This work presents a novel nature-inspired metaheuristic called Nutcracker Optimization Algorithm (NOA) inspired by Clark’s nutcrackers. The nutcrackers exhibit two distinct behaviors that occur at separate periods. The first behavior, which occurs during the summer and fall seasons, represents the nutcracker’s search for seeds and subsequent storage in an appropriate cache. During the winter and spring seasons, another behavior based on the spatial memory strategy is regarded to search for the hidden caches marked at different angles using various objects or markers as reference points. If the nutcrackers cannot find the stored seeds, they will randomly explore the search space to find their food. NOA is herein proposed to mimic these various behaviors to present a new, robust metaheuristic algorithm with different local and global search operators, allowing it to solve various optimization problems with better outcomes. NOA is evaluated on twenty-three standard test functions, test suites of CEC-2014, CEC-2017, and CEC-2020 and five real-world engineering design problems. NOA is compared with three classes of existing optimization algorithms: (1) SMA, GBO, EO, RUN, AVOA, RFO, and GTO as recently-published algorithms, (2) SSA, WOA, and GWO as highly-cited algorithms, and (3) AL-SHADE, L-SHADE, LSHADE-cnEpSin, and LSHADE-SPACMA as highly-performing optimizers and winners of CEC competition. NOA was ranked first among all methods and demonstrated superior results when compared to LSHADE-cnEpSin and LSHADE-SPACMA as the best-performing optimizers and the winners of CEC-2017, and AL-SHADE and L-SHADE as the winners of CEC-2014.