Industrial environments can use several layout setups according to their convenience based on item diversity, ways of production and market demand. This work focuses on design of manufacturing cell formation. A well-known type of production layout in industrial engineering that allows meeting a diversity of production requirements and operational flexibility is the cellular manufacturing. Among the various techniques and approaches applied to manufacturing cell formation, this article uses the firefly metaheuristic algorithm as an optimization engine. Such modern stochastic optimization algorithm can tackle non-convex, non-smooth, non-continuous and non-differentiate objective cost functions making them gradient independent and suitable to manage such problems. The adopted methodology relies on comparing the obtained efficiency and efficacy (clustering) parameters in the cell formation layout with several well-established benchmark examples found in the literature. The results show that the use of efficacy parameter is desirable if the focus relies on clustering manufacturing cell formation, however, the use of efficiency parameter can also lead to useful and cost-effective layouts at the expense of cell clustering. Some of the results also indicate improvements in the efficacy parameter relative to the benchmarked examples with a slightly enhanced layout formation that proves and justifies the suitability for the firefly metaheuristic algorithm.