Cultigen Group Unveils Cellbase, a Global B2B Marketplace Designed to Fix Cultivated Meat’s Procurement Bottleneck

Courtesy: Cellbase

The cultivated meat sector is edging closer to commercial reality, but one stubborn roadblock has slowed nearly every company in the space: sourcing the tools needed to actually make the product. Bioreactors, media, cell lines, scaffolds, and sensors each sit within a fragmented, opaque supply chain still shaped by pharmaceutical procurement norms. For startups trying to scale a food system, those norms have become a drag on progress.

This week, UK-based Cultigen Group introduced what it believes is the missing piece. Cellbase, a new international B2B marketplace, gathers suppliers of core cellular-agriculture inputs into a single platform built specifically for cultivated meat companies. It is, in founder David Bell’s words, “specialised infrastructure for future-friendly food production.”

Cellbase follows the opening of Cultigen’s consumer-facing Cultivated Meat Shop earlier this year, an online storefront Bell launched pre-regulation to build brand recognition and digital real estate ahead of Europe’s eventual approvals. Both ventures sit within a broader strategy: identifying and stitching together the gaps that have slowed down the cellular-agriculture ecosystem for more than a decade.

Bell says Cellbase was born from a problem he saw repeatedly in conversations with companies across the sector. Procurement, he argues, was quietly absorbing enormous amounts of time and resources because no unified system existed to support it.

“The supply chain is fragmented. Companies spend weeks chasing quotes and manually gathering product information across multiple vendor websites,” he explains. “Every emerging industry hits this wall. Someone has to build the rails. That’s what we’re doing.”

A Marketplace Built for the Realities of Cultivated Meat Procurement

Cellbase is built to consolidate that process. Instead of navigating pharma-focused catalogues or cold-calling vendors for specifications, companies can compare options through structured metadata, filter products by relevance to cultivated meat, and place orders directly through an e-commerce interface that supports major global currencies. Product categories include the essentials, cells, media, and scaffolds, but also equipment, consumables, bioreactors, sensors, analytical tools, and services.

Suppliers already listed include Multus, Sallea, Quest Meat, KCell, Mor-Cell.bio, Cellcraft, CellxCell, Qkine, Nexture Bio, and Defined Bioscience. Bell says at least 30 suppliers should be on board by the end of the year, with active onboarding now underway across all remaining categories.

Unlike directory-style models, Cellbase operates as a full marketplace. It provides order management, automated payouts, and comparison tools, and earns revenue through commissions on completed sales rather than listing fees. “Suppliers only pay when they make sales. Our incentives align: we win when they win,” says Bell.

The development process, however, brought its own hurdles. Standardising data across suppliers proved to be one of the hardest ones. Technical specifications arrived in inconsistent formats, PDFs, spreadsheets, and manuals, none designed for structured comparison. Building those into uniform metadata was, according to Bell, a critical foundation for making the marketplace genuinely usable.

Pricing transparency was another challenge. Many suppliers still operate through “request-for-quote” workflows that slow the pace of ordering. “This industry runs on dated procurement workflows, and that slows everyone down,” Bell says. Cellbase brings unit prices, shipping information, and purchasing tools into a single interface, offering card, bank transfer, and purchase-order options.

The timing, he argues, is right. The cultivated meat industry is maturing beyond early-stage research. Commercial-scale facilities, such as those underway by Believer Meats, Aleph Farms, and GOOD Meat, are preparing for larger, more complex procurement needs. Regulatory progress is accelerating, with the US FDA and Singapore paving early pathways and Europe preparing to engage more directly with cellular agriculture. Meanwhile, suppliers are finally developing inputs tailored for food rather than pharmaceuticals.

“Five years ago, the market didn’t exist. Today, it does,” Bell says. “When you combine regulatory progress, production scale-up, and supply-side readiness, you get the conditions for infrastructure platforms to work.”

Cultigen Group Expands Its Infrastructure Vision

Cellbase is just one component of the broader Cultigen Group. Over the past 18 months, Bell has built a portfolio of ventures designed to shape not just production, but perception and adoption. These include the Cultivarian Society, a public-facing advocacy body aiming to establish a “cultivarian” dietary identity; The Growth Medium, an editorial platform; Cultideck, a real-time intelligence and directory engine; and Cell.farm, an infrastructure concept intended to reimagine production accessibility and scalability.

Together, these projects reflect Bell’s thesis that the protein transition requires more than scientific innovation. A functioning market needs infrastructure, consumer education, cultural framing, and intuitive systems that make cultivated products accessible and desirable. He has bootstrapped the venture so far, building each platform “at operator speed,” as he puts it, and plans to scale strategically as adoption grows.

Cultivated Meat Shop, for instance, now hosts localised domains in more than 20 European markets. Although no cultivated meat is approved for retail sale in the UK or EU, the platform is building SEO strength, brand equity, and a consumer audience ahead of regulatory clearance. “First-mover advantage isn’t launching first; it’s being ready when regulation clears,” Bell says.

As Cellbase comes online, the question now is whether Cultigen’s ecosystem approach will give it that advantage, becoming the infrastructure layer underpinning a sector that has long needed one.