, after completing her MBA at the University of California, Los Angeles, Tina began a career at Deloitte in the U.S., working in strategy.

But by 2009, Loblaws came calling. That’s when the grocery giant approached with an offer to purchase a majority stake in T&T for $225-million. Lee, whose family retained one-third of the company’s shares, came back to Canada to help with the transition.

Five years after that, Cindy was 65 and ready to retire. But she didn’t simply hand Tina the CEO job. Cindy, in fact, tried to prevent Tina from taking over.

It was a case of mixed messages. Tina had been working as hard as she could to allow her mom an earlier retirement. Meanwhile, Cindy didn’t want any of her children to take on that burden. Both mother and daughter were communicating through actions, rather than words.

“So Chinese,” I said.

She rolled her eyes, laughed. “It was such a Chinese thing.”

Loblaw execs eventually stepped in, insisting that Tina take the role. She was made CEO in 2014, at just 34 years old.

Was she ready?

“You’re never ready,” she said. “I’ve been CEO for 11 years now. I’m still not ready.”

I told her, I don’t think you’re supposed to say that out loud.

She shook her head at this. With her mom, “it was always ‘What Cindy says goes,’” she said. But that approach didn’t make sense for Tina.

“The more you say things out loud like that, the more your team rallies around you.”

It’s a lesson that many children of immigrants learn early on: How to navigate between cultures, how to adapt behaviour and messages for different audiences.

“For us as Chinese-Canadian women, you’ve got to learn when to put on the right hat,” she said. “Sometimes you can be vulnerable. And sometimes, you’ve gotta raise your hand and get your voice heard.”

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By this point, Lee had moved beyond the egg tarts. She wanted me to try a piece of cappuccino Swiss roll. “Not too sweet,” she declared.

Let’s explain how we got here. Weeks before, I had begun following Lee on Instagram. Since starting her account a few years ago, she’s posted a lot: new products and store openings, but also images of Lee, bare-faced at home in faded T-shirts, and videos of her playing basketball in baggy shorts.

She seemed refreshingly relatable.

I asked to interview her outside of her workplace, away from the usual boardrooms and offices. But in the weeks that followed, her handlers quickly nixed my ideas and suggestions around Lee’s hobbies. They even ruled out cooking together, saying that the busy CEO doesn’t really cook – a fact Lee later disputed.

Eventually, her handlers suggested tea, which is how we found ourselves that afternoon, sitting in front of an elaborate display of T&T food products arranged by the company’s PR team. Muscat grapes flown in from Korea rested on the table, green skin as shiny and taut as a pool ball. Beside them, a layered crepe cake had been precut for the sake of the cameras. We were seated in T&T’s “studio kitchen” – a photo studio, with a backdrop designed to look like a kitchen – on the ground floor of T&T’s Markham corporate offices.

So much for casual.

Because the truth is, it’s no accident why Lee has chosen this moment to tell her story. T&T is in the midst of an aggressive expansion. Just last year, she opened the first T&T store in the U.S., and has plans to open nine new stores globally over the next two years. It’s a huge moment for the business.

Since announcing the American expansion, the political landscape has shifted dramatically. There are now tariffs to navigate, new regulatory hurdles every day and new competitors.

Lee is introducing T&T to new markets and new audiences. And part of that means introducing herself, too. That has come with challenges and growing pains. She’s still figuring out where to draw the line between how much to share of herself – how much her team is comfortable letting her share.

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As her handlers hovered around her, debating which seat Lee should take, weighing the different camera angles and lighting options, she and I discussed a TV interview that she recently did with CBC.

When asked in that interview about T&T’s expansion into the U.S., Lee had responded in a way that would seem unthinkable to many business leaders: She admitted she was nervous. She acknowledged the audacity – and risk – involved, and asked the interviewer, half-jokingly, “Do you think it’s a bad idea?”

She told me that she had worried about that response for weeks afterward. That perhaps she’d come across as weak, or inexperienced.

Instead, she said, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. “The feedback that I got was that people loved that vulnerability.”

“They were cheering on T&T,” she said. “People were supporting me.”