Global Fermentation CDMO & Pilot Infrastructure Directory

Bringing a precision-fermentation or alternative-protein ingredient, an agricultural biological, an enzyme, a probiotic, or a specialty or fine-chemical building block to scale — and need a partner who can actually make it, whether a toller, a full-service CDMO, or a pilot to get there? This directory is the map. It lays out 41 tollers you can actually hire — 5 purpose-built precision-fermentation plants, 18 established CDMOs and 18 regional & specialist tollers — plus a 20-facility global pilot & scale-up shortlist that bridges lab to line. Every counterparty is indexed on the terms that decide a sourcing call: archetype, geography, certification tier, the molecules they run, whether they take third-party work, and what they cost. Only the 9 captive incumbents sit outside your reach, charted as context.

Coverage spans one shared supply base. Food precision fermentation, feed and animal nutrition, agricultural biologics, and industrial proteins and enzymes — read as one toll base serving several demand verticals (pharma/biologics contract manufacturing is a separate landscape, not the focus). Every available toller is a decision-ready row — capacity, certification, toll status, any named client, any distress signal that flags cheap capacity now — plus 17 deep-dive profiles of the most significant, and an ag-microbial spore-toller sub-directory.

Global by construction. Every region was researched in its own language — Europe, North America, China, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Russia/CIS, Turkey, the Middle East, Africa and Australasia. That native-language canvass is the edge: it puts capacity that never advertises in English on the map — a Turkish enzyme CMO, an Argentine à-façon toller, an Australian purpose-built plant — and records where a region is genuinely empty rather than leaving a blank.

Reading the map. Food-grade capacity is more available than the industry assumes — but food-grade with a proven recombinant-protein process is genuinely scarce, and that gap, not raw capacity, is the real constraint. Certification tier, not the headline fermenter volume, sets your cost floor and decides which counterparties you are even eligible to use. And it is the strain's titre, far more than the plant's geography, that determines whether the economics ever close.

Beyond the register, the directory hands you the decision tools — an eight-dimension counterparty-evaluation framework, fermenter-to-€/kg economics rules of thumb so you can model your own numbers across molecules and geographies, and a named forward call on who wins. The names behind every row, the resolved capacities and cost figures, and the forward call sit in the purchased directory; decisive figures are blanked in the sample.