Tao Wu was standing behind the counter at his Union Station location on a Tuesday morning, pulling out product samples mid-sentence, when he stopped and shared news that the Toronto tea community has been waiting years to hear.
The Toronto Tea Festival is moving to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. He signed the deal yesterday.
January 16 and 17, 2027. After more than a decade of selling out the Toronto Reference Library’s Appel Salon and turning people away at the door, Canada’s largest tea festival finally has a room big enough for its audience.
As it happened, 6ixRetail had been at the MTCC just two days earlier for a completely different event. But for anyone who has spent a January weekend at the Toronto Tea Festival, watching exhibitors pour samples, guests linger over tea ware, and lineups form out the door onto Yonge Street, the only real question about the MTCC is whether even that space will be enough. Wu is targeting between 80 and 100 exhibitors at the convention centre, up from the 47 the library could accommodate. Close to 5,000 attendees had maxed out the Appel Salon in recent years, with waiting lists becoming a fixture of the January weekend. The festival had not just outgrown the room. It had outgrown the concept of what the room could hold.
That growth did not happen overnight. Wu moved to Toronto from Wu Yi Shan in Fujian province in 2007, bringing with him a second generation tea exporter’s knowledge of one of China’s most celebrated tea producing regions, a landscape known across the country for its Oolong and Black teas. In 2009 he opened Tao Tea Leaf at 934 Yonge Street in Yorkville alongside co-founder Mingzhu Gao, a certified Tea Sommelier and Carleton University graduate who had been working as an accountant before joining the venture. The two built the business around something that was genuinely rare in Toronto at the time: direct sourcing from farmers and tea masters, traditional Chinese tea culture, and a real commitment to education over transaction.
The brand earned a first place award at the North American Tea Championship and was named one of the best tea shops in Toronto by blogTO, with the Toronto Star also taking notice. Wu was running intimate four to six person tasting workshops out of the Yonge Street shop, the kind of experience that builds a loyal following one cup at a time. But he kept seeing something bigger.
“Tea is not just about my business,” he says. “It’s about sharing. Back then, there was no event like this anywhere in North America.”
The Toronto Tea Festival launched in 2013 and has run annually ever since, interrupted only by the pandemic. Now in its twelfth year, it has become what toronto.com called North America’s premier consumer tea festival, bringing together tea lovers, exhibitors, and experts from across Canada and beyond for a weekend of tastings, ceremonies, workshops and speaker panels. The 2026 edition at the Appel Salon featured over 40 exhibitors including Tea Squared, Momo Tea, DAVIDsTea, Genuine Tea, Kebaonish, and Tao Tea Leaf itself, alongside Chinese and Japanese tea ceremonies, talks on everything from regenerative tea farming to tasseomancy, and the Tea Tasters Box Challenge that has become a signature event within the festival.
Through all of it Wu has never stood at the front of the room. He has never given a speech at his own festival, never positioned himself as its headline. That decision was shaped early, when word got back to him that not everyone in the industry trusted what he was building.
“Someone told me Tao shouldn’t do this, because he is just going to promote himself,” he recalls. “Because of that, I made sure to stay behind the scenes. I want the festival to benefit all the small businesses, because we are all in small business. No matter how good your tea is, if you cannot survive in business, it does not matter.”
It is a philosophy that runs through everything Wu does. And it is a big part of why the festival grew into something the MTCC now makes sense for.
Tao Tea Leaf itself has grown steadily alongside the festival. Wu now runs three Toronto area locations, each with its own character. The Yonge Street flagship in Yorkville remains the spiritual home of the brand. The Square One location sits inside the Food District in Mississauga, a food hall environment that has evolved significantly since it first opened. And then there is Union Station, which Wu opened in 2022 directly under the Great Hall, one of the most visible retail spots in the country.
That location came together almost by chance. Wu was helping a friend scout spaces when he noticed an available spot at Union Station and recalled a thought he had been carrying for years.
“I saw Union Station and the Financial District and I was impressed with the traffic,” he says. “There was a thought in my head that maybe one day this would be a good idea. We believed that once COVID passed the location would be a good one. So we decided to take it.”
It was a bet placed at exactly the right moment. Traffic at Union Station has grown every year since the location opened, even as the new concourse development has introduced new retail competition and shifted foot traffic patterns through the building. Wu watches the numbers closely and says growth has continued regardless.
The brand’s collection now spans 180 unique teas and blends including 53 certified organic selections, sourced directly from growers and tea masters through annual trips Wu leads to China. That supply chain, built over 16 years, has also allowed the brand to expand its wholesale reach to tea lovers in more than 15 countries across North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and beyond.
Several new products are in development. A line of six certified organic and kosher tea bags is currently awaiting final approval from Pro-Cert before launch. Following that, a line of 12 premium whole-leaf pyramid tea bags is undergoing a packaging redesign, with the tea itself already part of the Tao Tea Leaf lineup. A signature pure black tea blend, specially designed for making milk tea at home using real Canadian dairy milk, has been tested with early customers and is moving toward retail shelves, giving home brewers a way to recreate Tao Tea Leaf’s signature milk tea experience. Freshly made canned drinks are also launching, following strong demand from previous corporate catering work and their popularity at tea festivals and food events. Merchandise, which Wu openly acknowledges has been a gap for the brand, is finally being addressed. The brand has the counter space, the customer loyalty, and three locations worth of foot traffic. The product to fill that space is on its way.
On the technology side, two integrated websites are being built on Square, one for the loose leaf retail side of the business and one for the drinks side, designed to share data across all three locations and connect with delivery platforms like Ritual. Wu sees the digital infrastructure as essential to what comes next.
Because what comes next is bigger than Toronto. Wu is developing a licensing model targeting Chinese diaspora entrepreneurs in the US and other markets who want to enter the tea business without having to spend years building sourcing relationships from scratch.
“Many people outside of China want to start a tea business, but the supply chain is not like other industries,” he says. “The quality standards, the sourcing knowledge, the relationships with farmers, that takes years to build. Our model gives partners everything they need so they can just focus on running the business.”
More Toronto locations will follow once the current model is proven across the existing three. But right now, the convention centre announcement is what matters most. For a festival that spent years being larger than its venue, and for a brand that has spent 16 years proving that tea in Toronto deserves to be taken seriously, January 2027 cannot come soon enough.
The Toronto Tea Festival moves to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on January 16 and 17, 2027.
Dustin Fuhs is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of 6ix Retail, Toronto’s premier source for retail and hospitality industry news. As the former Editor-in-Chief of Retail Insider, Canada’s most-read retail trade publication, Dustin brings over two decades of expertise spanning retail, marketing, entertainment and hospitality sectors. His experience includes roles with industry giants such as The Walt Disney Company, The Hockey Hall of Fame, The Canadian Opera Company, Starbucks Canada and Blockbuster.
Recognized as a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert in 2024, 2025 and 2026, Dustin delivers insider perspectives on Toronto’s evolving retail landscape, from emerging brands to established players reshaping the city’s commercial districts.