The cell formation problem is a classic optimization problem devoted to the manufacturing industry. Such a problem proposes to divide a manufacturing plant in a set of cells, where each cell is composed of machines which in turn process product parts. The goal is to design a plant division in such a way the need for part interchange among cells is minimized. The idea is to reduce cost and increase productivity. In this paper, we propose different variations of the original migrating birds optimization algorithm for solving this problem. In particular, we propose two different leader exchange procedures and three different neighboring solution generations. We illustrate interesting results by solving well-known instances considering the group efficiency as optimization criterion in contrast to previous work done on this metaheuristic.