A catalog in Bloomreach Engagement is a structured dataset of items you import into the platform, such as products, articles, or stores, and reference inside campaigns. Each item has an ID and a set of fields. You look an item up in Jinja and read its fields, for example catalogs['Products'].item_by_id(product_id) followed by item['display_name'].

How Asteroad uses it

Most product names, prices, and recommendation blocks in Bloomreach emails and weblayers are catalog fields rendered through Jinja. That makes the catalog the highest-impact place to fix field-level issues: get the value right once in the field (encoding, formatting, a non-breaking space between a number and its unit) and every campaign that reads it inherits the fix, instead of patching each template. Two practices we hold to: import as UTF-8 so special characters survive, and always guard the lookup with an {% if item %} check, because referencing a field on a missing item fails the whole render.