A gamified application is provided for users to feed animated virtual characters with images of real-world food items. The images fed to the virtual characters are to be uploaded to a data store in a cloud environment, for use in training a custom machine learning model. A server in the cloud environment receives a photo of a food item fed to a virtual character in an augmented reality environment in the gamified application executing on a user device, invokes the custom machine learning model to generate classification information for the photo, sends the classification information to the user device for verification by a user, and stores the verified information to the data store used for periodically training the machine learning model. Over time, the data store would include a large volume of food images with label data verified by a large number of users.