Despite CFSP developments since Maastricht, EU foreign policy has often manifested via informal groupings of member states, acting through ad hoc initiatives without formal mandates. Seeking to explain adhocism’s articulation with EU foreign policy beyond EU-CFSP-centrism, this article expands the regime-based intergovernmentalist approach envisaging EU foreign policy as a regime and adhocism as a rational solution to collective action problems, to cover the framing and development of ad hoc initiatives and encapsulate the full EU foreign policy cycle. To illustrate this approach, it provides an analysis of the ‘E3’ initiative on the Iran nuclear crisis (2003–2022) and ‘Normandy’ initiative on the Russia–Ukraine conflict in Eastern Ukraine (2014–2022) based on document analysis, archival testimonies, secondary literature and 39 elite interviews, which allow to delineate adhocism’s role in EU foreign policy. This article counterbalances EU-CFSP-centred assumptions of adhocism as a (recurrent) anomaly to demonstrate it is a normal EU foreign policy feature.