HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Joanna Sullivan, philanthropist and wife of the late businessman, Foodland founder and entrepreneur Maurice J. " Sully" Sullivan, passed away Wednesday. She was 94 years old.

Born on July 4, 1921 in Honolulu, Hawaii to Chinese immigrants, Joanna was a graduate of McKinley High School and was pursuing studies at the University of Hawaii when she left college to help her mother run Lanikai Store, a small grocery store the Laus had purchased in Kailua. Determined to ensure the store's success, Joanna helped everywhere she could, serving customers, stocking shelves, handling the bookkeeping and more. It was at the store that Joanna met the man who would later become her family's business partner and her husband, Maurice J. "Sully" Sullivan, an Irish immigrant and U.S. Air Force Sergeant who was stationed at Hickam Air Force Base. Joanna and her family befriended Sully and soon he spent his days off working at the store. After World War II, the Laus asked Sully to remain in Hawaii to help them run Lanikai Store. Although he declined at first, a few weeks of winter weather in Buffalo, New York were just enough to change his mind and he returned to Hawaii to work with Joanna's family. Sully had two conditions for his return: first, the Laus would remodel the store and second, they would promise to help him fulfill his dream of opening a full-service supermarket like those he had worked in on the mainland.

That dream became a reality when Joanna, her family, and Sully opened Foodland on May 6, 1948. It was Joanna who named the store. "I wanted a name that would tell people exactly what we offered," she recalled on the company's 65th anniversary in 2013. "It was going to be a place with lots of food – more than they had ever seen in one store – so the name Foodland seemed to make a lot of sense."