Aruba Aloe Balm was founded in 1890 by Cornelis Eman. It is one of the oldest companies dealing with Aloe vera in the world and also one of the first in the world to produce cosmetic products based upon the Aloe Vera gel.

The Aloes that Aruba Aloe Balm N.V. uses still come from exactly the same Aloe fields that were planted in 1890 by the founder Cornelis Eman.

In Aruba, the Aloe cultures started in 1840 and after a good start in the first decennia, the Aloe business was in a bad shape around 1890. It was exactly in that time that Cornelis Eman, started to plant the Aloes on the fields at Hato in Aruba to produce and export Aloe hard gum.

He took a risk by doing this because at that time the Aloe business was in a bad shape and the world prices for the Aloe Hard Gum were very low. Nevertheless he believed in the Aloe business and he acquired more land in the years thereafter and when the Aloe prices worldwide picked up again around 1905, he already had expanded to 63 hectares of Aloe fields.


Around 1945, another son of Cornelis Eman, Casey Eman, took over the company and he immediately started a very ambitious plan to build a factory where he would process the Aloe Latex and become the world’s larger producer of the Aloin as a finished product for the pharmaceutical industry instead of exporting the raw material Aloe Hard Gum.

In 1949 he opened his new factory at Sabana Blanco where he produced 7.500 kilos of Aloin in 1951, which at that time was 30% of the total world production of Aloin.

The reducing world demand for Aloin in those years, the diminished interest in working on the land in Aruba, and the difficulty to break into the Aloin market caused that it was a difficult business. Casey passed away in 1954 and the factory closed in the same year.

In 1966 Jani Eman (Another son of Cornelis and brother of Casey) continued the Aloe business but he saw the difficulties with the Aloin and discovered the beneficial properties of the Aloe gel and started the development of cosmetic products based upon the Aloe vera gel. He was very much ahead of his time because the tremendous worldwide popularity of Aloe vera gel as an ingredient for cosmetic products was still years away.

Jani spent many years doing research on the gel. Together with Yan Tai Wong and Alexander Farkas (a Miami scientist) they developed a white powder concentrate from the Aloe Vera gel which was called Alomucin. This was used as an ingredient for the first creams and lotions of Aruba Aloe Balm N.V. After a few startup years on the local market he took the first steps to export the Aruba Aloe products to the USA. The brief period that the products were sold in the USA ended when Jani passed away in 1981.

His daugther Editha and his son Albert continued the business on a modest scale for a few years until in 1984 when Henny Eman took over.

Henny was a businessman and politician and would later become the first Prime Minister of Aruba. When he took over the company he immediately modernized the company dramatically and contracted a young physician from Holland to run the company (Koos Veel). He would be the managing director of the company until the year 2000. As Senior Scientific Advisor Henny contracted Professor H.E. Junginger Ph.D. who was head of the Pharmaceutical Technology department of the University of Leiden and world renowned for his work in the field of creams and lotions. This team started the research to re-evaluate the existing products and develop several new product lines.

One of the first decisions was to focus on products made with the fresh Aloe vera gel and not with the previously used Alomucin concentrate, and for that a completely new process to extract and stabilize the Aloe gel was developed by Aruba Aloe Balm N.V. A commitment was made to make high quality products only with high contents of the fresh processed Aruba Aloe vera gel.

The end result was that around 1990 some 60 different products that could compete with any of the well known cosmetic brand names were ready on the local market and a few years later the first steps to re-introduce the products on the USA market were made.

The competition was fierce and the Aruba Aloe products had to compete with large international brands. The retail distribution of Aruba Aloe Balm N.V. in the USA was discontinued around 1996 and a website was opened to continue the sales in the USA via the Internet, at that time still relatively new, which became a successful outlet for the Aruba Aloe products in the USA.

At the end of 1986 Henny Eman became Prime Minister of Aruba and had to dedicate himself to leading the country of Aruba from a failing economy due to the closure of the refinery in 1984.

In the year 2000 Louis Posner took over 100% of the shares of Aruba Aloe Balm N.V.

He was already a very successful businessman in Aruba at that time and he gave Aruba Aloe a complete make over. An entirely new logo was created to identify the characteristics of the brand, as well as its history and professionalism. While completing this task, an in-depth analysis was performed on the whole product portfolio to determine their application to the new image. The packaging needed to be remade in line with the current market trends. The export strategy for the brand was re-evaluated and new markets were being added and evaluated and others were dropped.

A new factory was built on the site of the Aloe fields in Hato, right where the Aloes were planted originally in 1890 by Cornelis Eman. These new facilities were taken into use in 2002.

The Aloe fields around the new facilities were re-organized and replanted and an integrated plan was set into motion to develop all of the 60 hectares of Aruba Aloe Balm N.V. Aloe fields into a modern and productive plantation. This plan is being executed in phases and as of end 2007 new irrigation, plantation, and mulching techniques were implemented.

The website sales were taken to a new level as well. The USA based business was formalized in a new company that takes care of all Aruba Aloe Balm N.V. distribution in the USA (Aruba Aloe of North America LLC) and a completely new and modern website was built.

Louis Posner had great plans with Aruba Aloe and he executed them faster then many expected. In his own words his vision is:

“To make Aruba Aloe for Aruba, what Heineken is for The Netherlands and Coca Cola is for The United States of America”.