Epicure sales catalogues, 1980s and 1990s

Sales catalogues, like brochures, are pure advertising. They project the company’s products in the best light possible, exactly as the manufacturer wants us to see them. We have all manner of catalogues at the archive, going right back into the nineteenth century. It occurs to us though that bang-up-to-date catalogues are now available almost exclusively in electronic (PDF) form. They’re unlikely even to exist in paper form now.

So, let’s celebrate the last of the breed. Entirely at random I thought I’d sample two by the Epicure groceries people. You’ll recognise their logo from the pictures, and indeed, Epicure is still with us today.

My first problem was trying to date the catalogues. They looked vaguely modern, and are on very high quality glossy paper with lots of colour. The absence of dates was a bit of a mystery – how, at the time, would you have known if you were referring to the latest one? Anyway, we worked out that one catalogue was 1986–90 and the other 1990–95. We did this through the contact details. The first catalogue cannot be later than May 1990 because the phone number, a London number, is prefixed 01, and these changed to 071 and 081 in 1990. We then reckoned it couldn’t be before 1986 because in the blurb it describes the company’s successful trading for ‘over 170 years’. In the same breath it tells us the company started in 1816, hence our starting point of 1986. The second catalogue has to be between 1990 to 1995, because this has an 071 number, and these became 0171 in May 1995.

The internet was a thing at the time, but few companies had latched on to it, and Epicure is no exception. So, there’s no website or email, and in all fairness the desktop computers available at the time were not really set up to go online anyway. If you wanted sales prices, you picked up the phone and spoke to a real person. No AI bots here. The only nod to changing technology is that the later catalogue has a fax number.

These were catalogues for grocers and other wholesale buyers. They certainly hark back to a simpler time when you were more likely to have an independent grocer’s shop on your street corner than now. Most of the weights given are imperial. So, you bought your honey by the pound jar, and in this case, by the box of twelve.

But, hoping to find groceries in these catalogues that you just can’t buy any more, I was disappointed. And apart from a bit of rationalisation here and there, there’s little difference between the products in one catalogue with those in the other. Plus, while packaging is different nowadays, the differences between now and the 1980s/90s are not immense: there’s glass, tins, cartons and soft plastics then as now. No recycling instructions, of course, and recycling facilities wouldn’t have existed anyway.

I’m attaching some photos of the delights on offer from Epicure. Salivate and enjoy.