A new family of DC to AC converters, referred to as multilevel inverter, has received much attention from industries and researchers for its high power and voltage applications. One of the conventional techniques for implementing the switching algorithm in these inverters is optimized harmonic stepped waveform (OHSW). However, the major problem in using this technique is eliminating low order harmonics by solving the nonlinear and complex equations. In this paper, a new approach called the "bacterial foraging algorithm" (BFA) is employed. This algorithm eliminates and optimizes the harmonics in a multilevel inverter. This method has higher speed, precision, and convergence power compared with the genetic algorithm (GA), a famous evolutionary algorithm. The proposed technique can be expanded in any number of levels. The purpose of optimization is to remove some low order harmonics, as well as to ensure the fundamental harmonic retained at the desired value. As a case study, a 13-level inverter is chosen. The comparison results by MATLAB software between the two optimization methods (BFA and GA) have shown the effectiveness and superiority of BFA over GA where convergence is desired to achieve global optimum.