Dutch strategic communication consultancy specialising in agri-food, digital farming, and innovation ecosystem narratives for EU research consortia.
Schuttelaar & Partners is a Dutch strategic communication consultancy based in The Hague, specialising in food, agriculture, and sustainability sectors. Their full legal name — "adviesbureau voor maatschappelijke communicatie" — translates as advisory bureau for societal communication, which precisely describes their work: translating complex scientific and technological topics into public and policy narratives. In H2020, they contributed as a third-party service provider to two flagship agri-digital projects, almost certainly delivering communication strategy, dissemination planning, and stakeholder engagement rather than technical research. This positions them as a specialist communications partner for consortia that need credible, sector-fluent messaging alongside the scientific work.
Contributed to both IoF2020 and SmartAgriHubs — two of the largest H2020 smart-farming programmes — in a third-party capacity consistent with communication and dissemination services.
SmartAgriHubs featured keywords such as 'digital innovation hubs', 'competence centers', and 'smart specialization strategy', pointing to communication work around policy-level ecosystem building rather than single-technology promotion.
IoF2020 (Internet of Food and Farm 2020) focused on large-scale IoT pilots and food-chain integration, requiring sector-fluent communicators to bridge technology and farmer/business audiences.
SmartAgriHubs keywords include 'open call' and 'innovation experiment', suggesting involvement in communicating competitive sub-grant processes to potential applicants across Europe.
Their two projects fall in a tight 2017–2018 window, so the evolution is subtle but visible: IoF2020 centred their work on IoT-specific and supply-chain language (smart farming, precision farming, food chain, large-scale pilot), reflecting a technology-centric dissemination brief. SmartAgriHubs then shifted the vocabulary toward ecosystem architecture — digital innovation hubs, competence centres, smart specialisation strategy — signalling a move from project-level communication to shaping the broader policy and infrastructure narrative around European digital agriculture. The thread connecting both is food-system transformation, but the framing matured from "here is a technology" to "here is a European innovation system".
They appear to be moving toward communication work that supports the construction of innovation ecosystems (hubs, open calls, competence centres) rather than individual technology projects, which makes them a natural fit for future Digital Europe or Horizon Europe programmes building regional agri-digital capacity.
Schuttelaar & Partners exclusively entered H2020 as a third party — sub-contracted by consortium members rather than signing the grant agreement themselves. This means they are not consortium architects and do not carry administrative or reporting responsibility; they are brought in for a defined service scope. Despite this arm's-length role, both projects were enormous (IoF2020 and SmartAgriHubs collectively involved hundreds of partners), so they are comfortable operating inside very large, multi-country consortia without being at the centre of governance.
Across just two projects they touch 186 unique consortium partners in 25 countries — a remarkably wide exposure for an SME that never held a formal participant seat. This breadth reflects the scale of the flagship programmes they supported rather than an independent network they built, but it does mean they have direct professional familiarity with a large slice of the European agri-digital research community.
Most communication firms that serve research consortia are generalists; Schuttelaar & Partners brings deep sector fluency in food systems, agriculture, and sustainability, which is relatively rare and highly valued in projects where the audience includes farmers, food-chain businesses, and EU policy makers simultaneously. Being based in Den Haag — at the intersection of Dutch agri-food industry and EU policy networks — gives them a credible institutional context that a generic PR agency lacks. For a consortium that needs communication support grounded in agri-food sector knowledge rather than retrofitted from a tech or health background, they are a targeted choice.
