An Oxfordshire sandwich and salad bar that recently relocated is celebrating three years of business.

Sarnie 67 relocated from Sheep Street to Bicester Market Square two months ago, and owner Chris Dunbabin said the response from locals has been positive. 

Mr Dunbabin said: "We definitely have made the right move.

"The response has been really good from locals, the shop is busier and the feedback is great."

Well known for its different flavoured sausage rolls and homemade scotch eggs, Sarnie 67 opened in 2021. 

Alongside being a sandwich and salad bar, Sarnie 67also offers catering for businesses. 

Mr Dunbabin, from Bicester, decided to open a sandwich shop after realising he couldn't spend enough quality time with his children in his career in sales. 

He said: “I knew the timing would be hard and we battled through three waves of Covid at the time.

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“Footfall wasn’t great, but I was receiving a few catering enquiries which, although this wasn’t what we did, I took the business and it seemed to work.

“Long story short, the business developed and we were doing more and more catering for businesses and private events.”

After a year Mr Dunbabin started running the catering out of a small unit in Wedgwood Road, before taking his children on full time.

"I very nearly had to close the company and if it wasn’t for my amazing staff I’d have had to," he said. 

The team at Sarnie 67The team at Sarnie 67 (Image: Alex Davidson)
Mr Dunbabin described last year as "quite a challenge".

"Running a catering business in this climate is hard enough and looking after my girls, but again with help from my staff we battled through and again the company got busier," he said.

"At end of last year I had a small shop, a unit for the catering and a storage facility on the Launton Road. The foot fall in the shop was pretty poor, but the catering was doing really well."

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Mr Dunbabin said over Christmas he had a think about Sarnie 67 and how to move forward with it.  

"I came back at the start of the year and was walking through town and thought that firstly, I didn’t want to leave the town and secondly, that there are so many empty shops it would be a shame for the town to have yet another one," he said. 

Mr Dunbabin started searching and found an empty unit in the Market Square, which is set to undergo a £4.25 million transformation as part of a town regeneration project. 

"It was the right decision to move in," he said. 

"We’ve now been in there for two months and we've had a great response from our customers, we have room for the catering and have plenty of storage in the basement."