It was worse than the usual shopping slog. The bracing rain of a Vancouver winter, the cramped stores of Chinatown, and three young children in tow – including a five-year-old nephew who had to go to the bathroom, bad.
As Cindy Lee moved from one small store to the next to gather her family's groceries, the grind was all too familiar. Scarce parking, no washrooms.
Then, unable to hold it in, the nephew wet his pants. The shopping was abandoned and Ms. Lee took her troupe home, but the seed was planted for what would become T&T Supermarket Inc., today Canada's No. 1 Asian grocery chain.
T&T was started in 1993 by Ms. Lee and her husband, Jack, a real estate developer and food importer, backed by capital from a supplier in Taiwan and an Asian grocer in California. From the outset, T&T set out to blend East and West: shelves stocked with Chinese and Asian goods, presented like a Safeway or a Loblaw store, with bright, wide aisles. And bathrooms for customers.
“I just felt so bad. That memory really gave me a feeling we should give the customer a more pleasant shopping environment,” says Ms. Lee, the 58-year-old president of T&T, which was bought this summer by Loblaw Cos. Ltd. L-T for $225-million.
Ms. Lee will play a pivotal role in the strategy of Canada's biggest grocer to seize growth in a market where it has a position but is far from first.
T&T was built on instinct. Ms. Lee handled the books for her husband's business but had no management experience or experience in the grocery industry. But she did know what it was like to haul around kids while doing the shopping, so Jack put her in charge of the new venture.
“Our family laughs about it now,” says daughter Tina Lee, T&T's director of strategy and operations and Ms. Lee's heir apparent. “It was brave and naive at the same time.”
After a hard first year, and a brush with bankruptcy, T&T began a steady rise to dominance in the Chinese and Asian market. It has a devoted following, a half-billion dollars in annual sales and 17 stores – eight in and around Vancouver, two in Calgary, two in Edmonton and five in the Toronto region.
The so-called ethnic food market, encompassing a sprawl of cultures, accounts for about 10 per cent of the Canadian grocery market (which is worth nearly $80-billion annually). T&T has outmuscled its larger competitors, especially for Chinese-Canadian customers. It dominates in Vancouver, far ahead of No. 2 Real Canadian Superstore, owned by Loblaw. In Toronto, Loblaw's No Frills chain has only a slight lead on T&T, according to Solutions Research Group.
It was this success that drew Weston-controlled Loblaw to T&T and the Lees. More than just another business deal, it is a coming together of two immigrant tales, a story of Canada yesterday and today.
[The start] was really terrible. By mistake, I opened two supermarkets at the same time. — Cindy Lee
The Weston family is now the country's second-richest family, but its food fortune was born humbly in the 1870s when patriarch George Weston, son of a Cockney immigrant, was a baker's boy and sold goods door to door.
Cindy Lee was one of eight children, born in Taiwan to a successful family led by her entrepreneur father, who left revolutionary China in 1948. She studied accounting at university and moved to Canada in 1976. Arriving with little English (and a serious hearing loss that was eventually repaired), her first job was in bookkeeping for $5 an hour. Jack arrived soon after; they married in 1978 and have three children.
Jack Lee had been in the food business since the start of university in Taiwan, where he sold instant noodles to students in residences, booting around on his bicycle during typhoon season. On one such foray, he met his future wife.
In Canada, he worked initially as a food importer and expanded to real estate. He took on his biggest development project in the late 1980s: President Plaza in the growing Vancouver suburb of Richmond, which has a large Asian population.
