Lunch Gap

Inspiration

We were going through the C3 datasets and found that NEA publishes hawker centre closure dates in advance. Most open data describes the past, but this tells you what's going to happen next quarter. Then we saw that Kim Keat Palm in Toa Payoh closed for repairs on 14 Sep 2026, for about three months.

That raised a simple question: who loses their nearest hawker centre when one closes, and does anyone find out before it happens? About 87,000 residents aged 65 and over lived alone in 2024. For many of them, the hawker centre downstairs is the easiest way to get a meal. Nobody seems to line up the closure dates against who actually lives nearby.

What it does

Lunch Gap takes NEA's closure schedule and works out which HDB blocks will lose walkable hawker access, when, and for how long. It ranks those blocks by likely impact on seniors, so Active Ageing Centre staff and town councils get a list two to four weeks ahead. They can then plan befriender visits, meal deliveries, or a temporary food stall before the closure starts.

It also flags weeks when two nearby centres are shut at the same time. Those overlaps are when seniors have the fewest options, and they're easy to miss when closures are scheduled centre by centre.

How we plan to build it

Ingestion: a Lakeflow pipeline loads the closure dates, hawker centre locations, HDB Property Information, SingStat subzone population and Active Ageing Centre locations from data.gov.sg into Delta tables.
Unity Catalog: keeps raw, cleaned and scored tables in one place, with lineage from source to score.
Transformation: we geocode each block with OneMap, split every closure into one row per day, and find each block's nearest open centre on each day.
MLflow: tracks different weightings of the score so we can check how stable the rankings are.
Foundation Model API: drafts a short notice for each affected block in English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil.
Output: an AI/BI dashboard with a map and a ranked closure calendar, plus a Genie space where staff can ask things like "which blocks in Toa Payoh lose hawker access in November?"