Hi Michael,

Thank you for contacting Mearto with your appraisal inquiry.

Sanborns traces its origins to 1903, when American brothers Walter and Frank Sanborn opened a small pharmacy and soda fountain in Mexico City. The business quickly evolved into a popular restaurant, café, and social gathering place, eventually expanding into a department store format. Over the 20th century, Sanborns became known not only for its dining rooms and retail goods but also for its extensive Mexican decorative arts offerings, including silver jewelry and hollowware.

During the mid-20th century, Sanborns helped popularize Taxco-style sterling silver for domestic and tourist markets, selling work influenced by Mexican modernist silversmithing traditions. Today it operates as a major retail chain under Grupo Carso, associated with Carlos Slim, and remains a key distributor of Mexican silver and design goods.

Tea and coffee sets symbolized wealth, refinement, and social ritual. In Europe and the Americas from the 17th–19th centuries, owning porcelain or silver services signaled elite status and global trade connections, especially with China and colonial plantations supplying tea, coffee, and sugar. Elaborate sets reflected hospitality, domestic order, and fashionable taste. They also structured social interaction—tea and coffee gatherings became coded spaces for diplomacy, courtship, and conversation, reinforcing etiquette and class distinction in domestic life.

When full, sterling silver tea and coffee pots, as well as cream pitchers and covered sugar bowls were heavy and the trays they sat / were carried on were *usually* silver-plated rather than solid sterling, which on its own wasn't strong enough to support the weight of the set. You don't show the mark for the tray so I'll give this the benefit of the doubt and appraise as though it were sterling but if it's silver plated

The going melt-weight of sterling silver (.925%) is unusually high at the moment (about $2.30/gram) with pure silver (.999%) being closer to $2.48/gram. Including the tray, you have 6,912 grams of sterling (4,112 grams if the tray turns out to be silverplated), with some of that in the ivory or bone insulators on handles of both pots. That equates to around $17,000 in melt-weight silver ($9,400 without the tray).

Historically speaking, when Mexican sterling six-piece tea and coffee sets have come to auction, they usually sell in the range of $5,000-7,000.

If you're looking to sell this privately, I would recommend starting with a high asking price based on the current trading price of silver - if you don't get any takers, you can lower your price. Silver scrappers are currently overwhelmed and not taking on much silver to scrap.

Based on the photos and information provided, and subject to examination, this is:

A vintage Sanborns sterling silver 6-piece coffee and tea service
made in Mexico, 20th Century
comprising a tea pot, coffee pot, covered sugar bowl, cream pitcher, waste bowl and two-handled tray.
(DIMENSIONS)
CONDITION: With minor wear commensurate to age and use.
PROVENANCE: Inherited
$ 5,000-7,000*
*represents a fair-market value for auction purposes; retail or asking price may vary.

Please let us know if you have additional items to appraise, or questions/concerns, and thank you again for using Mearto.
~ Delia