NASHUA – A Peterborough company plans to open a natural and organic foods supermarket at an empty strip mall at 348 Amherst St., behind Five Guys Burgers and Fries.

Nature’s Green Grocer has operated a store for three years in Peterborough, where it has been successful with a “food-for-thought, you-are-what-eat” approach to grocery sales, co-owner Joel Patterson said.

Patterson said he plans to open the 22,000-square-foot store in November or December. It will be about four times the size of the Peterborough store.

The business model for Green Grocer is centered on educating customers about natural and organic foods.

“Our store is an adventure where people can find products that look better, taste better and make them feel better when they eat them,’’ Patterson said.

The Planning Board approved the site plan for the project earlier this summer and granted one waiver, allowing parking spaces to be 9 feet wide instead of the 10 feet required by city law.

Patterson said the new store will bring 60-80 new jobs to the city.

“It will be great, the number of new jobs that will be created with this store going in,’’ he said.

The store will include a 40-seat cafe where shoppers can the eat the products they just purchased or have a cup of all-organic coffee or tea or organic juices. The market will have a bakery and a salad and soup bar.

Shoppers will be able try Green Grocer’s sourdough stone oven pizza and organic artisan sourdough bread, he said.

Locally produced beer and wine will also be available.

Patterson said he started thinking about opening a store in Nashua about a year ago, and has been working to take over the Amherst Street property for eight months. The site is owned by Nick Hera, a Boston-area developer who started building the facility when the recession was at its worst and finished it about two years ago.

“We wanted a building that already existed,’’ Patterson said.

The new store is big step for him, since his Peterborough store is about a quarter of the size of the one he’ll open here. Overall, he offers 15,000 products for sale, from freshly caught fish to gourmet cheeses to all-natural beauty products.

Filling the empty plaza will be a bit of good news for a stretch of Amherst Street that has faced some retail struggles of late.

Notably, the Building 19 store at 420 Amherst St. closed after it was unable to reach a lease agreement with property owner AS-VR Realty of Londonderry. The 88,000-square-foot building is now empty.

The long-closed former Taco Bell across from Leda Lanes has rapidly deteriorated, along with a Pizza Hut next door that has sat vacant for years. Several other buildings in the region, such as the Loan Max store, have been idle since at least 2007.

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