CaptiveAire to bring 50 jobs to St. George in next 7 years

A manufacturer of commercial kitchen ventilation equipment will open an office in downtown St. George.

CaptiveAire Systems Inc., based in North Carolina, will add up to 50 jobs in St. George over the next seven years. The jobs are expected to pay an average of $85,650.

CaptiveAire’s ventilation system includes hoods, exhaust fans, electrical controls, direct-fired heaters, grease duct systems, fire suppression systems, grease filters, utility distribution systems, dedicated outdoor air systems, and Internet-based control systems. The company’s clients include independent restaurants and national chains as well as public and private institutions such as industrial, correctional, military and school facilities.

While the company has historically dealt only with kitchen ventilation systems, it is expanding to include HVAC systems. The $2.6 million St. George project will feature a build-out of a separate corporate office for a new HVAC product line.

“We’re thrilled to open a large office and research lab in Utah,” Bob Luddy, president and founder of CaptiveAire, said in a prepared statement. “St. George has been the home of our application engineering team for some time, and we’re excited to see this area of our company grow and expand.”

CaptiveAire has a network of over 100 sales offices in the U.S. and Canada; a local service network throughout the United States; and six manufacturing plants in North Carolina, Iowa, Oklahoma, California, Pennsylvania and Florida. The company began in a one-room facility in 1976 and now has 1,200 employees in the U.S. In 2019, CaptiveAire had over $530 million in revenue.

The project is expected to generate total wages of over $4.6 million over seven years and new state taxes of $668,933 during that time.

The project announcement came after the company was approved for a $133,786 tax credit incentive over seven years by the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) board.

Brady Ambrose, the company’s vice president of application engineering, said the company considered Boise, St. George and other sites for the project.

“We don’t have a western U.S. operation like a headquarters-type of operation,” he said. “We’ve had quite a few of our own IT employees and opportunities for hires that we can’t lure back to our headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, no matter the compensation, because they like the rural lifestyle that you find here in the desert Southwest and the Wasatch Front and mountain plateaus around here.

“So we needed something to lure in high-quality talent in the engineering and IT realm, and St. George was a logical location because we have some internal connections to St. George from existing employees, myself included.”

The people who want to “live the lifestyle here” include those “that are very talented and have the creative minds that we look for,” he said. “We’re really excited about it. We really like the area down here. The hiking and the outdoors, it just blends with creative minds.”

Ambrose said the company is growing quickly. “We’ve got offices in Utah already, but they’re just small rental locations with five people that we need to consolidate everything.”

Gregg McArthur, director of St. George Area Economic Development and a member of the St. George City Council, said CaptiveAire will move into a building that the city had been leasing.

“You’re exactly the high-skilled workforce that we’d love to have moving to our community,” he told Ambrose.

“We’re excited that CaptiveAire has decided to grow in St. George,” Dan Hemmert, GOED’s executive director, said in a prepared statement. “This expansion will create high-paying jobs in sales, engineering and management. We wish the company success as they continue to grow.”

“CaptiveAire will find Utah a business-friendly state that values teamwork to support corporate growth strategies,” said Theresa A. Foxley, president and CEO of the Economic Development Corporation of Utah. “Thanks to the combined efforts of ‘Team Utah,’ the company is already benefiting from our state’s collaborative approach.”