Due to the rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT)-related applications, the utilization of cloud services is experiencing significant growth. Although cloud computing has proven its effectiveness in processing and storing data for various applications, it faces challenges in addressing certain requirements, such as the growing need for real-time or latency-sensitive applications and the limitations of network bandwidth. As a result, fog computing is often seen as a supplementary paradigm to cloud computing, providing additional capabilities and benefits to the traditional cloud paradigm, aiming to extend cloud services to edge devices and end-users. However, the limited capabilities of fog nodes require lighter tasks while other tasks that need more processing time are processed in the cloud. In the present research paper, we propose a novel algorithm that is customized for task scheduling within the context of cloud–fog computing on the Internet of Things (IoT) framework. Our approach builds upon the Hunger Game Search algorithm (HGS) as its foundation. To improve the exploitative capabilities of the HGS, our proposed method, called HGSMPA, incorporates the Marine Predator Algorithm (MPA). Through experimental evaluation using various workload traces, we have demonstrated the efficacy of HGSMPA. The findings reveal that HGSMPA surpasses alternative algorithms in terms of reducing energy consumption and minimizing the makespan time. Specifically, The empirical evaluation indicates that HGSMPA can reduce the makespan time by 19.31% for synthetic workloads and by 17.47% for real workloads as compared to similar scheduling algorithms. Moreover, HGSMPA can reduce energy consumption by 14.72% for synthetic workloads and by 17.68% for real workloads as compared to other methods.