OJ production and banana peeling on a massive scale

I was having some orange juice this morning and I started wondering how do they mass produce this stuff? I’m envisioning this huge factory where thousands of illegal workers spend the whole day squeezing millions of oranges, but that’s pretty inefficient considering how little juice you get from one orange. So it has to be a machine, but what sort of machine can peel an orange? Is there a company that makes this?
What about bananas? Are there machines that peel them, too?

Why would you need to peel the orange to get the juice out?

Here’s a simple rundown of the process to make fruit juice, an a large scale.

BTW,

That would really be some serious operation if they had to peel each individual item.

I checked out the Tropicana Web site. They didn’t seem to say much about the mechanical process. The reason I asked, in reply to Mangetout (nice name, anything you don’t eat?), is there is no trace of orange peel in supermarket OJ. You’d think if they’d crushed the oranges, there would be some trace of that bitter, strong smelling chemical that’s in orange peel.

Thinking more carefully, I think they might peel oranges like in those antique apple peeling machines I’ve seen. The machines are sort of like a lathe, spinning the fruit around with a sharp blade running along the surface. If that’s what happen, then they can remove the orange rind and leave the white, pulpy material underneath it. That stuff doesn’t taste like bug spray, so now you can crush the orange for juice.

But, that doesn’t answer the question about bananas. Topologically speaking, a banana is just too weird. Maybe they boil them to soften the skin?

Bananas are generally grown in the Tropics, where labor is less expensive. In Costa Rica the rejected bananas from the packing houses are sent to the processor, where they are ripened, peeled by hand, and processed. They are homogenized, concentrated, and sent to further processing in drums to the countries where the baby food (or whatever final product) is completed and packaged. The banana professional in my company does not know of any mechanical banana peeler.

By the way, the rejects are for cosmetic reasons, not for the quality of the banana flesh itself. The product is fine.

Peeling a juice orange is neither necessary nor desirable. Cutting the orange in half is easily automated, makes for easy juicing, and leave the peel whole and ready for extractionof byproducts. I don’t know how Minute Maid or Tropican do it, but that’s how the hotel-sized models work.

I would imagine that the most efficient method is to whack a piece of skin off each side so that the resulting orange is cube shaped, then juice the heck out of it a la Juice Tiger.

Yes, you lose some of the orange, but possibly (probably) no less than you lose to the halving-and-squashing method, which I think we can all agree leaves a lot of unjuiced pulp behind.