Shopping cart application in Spring MVC
I think you need different approach to this. It's good practice when you don't have much of business logic in your controller. Maybe you should try creating a different class that will fill pages with content, based on something, like a template. 

Now answering to your question: 

You can create method with annotation @PostConstruct, which Spring will execute after done with his setup. In this method initialize field that you need, or in your case set application scope attribute with data that you need. 

Also, I don't know if you knew it, you can create jpsf - jsp parts, that you can include in any of your jsp. As an example, you can create part with menu, CSS link or other parts, that share all pages, and just include it in your pages - makes jps look much more cleaner.

Here how u can bind objects to any response of your controller: 

@ModelAttribute(value = "foo") 
public String addAttribute(){
return "string";
}


Or:

@ModelAttribute()
public void addAttribute(Model model){
   model.addAttribute("roo", "one");
   model.addAttribute("loo", "two");
   model.addAttribute("moo", "some");
}


this how you bind for every response of your application: 

@ControllerAdvice
public final class GlobalController {
    @ModelAttribute
    public void addAttributes(Model model) {
       model.addAttribute("msg", "Welcome to My Country");
    }
}