Voluntary sustainability standards (VSSs) are considered one of the potential mechanisms for promoting agricultural sustainability and mitigating environmental problems, such as pesticide risks. While consumer and farmer preferences for sustainability standards have been well documented in the literature, the preferences of other important agri-food supply chain actors (such as input suppliers, traders, processors and retailers) have received much less attention. In this paper, we investigated pesticide retailers’ perspectives on a hypothetical VSS scheme intended to promote environmentally friendly plant protection products.