Rolling Stoner Sessions with Andrew Kerr
Green Gorilla Hazelwood Outlet, or The Departure Lounge
Interviewer and writer: Andrew Macfarlane
In a quiet corner of Hazelwood, Pretoria, Andrew Kerr is building something that shouldn’t work on paper: a cannabis counter, a cocktail bar and an upmarket wine bar and restaurant, all sharing the same address. Welcome to Green Gorilla and to one possible version of South Africa’s high-end elevation spots.
Talk to Andrew Kerr for a few minutes and one thing becomes fairly obvious: he doesn’t see Green Gorilla as a cannabis shop. At least, not only as a cannabis shop.
The Hazelwood outlet is steadily becoming something broader. There’s cannabis, certainly. But there’s also wellness, cocktails, wine, food, and a fairly ambitious plan to turn this Pretoria corner into a destination in its own right. And potentially, the starting point for something even bigger.
The Corner Everyone Wanted
To understand what Kerr is building, you have to stand on the corner.
Four privately owned shops, held by two sisters, in a pocket of Hazelwood thick with restaurants — ten of them inside 500 metres, plus a liquor store, a pizza joint, and a Hudson’s about 150 feet round the bend.
“It’s the perfect spot,” Kerr says.
He’s not the first to notice; plenty of operators in his line of work have been circling that corner for years.
When the shop next door (a big, slightly out-of-place bike store) came up for lease, Kerr’s landlord offered it to him first.
He took it on the spot. Not because he needed more floor space for flower, but because he already knew exactly who it was for.
Next door, a beautiful, upmarket wine bar and restaurant is taking shape, one that will add to the experience as a whole rather than compete with it.
This isn’t a plonk-and-crackers situation; it’s the kind of place where the clientele arrive by limousine. The plan is a wine bar with a generous stretch of outdoor space, tables under the trees, properly lit.
And here’s where the worlds start to run into each other.
Green Gorilla holds a full liquor licence, and Kerr extended it through the connecting wall next door.
Now the wine bar can pour, and Green Gorilla can serve cocktails and beer to the same crowd.
Kerr is genuinely keen on the idea of adding to Hazelwood’s atmosphere as a whole, rather than just carving out his own corner of it.
“I’m not in the business of trying to screw anyone,” he says.
Cocktails and wine — that’s the lane.
Picture it: somewhere between the well-heeled crowd arriving for a rare vintage and the guy who came in for a pre-roll, a Venn diagram is forming that South African retail hasn’t really seen before.
The Route
This is the part that matters for anyone tracking Route 420, because Hazelwood has been earmarked as a potential Departure Lounge — a launch point for the whole experience — and standing in the room, it’s not hard to see why.
Fourways is lovely, Kerr says, but Hazelwood is the flagship, by some distance the largest of the three (the third one being in Potchefstroom).
It has the outdoor space, the wine bar next door, and a kitchen he’s currently bringing up to restaurant standard.
The wine bar is already being built as “one route” — a curated journey rather than a shop you walk in and out of.
Kerr sees the cannabis side slotting into exactly that logic.
Not a dispensary with a queue. A destination.
The Grey
Nobody actually knows how many cannabis shops are operating in South Africa. The number that gets thrown around is 5,000, but there’s no database, no register, nothing to nail it to — it’s a figure that exists mostly because everyone repeats it.
Elsewhere in the ecosystem, club-management software is quietly signing up outlets; one operator claims 18 clubs and 25,000 members already on the books.
The scale only becomes real when you see the numbers, and the numbers are enormous.
Kerr’s read on the regulatory limbo is pragmatic. He sources through partnerships with licensed growers, betting on a future where the government finally gets its act together and legitimate retail can only source from legitimate producers.
Kerr is positioning for that day now, buying quality and building relationships, on the theory that when the rules land, the people who did it properly will be the ones left standing.
Not Why He Got In
Here’s the swerve that reframes the whole thing: Andrew Kerr didn’t get into this for the weed.
He’ll tell you plainly that the products are excellent, the variety is there, the flower is beautiful.
But the reason he started Green Gorilla — really started it — was health and wellness: CBD, the non-THC range, the wider business of feeling better.
So he made a decision most cannabis retailers probably wouldn’t.
He flipped his own website.
Where it used to lead with bud, it now leads with wellness — CBD, fitness partnerships, a discounted deal with a Fourways boxing centre, and farm getaways where members can switch off for a weekend.
The flower now lives behind a small tab.
“By the way, if you want some flower, there it is.”
It’s partly principle and partly survival — post a picture of a bud on Instagram, and it vanishes fast.
But it’s also a genuine read on where the culture seems to be heading, and it’s the same instinct that makes the wine bar make sense: cannabis as one item in the wellness arsenal rather than the whole armoury.
A flavour profile in a lifestyle, sitting on the same shelf as the cabernet and the boxing class, waiting for the stigma to catch up with the room.
The Second Act
None of this was the plan for Andrew Kerr’s life. For 35 years he’s run a licensed immigration advisory business, moving South Africans to New Zealand and Australia — 15,000 families over three decades.
Up to 40 a month before COVID froze the whole thing. He’s retiring from that in two years.
Years ago, Green Gorilla started, in part, as an opportunity for his son — Kerr could see the potential James held, and the knowledge he’d bring to it.
James, 22, made the decision to step away from a career in finance for something where every day looks different. James now knows far more about the industry than his father ever will, Kerr says, cheerfully — the strains, the culture, the customers, the sourcing, all of it.
It’s a young industry, and Kerr leans on that generational fluency rather than fighting it.
Much of the team, in fact, came up together — old friends who found themselves drawn into the same space, and who now share in building something with real momentum behind it.
Kerr casts himself as the guy in the background paying the bills while the youngsters do the real work — modest, given how much of the vision is his, but it’s clearly a point of pride for him to say it that way.
You can’t sit with the immigration story and the cannabis story side by side and not feel the ache underneath.
Kerr has spent three decades helping people leave a country he clearly loves, and the reason is almost always the children — young South Africans facing unemployment rates above 40 per cent, compared with an overall unemployment rate of just over 5 per cent in New Zealand.
It’s not an abstract statistic for him; his own daughter graduated, couldn’t find work in her field here, and is now building a life in Australia.
“People don’t want to leave South Africa,” he says. “They’re leaving for the children.”
And yet here he is, at retirement age, building something in Pretoria for a 22-year-old who stayed.
A premium, wide-open, wholly optimistic bet that this country might still have a lifestyle industry worth sticking around for.
Cocktails, cabernet and CBD, limousines in the car park.
A departure lounge that, for once, is about arriving.
Green Gorilla operates in Potchefstroom, Fourways and Hazelwood.
The Hazelwood location is being developed as a potential Route 420 Departure Lounge.