Pneumatic bioreactors, including bubble columns and air-lift reactors, were once considered the most suitable for large scale cell culture. However, their applications quickly declined and research interests diminished when it was suspected that the bubbles bursting at the gas-liquid interface could cause damage to certain cells. Stirred tank reactors, limited to 1~2 m3 working volume, became the industry standard. In recent year, the emergence of new cell-based technology, such as cultured meat, has led people to reconsider the bubble column reactor technology, as such products required reactors in the order of 100 m3 to be economically viable. However, there was generally a lack of up-to-date understanding of the performance of pneumatic reactors in the context of cell culture due to the lack of interest from the industry in the past four decades or so. In this study, cold flow experiments were conducted and CFD simulations were performed to investigate the effect of microcarriers and cell culture media additives such as Pluronic F68 and Antifoam C on the hydrodynamics and mass transfer characteristics of a bench-top bubble column. Foaming and foam control were also investigated. It was found that in the presence of 0.5 and 1.0 g/L Pluronic F68, the bubble size in a simulated culture medium remained almost unchanged as the superficial gas velocity increased from 0.04 cm/s to 0.17 cm/s, dissimilar to the air-water system where the bubble size increased significantly with gas flow due to coalescence. Microcarriers of 14%~20% volumetric fractions were not found to impact the bubble size and Antifoam C of up to 1.60×10-4 was required to suppress the foam, without affecting the bubble size in the column. Despite the smaller bubble size and higher gas holdup, the overall volumetric mass transfer coefficient, kLa was on par with the air-water system, as the medium additives negatively affected the liquid side mass transfer coefficient, kL. In all the experiments, the microcarriers could all be completely suspended. The gas holdup and solid distribution in the three-phase system could be adequately described by an Euler-Euler CFD model.