SO, just how many juice boxes are out there?

Nobody could tell the Chook how many were produced in Australia each year.

We asked Lion Australia, one of the biggest producers, how many of their products made their way to supermarket and deli shelves, but they weren’t going to cough that up.

“Unfortunately our manufacturing/ sales data is not able to be disclosed,” an anonymous spokesperson emailed back.

The Australian Beverage Council said “we have no idea” and suggested that we try the Australian Bureau of Statistics. However, the ABS said the question was “too specific” for their databases and they couldn’t give an answer.

So the Herald was reduced to a bit of number crunching on its solar-powered calculator.

According to the federal department of agriculture, fisheries and forestry, Australians drink 7.7 billion litres of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages annually.

Of that, it says 10 per cent, or 770 million litres, is fruit juice.

Australian Beverages say 8.3 per cent of that market goes to juice boxes and other fruit drinks such as pop-ups, making 63 million litres.

Using Woolworths’ online supermarket as a rough guide, the Chook calculated that juice boxes make up 85 per cent of those products, with each little carton having on average 232ml of juicy, sugary goodness inside.

That means Australia is producing roughly 220 million individual juice boxes each year.