How do they section grapefruit for commercial retail sale?

They do that in Canada. You can buy liquid segmented grapefruit in a jar. Unfortunately they don’t taste that good… it has a bite. The white part is healthy for you. It is high in fiber.

I’ve wondered since I was a kid how they got all the membrane off of Mandarin oranges in a can? I suppose that has something to do with heat/cooking.
But I can’t grasp how they can section fresh grapefruit. I do it at home by peeling them with a knife, and then working from the middle out to remove all the membrane, but it’s a labor intensive, time consuming prospect.

I found a University of California book on grapefruit processing that describes two methods:

Chemical: The peeled grapefruit are dropped in a lye solution, which loosens the membranes from the sections. The sections are then rinsed to remove the lye, and the membranes are removed by hand.

Mechanical:
The grapefruit is peeled, then placed in a holder cup, blossom end up. It’s accurately centered using a beam of light so that the core is aligned vertically. The machine has probes that find the partitions between the sections and identify cutting paths. The fruit then moves through six blade-head stations. There, probes find partitions and align the blade with the cutting path. Once the separating cuts are made, the sections are shaken to dislodge seeds. Finally, the core is rapidly spun to sling out any sections that are still adhering to their partitions.

Because this is such a complicated (therefore) expensive process, almost all of this processing is now done overseas. But recently, a new process has been developed:

Enzymatic: an enzyme that dissolves pith and membrane is introduced by vacuum into the fruit, which makes removal of the membrane very easy, and preserves the juice alveoles intact (unlike cutting). This hasn’t been widely implemented yet, but the hope is that this may make processing in the US a viable option once again.

GA, @thorninmud.
GA.
GA.
Thanks, even if only one counts, you get three from me.
Very interesting!