Tawad: Palengke Price Tracker
A daily-updated, open-data pipeline that turns ~2,900 Department of Agriculture price-report PDFs into a clean table of ~890,000 Metro Manila palengke prices, published as a BigQuery dataset and Looker Studio dashboard.
Data Engineer, Palengke Price Tracker (tawad), 2026.
The idea
DA price reports are public but locked in PDFs with five changing layouts, so nobody can easily track food prices over time. tawad turns about 2,900 reports into one clean, daily-updated dataset of Metro Manila palengke prices.
What I did
- Built a Python medallion pipeline (bronze, silver, gold) that parses the DA PDFs into a star schema of ~890,000 prices across 55 markets
- Cleaned the data with dbt and DuckDB, mapping ~1,500 commodity spellings and many “no price” formats to a consistent standard
- Added PSA inflation and retail data plus government price caps for deeper analysis
- Automated a daily run with GitHub Actions and Docker, and loaded the gold data into BigQuery
- Published the results as a Looker Studio dashboard and downloadable open data
Result
A free, daily-updated open dataset showing pork, cooking oil, and vegetables rose 40-55% above inflation since 2019.